There was a guy who saved someone in a car crash and he said he learned what to do medically in the moment from this game.
The tutorial for that game was kinda wild, they simulated what getting a class on first aid during boot camp was like. So you’d listen to some corporal talk about applying a tourniquet, and then do a short test, and boom you get rank points for multiplayer.
Nawww it was way harder than that!! If you wanted to play as the medic class in a game online you had to do the offline training. The training made you sit through like a 45 minute long combat life saver class. No shit had to like walk into the classroom and sit near the projector and look down to answer questions lol
If you wanted to do the Special Forces maps (basically night mode maps) you had to pass this skull dragging class where you had to avoid being spotted and slowly move into an area. I remember trying for like 3 days just to pass that friggin class!
Had to take a class to drive the humvee, and use the jav. Probably more but it’s been a hot minute. I was amazed you had a button for the transfer case and one for your seatbelt. You could do 4lo and 4hi, wild.
Hold the ‘m’ button on his laptop?!?
I played it for a while. It was ok for the time, when there weren’t many pseudorealistic tactical FPS games.
It was a legitimately good completely free multiplayer FPS game. I was into it for a while ages ago, and it was quite fun.
I genuinely doubt it actually inspired a remotely meaningful number of people to actually join the army, though.
Probably the opposite. Who wants to do a job where you die the first hour on the job?
lol yeah the learning curve was pretty steep, because for a very long time there were no heal mechanics, so if someone winged you decently without outright killing you, you were gonna have serious trouble contributing to the round.
I recall playing the tutorial. Never went online. Dial up sucked. Interesting tidbit, if you shoot your drill instructor at the range you’re dropped into a prison cell at Fort Leavenworth. All you can do from that point is listen to somebody whistling and drag a tin cup across your cell bars.
Wait…can you quit to main menu?
No, no, they come to your home and take you to the prison. That’s not part of the game.
Ooooooh. Like the real game is escaping Guantanamo
I definitely played this in high school
It was really good but they found other recruiting methods more effective
Played this a lot. My favorite map is bridge.
Same.
Something soo satisfying about shooting snipers who thought you should stick the barrel out if the upstairs windows
This game and the OG Planetside both taught me the simple joys of fighting for/on a bridge.
You can have a huge overworld, you can have an intricate map with all the lanes and passageways you want, but, in the end, the (much, much older) children yearn for the bridge.
Yes the map is beautiful but the kill lines here at the bridge are
when_the_light_hits_the_hills.pacha
LOL. Played that game for years. Did the whole clan thing. It was pretty good fun
The special forces test was hard.
For the written test. there’s parts where you would be shown a helicopter for 100 milliseconds then have to remember the configuration, number of rotors, ordinance… Or you see a tank for a split second and have to correctly identify the barrel measurements and other little details.
The stealth mission was difficult too. I managed to be a medic and a ranger but not special forces.
The special forces test was nuts, was playing on a friend’s account at the time but it boiled down to just crawling through the lowest point along the entire path. Literally the entire mission you’re in a drainage or small creek just crawling and going stealth. I can’t remember if you eventually fight or do anything, I just remember the two hours of crawling on the ground to go undetected.
After I got the SF certification you could play this map called Hospital where you’re extracting a VIP while an insurgent team is trying to kill him. So much fucking fun. I loved this game. Yvan eht nioj
That’s when I stopped playing. I think I was an hour in before I got spotted and then wasn’t going to spend another 2 hours literally crawling.
I played the crap out of AA Proving grounds. Was a ton of fun! Had a bunch of shit “join the army” bs in it, which I doubt worked on anyone with a few brain cells, but the game was great.
Had big vans parked on the UT Campus lawn paid for with Pentagon money, where you could play the game right next to a real live military recruiter.
I like to think about this while I’m looking at videos of Palestinian student protesters getting maced, tackled, and dragged away by campus security.
Pretty sure I got a copy from the army recruiter at my school. It ran slow as shit on my parents ’ janky ass Gateway, so I never got to really play it.
It had a reporting system. If you reported someone for camping, the vote would be turned against you and if people agreed you were kicked. 😂
It was extremely popular. I played it a lot. Many players were international because, you know, it was free.
It was great anti-miliarty propaganda. I mean I died several times per hour.
I was one of those international players, it was pretty good and a nice change when you needed a break from Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, which was very popular around the same time.
I was one of those international players, it was pretty good and a nice change when you needed a break from Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, which was very popular around the same time.
Ahh shit I remember ET. That was my jam.
It was extremely popular.
It was free to play. But it didn’t hold a candle to Team Fortress, Call of Duty, or even Tribes in terms of overall player count. The project was eventually abandoned when Pentagon officials realized they could just send kick-backs to EA executives in order to inject their propaganda into a more popular franchise.
Now US Army and Navy sponsorship of tournaments is routine, streamers regularly get promoted based on their military affiliations, and native advertising has ramped up substantially.
But it didn’t hold a candle to Team Fortress, Call of Duty, or even Tribes in terms of overall player count.
In terms of player count, no. But mechanics and graphics? They were pretty freaking good.
Although one pretty ridiculous thing was that one would never play as “the enemy.” You’re always on the side of the US Army, obviously, and the enemies are vaguely mid-eastern people dressed very stereotypically, yelling. But if your friend was on that enemy team, they’d see themselves as a US soldier and you as a somewhat racist terrorist stereotype. And the guns work like that too; you start of with an M16 or whatever your role might be, but when the enemy kills you, they’ll pick up an AK with a drum magazine. Weirdly the guns had different mechanics, so which ones was the game using at what times?
Anyways, thought to mention. I played Tactical Ops mostly at that time (having had stopped CS when the annoying 1.6 steam update came), but with one friend we did AA. Always on American servers, playing with like 190 ping. (And yes, if it’s a steady ping, you can actually get used to it and hit things. Well even.)
Tribes is my all-time favourite shooter. I esp loved Tribes 2… unpopular opinion maybe but wow was that an amazing game to me.
The gameplay balance was something else. Not quite as intricate as TF, but the intricate maps and exotic weapons made up for it.
One reason I fell in love with Halo so quickly was the way it derived a lot of its aesthetic from Tribes.
I played this at the same time I played Tribes (renegades always) and this game was a novelty, Tribes was the fun.
I saw a new Tribes is coming out/just came out, but I’m wayyyy too old to keep up now haha.
Ha, very much the same. The number of games I own is far greater than the number of games I’ve played. And like our universe, those two numbers will continue to grow apart in perpetuity.
I never played any of those because they’re not free
Now they just pay Activision to do that on their behalf with CoD.
