1. OFP rocked, and indeed, rocks. Kids have modded it from the American Civil War to the Falklands Against Britain-and-the-USA to Finland Against Pre-Glasnost Russia and beyond. Even in these days of collapsing currency, the cost to enter is only slightly higher than the expense of installing and goofing around with Linux, with similar results (if you're willing to read instructions and learn something new).

2. ArmA was anticipated like the second coming. And it fell flat like the "first three" Star Wars movies. I'm not going to link to the endless forums of frustrated fans posting on BIS' own forums to the tune of "why does the campaign suck?" and/or "what am I doing wrong, I killed everyone and waited two hours and wandered off the road and now it says I've failed" because, frankly, if you Google the name of any ArmA mission you can find the bugs for yourself, along with people in 2007-2008 hoping for a patch to make the game playable.

3. ArmA II is a scaled-down version of the military-industrial complex' simulation of small-unit tactical combat. That's super. It takes an absurd amount of CPU and GPU to deliver what, by most accounts, is a photo-realistic version of a ten-year-old war simulation (Seal Team Six used to play Laser Tag in empty warehouses with Cray XMPs keeping score, and complained that perfect shots had a one-in-four chance of "not counting." Heh heh heh).

If you can afford it, it's great. Kind of like everything in the world, up to and including super-leet Windows gaming rigs, prostitutes, and private aircraft.

I think that simplifies things. If you're still confused, feel free to ask for clarification. (N.B. I entered this forum by saying that OFP ruled all; I'm not here to dump on the product which, in fact, I've just bought.)

Oh, it's all right =)

I just thought it was kind of odd that you randomly began to talk about ArmA. Well, I did play that one, and while I don't think it was bad, it was definitely inferior to OFP.

As for ArmA 2, my PC is not powerful enough to play it, so I kind of have to agree with you here. But it's a great series overall, and I think the ArmA games are still much better than the Codemasters' OFPs.

See point #2 above. Better yet, try it out. Go to the BIS forum and select "Missions: Official" or whatever it's called. A human child born the last time a "broken mission / campaign, please help" thread was updated, would be walking, talking and dressing itself.

I don't care either way, but "definitely inferior to OFP" is right up there with "the sea hovers above the clouds" in my estimation. Try again. Try harder, if, as it seems, you have a vested interest. But don't pee in my pocket and tell me it's raining, please.

I loves me some OFP. I have the original GotyY disks around somewhere (there's a persistent rumor that the copy protection was never broken; who comes up with this stuff?), plus I bought the GoG version twelve hours after I snarfed the AngryWarriorChick.com version for twice the "download" price (because nothing beats physical) which included the yucky Red Hammer campaign. Now I have two copies of that... thing.

(Why not back up your backups? Have you kept track of how many multiplayer games "no longer support Online.com, so send in for your LAN-party personal CD-code"? Don't be silly. Don't assume the Internet will be here in twelve months. Download, burn, backup. Be serious.)

The Red Hammer campaign, I'm sorry, it's like "I paid to see the Nutcracker on stage at Christmas with the understanding that nuts would be cracked, and nobody squeezed my personal nuts even backstage when I raised a ruckus and spent the night in county lockup -- FAIL!" Really, they're doing you a favor.

Damn Englishmen, reinventing words!

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dilligence

I... I think I just got a spelling flame! Wow! I'm totally buried in nostalgia, quick, call the exhumation team!

Nah, I'm a non-lawyer abusing legal terminology, the way lawyers abuse classical Latin. I don't watch lawyer TV, but I drink with them sometimes, and I pick up bits and pieces.

Say you're a lawyer -- wait, it gets better -- and your client wants to buy the Battlefield 2 Total Collection. So you recall something about "BF2" and "The server has refused the connection." and just to be on the safe side, you plug those two strings into Google, because you're tired of hearing your neice complaining about how broken The Sims 3 is and how EA doesn't wanna know, and although you can tell her to shaddap her piehole, with other chronic complainers you have to be a little more professional.

So you do, and your jaw hits the desk and your eyes pop out, because the refusing-connection thing is ongoing from 2005 to earlier this summer, and even Tom's freaking Hardware doesn't have a reliable fix. And forget about having to be online to play the booster packs, you have to be online and logged into your EA account ("At EA, when hackers pwn our servers and jack your credit card info, personal info, login and password, we're reeeealy, reeealy sorry about it. Really.") or none of the booster packs or associated maps will work. No, actually, forget the "never mind the booster packs" bit. The same sixteen dinky maps playing against sixteen other bots gets dull pretty much overnight.

