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hellfish

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Posts posted by hellfish

  1. The trailers and screenshots are both prerendered. Furthermore, it's not the original OF1 developers working on OF2, rather it's an in-house Codemasters team. Looking at the history of Codemasters developed games, I wouldn't hope for much.

    Check out the developer's briefing from E3. It has ingame stuff, and a better explanation of what to expect. Before I saw it, I was pretty dubious about the whole thing myself, but this dev thing did get my attention.

    Besides, Armed Assault 2 will be a copy of Armed Assault 1, except all the mods won't work, it will have tons of bugs and will play exactly like OFP1 - a nine year old game by then. BIS lost my business when Arma1 was a massive disappointment.

  2. He focuses on the junior enlisted men. All the NCOs in the book and show are pretty professional, but the junior enlistedmen act like they're right out of high school. Because they are. Having been a junior enlistedman in the infantry, I can tell you they're all goofs. They'll fight like lions, but they're goofs.

    As for your complaining about the troops whining about sending the Iraqis back to the death squads - God forbid American troops should have a shred of humanity.

    Idiot.

  3. Yeah, that's not a 30lb skull.

    I still have no idea what it is. Those spikes are pretty big, so they'd probably protrude from the skin, and they look like they're pretty even in length down the whole body. That skull, though, doesn't strike me as a fish skull. It does look kind of reptilian, but that doesn't jive with the rest of the skeleton for known species.

    It'll probably end up being something really obvious, but damned if I know.

  4. Get Civ4 with the Beyond the Sword expansion. A good couple of mods are "Rise of Mankind 2" (it adds a lot of civ-specific units and buildings, resources, techs) and one that I think comes with the BTS expansion.

    I forget the name of it, but it's more historical - civs show up at specific times on a giant real-world map and you can jump to lead a new civ when it arises. It's hard, but fun. Africa is a nightmare to raise a civilization in, so beware the Egyptians, Malinese, and Ethiopians.

    Skip the "Fall From Heaven" mod that seems to be so popular. It's really pretty lame, and all the "evil" civs end up becoming neutral or good in the end, meaning it's rare to see any fighting.

  5. I've been an amateur marine biologist and a volunteer aquarist for years and I've never seen a skeleton like that. It looks vaguely like a flathead or snakehead. It looks like the jaw is missing too.

    Of course, with that said, there's still incredibly little we know about the ocean. I wish I could see better pics of it, with a sense of scale as well (the kids don't help).

  6. It wasn't designed to be a history book, and it had no obligation to be. The Marines knew who Wright was when they let him tag along.

    I read a lot of books by embedded reporters/writers in OIF and I'd argue that Wright's is the only one to pay full attention to the enlisted. So many of the books written were about O-3s or above, with scant attention paid to the enlisted men. I think a lot of the embeds came across as snotty pricks too - keeping with the well educated officers instead of entering the [sarcasm]terrifying realm of the unwashed enlisted masses who listened to rap music and heavy metal. [/sarcasm] By and large I got the impression that most embeds were intimidated by the enlisted men, which is why so much time in their books was spent on officers, to whom they could find a kinship in education and middle/upper-class affluence, and also why so much of their book involved the embeds themselves.

    Wright's book was easily one of the best to come out of OIF so far, along with Colby Buzzel's book and Nathaniel Fick's. Bing West deliberately focused on higher echelons, so I can't fault him for that. He was also more interested in the history of the fight, rather than the people who fought it.

  7. ^ Agreed re: JA2. I was looking for a realistic military squad-level game and found a pretty ridiculous tactical game. It had it's moments, but I really hated the whole idea where you start with pistols and progress from there. I'd much rather start running and work from there against an enemy who seemed more organized than a random bunch of soldiers with ridiculous mixes of weaponry. There's a JA3 coming out in 2010, theoretically. I'd like any future version to include vehicles, logistics (money, guns, ammo, etc) and a halfway realistic enemy.

    X-Com1 was fantastic - fantastic! - and I would love for someone to replicate it with modern graphics. All the clones I've played either attempted to add or take away the things that made the original great, and in the process failed entirely.

    I'm looking forward to the Les Grognards demo (I'm not a Napoleanics fan, but there are a lot of interesting concepts involved in the game that might bring me in). Likewise for Empires at War - I think it has a lot of potential, based on what we know of it so far.

    Otherwise the only games out there that I've heard of that I'm interested in are Armed Assault 2 (though I fully expect to be disappointed in this, as I really doubt it'll be what it could be... like Arma1 was a disappoinment). Operation Flashpoint 2 might be interesting. Far Cry 2 might be good if it's the modern Oblivion based in West Africa like I think it is.

    In the end, however, I'm still waiting for someone to build me an integrated battlefield sim like Microprose once promised. Or a strategy game that doesn't look like it belongs in a long, thin box with carboard counters.

    Remember Road to Moscow? That would have been brilliant. :(

  8. I am hesitant about this series, and I did not read the book. 1st Recon was with RCT-1 during the push and I did come across them several times. (I was with 2/23, the third infantry battalion of RCT-1). I have a fellow Marine infantry officer whom I have known for a long time who strongly disagreed with some of the stuff put in the book and said that the book suffered from a few malcontent perspectives that were skewed negatively to the reporter that was embedded with the unit.

    The clips on the website did bring back some memories, until I heard the " L-T" line. That is just not heard in the Marine Corps, just like "sarge" is not uttered as well.

    I guess I will have to wait and see....

    To be honest, it's not an historical book. It's a book written by an entertainment reporter embedded with the Marines. It's mostly about the junior Marines he met - the Generation Xers and Generation Yers.

    From my Marine friends, it seems the guys who did their 4 years and got out liked the book, but anybody who became a Corps lifer tended to hate it. Same as Jarhead.

  9. A TOW flying over the target is not a failure - it would best be explained as the gunner just missed the target. A TOW impacting halfway to the target could be a failure, or could be that the gunner sneezed or got distracted. No missile is 100% accurate. You're going to miss some of the time. Just be glad you're not forced to use the Dragon ATGM.

    And the "hump" of the TOW right before it hits the target is the top-attack feature at work.

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