GAMES?: Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe

Update 29.12.11 – GAMES? ran for two issues and it was a great success. I’m honoured to have been a part of it and met many of my friends off Twitter through it.

A few weeks ago The Telegraph’s games co-respondent Ashton Raze requested budding writers for a new project. The idea is GAMES? and you can find out about it here. I’ve often felt games journalism focuses too much on the big titles and not enough on the unexpected classics. GAMES? looks to rectify this. The first issue is out now and I wrote a feature on Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe, an open source version of Chris Sawyer’s strategy PC title. You can find the full piece here and an extract below. It’s one of my favourite games on the PC and I’m looking forward to contributing more to GAMES? in the future.

Ever since my friend grew a beard during a mammoth 14 hour Spore session, any activity that’s yielded similar levels of obsession has been labelled by its corresponding ‘beard’. So ladies and gentlemen, I have a Train Beard. We’re talking about OpenTTD, an open source clone of Chris Sawyer’s long extinct Transport Tycoon Deluxe.

oTTD, and the game it’s modelled on, is of a bygone era; one of the last giants of a time when simulation ruled the dominant platform, the PC. Rendered in isometric 2D, it concerned itself with the raw mechanics of transport simulation and the business that drove it: cargo.

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