It’s available right now, pretty much everywhere (except Japan), with pricing to of course vary depending on where you are. In the US, for example, it’s $US30. In the UK, it’s £20, while in Australia, it’s… AUD$70 (USD$65).

Kotaku AU Note: A quick check of EB ($55), JB ($100) and GAME ($60) puts that $70 price tag into perspective.

The Skirmish downloadable content pack for Dragon Rising comes out for free on the PC tomorrow, bundled with a title update that will take care of various single and multiplayer issues that players have been complaining about since the game was released. The four new maps — Lumberyard, White Fang, Stomping Grounds and Force Dispersal — along with the All Round Defence and Uphill Struggle FTE missions will be available for free download for the PC version of the game starting tomorrow.

For console owners, November 5 will see the release of a title update for the Xbox 360 version, with the PlayStation 3 title update following shortly after. The Skirmish DLC will be available for both consoles at a later date, running players either 400 Microsoft points or $US3.99.

You can check out a full list of the title update fixes for the PC and console versions at the Codemasters community website.

The Wii version adds a host of motion control techniques to the game, with the Wiimote used to bat, bowl and even shine the ball.

“It’s always refreshing to see new and unique ways of bringing the game of cricket into lounge rooms across the country and being accessible to families,” says McGrath. “Being involved in the game at the highest level is a truly amazing experience and being able to assist in letting fans of the game simulate this is fantastic.

“After playing this game I almost feel like pulling the bowling boots out again and having another crack at the Poms.”

When we reported the Wii version delay back in August, we predicted an endorsement would follow. We went for a revival of Shane Warne Cricket. We were close.

Codemasters trotted out the PC version of Colin McRae: DiRT 2 today at the Windows 7 launch in New York, showing off the snazzy DirectX 11 features the game was delayed for.

The DirectX 11 effects actually look rather impressive, though I’m not sure they amount to anything that really warranted the game being delayed on the PC. I guess that’s what comes of forming a strategic alliance with Microsoft to gain early access to the DirectX 11 tech.

“The opportunity to enter into a strategic relationship with Microsoft to fuse key DirectX 11 technologies with Codemasters’ EGO™ Engine and set the new standard in race gaming on home computers was irresistible,” said Bryan Marshall, chief technical officer, Codemasters. “By taking advantage of the DirectX 11 feature set included in Windows 7, including hardware tessellation, multi-threading and Shader Model 5.0, we will deliver the most immersive and realistic off-road racing experience yet and set the technical benchmark in the genre.”

Really, they’re the kind of effects you only notice if you are watching someone else race. Pretty, but ultimately unnecessary.

In this first-person shooter sequel you command a squad of marines helping to retake the island of Skira from the Chinese in a near-future teetering on the brink of war.

But no longer in the hands of developers Bohemia Interactive, can Codemaster’s Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising prove itself every bit as difficult and fun as the original?

Loved
Damage System: Getting shot in Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising can have a lasting impact on how you play the missions. Besides headshots killing you instantly, you can get tagged in the legs, the chest, the arms, the head. Injuries show up on a little version of your character on the screen, if you don’t fix yourself up fast (or have a medic do it) you’ll eventually bleed out. And even when you do patch yourself up you still won’t be able to run sometimes. The end result? More cautious gameplay, more thinking before you move. Perfect for this type of game.

Sound: I’ve played my share of first-person and third-person shooters and, next to America’s Army 2, this game has some of the best sound effects out there. You’ll hear a sniper bullet whine by your ear urging your to drop to the ground and use the report of automatic fire to pinpoint an enemy and listen for footsteps to alert you to nearby bad guys.

Difficulty: Played on the average setting, Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is a brutal, unforgiving experience. If you don’t pace yourself, using tactics and squad commands, you’re going to be shot down in seconds. And those one-shot kills you land can happen to you too, so don’t stand in one place for too long.

Realism: From the whine of bullets and full body damage modelling to the relatively open map, which allows for just about any sort of approach you want in a map, Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising plays more like a training exercise than it does a run-in-gun shooter.

