Gamespot Top 10 Game Of The Year (GOTY) and the new Falcon 4

The Gamespot’s GOTY for 2005 can be found here.

There are a few surprises there. For example, I expected Call of Duty 2 to show up, but instead it’s Battlefield 2.
It seems that Battlefield 2 is worth being a GOTY finalist though; for example, on how it makes online co op even better. For those who still remember, it was Return to the Castle Wolfenstein which first made online co op popular (previously, it was all deatchmatches). Battlefield 2 makes online co op FPS even better, by integrating voice chat capability; that’s it, for those who have enough bandwidth for it.
Also, squads is a great idea – if you’ve played RotCW, you’ll remember how sometimes it’s frustrating to get a single objective done. With squads, it’s now possible to tackle even multiple objectives at the same time. And while online co op brings a sense of solidarity for people on the same team; with squads, you and your team mates are like brothers.

The most surprising one is Resident Evil 4. I’ve played previous versions of it, but was not very much impressed.
But since this is the #1 game in this year’s GOTY, there must be something special about it. Alas, not much chance for me finding it out, since it’s on GameCube.

Anyway, I was just going to install Falcon 4 on my PC for my little brother – he’s very interested in planes and said he wants to become a pilot. With Free Falcon 3 and SuperPack 4, it should be good enough to let him experience how it is to become a pilot.
I almost became a pilot myself – passed all Merpati‘s pilot screening tests, and made it to the last test. I failed on that last test, however I later found out this is because I didn’t have any recommendation letter from a high ranking government officials (read: “katebelece”)- so I wasn’t too upset about it.

Back to Falcon 4 – with a good HOTAS (hands on throttle-and-stick), it seems that only a multimillion dollar, specialized, sim machines can rival a PC with Falcon 4 installed.
Stumbled upon a good news though – the next version of Falcon 4 has finally been released, after 7 years !!
It’s probably the magic number for it – after we got Falcon 3 on 1991, we also had to wait for 7 years to get Falcon 4. 🙂

Falcon 4: Allied Force is basically what Falcon4 was, minus the bugs, and with ability to utilize today’s 3D hardware — the original Falcon 4 was designed to run on plain VGA cards ! (later there were patches to let it uses 3D cards, but these are not built-in feature), and actually runs on DOS. Damn, we’ve been waiting for a LONG time indeed, but at least it’s here now.
Best of all, it’s VERY cheap – Falcon 4 costed me close to US$ 50, but this one costs only about US$ 19. This is probably because they made the manuals as PDF file (700+ pages) – I prefer the book, but I can always use the one from Falcon 4.

If you think yourself as hardcore sim player, you are not until you got this.
I’m very much looking forward to try this out with my little brother.

[ Gamespot’s 2005 GoTY ]
[ Falcon 4 HQ ]

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