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The Story Of Doodle Jump: Brotherly Love And Digital Snacks It’s no secret that today’s soldiers train on all manner of video game-style simulators. In the United Kingdom’s Ministry of defence, British servicemen use Virtual Battlepace 2 as part of their regimen. VBS2 is a product of Bohemia Interactive, who also make the ultra-realistic shooter sim Operation Flashpoint games for the consumer market. (The U.S. Secret Service use it, too.) However, unlike the OpFlash games, VBS2 hasn’t gotten an update since 2007. In the dog years of video game engine iteration, that’s a loooong time. With recruits already having experienced the better graphics and gameplay of Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3, British military are finding that VBS2′s hoary old experience no longer holds new trainees’ attention. Bored soldiers-in-training probably aren’t what you want to be sending all over the world.
Bohemia Interactive’s ArmA II isn’t due out in the states until next week, but it’s out today in Europe, so we’re stealing their launch trailer while they’re not looking.
History lesson: Bohemia Interactive’s Operation Flashpoint was one of the most ambitious PC games ever developed. Its publisher, Codemasters, owns the name. And its original developers don’t like that somebody else is making a sequel.
As I discovered after posting about my experience with Operation Flashpoint 2: Dragon Rising at E3, I discovered that many fans of the original game don’t consider OF2 the true sequel to Operation Flashpoint. For these fans, ArmA: Armed Assault, developed by estranged Operation Flashpoint developer Bohemia Interactive is the sequel, which I suppose would make this screenshot the first official screen of Operation Flashpoint 3. Between this and the whole Final Fantasy numbering issue I am going to go insane.
Either way, the screenshot certainly looks nice. Bohemia went out of their way to make sure we knew this was in no way doctored, though I suspect those logos might not make it into the final game.
There’s a feeling you get when playing Operation Flashpoint that no game since has managed to capture. Not even Oblivion. The feeling of being a real person, alone, in a dangerous place, and each step you take across the game’s huge landscape could well be your last. You agree? Then be heartened by this. The latest issue of PC Gamer runs a preview of Operation Flashpoint 2: Dragon, which can be bust summed up by their calling it “the most mind-bogglingly vast and mercilessly realistic battlefield gaming has ever known”. Vast, check, merciless, check, OK, that’s enough to get me excited.
Operation Flashpoint 2 blown open [PC Gamer, via CVG]
Militaries using games as training tools is nothing new; but here comes one account of a group of five gamers taking on five soldiers from the Netherlands in ‘Virtual Battlefield System 2,’ and scoring a resounding win (the author points out that the gamers were way ahead the soldiers in terms of familiarity with the software, which helped). It’s entertaining, but also contains some musings on the future of such war games and gamers and the military. If you can forgive the typos, it’s an interesting little piece on current applications and perhaps where this might lead:
Many people have been saying this for a long time, and i think we approach the point that more armies will see that ‘Gaming’ is not only fun to do. you can learn from it. – just like we did today. In the last years, technology has taken an enormous jump. the current weaponry has been benefiting from this fact, and its inevitable that normal troops will be trained with special simulation equipment. this can vary from radar observance to real field duty procedures. Gaming has been around us for many years for our pleasure. But yet since a few years, many countries have learned that gaming could be more than just recreational fun.
While real exercises are very expensive, simulations are quite cheap in comparison. Although today’s artificial intelligence is possibly not sufficient for proper training, todays available simulations tecnologies are hard to neglect.
Field report : Gamers fight real Soldiers in VBS2. [ArmedAssault.eu]
