Bohemia Interactive has released their latest patch for ARMA II: Operation Arrowhead, to coincide with the release of their first DLC pack British Armed Forces. Among some of the other change, the patch also includes the units, vehicles and weapons of the DLC pack albiet with much lower resolution textures and lower quality sounds.

Change log after the break.

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News coming out of Gamescon is that Microsoft's commitment to PC gaming is completely renewed! Yeah, I've heard that song and dance before. It seems every year Microsoft comes around and says that they're going to refocus on the PC, that the PC will be their new development?

Remember when they were really going to make LIVE a viable platform on the PC? And now they're spouting some bullshit about reinvigorating some of their best franchises such as Age of Empires and Flight Simulator.

Oh wait, those are the two franchises that they totalled cancelled, and fired the teams working on them.

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"The hills have revealed their terrible secret."

The awesome, PC-centric, guys at Rock Paper Shotgun are giving away copies of Operation Arrowhead in order to play a big co-op with their readers. Some info below:

Rock Paper Shotgun wrote:Idea Games have air-dropped twenty (20!) copies of Operation Arrowhead into the reinforced RPS hyper-bunker (we left a window open so we could hear the birds arguing) and we thought there might be no better way to test drive this particular Hummer than to let you lot have at it in some kind of cooperative battle-event-thinger. So this is a recruitment drive. RPS needs soldiers. But more importantly, RPS needs YOU to be AVAILABLE! We’re going to dish out 20 keys, but only to those happy few who promise – cross fingers and hope to be poked in the eye by Quinns – to be around for our own little D-Day on Sunday 22nd August at 2pm BST. If you really can’t make that date and time, please don’t bother applying. Winning a war involves being there in the first place.

To help with this, we’re limiting this giveaway to registered folks. To have a chance of winning you need to be registered to RPS so you can receive private messages via the forum, and you need to leave a comment below. Give us a reason why you should win. The best twenty reasons why – as judged by the hivemind – will win the keys, and join us for a special mission on the 22nd.

So go on over and play with these dudes if you don't already have a copy of the game.

Thanks go to Jive for this awesome video.

With the recent reappearance of Risen on the North American Steam store page I thought it would be a good time to give my impressions of this often overlooked gem of a game.

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Valve erroneously VAC banned several thousand Modern Warfare 2 accounts over the past week due to an error or some such. In addition to unbanning those accounts, they've given each affected player a free copy of Left 4 Dead 2 (if they didn't already own it) and a second copy to gift to a friend.

Stay classy Valve.

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Bohemia Interactive have announced their first DLC pack following the release of Operation Arrowhead. Although no price is listed on the Steam page the extra content will cost $10. This bit of downloadable content promises a new mini-campaign featuring the British Armed Forces. Key features are listed below.

New vehicles and weapons

• Modern British troops in multi-terrain, desert and woodland camouflage
• Personal weapons: L85A2 and L86A2 rifles, L110A1 machine gun, LRR and AW50 sniper rifles, N-LAW AT launcher
• New vehicles: Jackal 2 WMIK all-terrain vehicle, modernized FV510 Warrior
• New helicopters: AH11 Wildcat (multi-role), HC3 Merlin (transport)
• British versions: offroad car, Chinook transport helicopter, AH-64 Apache gunship
• Desert and woodland paint schemes of the ground vehicles

New singleplayer campaign

• Player will command a mobile observation team of British troops into battle with the Takistani insurgents. Short campaign will be focused on depicting the assymetrical warfare with a guerilla force and the counterinsurgency operations.

Multiplayer modes

• Cooperative scenarios featuring all the British units, vehicles and equipment.

Earlier this week Alien Swarm was released via Steam for FREE! Along with the release came the Alien Swarm SDK and game code. Alien swarm is a top-down, 4-player co-op game powered by the source engine. The game looks beautiful and is incredibly fun and addictive.


Some of the features mentioned on the store page include:

• Tactical, 4 player co-op action game with a top-down perspective
• Complete game code and mod tools
• Unlock persistent items by gaining levels
• Over 40 weapons and equipment with countless loadout configurations
• 4 unique classes and 8 unique characters
• Matchmaking, Steam Cloud, Steam Stats
• 64 achievements
• Tile-based map generation tool
• Powered by Source and Steam

A new TF2 Hat is receive after accomplishing an Alien Swarm achievement:

So you've read the review, and you're interested in Operation Arrowhead but not sure if you want to jump in with both feet. BIS has a solution for you, a demo!

Quote:Arma 2: Operation Arrowhead Demo allows you to experience the unique gameplay featured in the full version of Arma 2: Operation Arrowhead including multiplayer, as well as samples of the vast amount of vehicles, weapons and units and realistic environment.
The demo also contains a part of Takistan terrain, which is based on the real-life landscape.

Features of the demo:

• Singleplayer mission Coltan Blues from the main campaign
• Singleplayer scenarios Benchmark and Little Bird
• 3 Boot Camp scenarios: Basic, Driving and Helicopter tutorials
• Multiplayer missions Hike In The Hills and One Shot One Kill
• Multiplayer template Team Deathmatch
• Mission Editor with save/load option