I came, I downloaded, I ripped fools to pieces with an M249.

For a free game, this one is incredibly fun. Once you get over the steep learning curve, it's a great game. Your offline training will barely help you. You will die, a lot. And following all those people around on deadcam, you'll learn stuff. And then you too will know when to open that door and spray thirty rounds at the church resulting in four dead and two wounded. Yes'm, good times ahoy!

www.americasarmy.com

I tried a few games of it a bit over a year ago, when I was still in the real Finnish equivalent. Now that I got a new computer at home, I've been playing a few hours of it every day/night. For those of you who like realistic modern online FPSs, you'll love it.

It's a bit tough on us Europeans, especially us in the far Northeastern corner... About 95% of the servers are located in North America, and ALL the servers where you can gain Honor ("Experience Points", which helps you get the weapons you want and to get into the Special Forces) are there. With a ping of 250-500ms, it can be pretty frustrating at times. So I definitely recommend it to those of you who happen to live near the US, you'll have an easy time killing all the foreign n00bs.

I'm intrigued, but my current hardware won't handle it. Ah well, in a few years.

~J

AE: What is your username on AA:O, and what maps do you play?

I'm IndyLegion and have been addicted to livefire MOUT_McKenna for a few days now, and occassionally Insurgent Camp or Bridge.

Just make sure I don't get the M203.

GrimRedeemer. Lately I've been mostly playing SF Hospital and SF CSAR, on any Official or Leased server with as little server lag as possible. Insurgent Camp used to be my favorite pre-SF, but it's too much of a nade map for my tastes now.

Hospital is good because the rounds are fast. On average, the 7 rounds last about 15-20 minutes, which is great for me because I hate waiting for minutes on end while people crawl over kilometers of boring desert (like in Radio Tower, or SF Recon). CSAR is almost as good, with a lot of nice CQB-action.

Weapons Cache I used to like as well, but I think that's just because I used to get in the Def team all the time. A few games in the Assault team killed it for me once I realized that the map is insanely biased, especially when there are lots of players on the server (~20).

I HATE Bridge -- it's just too darn hard for the Assault team. Bridge SE is better, but it's definitely not one of my favorites either.

MOUT_McKenna is nice, I might play more of it if only it were a real combat map. The MILES maps are real RoE-traps, and it lacks that feeling when you suddenly hear the snaps of bullets passing your skull by 5 inches or suddenly spotting an E through your scope only to notice that he's aiming an RPG at you, and *WOOOSH*

Haha, that's why I do livefire only, I can't stand the MILES either.

Need more honor for SF!

You can play SF Hospital and SF CSAR as Indigenours Forces, whether you have 15 Honor or not, you know. And RPK and RPG are very fun, though getting stuck with a barebones AKS-74U sucks.

I've never seen a livefire MOUT_McKenna... Gotta check that out. Are you playing it on an Honor server?

There are a few livefire honor McKennas. I played SF Recon as indig, it was fun with an RPK until I realized I had no NV and the SF guy ran waaaay too fast. I just got ripped to pieces with NV, haha. RPG sounds fun, haven't gotten ahold of it yet.

Yeah, well, Recon sucks. 5 kilometers of pitch black desert. Average round time = 8 minutes. Average amount of action/round = ~1 exchange of a few shots.

RPG certainly is fun, but you have to incredibly careful with it not to get ROE. It can easily go up to 45 degrees off target, which can be very bad when firing it near/from behind friendlies.

I thought there wasn't any way to play IF, all players being required to be the "good guys".

~J

IF, Indigenous Forces, are a sort of good guys...

You can play them in SF Hospital, SF CSAR and SF Recon. Wielding either an AKS-74U (with or without a ~4x scope), an RPK(-74, I'm not sure which RPK it's supposed to be) or an RPG-7 + AKS-74U.

Anyway I can install aa on my D: drive? As it is, americasarmy200download.exe self extracts into the C: drive by default, but I dont have an extra gig to spare there. I like to keep my C: drive as small and empty as possible for quick defragmentaion.

[update] tried -d in the run command line, so far it seems to work, I am hoping its installing on the d: drive now.