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Page Tools.If you want to complete the most objectives as possible, do the full balls assault mode (try the autogunner or grenadier for the grenades and C4/AT mines to destroy the trucks). You need only to pick up the M107 NO when you start to get the sniping weapon. So you get 30 rounds of night ops action.
The JDAM objective will boost the score to a gold medal, provided you do enough of the killing yourself.However, the best (and easiest) method is to use silenced weapons to get to the crossroads (this way, the enemy gunship almost never catches up to you). You will need to use grenades and under-rifle grenades to destroy the supply trucks. Using this method means you lose out on the points from the objectives, but you will have a far easier time of things. By the way, if you don't have tutorials or help icons on, you may want to use your NVG in the dark (see your controls).
Stand together with the US Marines in Operation Flashpoint: Red River, the ultimate tactical infantry shooter. Operation Flashpoint: Red River is a tactical shooter. The player has the choice of playing the campaign co-operatively. However, the game does not feature competitive multiplayer. The game does not feature a mission editor or SDK.
Remember, not all marine weapons have flashlights.Break PLA Defensive Lines This objective covers several tasks, which can be done either in a full assault, or a stealth approach. It's highly recommended that you do the stealth approach (you don't need silenced weapons, but they help). The chief task not to do for a stealth approach is to complete the JDAM bonus objective.BONUS — Get supplies from Alpha's HummVee (M107 NO or SMAW) Optional objectives need not be completed for the mission to succeed.If you want some easy objective XP, swap your weapon quickly for the M107 NightOps or SMAW. Even if you don't want to use the weapons at the containers where you are dropped off, just taking one of the weapons will satisfy this condition.If you have the Night Ops scope for the M-16 (rifleman) or the M-14/M-39 (sniper), ditch the M107 NO (it has about half the ammunition of the other weapons). If not, take it, as you will need it to see in the dark.The M107's bullets can be replenished from ammunition bins you locate, but not the rockets of the SMAW.BONUS — Clear targets at bridge by stealth or engagement Optional objectives need not be completed for the mission to succeed. While this is an optional/bonus objective, you pretty much complete it by following the stealth RV points around the blockage and going on your merry way to the next rendezvous.
If you opt to fire on the enemy here, you will have a hard, hard fight to the crossroads (and the ambush).Opt for discretion and take the side route to avoid confrontation. It's Confucian to win without combat, but it's the Marine way to do the same thing without accumulating a national debt.Break first defensive line This objective is to get through the Chinese PLA pickets and reach the settlements and orchards on the valley floor.
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The second line of defence (south of the crossroads) will be augmented by Type 92 IFVs here and there. Additionally, if you haven't caused enough damage, the ruckus you do in the valley will trigger an incoming enemy gunship to find you and kill you.BONUS — Reach village vantage point to call JDAM (causes alert) Optional objectives need not be completed for the mission to succeed.If you decide to complete this task, you will get more objectives completed but you will trigger the enemy chopper to come in. This will play havoc with your ambush on the convoy. IGN recommends committing to this objective after you've upgraded your soldier's stats and have access to more weapons. To not do this objective, simply regroup with Knox and the squad at the mouth of the valley.To accomplish this task, follow the RV points from the bottom of the ravine to the bombed out structure. Only from the roof of the marked building can you get the height needed to spot and place the JDAM.
Once you use the JDAM, regardless if you hit the marked enemy depot or not, you will cause a region wide alert.Regroup with squad Locate the break in the fence going down to the valley floor. You will get a checkpoint here as well (first part of the mission done). Knox will send your fireteam down with McGee's team (Alpha).
If you can keep the members of Alpha fireteam alive, they will help immensely in killing the convoy (later). If not, you'll have to be more careful.Ambush the PLA Convoy This set of objectives is to go through the valley floor back to the crossroads (previous mission) and destroy an enemy supply convoy going through the same road.Provide cover for Alpha Whether you are covering an ally or securing a target with your allies covering you, the criteria is the same.
Once you neutralize all the enemy hostiles, you can easily walk up to your target and move the game forward.Take out the enemies as Alpha team heads for the first house.Secure compound (1) This is the first house Alpha secures while you cover them.Secure orchard (1) The orchard near the first house has enemies that you need to clear. Once you do, you will move to the next farmhouse.Secure compound (2) As Bravo team, you need to take the lead and secure the second farmhouse.
