Well, I'm sure Rockstar still can't afford it. They're a tiny company after all, a PC port would strain their limited resources.

I prefer the Celery zombies over the DayZ zombies, because the gameplay mechanics are more consistent. The three-strikes system is brutal but it works. The player gets immediate feedback for everything. Two strikes from death, one strike from death, and then death. Bandages erase all strikes, but you can waste bandages by using them with only one strike (yet saving them for two strikes is a lot more risky). You also need to commit some time to apply a bandage, which makes you vulnerable. There's a bit of strategy involved. It may be simple, but it's consistent. In DayZ, you get a desaturation filter for health. Bandages don't always stop bleeding. A zombie can do a small amount of damage by biting your face, and then snap your legs in half by biting your face again. Zombies can also knock you out randomly. This is inconsistent randomness that seems to be at odds with ArmA's functionality, and I personally found this a lot less fun to deal with. Not to mention that either situation takes control away from the player (as opposed to the three strikes system, where the player has full control until they die, which is less grating). I can concede that having more types of injuries is more realistic, but I'd rather die outright than crawl two kilometers to a hostpital with broken legs and a black and white filter.

I'd like to see less people who are pointlessly intolerant of how others play this highly moddable sandbox game.

This reminds me a little bit of Echelon (1988). In that game, you also flew around in a hovership, puzzled out the story, and engaged in occasional combat. Here's the Moby page: http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/echelon_ That really brings me back. I can't seem to find any gameplay footage though. :( I went ahead and bought A.I.M. and it's sequel off GG after reading the information in this post and looking up a bunch of gameplay footage. I had to set A.I.M. 1 to Windows 98 compatibility to fix a GUI display issue, but otherwise both games run well. Pretty fun so far. :)

The oddest thing is I've worked with pilots in real life for about a decade and my experience with them has been overwhelmingly positive. Generaly, they're a great, upbeat group of folks. They love their sport/hobby/job and it shows. Why the flight simming communities are so insanely caustic and miserable completely bewilders me.

I've never had a positive or remotely enjoyable Domination experience in Takistan, while I've had plenty in Chernarus. Partially it may be the way the mission is set up, but my experiences so far are with what the popular servers ran: Chernarus: Mostly play as US, with roughly equal Russian forces and rolling hills/forests making engagements somewhat difficult (fun) and rather tactical. The map is pretty and varied (some towns have fields around, some have wooded mountains). Also, no FLIR weapons were available. Takistan: Always play as US, everybody takes FLIR sniper rifles and rushes to the nearest mountain to snipe as many untrained conscripts as possible. Rarely see an AO not completely steamrolled in under three minutes. Usually 1-2 minutes. It's very rare that I can actually get into a town and have a proper house-by-house firefight with the AI, and I'm usually racing to the AO as quickly as possible to experience this before the FLIR sniper horde happily skylines (evidently without danger) over the mountain. Any conscripts not in the town are on the opposite mountain, unshielded by anything. Even if the FLIR'n'stovepipe player horde didn't spiderman up and down the obscenely steep mountains, the AI will anyway. I'd rather much have Chernarus, especially without FLIR weapons. If the new Czech terrain is actually "summer 'Chernarus'", I'd love to see Domi on that.

I haven't seen this on the roadmap, so I'd like to suggest it: A paramater to start with a moonless/newmoon night, a parameter where players can spawn with just G17s (or only weapons with flashlights), and a paramater to toggle whether all or some ammo boxes contain weapons with flashlights (even if they're just US guns and appear in Russian ammo crates). Recently I tried to set the paramaters up for a night crawl where players had to find weapons with flashlights before it got too dark, but never spawned in a town whose ammo boxes weapons with flashlights. Even if I were to get one occasionally, it's not the consistency I would have wanted setting the mission up specifically for flashlight hiking. Outside of that, the mission has been an absolute blast. I love how incredilby desolate Chernarus feels with volumetric fog turned on and the weather set to wintry mix. My favorite setup is no cars, ammo boxes in towns, zombies everywhere, helicopter finding with the marker on, and expert mode (partially to force proper map navigation).

I checked out some locations in the editor for ArmA2. The green house in the woods is definitely the house at the end of the dirt road in the middle of Black Forest (slightly East of the middle of Chernarus). You can even match up the size and spread of the three tree trunks against the left side of the house. The hill is angled the same as well. The only difference is the grass in the new screenshot is shorter. I was able to recreate the airfield scene by standing Southeast of the tower at the NW airfield and zooming in towards the hangars. While I was able to match up the exact count of window panes in the upper part of the hanger, as well as the street lamp, I'm still not sure if it says much. Airports could very well be very generic. As for the ruins screenshot, I'm quite sure that's in Kumyrna, which is South of Guglovo (slightly South of center). It's the same asphalt road type, with the same hill in the background, with the same layout of bushes and trees. I recommend visiting these locations in the editor and having a walk around, and zoom in with RMB where you think the shot might be taken from. It's uncanny. Having seen this stuff ingame, I would be surprised if we weren't getting a complete summer Chernarus.

