By Adam Smith on February 6th, 2012.
Ultra-realistic military sim to contain fictional near-future vehicles and weaponry. Upon hearing the news, four retired colonels smash crystal brandy decanters while blustering angrily through their majestic militarised moustaches. If you think you can stay resolute while squinting at intensely detailed visual representations of things that do not exist, Arma III may be the game for you. Put the brandy to one side and focus your monocle below.
By Craig Pearson on January 25th, 2012.
Hello! I bring good news. The release date aiming cone for Bohemia Interactive’s sci-fi action strategy game Carrier Command: Gaea Mission has narrowed. The bad news is it’s only as specific as Q2 2012. Now I’ve been doing this job since 2000, and not once have I ever looked up what release date quarters mean. This chart did not help. So instead of explaining it further, I’ll have to distract you with some new screenshots of the game below.
By Andrew Smee on October 28th, 2011.
Take On Helicopters, Bohemia Entertainment’s civilian helicopter sim, has landed. Or taken off. Or remains hovering, terrifying, in the air, threatening to remove fingers from waving hands. Our lovely Tim was quite taken with it and now you can be too. It’s on Steam for $49.99 or £31.99 and is also available on a whole crate-load of international distributors. Tim recommended it for anyone with even a passing interest in flight sims, so fire up those rotors and watch out for crosswinds. The release trailer’s fuelling up after the jump, and features footage of some thrilling low-altitude flights through the tree line.
By Jim Rossignol on October 5th, 2011.
Take On Helicopters Pre-Order Beta access thing is now live. The full game of commercial hovering is released on the 27th, but you can get it now if you are so inclined. For some insight into what the simulator contains you can read Mr Stone’s take on the thing, where he says: “Even if the campaign turns out to be a bug-spattered nightmare, I’ll still be recommending ToH to anyone with even a passing interest in simulated flight.”
Gosh.
H is for hot-diggity
By Tim Stone on September 28th, 2011.
My left mouse button is confused. It’s just spent five unbroken hours with a Bohemia Interactive game and not once was it asked to snuff out a man’s life. There were times when I felt like asking it to snuff out a man’s life, but as the preview build of Take On Helicopters doesn’t include player firearms, such a request would have been fairly pointless. After the jump, a picture of the man I wished dead, plus twelve hundred words where four -“Take On Helicopters! Gosh!” – probably would have sufficed. Read the rest of this entry »
By Alec Meer on September 13th, 2011.
For some people, there’s nothing better than watching nine Arma 3 videos in a row. Those people are going to be extremely disappointed, for today I am only able to bring them eight Arma 3 videos in a row. I have let you down. Perhaps even betrayed your trust. I am so sorry. One day, I hope, we might come to love each other again. Those of you with less exacting tastes will hopefully be able to draw some small measure of pleasure from the following 10-ish minutes of footage culled from presentations made at GamesCom last month. Includes a whole lot of undersea action, including what I’m prepared to guess is the most realistic flipper physics consumer videogames have ever before offered. Also, includes discussion of how much time they spent convincingly recreating soldiers’ underpants. PRE-ORDERED.
Nicely laid-back and chatty videos, given Arma’s steely-eyed nature, these – worth a watch whether or not you’re into soldier sims. (Er, you probably shouldn’t load the below post on a Netbook or anything else that has itself a cry when presented with Flash videos.)
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By Jim Rossignol on September 2nd, 2011.
If there is something I’d really like to be simulated, it would be a giant digging machine that could bore through to the deepest parts of the Earth and then shoot upward, bursting out of the ground and eating the entire Eiffel tower in its spinning jaws. One day that will be simulated. But not today. Today we wait for Take On Helicopters, a simulation of one of the helicopters that will no doubt buzz around the giant Earth drill-ship like flies, perhaps bravely allowing the heroes of the movie to leap onto the armoured drill deck and fight their way inside, before finally duelling the evil and insane drill-ship controller on the bridge, as a nuclear bomb’s timer ticks down to zero. Amazing stuff.
The Take On Helicopters trailer, which features impossibly handsome helicopters, some knees, and more dials than I know how to look at (but zero colossal rock-boring mole-craft) is below.
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By Jim Rossignol on June 30th, 2011.
German games mag GameStar has managed to get a look at Arma 3 in action. The tech is looking several strides ahead of the previous Arma game, and surprisingly bright and colourful, too. The demo shows a bit of sniping, vehicles, and the new physics in action. The resolution and view distance of the landscapes also appears to be better than real life. At the end of the demo, there’s something a bit new, too: underwater combat. It’s all the rage, eh?
And don’t worry, Englishers, the actual presentation is in our default language.
By Jim Rossignol on June 24th, 2011.
Op Archers? Owners of Operation Arrowhead, anyway. If you are one of those people – as you should be if you like soldier simming – then you are entitled to a preview version of Take On Helicopters, the forthcoming commercial chopper game from Bohemia Interactive. It looks like this is a sort of add-on for Operation Arrowhead which demonstrates the new flight model and pilot animation using a “light chopper” (pictured). Perfect if you were wondering how you were going to be able to get through another weekend without some simulated hovering.
By Jim Rossignol on June 23rd, 2011.
UPDATE: Get Arma II for free here. That means you can play in multiplayer, but not Operation Arrowhead.
According to the releases that have just popped up from BIS, Arma II is available for free, while OpFlash has been renamed for future release. Sadly, they do seem to be jumping the gun somewhat, as the download links are not actually live on the site in question. When the links do appear, you’ll be able to get a version Arma II, minus the single player campaign, minus fancy graphics, but with all the awesome multiplayer and editor stuff, for nowt. Hell, we might just have to run some “Arma II 4 Nowt” RPS evenings so that some of you who haven’t yet tasted the pungent, leathery-yet-addictive taste of hard simulation can find out what it’s all about.
Carrier Bagged
By Jim Rossignol on June 14th, 2011.
There are some remakes which are baffling, and others which are ultimately pointless – when they they share little more than a name with the original game, for example – but there are others still which were crying out to happen, and make perfect sense when they arrive. Carrier Command: Gaea Mission is one of these. The original was an extraordinary piece of game design, straddling strategy and vehicular combat in the crude 3D of its day, and managing to create an open-ended sandbox experience early on in the history of gaming. It now looks all the more impressive for having been released in 1988. While it has had a couple of notable imitators such as the Battlezones and Hostile Waters, it’s perhaps surprising that no one has tried to remake the original until now. What is most extraordinary (and unsettling) about this remake is just how faithful a game made over twenty years later has managed to be.
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