Rock, Paper, Shotgun

And it’s ArmA2. This is fascinating. The situation where a developer keeps the technology and the publisher gets the name is common enough. There’s always obvious competition between the keeper of the flame and the keeper of the name (e.g. Football Manager versus Championship Manager, Far Cry 2 versus Crysis, etc). But Bohemia, in a recent press-release, have made that incredibly explicit. To quote the opening: “Is the upcoming Codemasters game really ‘the much anticipated return of the genre-defining military conflict simulator’ Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis? Is it really ‘the official sequel to the multi-award winning Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis’? Bohemia Interactive says: ‘No! What matters is the game, not the name.’” Seeing Bohemia’s fury at Flashpoint 2 being described by Codemasters as the “return of” or “official sequel to” is without precedent in recent gaming history. Read the whole thing for more. Crikey.

We took the opportunity to chat to Bohemia CEO Marek Spanel about the whole situation…

Read the rest of this entry »

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.