Gamers invade Army Web site

Yahoo/CNET ^ | Thu Jul 11,12:34 PM ET | David Becker

[Dominic Harr]

Gamers invade Army Web site
Thu Jul 11,12:34 PM ET

David Becker

The U.S. Army announced that more than 400,000 people have downloaded the service's new recruiting game since it became available last week.

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As previously reported by CNET News.com, "America's Army" is a pair of games, one a squad-based shooter imitating military tactics and another a simulation game that replicates a typical Army career path. The games were developed by teams at the Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey, Calif., and the Army is making them available for free as recruiting tools.

An early "Recon" version of the games became available for download July 4 from the Army's main recruiting site and other Web outlets and quickly became a major bandwidth-burner.

According to an announcement from the Army, 400,000 copies of the game were downloaded over the long weekend, and more than 240,000 players already have completed the "basic training" portion of the game to qualify for online play, forcing the Army to scramble to triple the number of servers dedicated to the game.

"With this great demand, we've taken all measures to ensure that everyone who wants to play the game will be able to," said Lt. Col. Casey Wardynski, project originator and director. "We've increased the number of servers, increased the number of gamers that can play in a mission, and are releasing software this week to let gamers host their own servers."

[Dominic Harr]

Too Cool!

I'm off to download it right now!

[Dominic Harr]

My kinda army!

[Terriergal]

OOOOH OOH OOOH OOOHHH FUNNNNNNNN!

[Terriergal]

is this the same one you were telling me about?

[weikel]

Kick ass.

[Husker24]

I tried to sign up for it about a week ago, and they never emailed me back, must have been too busy. I saw a preview of the game on the news and it looked damn cool!

[Dominic Harr]

Download it Here.

I'm downloading it now, i'll let you know what I think. The screen shot they showed was mighty fine.

[Dimensio]

So, heh...is there a Linux client available?

[LibWhacker]

I'm trying to download it now, but no luck. Looks like their servers are jammed.

[Bob J]

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[adaven]

No, but the server runs on Linux.

[Dimensio]

great, so I can host games that I can't play...

[Michael2001]

Thanks for posting. I'm off to download.