Use the NightOps scope to pick out enemies from afar (shoot lights/lamps if they are blinding your NVG).You can secure most houses from afar by sniping enemies and opting to downing them all as they run around in the dark.Secure compound (3) Another building (Alpha will assault). If it's in the clear, you may want to assault targets with the NPC bot team. Although they are more vulnerable (if the bots die, they do not respawn like your Bravo team at checkpoints), their weapons are just as lethal, so you may want to stack guns and vaporize the opposition.Secure compound (4) Another farmhouse to take. Be sure to look ahead with the Night Scope. Some white silhouettes are the enemy APCs (do not fire on them), while others are enemy soldiers at emplacements (kill them first).Secure orchard (2) The second orchard has APCs, and the occasional enemy HMV, if you didn't use the JDAM to destroy their base. Avoid shooting the APCs (they are invulnerable unless you use artillery or SMAW fire). When attacking HMVs, take out the gunner first (stops the attack) and then the rest of the crew.Secure compound (5) Secure this house by neutralizing all enemies.
Note that any enemies in emplacements that you pass may still show up on your compass and map as threats, but they may not disengage and turn to fight you. If that's the case, use that opportunity to take them out (just in case these enemies do change their A.I. Behavior).Secure compound (6) Secure this house by neutralizing all enemies. Some of these houses may have ammo bins for bullets (and bullets only). Restock if necessary, especially if you are using the M107 (and its crappy 30 round allotment).BONUS — Regroup with Alpha Optional objectives need not be completed for the mission to succeed.After breaching the second line of defence, head for the RV marker at the ruins and wait for McGee's team (or just McGee, if everyone else died) to catch up.
You can push on ahead, but there's a checkpoint around here, plus completing it will earn you extra objective points.Destroy all supply trucks The actual destruction of the enemy convoy occurs only when the trucks roll in. The first and last vehicles are enemy HMVs (armed). If you can find a way to kill the enemy escorts, you can just drop a single grenade (M67 Frag) under each supply truck/lorry (use the aim button to throw under-handed). One grenade each takes out a truck.Remember that you can take out the convoy yourself, or wait for the caravan to get near Alpha, where they will blast the first HMV (saves you the trouble) and you hit the dance floor with the rest of the party from the sides or back.What's tempting is to wander around the village (or near the crossroads) while waiting for the convoy to show up. If you sounded the alarm early, then an enemy chopper may be around (the Z10), if not, the chopper will be incoming once you start attacking the convoy.Try to pacify the patrols around the crossroads before the convoy shows up. If you can do that, you will have less to worry about once the targets arrive. Placing AT mines on the road won't work - the first vehicle to drive over it will explode the device.
Hence Frag grenades are a better choice.Once all the supply trucks are destroyed (or sounding off with the critical damage beeping), start heading back towards Knox on the hillside.Fallback to extraction point This set of objectives covers your escape from the AO after standing off a few waves of enemy hordes. The name of the game is defence, and you will have limited usage (about three or four) barrages of high-explosive mortar munitions to take down enemy APCs and infantry masses.Evade PLA attack helo (Z10) Either before, or as you destroy the convoy, the enemy Z10 gunship starts approaching the AO. You generally have about 4 minutes from the time you set-up at the crossroads until the chopper shows up (the convoy takes about 2 minutes or so).Considering that window, you'd best do your damndest to blast all the trucks before the Z10 appears, or you'll be caught on the road (the shots from the gunship kill instantly). Evading the Z10 is cheifly using the buildings you passed on the way to the crossroads. By ducking inside them, you hide from the chopper's view and it will need to make a new pass to kill you. When it's adjusting its attack run, you use the opportunity to get to the next dwelling or safe zone.Naturally, the best way to avoid this enemy unit is to blow up the trucks before the Z10 even gets in range.
Using the grenade method (after killing all the guards with suppressing fire) takes about 30 seconds (1 frag per truck).Once you get close enough to the mountainside, the chopper will stop pursuit (fear of SAMs) and allow you to continue your escape.Regroup with Knox By the time to catch up to Knox, the enemy APCs will have moved from their guard positions to fire on the slopes where they suspect you are. You will have a few support munitions (high-explosive mortar shells), but since they are inaccurate, you will probably not destroy the APCs. Call support down on the infantry and zip back to Knox.Defend the clifftops Restock at the hillside hut (bullets and such) and remember to take stock of it once more after this battle.
