Jman1000

1) When my character goes into the water, he starts screaming and when he emerges (assuming he doesn't die), he's cut up. So either the water is filled with razor blades or there's a major bug I forgot to patch. 2) Bullets don't splash when they hit the water. 3) My character gets mysteriously trapped by objects in buildings. 4) My character hobbles slowly when holding a rocket launcher. 5) My character moves slowly when not holding a gun (or when a prisoner). 6) In Escape from Prison, sometimes I can't enter the helicopter. 7) I can't find a hotkey for Eject. 8) Enemy guards are apparently telepathic and even if I shoot them out of sight of their base with a silenced gun, the alarm goes off in seconds. 9) If I'm right next to an enemy and run out of ammo I can't seem to kick, punch, or pistol whip the enemy. 10) My character can't seem to hop fences when it's too far to run around. 11) My character doesn't put his rifle back in his hand after he climbs up a ladder. 12) Speaking of which, he climbs like a grandma. 13) The airplanes mysteriously sink while flying and don't gain altitude without permanently losing speed. 14) I can't bum rounds off my buddies when I run out. 15) Sometimes I'll give the command to shoot a particular object or enemy and my subordinate will just stand there looking clueless even though his target is right in sight. 16) I can't order the A-10 to strafe and if he runs out of Mavericks he just orbits the scene uselessly. 17) I can't get the BRDM's blast shields to shut. 18) I can't shoot out the window when I'm a passenger. 19) I can't get the commander's cupola in a tank to rotate without switching to 3rd person view. 20) In Guardian, sometimes the trucks randomly turn toward buildings and just stop dead in their tracks. 21) My men have been known to be trapped in someone's backyard and I had to physically push them out one by one. 22) Sometimes the contextual action menu jumps and lurches and I can't zero in on an action. These are actions that in real life require only broad movements and not fine, finnicky masturbation and yet in order to do these basic things in the game such as grab a dead man's weapon or hop in a vehicle I must tweak around with a crappy interface. 23) My character sticks to cliff faces like Spiderman. 24) I can't peer around corners. 25) Enemies magically know that a T-80 tank rolling by has one American soldier inside and not 3 Russians. 26) The LST won't move. 27) If I try and land a helo on the LST, when I get out, I fall through its deck. 28) If I'm the 5th passenger in a SCUD the vehicle becomes invisible. 29) I can't steer my parachute. 30) I can't pick which seat I want to sit in as passenger. 31) If I bump a helicopter at low speeds into a tree, I die. 32) Sometimes tanks magically know I am right in their blind spot even if they never saw me coming. 33) I cannot throw my satchel charges. 34) Nor can I wedge them between the turret and body of a moving tank so I can let it get some distance from me before I vaporize it. 35) I can't find the hotkey for planting or detonating said charges. 36) I can't switch places on a boat without drowning. 37) Boats move on land. 38) I can't find a way to sit in the copilot's seat of the Chinook. 39) In the editor, I can't find a way to make someone wait X number of minutes before moving on to the next waypoint. 40) There's no wound direction finder so you can know what side of your body is being hit with bullets. This is pretty important when your headphones don't give you much info. Many of these are serious bugs and I've died as a result of the majority of them. So there must be patches for them. Anyone?

Doesn't it seem odd that (A) from a gameplay standpoint a long-range supersonic bomber would be picked for a tactical warfare simulator and (B) that a small communist enclave on a small island would have any need for and even be able to afford such a high-end piece of machinery?

Am I the only one who noticed this and other glaring dialogue errors in the game? Or the fact that in the early spec-ops mission where you take out some tanks at night, the map refers to an "optional quest" as though this is D&D? How'd that slip past QA?

Well said!

Englisz?

It's hard not to find the islands in OFP fascinating. You've got terrain the likes of Greece on one island, Germany-esque forest on another, and then dry, desolate wasteland on a third. Two of the islands have town names that are Irish and Italian but mostly French, but the inhabitants speak with Czech accents and have Slavic names. One of the islands is dotted with ruined towns. Is there an official backstory and perhaps an explanation for the cultural soup that appears on the two inhabited islands?

I read the wiki information and it wasn't terribly informative. I'm quite curious about the odd mix of town names. Similarly, there must be an interesting backstory to Sahrani given its Arabic name but the paucity of Arabic town names. Maybe it was a Moorish trading post but taken over by the Spanish in the Reconquista? That wouldn't account for the Portuguese names, though.