Finally beat this solo! I was freaking out by the end. aydUotlgqUQ Now it's time to wait for part 4.

I've managed to get to the end of this mission twice while solo, on expert default with ACE2. It's taken a lot of attempts. So far, the two difficult parts of this mission getting to the cabin (the first third of the mission), and dealing with the very last task. I've found that once you get to the cabin, it's almost guaranteed you'll make it to the town at the end, unless you're very careless. Both times I've gotten into the safehouse, the mission asks me to kill the remaining zombies in the town. My only complaint about this mission is that the zombie counter actually goes up while running around outside but close to the safehouse. In my last run, I was overwhelmed and killed after killing more zombies than the initial zombie counter indicated, without going more than a couple houses away from the safehouse. Absolutely everything else, including parts 1 and 2, are brilliant. While I've managed to figure out the rest of part 3, I'm stumped on how to complete the end. I've seen the solo playthrough video, and he manages to get the counter to go down while running around town shooting zombies, so I'm just not sure what I'm doing wrong. I'm going to keep plugging away at it, since beating this mission solo/ace/expert is my goal. Every day I put in at least a couple attempts, and every day those insane zigzagging deflection shots with the G17 get just a little easier less hard.

I personally wouldn't mind the lack of ground fidelity using the Seattle map in ArmA2 or ArmA3, minus the traffic. It's a good spot for a Red Dawn type of scenario. Even if experiencing the scenery as infantry is a little too rough to bear, playing as a helicopter or fighter pilot is certainly feasible.

They admit to not being artists, but they sure as hell aren't presenters either. That was the same unprofessional condescending tone I'd expect from anyone trying to hard to be funny writing a game review or something. It's a good concept and I hope it's real, but they're going to have a difficult time trying to sell their tech if this is how they express themselves. On a positive note, the idea that something like this could be real makes for some happy thoughts. It would be an intense relief as an artist to not have to worry about polycount while modeling stuff. In recent projects I've had to spend most of my time thinking up ways to get an effect I want to be simple on resources, and then even more time taking a model and strategically stripping geometry off until the FPS is happy, as well as replacing former geometry with texture effects. Someday I'd like to actually stop worrying about this stuff.

Why did they even bother.

GWX3 is fairly all-encompassing. http://www.thegreywolves.com/gwx3/legacy.php Probably the best way to see the entire scope of the mod is to grab the PDF from near the bottom of this page: http://www.thegreywolves.com/downloads/

What I've seen over the past several months are people who don't have the time, energy and willpower to conduct a little honest pre-purchase research, yet will spend several months complaining and begging on the game's forums. I see the DR people over there as having bought Barbie Horse Adventures (DR) and begging the shovelware developer (CM) to patch in an extensive mounted combat system, yet refuse to ever touch Mount & Blade (ArmA2) because they once saw an AI ride into a tree and the game lags if you have 600 combatants on the battlefield. Seriously, DR wish lists are literally all ArmA2 existing feature lists, but they have an irrational hatred of ArmA2 on the level of mental illness (at least judging by the lies, my favorite being that ArmA2 doesn't have jets. :D)

Steam has an offline mode. I've been able to play singleplayer games through it on the occasion that I couldn't get online. Even when I was playing a singleplayer game on Steam and Steam itself dropped, my game didn't screw up or shut down. I haven't tried Valve's own games this way, I'm guessing they misbehave since they require Steamworks. Hell, playing multiplayer games purchased through Steam which didn't use Steamworks networking weren't even interrupted when Steam went down. With UBI, if the connection goes, the singleplayer game stops, and you can't even save your game. Kinda sucks if you were three hours into a patrol from your last save in SH5. Regarding subsimming, probably the best thing is to get SH3, install GWX, and cope with not having a first person submarine tour which will likely get old after 5 minutes anyway. I'm really unimpressed with what they've shown in SH5 previews so far, the GUI looks horrendous. The Atlantic has water from the Caribbean. VII-type only, war ends in 1943. Ugh. Still, I'd probably pick it up if it I knew it didn't have the retarded UBI DRM. The forced online requirement at all times was also why I didn't buy Rise of Flight. I heard that they were removing that requirement, although I couldn't find any official sources. If they do actually remove the requirement, I'll happily purchase it, but until then, Over Flanders Fields gets my WWI playtime, since the people who made it don't consider their customers criminals by default. :)