Hated
Save System: Managing and creating save points in a game can be an art. Too many and players will just trudge through the game, regardless of loss of life, knowing that they can respawn metres from where they dropped. Too few and you have Dragon Rising, which has you play for 30 to 40 minutes, cross vast tracks of terrain, take out multiple units and then die only to do it all over again. The save points improve as you near the end of the game, but the beginning is brutal and unnecessary.

Line of Sight: When a single shot can kill you instantly and save points are stretched between unforgiving distances of objectives and terrain, having a game that can’t render an enemy on the horizon doesn’t just look bad, it guts the action. In almost every map I played there were enemies who phased in and out of existence as they wavered on the edge of what the game could handle showing me, making sniping a near impossibility.

Brain-Damaged Friendlies: Your squad mates can be life savers, helping you flank enemies or patching you up after you’ve taken a shot to the chest. But man can they be stupid. It’s shocking how many times my men came to patch me up and then just stood over me with a med kit in hand, watching me die, or refused to mount a vehicle, or walked directly in front of me while I was shooting. Or the one time I had to restart a section of a mission because my squad had commandeered a jeep, drove to the other side of the map with it and then refused to join me at the extraction point. In a game so reliant on squad, this level of artificial intelligence problems is unacceptable.

Plot: Maybe this is a plus for some gamers, but if you’re going to bother having a storyline, even a rudimentary one, then invest a little time in creating a story arch, characters with first names, some meaning. Look at Modern Warfare. It was a core shooting experience, but still managed to deliver a evocative and interesting story.

Not So Online: I’d love to be able to tell you what playing on the Playstation Network is like with Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising, but I was never able to even connect to the servers. Going online I found a six-page thread about the problem and promises from the developer that they were looking into the issue. Apparently the same problems can be found on the PC and Xbox 360 versions of the game, according to the thread.

Buggy: This game could have used a bit more time in the cooker, it also could have used a thorough once-over after it was finished. From spastic animations to clueless friendlies to missions that won’t end to missing radio communications, Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is a mess.

Despite the problems, and there were quite a few, I did love the concept of Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising. I think games these days are too forgiving. Gamers, especially “hard core” gamers need some tough love. That means permanent death in massively multiplayer online games, overwhelming odds in strategy titles and one-shot kills in shooters.

Playing through the game was a painful, but fun experience. The bugs and overwhelming problems with the title made the time spent gaming often frustrating, but those times when the game was working properly it sang.

Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising was developed and published by Codemasters for the PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 on October 6. Retails for $US59.99. In Australia, the Xbox 360 and PS3 version are on sale October 15 for AU$109.95 and the PC version on October 22 for AU$99.95. A copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Played through the single-player campaign, but was unable to join any multiplayer servers over the course of four days.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

As we reported in September, long-time Archlord North American and European operator Codemasters had lost the rights to run the game, with South Korean publisher Webzen taking over the reins this month. Now the North American and European servers are live, and Webzen is accepting pre-registration for transfers from the Codemasters servers to their own, with in-game cash being offered as an incentive for making the move. Codemasters players can visit Webzen’s Archlord home page for details on making the move.

Sweetening the deal for Western players is the introduction of the new Swashbuckler character class, a close-quarters female fighter sporting bunny ears, as seen in the picture here. All this, plus a bunny girl? I, for one, welcome our new South Korean overlords.

Luckily, Sion Lenton—Executive Producer at Codemasters on Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising—was a good sport and let “Professor Glasser” talk his ear off about real-life conflicts between Russia and Japan. You see, his game is loosely based on one of those conflicts with some, uh, minor tweaks.

In Dragon Rising, it’s a few years into the future and China’s economy is going down the tank. There’s an island north of Japan called Skira (topographically based on real life Kiska Island). The island is contested territory between Russia and China because of its large oil reserves. Also, the US Army, acting on behalf of the Russians to “liberate” it from the Chinese.

I think my political science professor would flunk any of his students who couldn’t name all of the things wrong with that premise. For one thing, Kiska Island is in Alaska — which is pretty far from any of the Kuril Islands north of Japan that are actually contested territory. For another, those islands are contested territory between Russia and Japan, not China — and I don’t even think they have oil; they’re just in a really sweet strategic spot. Also, China’s economy is going lots of places these days — but none of them look like the tank. And the US acting on behalf of Russia against China? It wouldn’t just have to be the future; it’d probably have to be a whole different planet.