The instruction manual doesn't help much. There appears to be an "auto-hover" option but the plane does nothing when I select it. Help a brotha out.

I've never actually flown a real helicopter, but all I notice is that compared to the original OFP, the helicopters in ArmA are much harder to handle. So either (A) there's a bug or (B) they decided to make the physics more realistic. Which one?

It only happens when quitting a mission or loading it, but the game will freeze and only quitting through the task manager will work. Which patch fixes this?

"Buenos Dias, Amerikanska". And then the guys in the chopper say some funny sounding stuff too. Then, what does the Spetznaz say when you enter the tent or when you pick up a gun?

Oh, and Sepe, yes, you definitely can sometimes board the helicopter in Escape. It's the best, most fun way to beat that level. Those mongrel red commies who were pushing me around and probably saying nasty things about me in the helicopter ride are soon praying to the Baba Yaga as I shower them with 57mm rockets and that smug T-80 thinking he's invincible is reduced to a pile of scrap metal by an AT-6. Mind you, this is a rather unrealistic way to win as normally bad guys would have faster reflexes, so the first time I played through it, I simply snatched up an AK-74 and started blasting enough people to let me run into the woods.

- Melee combat may not happen frequently, but when it comes up, it's VERY important. If you've worked hard to survive on a mission, suddenly find yourself out of ammo without enough time to reload as an enemy has popped out around a corner, you will really be pining for melee combat. Considering games that are 15 years old feature it, there is zero excuse to exclude it. - Once again, I know 15 year old games that have leaning and jumping. They aren't "extra features". Jumping and leaning are such basic, obvious functions for a shooter that they should be coded before a plot is even thought up. If they had time to program pictures of Vladimir Lenin into guardposts and Christmas Tree easter eggs they had time to program very elemental movements any soldier would want. - Patently unrealistic? Not knowing what part of your body just got hit with a bullet is unrealistic. One of the most central rules of game design is that whenever you are forced to sacrifice realism due to technical constraints resulting in increased difficulty, you must add counter-unrealisms to paradoxically make the game more realistic. Why do you think the game includes little boxes telling you where your destination is? It's to compensate for the lack of our ability in real life to orient ourselves using our internal gyroscopes. - Shooting from a vehicle ineffective? Why add mounted guns then? If you're a passenger on an unarmed vehicle, and enemies start harassing you, you are obviously going to stick your rifle out the window and mow them down. - Satcheling tanks, if you haven't noticed, is one of the KEY objectives in at least two missions. If you're being pursued by a tank, and have the opportunity to duck behind an earthen knoll, and toss your plastic explosives at the tank, you damn well should be able to. - A game should not have to be "played around". - I never said I expected aircraft physics on the detail level of X-Plane. I expect physics to WORK. The airplane physics in OFP are a pathetic attempt at realism. Anyone with a brain would have simply, given the lack of time to program realistic physics, yanked an arcade style physics engine from an old fighter jet game that would have worked 100 times better than the garbage in OFP. As I said before, the minute a player can say "Damn. If this game were more realistic I would have survived," then the game is a failure. Realism, if it is removed at all, should only be removed to make a game easier, not harder. To make a game harder one must add realism. In short, if these features were intentional and not bugs then I sure hope some designers are in the unemployment line right now.

Wow, you put some thought into that one. It kind of amazes me how a game that gets so much right can do so much wrong. While some of the major glitches I mention are more difficult to solve, especially AI, others should have been taught against in game design kindergarten. Any action which is, in the real world, crude and fast such as yanking an eject handle, opening a car door and getting out, or snatching up a rifle should be equally crude and fast in a game. Then there's the issue of the clipping. While it's not as easy a problem to solve as sticking in a hotkey, if programmers of Doom in 1994 could get it right, I don't see how programmers in 2001 had such a hard time with it. Ah well. Hopefully they will remember the number 1 commandment in game design for ArmA 2: Thou shalt not ever make a game more difficult by removing realism. As it is I'm moving on to ArmA but unfortunately my seemingly good laptop chokes on it to where 800*600 resolution still jerks and stutters like the Don't Tazer Me Kid. Until I can play the game in max resolution with the smoothness of Maggie Gylenhaal's supple buttocks, I'm going to have to live with OFP for my battlefield simulation jollies.