I remember getting the pre-release demo for OFP as soon as it was available, and I bought the game as soon as I could find it locally. The demo was just way too much fun. I was able to get more mileage and challenge out of it by trying to beat the SP mission by TKing the leader right at the start and surviving the M113 long enough to loot the LAW off a guy in the first village. I eventually was able to beat the mission each time by killing everything on the map. Someone eventually released an edited version of the demo to include all the vehicles in the code for us to play with. I knew I was going to like the game before the demo, but the demo was just a total blast. Our group of friends played OFP feverishly until sometime in 2004. We skipped Red Hammer, but bought Resistance, and after playing through the awesome sp campaign, our group of friends moved all mission-making and online operations to Nogova. That island was like a second home. ArmA1 wasn't something I was very happy with because of the odd mouse lag. I didn't get into that game in full until after ACE was released, after I had built a new machine that could just brute force it's way around the mouse issue. I didn't bother with Queen's Gambit. ArmA2 has been just awesome for me. It just worked nicely from the start, and I couldn't stop playing it, and it's only gotten better since with patches, ACE and the like. The amount of new content being created for ArmA2 exceeds the free time I have to experience it, which would make this game one of the highest values I've ever experienced (along with OFP, Morrowind, and Oblivion). I'm really looking forward to Operation Arrowhead.

Here's a rough outline of Armaholics updates over the past two days based off a quick glance. Apologizes if I missed anything. So far on the 6th: German police car News reporter units Capture & hold game play mode F-4 Phantom AAS game mode Warfare mission pack to support six user islands Virtual Training Space Beta 3 Single player mission German editor prop pack TvT game mode An update to a user campaign to utilize ACE units Another AAS game mode On the 5th: Interview/preview of Conspiracies Rising, a large horror/scifi project Preview screenshots of a Challenger tank Huertgenwald island release Coop mission Singleplayer mission Another Coop mission Another AAS game mode Celle island release Large Isla Duala island update It's like a little Christmas every day. I had a major tank battle on Celle (very Steel Beasts-like terrain, perfect for tanks), I just got done exploring the major updates to Isla Duala, and I've yet to try out Huertgenwald, but I plan on doing so in a little while. Since that's a wintery map, I'll make sure to run NIM Weather and set it to a light snowfall. From the screenshots, that map looks like a good setting for those Charon zombies I've been having so much fun with over the past few weeks. Oh, and I'm a big fan of the F-4 Phantom, so I need to give that a fly too. Maybe drop some Mk82s on said zombies...

How active is Project Reality?

Same. I wasn't excited about the idea of getting Black Shark or Flaming Cliffs because they used Star Force, but honestly, I was missing out on some really awesome simming from the only company that seems to operate in the high fidelity combat flight sim genre anymore. After biting the bullet and having purchased and owned both for a while, I can say it wasn't a big deal, even if it wasn't the ideal solution (from a customer standpoint). When/if I decide to build a cockpit pod, I know I can have an offline computer running it which is dedicated for the task without being forced online and all that garbage. I drew the line at being forced online to play singleplayer games. For instance, I refuse to have anything to do with Rise of Flight because it does just that. I wound up purchasing Over Flanders Fields instead, since it's actually customer-friendly. I don't care if it's better or worse than ROF regarding anything, because I know I'll never play RoF since the company that developed it considers all their customers as criminals in waiting. If OFF didn't exist, I'd likely have forgotten about WWI flight simulation altogether. I'd happily ditch gaming/simming as a hobby entirely if everything that came out required such asinine DRM/connection to operate. After all, I still have my Falcon 4.0 CD from 1998 and it still fucking WORKS, and I've used it to install OpenFalcon, which I still play. I'm grateful for this.

Agreed. I felt not a single bit of addiction or "new game joy" from this. The soldier feels clunky despite a good framerate, and every round felt tedious. I can deal with fast-paced arcade FPS. Heck, I had fun with MW1 & BF2, but BC2 just feels really "off" to me, even after playing a bunch on fast/low ping servers. This just isn't fun for me. I'm canceling my preorder.

Well, on the plus side it means saving money for something else, like a hobby that hasn't severely degraded in the past 20 years.

This looks great. Are you adding fog, post-processing presets, and music as well? VTS is addicting. :)

ACE is so active that they had to adopt an SVN-style distribution system just to make it easier for users to stay up to date. Hell, some ACE servers are set up to update themselves and restart automatically. The perpetual stream of blatant lies from these DR players is getting extremely tiring.

The number of votes which even occurred on that site is tiny relative to the number of people playing the mentioned games. Also, the number of games in each category is far too small and has strange/misplaced/missing entries. Such a relatively small and little-known website is susceptible to rallies and joke voting, and that's what certainly happened. There's nothing to be proud of. The only tangible result of that voting session was figuring out which gaming community even noticed or cared about it.