Falcon 4 BMS PMC Europe Theater Review
74Interview (Edited):
http://www.krauselabs.net/dump/interview.html
Buy PMC theaters:
http://tactical.nekromantix.com/f4/falcon-4-pmc-theaters.php
Donate/Snake Man's Story:
http://tactical.nekromantix.com/donate.php
Original PMC Theater discussion thread on the BMS forums:
http://www.benchmarksims.org/forum/showthread.php?8085-PMC-Theater-PAYWARE-!!!!!
Since the time I discovered Falcon 4 Allied Force 3 years ago i've wanted to fly a cold war gone hot. See huge Russian armored formations smashing into a feeble defense as MiGs scream overhead. Desperately defend a thin, collapsing FLOT against a horde of commies. Scramble from some german airbase being bombarded by chemical weapons and being air assaulted by spetznaz. See nuclear clouds on the horizon. World war III, team yankee style, would have been pretty cool to experience in a video game. And Falcon 4 is the only engine capable of simulating it in it's full, grand scale.
Fast forward to December 2011. 4 months since BMS was released. Snake Man, an old Falcon 4 modder known as the leader (And only remaining developer) of the PMC Tactical group releases a bunch of theaters, instantly energizing a hopeful community. Unfortunately the initial excitement over these theaters, all of which were conversions of old Falcon 4 theaters, turned into outrage, as word reached the community that the converted theaters were being sold for 15 euros each. Snake Man claimed this was to support PMC's hosting and development costs but the community didn't buy it. They criticized PMC's for not providing screenshots, video or a demo - as well as what they percieved to be the greedy profiteering of a developer taking advantage of the free contributions of past community members. Snake Man claimed all other's works were removed before release. Nevertheless: PMC's theaters were removed from the official BMS forums. In response the bitter PMC developer divorced himself from the greater Falcon 4 community. The few people from the BMS forums who bothered to buy the theaters reported that they were incomplete, broken or of very low quality - essentially "copy and paste" conversions without signs of quality assurance.
After the initial release, little more was heard of PMC's theaters due to lack of interest. Meanwhile, I dreamed of flying against the USSR in World War 3. I wanted to fly the PMC Europe theater. And so did my squadron. Being a bunch of milsim nerds, we wanted the terror of merging into fulcrums with nothing but our crappy aim-9ms to protect us. So it's only natural that I messaged Snake Man and offered to give his theater a fair shake in exchange for a free copy of it. As a relatively new member of the community I have no stake in this conflict and just intend to do an impartial review - no bullshit, just the facts. For more backstory on the development process of the PMC theaters please check the link in the video description, which contains a short interview I had with the elusive and private Snake Man.
Some concluding remarks. I want to thank Snake Man for this opportunity to try his Europe theater. While it didn't quite fulfill my cold war fantasies, it's an able theater which would really benefit from some open community development. Those few bugs I reviewed are inexcusable and would have been noticed by even the most cursory testing. Obviously if this were a free theater, there would be no room to complain, but at 15 euros, 20 american, you would expect working PAKs, theater selection, tower comms and threat steerpoints. With some work this theater could become one of the greatest. At it's current state I give this theater 3 slices of bacon out of 5. Mmmmm delicious bacon. If you're interested in checking PMC Europe out, or any other of the PMC Theaters, please check out the link in the video description below. You'll need a paypal account. See you folks next time, and hope you enjoyed!
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