Defend the hillside by shooting down-slope the enemies coming up to pursue you. Just remember you may take hits from the enemy APCs and die. Try to stay low and use artillery to blast the foot of the trail to stem the enemy tide.Fall back to the ruins You can fall back to where Alpha, Charlie and Knox have taken up position once you hear Knox's radio chatter (although if you know it's coming, you can slowly move out earlier). Before you move away from the hillside cabin, refill ammo (especially if you're using the ammo-thrifty M107).There's a marker for you to move to, but get the lay of the land, and sit your fireteam on the highest spot in the hilly countryside (but still near your allies). Check your TacMap and order suppressing fire on incoming threat clouds. With a sniper rifle, you yourself can take out a whole enemy squad once they land and get their bearings.Defend Be flexible in defence - your firetetam can assist the other NPCs (probably all dead except the FT leaders) in suppression, or assist you in holding off enemies while you reload.Eventually, Knox tells you to fall back to a more defensible spot - a building on a hilltop (or sorts). There's an ammo bin near this building, so replenish your bullets.
It's probably a good thing to keep your fireteam at the building's base and tell them to Move/Suppress instead of having them Hold/Defend the building at random spots.The enemies will come at your position from over (and beyond) the ridge. If too many of the NPCs have died (leaving only the FT leaders and Knox alive), you will need to use someone from your fireteam to keep enemies off you while you take out the enemies past the emplacements. If not, you're in a better position to blunt the incoming attack and survive without trouble.You will likely run into problems when your M107 runs dry (hence a good idea to play Combat Sweep in FTE several times to max-level your rifleman or sniper for Night Ops scopes; rifleman is better). Do your best to hold off enemies and visit the ammo bin at the base of the tower/building to restock bullets.Provide cover for Charlie team Continue doing what you do best - shoot from cover and aim straight. Stick around and blast enemies until Sorenson's team is aboard the HMV convoys. Once that happens, you have 30 seconds to get aboard the extraction vehicle before the artillery rounds land (and kill you).Mount the extraction vehicle Board the extraction vehicle and you will be on your way to the next mission. Of all the missions, this one is particularly difficult due it being at night.
MARSOC (Marine Special Operations Command) you are not - not with all that crappy equipment.
You learn some useful things playing computer games. Thanks to Operation Flashpoint, I now know how to navigate using the stars, although I'm not exactly sure how much use it will ever actually be to me in this real world of A-Zs, late-night taxis, mobile phones and helpful rapists. That is to say, I now know how to locate north by finding the saucepan-shaped Big Dipper constellation. Which will he great the next time I'm on a weekend yomp, but probably as much use as a salad fork in Texas the next time I'm staggering home from the Cow & Abattoir after a Friday night social engagement.
But that does show how much thought and design Czech-based Bohemia Interactive Studio is putting into the total combat simulator that is Operation Flashpoint (previously known as Flashpoint 1985: Status Quo, in case you were wondering what all the dodgy song references in the intro were about). Indeed, nighttime navigation is just one of many training missions and it is odd to think that I'll have less trouble finding the stroppy commanding officer running around in a pitch-black forest than I would were I given a map, a compass and a jeep and told to drive from point A to point B.
Actually, watching the jeep lesson was when the full impact of what Flashpoint is trying to do really hit home. 'Total freedom' is one of those claims that game designers are often making and the truth is often less impressive than the boast would have you imagine.But there you are, getting hopelessly lost in some part of France, stopping every 200 yards or so to hop out of the jeep and check a road sign, when suddenly you hear a loud bang somewhere just over the next hill.
You scramble back into the jeep and decide to check it out.Cresting the hill, you're surprised to see a couple of friendly tanks, one burning away, guns trained on the horizon, and a squadron of soldiers running about trying to take up positions. Swerving the jeep off the road, you jump out and dash over to a couple of your comrades, and hit the deck as another shell explodes nearby.
It's at that point in the demo that the thought hits me - none of this actually needs to be happening. It's just a training level in the game, learning how to drive a jeep. You don't even need to take this turning and probably wouldn't have seen any of this if you hadn't actually got lost in the first place.
There's a world going on here, regardless of what you're up to and if you want to just hop in a jeep, jump into a passing truck, hitch a lift on a cargo helicopter or even hijack a local farmer's tractor and drive anywhere you want to, you can. Impressive stuff.
