Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I don’t play Armed Assault, bar a disastrous tinker with the demo, which resulted in me holding my head in my hands, rocking, sobbing gently and begging that a passing member of PC Gamer help me, oh God won’t they please help me. I very much feel as though I should, and I’ve been told or sent links to any number of incredible tales of high heroism and astonishing accomplishment that sound impossible in any other game. Unfortunately, I am scared and stupid and all-too-brief of attention-span, so I shall leave the game to men of greater resolve than I.

Nevertheless, I remain fascinated to hear about it, and the new mode in its just-released latest free update certainly sounds fairly remarkable. It’s shaking off the shackles of first-person shooter oppression and running for the real-time strategy hills.
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Our chums over at 505 Games have dropped us a line to say that they have five copies of Armed Assault to give away. For details on how to win, and a truly impressive ArmA video, click past the jump…
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Jim is away today. Don’t be sad. He left something for me to post later and until then you can get your Rossignol fix over at the Escapist, where they’ve just published his Virtua Corps article. It’s about hardcore Solder-Sim fanatics online.

One of the finer pleasures of being a journalist who spends too much time in the depths of PC gaming is the number of encounters you have with the platform’s various subcultures. Over the past five years, one in particular has fixed me with a mixture of dread and amazement: It’s the community that surrounds the hardcore soldier sim.

Idle, completely pointless and completely unprovable boast: I was the first person who started referring to the whole sub-genre as Soldier Sims. I’m all about the morning neologisms, me, even if they’re not really very clever at all. Anyway – read the rest of Jim’s article over here.

You may be aware that as well as releasing splendid (if a little – er – twitchy) Soldier Sims, Bohemia interactive turn their Armed Assault (i.e. Flashpoint minus the intellectual property rights) into military simulators. VBS2 is actually developed by Bohemia Australia. Among their clients are the Dutch army, who recently arranged a game between five professionally trained soldiers and five gamers. Jerry Hopper was there.

The gamers would do whatever gamers would do. The Army would work according to official doctrine. Since the soldiers in question weren’t actually familiar with VBS2, the results were perhaps a trifle predictable, but that’s hardly the point.

RPS would challenge the SAS to a game of TF2 to decide who’s the hardest three-letter-acronym group on the surface of the planet, but we’re far too scared they’ll slide a blade across our throats in our sleep or something.