Best of 2001 Awards
by Douglas HelmerArticle Type: Best of 2001 Awards
Article Date: January 04, 2001
Blood in the Streets
2001 was the year that Mr. New Economy bailed out of his NASDAQ-hype-fuelled fighter jet and took a couple trillion of dollars of other people's money with him (we have reports that Mr. New Economy is living high on the hog in Argentina). 2001 was the year that dozens of popular games sites like 3DFiles.com and Daily Radar.com just ceased to be. Thresh's ambitious Gamers.com looks like it has been picked up by Ziff Davis and Stomped.com is down for "repairs".2001 was also the year of 911 (if I have to explain that, please get out of your parent's basement and go buy a newspaper). Unlike the Gulf War, which spawned a flood of modern jet air combat titles, the only noticeable effect 911 has had on the simming world was the removal of Manhattan's Twin Towers from Microsoft's Flight Simulator 2002 (released in 2001, go figure).
Air Combat
What about combat simulations in 2001? Compared to previous years, 2001 was a real yawner for air combat simulations. Two venerable combat sims franchises departed from controlled flight and went the action / arcade route. The much anticipated follow-up to EF2000, Eurofighter Typhoon, turned out to be a dud with its dumbed-down cockpits and revolutionary, but annoying, pre-flight interface that forced players to wait in the pilots' lounge for their next mission. NovaLogic's Comanche 4 was the other sim to morph into an action / arcade title—a real disappointment for helo fans of the previous titles in the series.The only other jet sim of note other than Eurofighter Typhoon was SSI's Flanker 2.5. It was released as a free download and was a bright spot in an otherwise dark year for kerosene burners.
Of course the saving grace of 2001 in the air combat genre was 1C: Maddox Game's IL-2 Sturmovik. As a community we worried it was never going to see the light of day, what with the delays and the change of publishers mid-stream, but our fears turned out to be unfounded. Aside from a leaked demo (which was not a bad thing for simmers) IL-2 has been an unmitigated success. Finally, a WWII air combat simulation that was not only not virtually bug free, but was an intensely detailed masterpiece. Let's just hope it does well at the box office so publishers won't completely lose faith in combat simulations.
Shooters
2001 was the year of the first person shooter, or (take a deep breath) Squad-Based Tactical First Person Shooter, as we like to call them in the military combat simming world. Shooters are usually sneered at by combat simmers because of their twitch shooter antecedants (games like Duke Nukem, Sin, Quake, Unreal Tournament and Half-Life's Team Fortress).Shooters have evolved as a genre and now there's the slightly more tactical shooters like the Counter-Strike mod for Half-Life, which does have more of an authentic spec ops feel about it, and the recently released Return to Castle Wolfenstein. The truly tactical FPS's include titles such as Hidden & Dangerous as well as the Rainbow Six / Rogue Spear and Delta Force series.
Of course, the mother of all military combat shooters this year was Bohemia Interactive's Operation Flashpoint. Calling OpFlash just a shooter, however, sells this game far short since it also includes armor and air combat so we created a new category called "Integrated Battlefied Simulation" just for it.
Deadly Dozen, Rogue Spear: Black Thorn and Ghost Recon rounded out this year's line of commercial military shooter offerings and although Ghost Recon is being touted as a breakthrough by some of the bigger gaming print mags, we were far less impressed with this title than the journalistic mainstream.
On the free mod / expansion side, there was the outstanding Day of Defeat mod for Half-Life. Although still in beta, this mod is a free download and a superb bit of WWII shooter fun that gives Wolfenstein and even Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (still not released) a run for their money . . . literally.
Wargaming
I'll now hand the microphone over to James "Bismarck" Cobb as I'm a complete nincompoop when it comes to wargames.Small independent American countries and Europeans continue to assert their dominance in this genre during 2001.
John Tiller and HPS Simulations produced an abundance of games.
- 1812
- Bulge '44
- Tobruck '41
- Middle East '67
- Corinth
- Squad Battles: Vietnam
HPS continues its dedication to hard core gamers with Decisive Action, a modern game that may have been the most innovative of the year.
Shrapnel games also appealed to the wargamer market with
- Remote Assault
- Combat Command 2: Desert Rats
- The War Engine
Matrix continues polishing old gems with their re-makes of War in Russia, Pacific War and the Steel Panthers series. Nothing is wrong and many things are right about making good products better—especially when the refurbished games are free.
Schwerpunkt's Ron Dockal made major changes to his DOS-based line of World War II East Front games with the Windows-based Russo-German War '41-'44. Detailed in the extreme, the game bursts the envelope of ports of turn-based games. Little more can be asked of a designer.
Breakaway Games took Firaxis' Gettysburg engine and dressed it up in Napoleonic epaulettes with Waterloo: Napoleon's Last Battle. Grognards grumbled, gamers enjoyed.
Canada's Strategy First funnels quality historical real-time strategy games into the US with Cossacks and Sudden Strike. Neither one is as detailed or accurate as some turn-based games but they both rise above the twitching jumble of other real-time strategy games.
Talsonsoft wrote its epitaph with the heart-breaking Age of Sail II, a graphically excellent gamed doomed by silly AI. Bought by Take 2 Interactive, Talonsoft completed its World War II Campaign Series with Fall of the Reich and then proceeded to re-market all these games with Europe in Flames. Profits must be made and collections are nice. However, the latest child of the series, Divided Ground, was the first Tiller campaign without the Tiller team. A brave attempt to enter into post-1945 suffered from the lack of experience.
Some commentators cry the death of wargames because of the lack of large companies' interest/ 2001 proves that these companies exerxised a dead hand on their hoddy. Their disinterest has allowed the genre to grow and mature.
