Clippings: Sea Power, Metal Slug Tactics, DQIII, Ara update, Flight Simulator 2024, C:MO in real life

Hi, everyone. Over recent weeks:

I’ve been playing one new release, Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom on Switch (nearly finished!).
I’ve also been replaying several older games on PC:
- Terra Invicta (now finished — stay tuned for some thoughts);
- Crusader Kings III with the “Roads to Power” DLC (not far from the end of my latest run — put on hold while Terra Invicta was ongoing);
- Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord (again, stay tuned — I have an article half-written on how my thoughts have evolved since the game was in Early Access);
- Sengoku Jidai (and courtesy of this bundle, its newer stablemate, Field of Glory II: Medieval);
- Total War: Three Kingdoms; and
- The most classic of them all — Chrono Trigger.
And I’ve read a mix of fiction and non-fiction by the late Tim Severin (Amazon link), a sailor and adventurer whose exploits included sailing across the Atlantic in a tiny leather coracle, sailing from Oman to China in a dhow, and trying to cross the Pacific in a bamboo raft. You could make a pretty good game out of his journeys!

Recent releases

Sea Power: Naval Combat in the Missile Age, a Cold War naval sim, is now available in Steam Early Access.
- It looks spectacular, has a pedigree (the studio’s founders previously worked on sub sim Cold Waters), and early impressions seem positive: see Stormbirds’ writeup and the “Very Positive” rating on Steam.
- On the other hand, it’s also very early in its life — so early that, for example, saving & reloading aren’t implemented yet. A campaign mode is slated for 2025.
- I might take a look once the game is more mature.
Metal Slug Tactics is now out, to moderately positive reviews (Metacritic 79%, Opencritic 78%).
- The game’s greatest strength is its personality — it has the colourful sprites and exuberant animations I associate with the Metal Slug arcade games.
- Despite the name, this is an extremely puzzly game, closer to Into the Breach than to XCOM. (For example, most characters can only shoot at enemies in a straight line.)
- After trying the Game Pass version, it’s too puzzly for me, but Metal Slug and genre fans might want to take a look.
Classic JRPG fans might be interested in the new HD-2D remake of Dragon Quest III.
- Reviews are positive — Metacritic 85% and Opencritic 84%.
- This one might be too retro for me, based on my experience with Octopath Traveller II and Eiyuden Chronicles.

The 1.1 patch for Ara: History Untold is now out (changelog here). This adds a new crafting screen in a bid to improve the game’s UI, which was one of my complaints at launch.

The 2024 edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator will release in a few days (either on November 19th or November 20th, depending on your time zone). Here is a September preview from IGN, and here is a Microsoft/Xbox blog post going into more detail on the new career mode.