Believe What You See
Astonishingly though, this is actually a bit of a bodge, according to Bohemia's lead designer Marek Spanel. 'Originally, we wanted to create just one world with a real war on it,' he confides. 'Later, we saw it simply wasn't enough fun so we moved to a more conventional method with pre-designed missions. Strong aspects of freedom and unpredictability still remain in the game, but the campaign itself is just a series of missions with some nonlinear points involved.' Fooled me.The other remarkable tiling about the game engine is just how believable the AI is. Flashpoint is perhaps the first game that truly has NPCs who move and act like real humans, putting so-called advances in AI seen in your Quakes and your Unreal Tournaments to shame.
'The AI is good,' agrees Marek, modestly. 'It allows all units to perform almost independently on the battlefield. I don't want to go into too much detail now, but the player can be subordinated to an AI leader or command his own AI soldiers. This requires a very solid AI background because the player actually sees all his units performing his orders alongside him. Either that or he's listening to the orders of his commander and having to make sense of the changing situations. In the multiplayer game, we had difficulties recognising who is AI and who is human.'
This realism extends to the physical nature of units. It's par for the course these days to say that a military simulator has amazing graphics, but when you consider just how ambitious in scope Flashpoint is, letting the player control Veverything from foot soldiers to cars to tanks and even helicopters, you'd forgive Bohemia for skimping a little on the visuals. While it's true that the interiors of vehicles rely on the slightly dated 'painted texture titan' method, the exteriors are very detailed indeed. The real beauty though, is in tile human models. When you first see them, you think they're moving a little peculiarly. They seem to run a little bow-legged. But after a few minutes. watching how smoothly the joints move, how there's none of the polygon break-up you sometimes get at the shoulders and hips in 3D models, it suddenly looks more realistic than anything you've ever seen before. And you realise just how unbelievable all other 3D games are.
Jeux Sans Frontiers
In the past couple of years it has not just been Britain, France and Germany producing top-name games.
Spain, for instance, has begun to get in on the act with Rebel Act's Severance and Commandos' designers, Pyro Studios, taking everyone by storm. However, it has always been more difficult for teams away from the more central areas to make an impact on the global market Things might be improving soon, though, 'it's a great time of opportunities for European developers,' says Marek when asked about the prospects for growth in the region. 'There are no really big publishing forces in the region yet, but that might change with the recent merger of the biggest Czech distributor with one of the biggest Polish game companies. As well as that, there are also two other Czech teams working for big international publishers - one of them is Illusion Softworks, the creators of Hidden & Dangerous, and there's another team in Slovakia working on Battle Isle IVior Blue Byte.' It's clear that there's an awful lot of talent waiting to be discovered in the paths less travelled, so let's hope that the big-name publishers start to take some interest.
A Brief History Of The Cold War
As part of our court-ordered community service, we take a break from our usual sexual innuendo, xenophobia and k gratuitous violence to try and educate your young minds with a history lesson...
The Cold War officially began in March 1963 when a British secret agent was lured to Istanbul by a beautiful defector and ended up stealing a Russian code machine from under Soviet noses. The Russian Premier, Ernst Blofeld - famous for the odd birthmark on his head - took revenge by attempting to blow up an atomic bomb in Fort Knox. This became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis and was only prevented from succeeding thanks to US President JFK sleeping with Monica Monroe at the Watergate Hotel. In the meantime, German efficiency took a serious blow after blueprints for a proposed patio extension were misread and a large wall was instead built across the whole country. The Berlin Wall still stands today and is the only man-made object visible from space To help ease tensions, new US President Ronald McDonald opened a restaurant in Russia and soon American values were flooding the country and communists everywhere were wearing blue jeans and dancing the jitterbug. The Cold War finally ended after Boris Yeltsin, a local Moscow drunken lunatic, climbed into a passing tank and shot at the government building blowing up the evil Blofeld and saving the day.
If You Build It, They Will Fight
Operation Flashpoint's powerful mission editor lets you create some impressively complex scenarios.
As is rapidly becoming the norm in everything from hardcore flight sims to sodding platform games, Flashpoint comes complete with a powerful editing tool, letting you create everything from one-on-one shootouts to full-scale invasions. 'The mission editor allows you to alter everything the game can do,' says Marek. 'We're not using anything else ourselves, so the game is really open on this side. The best thing is the editor is built directly into the game - you can create your first mission within just minutes, it's very simple.'
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