I related all of this to Lenton as a roundabout way of asking if Japanese forces would be included in the upcoming downloadable content that Codemasters is planning for Dragon Rising. In real life, the Japan Self-Defence Force couldn’t do anything to Russia (or China) unless Japan really did own the islands and Russia (or China) really was moving in on them with armed forces. But, hey, if we’re not worried about realism, why wouldn’t you want to get Japan in the mix?

Lenton said Japan would deserve more attention than just DLC (”That would really be a whole separate game,” he said). However, he was intrigued by the idea of an overarching security dilemma as motivation for stealth gameplay.

Bear with me — I got an A- on my thesis for this. A security dilemma is a situation in which two countries both want the same thing. One can sell out the other to get that thing, which sort of sucks, but usually doesn’t lead to war. Or, they can both try to sell each other out to get what they want and that almost always leads to war. Or—what usually happens—they get stuck in a staring contest where neither of them doing anything and so neither of them gets what they want. But nobody goes to war.

This was my roundabout way of asking if there was stealth in the game. After all, if Russian forces claim to shoot down Chinese planes in Russian territory but can’t prove it with physical evidence, it’s be really hard to convince the whole world that declaring war on China is totally cool. So, it would sort of make sense to have stealth in the game, right?

Lenton seemed to like the idea, but sadly it’s not actually part of Operation Flashpoint. That’s not to say the developer was totally unaware of international relations. After all, Lenton explained, a lot of work went into figuring out how to explain why US forces were involved in the conflict (*cough* oil *cough*). And the basic message of the game—that war is scary—certainly is a nod toward realism.

But after our little chat, I wonder if Lenton or other war game developers will look into security dilemmas as a basis on which to build a war-torn future to play in. After all, sometimes real-life is scarier that the “what-ifs” video game developers imagine for us.

Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is out October 6.

Everybody loves a good explosion. And text flashing on blank screens is nice, too.

Actually, the explosions in Dragon Rising might not be what you’re expecting, based on past war video game experiences. The developers behind the game did research, you see, and concluded that explosions are more about smoke and oily fumes than about fire and debris.

That’s not the only streak of realism the game is going for. Check out our preview for some of the other ways Dragon Rising goes for authenticity and keep an eye out later for a rant about the one thing the game doesn’t get right when it comes to rendering the reality of war in a console shooter.

Explore the history of Skira Island, the fictional setting for Codemasters upcoming Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising, coming in October for the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.

Skira Island has long been a place of turmoil. Luckily its real-life inspiration, Kiska Island, which was the scene of much strife during World War II. In 1942 the Japanese captured the island, one of the Rat Islands group of the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, owned by the United States. After staging several bombing runs, the Allies brought in a force of 34,426 troops in 1943, only to discover that the Japanese had evacuated the island under cover of fog without the Allies noticing. Despite encountering no human opposition, booby traps and friendly fire caused close to 200 casualties.

Now the site is a US Historic Landmark. Unfortunately, its fictional counterpart hasn’t fared nearly as well.

The Orcs, Elves and Humans of Chantra will be moving to a new home on October 3, when Korean publisher Webzen takes over the operation of the game in North America and Europe. According to an email notice sent out to players, Codemasters was unable to come to a renewal agreement with Korean ArchLord developer NHN, resulting in a rather speedy transition between the two companies. Codies shuts things down on October 1, and Webzen looks to have things up and running two days later. That trick never works, but we’ve got our fingers crossed.

According to the ArchLord transition FAQ posted at Codemasters’ website, Webzen will be receiving all of the character data for the game, so players shouldn’t have to worry about losing their hard-earned gear or experience. As a precaution, Codemasters has shut down new account generation and the game’s cash store to ensure that there are no outstanding issues come October 1st.

North American and European players are urged to visit Webzen’s ArchLord page for more information.

Thanks to Paul for passing this info along!