You're in the Army now

America's Army celebrates Independence Day by bringing the internet to a halt

Image credit: Eurogamer

News by Gestalt Co-Founder and former Editor-in-Chief

Published on July 4, 2002

The US Army's much vaunted Unreal engined online shooter was released slightly ahead of schedule last night, with the first "recon" version of the game featuring a selection of single- and multi-player scenarios. To get you up to speed, four offline maps offer basic training, an obstacle course and rifle marksmanship. Presumably a strange looking bloke in a hat will be standing next to you the whole time screaming in your ear, muttering "this is your rifle, this is your gun" and complaining about your level of donut consumption. Once you've navigated that hazard it's time to go online, with half a dozen multiplayer missions giving you a range of challenges, varying from rescuing prisoners and preventing an act of ecological terrorism (aw, bless) to "homeland defense". The bad news is that the game weighs in at a little over 200Mb and, needless to say, every site that is hosting the file is completely swamped. Most download sites are grinding to a halt, there's an hour and a half queue to even start downloading it from FilePlanet, and predictably enough the America's Army website itself has keeled over and died under the strain. Nice to see military preparedness in action. If you're lucky (or exceptionally patient) though, you may be able to download the game from one of the following sites -

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