Logan, Dan, Evan, Josh and Andy share their holiday wish lists and exceptional gaming moments of 2010 on this end-of-the-year podcast.

Download the mp3, subscribe and call in with your exceptional moments, questions and predictions of the future, toll free: 877-404-1337 ext 724.

PC Gamer US Podcast 253- Year Of The Trackball

I’m hunting for Russian tanks with an AS50 anti-materiel rifle. They’re guarding the dead forest that surrounds a nuclear site, idling over broken terrain like fat, metal deer.



I put my eye to my thermal scope to find the hottest part of the tank (the engine) and poke a 12.7x99mm hole between its pistons; my well-placed shot blows off the last T-55’s steel lid, clearing the way for my civilian inspection team to access the facility. This is exactly what an excellent ArmA 2 mission should be: violent, unscripted problem-solving with realistic military equipment. But oddly, this is one of only three open-ended missions in ArmA 2: Private Military Company’s 11-mission campaign.

PMC puts its focus on storytelling, which remains a weakness of developer Bohemia Interactive, and your role as a mercenary escort is hamstrung by awkward, on-rails missions that are at odds with ArmA 2’s massive, wide-open landscapes. In the intro, you’re running aimlessly through a village trying to locate a contact while artillery shells drop around you. In another, you man a minigun mounted atop an AI-driven SUV, gunning down roadside ambushers. Yet another assigns you the busywork of shooing civilians away from a facility. ArmA 2 has never been good at scripted sequences like these, and while the voice actors have improved, the lines they’re reading haven’t, and rigid facial animations make characters look like Kevlar sock puppets.

PMC’s new equipment also pales compared to the previous DLC. There’s a speedy-but-unremarkable Ka-60 helicopter, a machinegunning UAV drone that’s good for harassment and the AA-12 automatic shotgun, a weapon that’s rarely effective on ArmA 2’s expansive battlefields.



The star of PMC is the new Proving Grounds map—it’s dotted with skeleton trees and ruined shrubs; the bomb crater at the middle of the eerie scrubland looks like the work of God’s spoon. Unfortunately, Bohemia didn’t produce any stand-alone missions for it with PMC, so you’ll have to make your own (or download user-created ones from community sites like www.armaholic.com) to fully enjoy it.

While there’s novelty to playing as a mercenary in ArmA 2’s realistic universe, but there are too few new military toys and too few unimaginative missions to make PMC a must-download.

...blew up a T-55 Russian tank with a sniper rifle by putting a bullet in its engine block. Video within.



Part one of a recurring series, if you guys like these (do you?). Weapon used: the AS50, a British-made anti-materiel rifle that's nearly 54" long. The ammo: 12.7x99mm. The mission: the fifth chapter of ArmA 2: Private Military Company's campaign, "Elimination."

The latest patch for ARMA 2: Operation Arrowhead will add vehicles and weapons from Private Military Company, giving players a preview of the new features included in the expansion.

Patch 1.56 will add Private Military Company Lite to Operation Arrowhead. This adds all of the new units, vehicles and weapons from Private Military Company to the game. The models will be of a lower resolution and sound quality than ordinary vehicles and weapons, but will handle just as they will in the expansion, letting players try out the new content before laying down any money for it.

The patch also adds the ARMEX Multiplayer Armory, which dynamically generates multiplayer missions for up to eight players and includes all of the weapons from ARMA 2. The patch also makes a few balance changes and bugfixes.

The Steam version should update automatically. If you don't have the Steam version of the game then you can download the latest patch from the ARMA 2 site. There's plenty more information about Private Military Company right here. The expansion is due out later today and will be priced at £8/$10. The launch trailer is embedded below.

The dodgy business of contracted military firms and mercenaries make up the back drop to the next slice of DLC for ARMA II. The ten new missions added in Private Military Company will introduce a host of new weapons and vehicles, and provide a single player and co-op campaign in which you play as a new faction. Read on for more information and a video report from the front line in Takistan.

The NATO Green Sea deployment is in the process of aiding the withdrawal of British and coalition armed forces from the region of Takistan, and have hired a series of competitive military contractors to fill the gaps left by the disappearing troops. There's also a small matter of Takistan's abandoned nuclear weapons program, and presumably related questions, like: "did they build any bombs?" and "where the hell are the bombs?" The campaign will have you defending a team of UN weapons inspectors on the hunt for just such answers. The DLC will be arriving on November 24th and will cost £7.99, for more information, check out the Arma 2: Private Military Company site. Check out in-engine news report below for a sense of the level of gritty realism Bohemia are aiming for with their latest expansion.

Good men died on our ArmA 2: Operation Arrowhead server ("The War Walrus," as we like to call it) last night. Brave, strong, 15-year-old men died. But they did it nobly: we were on a morning raid to rescue four members of the press (in our imagination, courageous game writers captured by the enemy). Along the way, we shot down a helicopter with light machine guns. Here's how it went down.

We're having a ball on our 64-person server. If you're not already one of the 34,000 members of our Steam community group, you're missing out on weekly Team Fortress 2 events, ArmA 2 sessions, and free candy.

En route to rescuing hostages on ArmA 2's "Sharpur" industrial map, an enemy Mi-8 appeared overhead. Our response: loot PKM machine guns off our enemies' hides, and let loose enough red and green tracer fire to make Star Wars jealous.



PC Gamer intern Mike Quach had a closer perspective on the flyswatting, which he captured in the video below. Skip to 1:29.




On Saturday, we were the recipient of anti-air fire--my bit of close air support turned into an infantry stand-off after AA clipped the tail rotor of my AH-64 Apache. We ejected directly over the area of operations. Utilizing whatever civilian vehicles they could hijack, enemy reinforcements arrived in a passenger bus.