America's Army™

  I feel cheated, I feel abused, but worse, I feel alone.  Do I have major psychiatric problems that need to be looked at? Well, maybe, but that's not why I just said that.  America's Army looked like a decent game to me, regardless of the mindless 312 Mb download.  Built off the Unreal Tournament™ engine, the game attempts to revolutionize realistic gaming.  Not only are the physics realistic, but you must actually complete training missions to become a soldier.  Your stats help you join online servers with skill restriction.

   Well I thought it was a good idea, and remarkably it only 30 minutes to download.  I installed it and began instantly.  The game goes into great depth about training and the location of were you'll train, Fort Benning, Georgia.  First you go through a marksmanship qualification with the Colt M16A2.  You get 40 rounds, and must shoot at least 23 targets to qualify for basic marksmanship. After this course, you upload your stats to the server.

   Here's the problem, when I updated, and came back to play the game later, it was like I never completed the training at all, I had to redo that same course.  Well I went to the AA forums, and I only got people to state they had the same problem.  One guy said that if I do the entire training in one shot and upload, it might work.  Well, believe or not, I DO have better things to do, well at least sometimes. 

   Anyways, I find that the AA team has an IRC chatroom, "live help?" I thought, well sorta.  I waited in the room for about an hour and a half and then gave up when i realized the people joining AFTER me got to go ahead of me for some reason.  However, I did manage to get a message that said my problem was common and I'd receive an e-mail about it.  Well guess what? NO FRIGGIN' E-MAIL!

  Sheesh! With a team supposedly connected somehow to the US Army, you'd think they'd have a little better bureaucracy, but no, I cant get ANY help.  I tried going online to serves and asking, but oh yeah, I CAN'T PLAY ON ANY OF THEM! It seems that my training, which I did complete, turns out to be uncompleted on the master server.  If they fix this later, I might come back and actually say I enjoy the game, but they screwed me, so I'm screwing them for now.

One pissed off gamer,

Saladin