ARMA Gold - With Old-School Flavah!
I actually had a weekend this weekend. Well, except for Friday night - that was trashed due to deadlines at the day job. I found myself playing some Armed Assault Gold (ARMA Gold) - sort of the spiritual successor to Operation: Flashpoint. It's a "realistic" first-person shooter released around a year and a half ago, which models all kinds of real-world weaponry and drivable vehicles. It's more "sim-like," which is sort of the kiss of death in the modern videogame market.

I found myself flying multiple helicopters, armored vehicles, trucks, and wielding everything from a pistol to a sniper rifle to a captured enemy rocket launcher in several different missions, and sometimes doing some pretty weird things.

In one mission, I was a sniper commanding a saboteur in a raid in the middle of the night. I messed up on my orders, and the saboteur didn't place his satchel charges near the trucks after we had cleared the base with sniper shots using night-vision. I accidentally ordered him to drive the truck. Which he did. I jumped into the other truck and decided we'd take the trucks back to our extraction point, whereupon we blew them up with small arms fire prior to getting inside the helicopter. The mission was confused, but seemed to give me credit for success. So long as you complete the mission objectives, the game doesn't complain too much about how you did it. Which is as it should be, in my opinion.



The game can be frustratingly difficult at times. Death comes quickly and often by surprise. I'm sometimes left looking at my own body in the post-death camera-panning view wondering what shot me. I never saw it coming. One good hit is all it takes. One moment you are feeling nigh-invincible near the end of a twenty-minute-long mission in your armored personnel carrier, and the next moment some guy hiding in the weeds with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher has robbed you of victory. Save early, save often. There are no health pick-ups, though friendly medics may patch up minor wounds so that your aim accuracy and movement rate are less horrible.

You are frequently in command of a squadron. Navigating the command menu hierarchy can be almost as challenging as navigating an enemy-held village. It's easy to give bad commands (as I did in the raid / sabotage mission), but you have a surprising level of indirect control over your squad. It's almost like an RTS game at that level. An RTS game where where the commander can get his own head blown off while giving orders.

The game has something of a cult following. I do not believe it was a huge seller. But as I played it, I couldn't help but think that this game - had it been possible to build in an earlier era (say, the 80's and early 90's), it might have been a monster hit. I'm thinking back to the era where games like X-Com and Falcon 3.0 could be best-sellers. But now it not only faces some stiff competition from less-hardcore but prettier titles, but the gaming landscape has changed. The gamers for whom this would have been "lightweight" fare no longer resemble anything like a dominant market.

I miss those days. But there's an ARMA 2 coming soon. So I guess there's still just enough of us left.

Labels: Mainstream Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:33 AM (Permalink)