So you present a bill for two hours' work and advise your client to stay far, far away from BF2, and if I'm hearing right, he totally ignores you, reproduces your research trying to register his booster packs, fails, and calls you up during lunch and refers to you as everything but a gentleman and a child born in wedlock for not miracling BF2 into exactly what you told him it wasn't.

Long story short (TOO LATE!), I no longer buy anything more substantial than a gumball without doing what amounts to opposition research on the product or service. It's broken, fraudulent and not supported worth a fig; that's the baseline hypothesis. But in what way? Specifically what makes it a disaster? This is why I emphasize game forums, from pre-alpha to zero-day to the 90th Day of Judgement and beyond, as a barometer to how much of your will to live a given videogame is likely to drain away.

...

I rest my case.

What? Okay, you got a cheap zinger on "dillligence," but what exactly is your objection to the quoted text? What are you on about? Your hobby-horse has faded into the background, so nobody's paying any attention anymore. Feel free to really, you know, express yourself.

P.S. I snagged one of the last OFP: GotY boxes from TallFemaleWarrior.com, for one dollar more than the version I downloaded, and my comparison is... whoops, not available to you. It's all part of the report -- Abandonware v. Classics-for-Two-Bob-Each v. GoG.com.

People WILL pay for online content, if it's the right content. If you're going to show up at a computer tech forum looking for companies to invest in, it's helpful to have trustworthy, no-B.S. reports in your briefcase. It's just another form of dillllligence.

Ok I'll clear the confusion: I found it a bit funny that right after you had joked on some poor "furriner" for making a mistake in your native language, you made a spelling mistake yourself. In fact, I was pretty sure you did it deliberately, but I couldn't be quite sure.

I've been very touchy about people laughing at others making a mistake in foreign languages ever since that f*cking taxi driver in Lyon laughed at me maliciously when I pronounced "merci beaucoup" funnily, or that waiter who yelled at me "OU SONT LES TOILETTES!!!" (or something) when I asked wrong "Ou est la toilet?" (Mind you, he refused to speak English with me as well, and he was very abusive in all imaginable ways known to humankind.)

After that I said "f*ck it" and continued to speak strictly Finnish to the waiter (I also tipped him with an used Finnish postage stamp I found in my wallet), and to all the other f*cking fr*gs rest of the trip. Hah, that really shut them up, suddenly they took me much more seriously and really seemed to pay attention to what I was saying.

As for Oper*tion Flashp*int, woohoo I located my original CDs yesterday! What's more, I didn't even remember I also have the "Red Hammer" expansion that people here are complaining is missing from the digital download. I guess I'll have to play this game sometime, not sure whether I should play ArmA (which I could download for free from the Bohemia homepage) or the originals.

- Originals include Red Hammer that the digital download version lacks?

- But the originals have some evil copy protection system that may render the game unplayable, dress all enemy soldiers as bunnies and make my DVD-RW drives spin the wrong way, and some such weird shit? I'm not sure if I dare to play the original CDs anymore.

I can't help you with the backward-spinning DVD, sorry. I hear that re-installing Windows fixes some, but not all, problems. Good luck with that.

Would installing Linux fix all the problems?

All kidding aside, there's a persistent rumor that OFP was equipped with the One Ring of copy protection, and it's just as well to leave the myth alive.

It's like Wizardry I on the Apple II. You could phreak calls to Mars, use your ______ modem to imitate any and all in-band signals and pipe them straight into the phone jack, demodulate radio signals that were none of your business, and exploit RWTS so that copy protection was basically a matter of squeezing your crew's logo into any given game's splash screen, but only an egg-sucking dog would actually own a copy of Wizardry I that he hadn't paid for. Strange but true.

Anyway, back to the subject, it's not a matter of unbreakable protection, more a matter of True Believers going out and buying the thing, and gradually getting tired of swapping CDs every time they wanted to play. And it's not like OFP attracts dimbulbs and instant-action junkies, so who was to spread the word?

For what it's worth, Red Hammer... in medicine mercy killing is against the law. In pop culture, mercy killing IS the law. No big loss there.