Thanks, James.
Obituaries
2001 was the year we stood by the graveside of a few venerable combat simming institutions.Rowan Software, creators of Flying Corps, MiG Alley and Battle of Britain, were absorbed and assimilated by Empire Interactive. Their woes started in 2000 when Rod Hyde left the company after an unsuccessful attempt to rally grass roots support for new combat sim title development. In 2001, Battle of Britain was released in North America and although it was both a sim and strategy game in one, it ultimately failed due to continuing bugs and lack of official patch support. In December of 2000 Rowan was bought by Empire Interactive and shortly thereafter it was announced that Rowan would no longer be supporting any of their combat simulation titles and would be getting out of combat sim development entirely.
Fortunately for combat simmers, Rowan publicly released the source code for both MiG Alley and Battle of Britain as a way of saying "Thanks" for all the support over the years. Empire also bought Razorworks in late 2000. After the purchase, Razorworks, creators of Enemy Engaged: Apache vs. Havoc (1998) and Enemy Engaged: Comanche vs. Hokum (2000) announced that they would be turning their attention away from combat sims and toward consoles and car racing games.
2001 was also the year that the original massively multiplayer online game, Air Warrior, was laid to rest (a moment's silence if you please). From this author's own review of AWII back in 1997, Jonathan Baron spoke about Air Warrior's beginnings:
| Ten years ago in 1987, a man named Kelton Flinn developed a WWII combat flight sim game designed for on-line play called Air Warrior. As you can imagine, it was primitive. It made its debut on the Mac II with extremely simple black and white graphics, little in the way of the physics affecting flight, no time of flight gunnery, and so forth. It was, however, the first fully graphic multiplayer online game and this novelty sustained it initially. These were the early days of the medium, where the true wizardry involved how you allowed many folks to fly with and against one another in real time over low speed, high latency packet switching networks of the day. |
Air Warrior had a huge community of loyal followers but that started shrinking when competitors like WarBirds, Aces High, and even Microsoft's Fighter Ace surpassed it in terms of graphics and gameplay. A few years back, there was some talk of an Air Warrior: Vietnam with jets, but that fell though. In April of 2001, John Riccitiello, President of EA.com sent out a letter to the community proclaiming EA's continued dedication to what was then called Air Warrior: Millenium Version. Development of enhanced 3D models and graphics continued right up until the announcement (or lack thereof) by Electronic Arts that the Air Warrior team had been laid off.
Now this obit may be premature, but we also learned just prior to the close of 2001 that Playnet had filed for Chapter 11 protection against its creditors. Given that only 25 percent of companies that file for Chapter 11 ever get out of it, the future doesn't look bright. Where this will leave Cornered Rat Software's WWII Online: Blitzkrieg, an MMPOG combat simulation hosted by Playnet, only time will tell.
Resistance is Futile!
Speaking of acquisitions, 2001 was the year that the international conglomerate UbiSoft/Guillemot Company Group continued to move Borg-like into the combat simulation gaming arena. Ubi Soft is the game software side and Guillemot is the hardware side. The first we noticed of the France-based group was in 1999 when they purchased Thrustmaster and the Hercules graphics board company. They then assimilated Tom Clancy's RedStorm Entertainment, makers of the Rainbow Six line of shooters, in 2000. February of 2001 saw them purchase Blue Byte, the then publisher of 1C: Maddox Games' IL-2 Sturmovik.The acquistion blitzkrieg continued in March 2001 when they scooped up The Learning Company and its Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI) at, we presume, was a fire sale price from Gores Technologies (Gores had bought SSI from Mattel). SSI oversees Silent Hunter II, Destroyer Command, Flanker, LO:MAC and several other strat and sci-fi titles.
Big monopolies are generally bad things, but on the pro side (besides cutting down the amount of inter-booth walking we had to do at E3) the virtual monopoly the group has in combat simming hasn't been all that bad. In fact, if it weren't for Ubi Soft, Thrustmaster would have died completely (with much wailing and gnashing of teeth by F22 Pro and TQS owners), and there certainly wouldn't be a HOTAS Cougar (those crazy French like to reverse their nouns and adjectives) on the near horizon. They came through on IL-2 Sturmovik and they seem to be supporting all the plans SSI has for future combat simulation titles.
Shaddup Already! Who Won?
Okay, without any further ado, and with minimal fanfare, here are the awards we doled out this year:- Air Combat: IL-2 Sturmovik
- Land / Armor: Panzer Elite Special Edition
- Naval: Silent Hunter II
- Wargame: Decisive Action
- Strategy: Europa Universalis
- Squad-Based Tactical Shooter: Operation Flashpoint
- Shooter Mod / Expansion: Day of Defeat
- Integrated Battlefield: Operation Flashpoint
- Space / Sci Fi: Independence War 2: Edge of Chaos
- MMPOG: Aces High
- Video: NVIDIA's GeForce3
- Special Mention: Cheap RAM in General
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| Sample award graphic |
No Best Sim of 2001 Top Prize?
Well, it was going to be either IL-2 Sturmovik or Operation Flashpoint, but during the lively debate as to which was the more worthy, James "Bismarck" Cobb piped up and made a compelling case as to why a certain wargame should be given the award—to really drive his point home, he did this using the very same criteria I had used to defend my choice of Operation Flashpoint. At this point it became clear to me how narrow-minded we were all being because we hadn't even considered wargames. In the final analysis it is silly to say that IL-2 is better than OpFlash or either is better than Europa Universalis—we'd be comparing apples and oranges, baby.
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