Yes, this one is also a modified q3 based game.

"Really, everywhere there is trouble in the world - you'll find extreme Islam."

You're partially right. While extremist Islam has infiltrated many nationalist and ethnic struggles - Bosnia, Chechnya, the West-Bank, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Iraq etc. - the struggles in their non-religous forms existed in a large part before the infiltration. So is the solution to generate more instability, thus attracting more extremism?

And there are many, many contemporary examples of struggles in which Islam plays no part (Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, assorted central and south African ones).

The game uses gamespy for match making and stats... yet they give the exclusive to gamespot.

It was one of the first games for me that didn't leave me thinking "Wouldn't it be cool if they had put in....". It was rough, sometimes ugly (though the sunrises on Nogova tended to be quite pretty) but the combination of a very easy yet powerful mission editor and a diverse set of vehicles that all were great fun in their own right... man, that game just worked so damn well.

The only thing I wished they could have fixed was the view distance, without resorting to editting a mission and sticking in the setviewdistance command.

The guns felt real (in my limited experience) and in my mind it set a new benchmark in MP Coop play.

rant rant rant... I'll stop now.

It's a terrible game. It's a great engine, a cool idea, cool setting, nice back story but they completely forgot to put the game in. You just send people to do tasks, sometimes interact with them, but the whole thing presents an enormous interface to some very shallow gameplay.

Had so much potential, I was really disappointed.

The newish apple pro keyboard is the nicest keyboard i've ever used.It's the wired one with the two usb ports on the back. The only bad thing is "windows" and alt keys being swapped around. Other than that, it's perfect. Very nice action, looks nice, sane layout.

And I don't even own a mac.

A good PCZone review is worth a lot.

I've disagreed with them twice, once over Black and White (where was the fun bit?) and Republic (boring and limited). Odd that they both came from English game houses that had given them a fair share of exclusives, eh?

F!A!N!T!A!S!T!I!C!

I think that press release just used up the world surpless of exclaimation marks.

I have both games.

Codename panzers is more like a really well put together battle from C&C:G, numbers wise at least. You can do some nice little tricks, and it lets you get a real feel for proper battlefield tactics.

Soldiers is more like Cannon Fodder than anything else. It looks lovely, and running around killing the crap out of buildings and stuff is great fun. It's a lot closer up than Panzers.

Based on the demos, I thought Soldiers was way better, but I'd now be inclined to say that they are both very good, but in very different ways. I think I enjoy Panzers more on the whole though.

They both have co-op campaigns, which is my new favourite thing. A lot of fun.

1) You don't know what strategy means. Strategy doesn't even come into either of these games.

2) BMP-1s entered into service in the Red Army during 60s if memory serves, not in the 40s to the Wehrmacht.

3) Codename Panzers requires far greater tactical understanding than Soldiers. Soldiers is great fun and does require that you use your brain, BOOOOM is right, but Panzers requires far more thought.

I have both of them.

There's a lot less thinking in Soldiers. Although there are some incredibly stupid bits in Panzers, it does let you actually carry out something approaching battlefield tactics... scouting, shelling and then blocking counter attacks on your artillery with your tanks.

I haven't seen anything like this in Soldiers. You might get 4 or 5 tanks to control, and that's that. A complete lack of fog of war makes it a little silly as well.

They're both really good fun games, but they are quite different as well.

If you got the german version of this, you probably would be able to get by, assuming you *really* want to play it. It makes the mission objectives pretty graphically obvious.

My german is pretty good, and I've really enjoyed it. You can do some lovely manovours.

Here are two that I like:

1) Install Flash - Click to Run. It means that flash files don't play unless you click on them.
2) In the address bar, type about:config and hit return

Look for:

browser.block.target_new_window

and double click on it. Change the false to true.

Personally, it really irritates me when sites open new browser windows. This prevents that from happening.

And while I'm at it:

Panzers uses Starforce. It looks like this will as well. Codemasters, if you're listening, I'm not going to buy a game that doesn't let me make a useable backup of my cd!

Ah the damage models on the tanks in Panzers isn't that bad. There is a health bar for each of the 4 sides of the tank, and then another for whole tank itself.

I liked the damage models on the tanks in the demo as well as the cool individual control thing, though they'd really need to sort out a couple of really bad things before I'd call it better than Codename: Panzers, which is excellent. (Mine arrived yesterday)

1. God awful interface. I have a keyboard, please let me use it to do things in the game.
2. Buggy collision detection. Panzer 4s do not take an infinite number of 75mm shells to destroy.
3. Music. It looped far too much. I ended up switching it off.
4. Micromanagement. This should be a part of the game, but to get a tank refueled took so much stupid clicking, it was ridiculous.
5. Too many cut scenes break up the flow of the game.
6. Your own troops die instantly if they even touch a moving tank, regardless of its speed.

Other than that, top notch stuff. Hopefully they polish it as much as Panzers.

I played the German demo. It's a nice game, definitely lets you flex your mind a bit... it just looks god awful. Compared to the upcoming Panzers and Soldiers: Heroes..., I don't think this stands up at all well.

No, basically.

There is an overhead associated with managing more than one processor. With a single processor, the driver doesn't have to decide which chip to send a command to. With two, you have to work out which one can accept it.

So it'll give a boost, but it doesn't scale linearly.

It's odd. Back in the days of SLI, graphics cards were limited by fill rate. Hence, letting the other graphics card handle every other line of pixels boosted things nicely.

I don't think that is the problem now. It seems that the GPU, pixel and vertex shaders are the slowest part. So I'm guessing if you are putting two graphics cards in a system, they'll share a framebuffer, probably have some cable running betweem them for sharing their general purpose texture memory and then a custom driver will offload every other command onto one GPU and set of PSs and VSs. I can't see the SLI approach boosting things at all.

It's been ages since I've looked into graphics cards properly, but that seems like a likely approach. Of course there could be some feature of PCI-x that I haven't read about. The other problem is waiting on AW to actually release drivers for the card.

I have to say fair play to them for at least acknowledging the fact that very few people seem to take them seriously... though if you were a less cluefull VC with money in them, how would you feel after reading that?