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Single Player Multiplay – The v8th Ops Phenomenon
By Joe "Impaler" Highman

Find someone who claims to be an expert on the subject of computer gaming. If you aren’t sure, just ask them! They will have no problem detailing their expertise. Ask that person about the likelihood of a stand-alone, single player offline only title surviving in today’s highly competitive marketplace, and the chances are that your sanity and intelligence will be immediately and brutally questioned. If, that is, the gamer can get any form of an intelligible response out between peals of fitful, hysterical laughter.

The lure of multiplayer titles has matured admirably since the "old days" of individualized efforts; single gamers gunning down every moving object before them and then gloating and boasting over the splintered carcasses of their friends.

Modern advances in bandwidth availability coupled with the raw computing horsepower of today’s routers, servers, and compression engines allow the proliferation of multiplayer titles. Today’s multiplayer online gamer can find experiences ranging from playing Cribbage against a Yugoslavian cab driver at 3:00am to entire virtual Battalions of infantry battling madly, each soldier being controlled by a diverse collection of players from around the globe, all working together (in theory anyway!) toward a common, understood, and embraced objective.

Co-pilot: We lost the Multiplayer engine! Pilot: Hold on! Maybe we can rescue it!

I count myself among those players who find the team-based, strategy-oriented titles more rewarding than a simple frag-fest free-for-all melee. I relish in coordinated efforts and the camaraderie that emerges among players who have been playing together for an extended, some might argue unhealthy, time! I admire the way in which these teams, clans, squadrons, units, platoons . . . whatever you choose to call it . . . pull together, work in harmony, generally play with dignity and honor, and have a truckload of fun in the process. The rivalries that spring up among these units can get downright insane, with public servers instead becoming the turf of a virtual gang war.

Being a lifelong student of WWII aviation, and particularly a devotee of the heavy bombers of that era, I have been waiting with bated breath for the release of Hasbro Interactive's and Wayward Design’s B-17 Flying Fortress: The Mighty Eighth.

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