Idle Thumbs 235: Plaited Haircut of the Whale

[Salacious Snake]

 

Now that I think about it, that Steel Battalion multiplayer game had voice chat stuff too. If you had a certain piece of equipment on your mech, you could listen in to the other team's voice chat and hear what they were planning. It was even cooler because it required physically turning a knob to the correct radio frequency. I think to talk to other teammates you had to turn the knob to their channel, so you only could only talk to one other person at a time. If someone wanted to listen to you they had to find which channel currently had people talking. My memory is fuzzy though, I might be wrong about some of that.

You're talking about the Sheepdog:

 

 

It's not quite as complex as you remember, because multiple people could be in a channel, so you could talk to your whole team at once. Intercepting communications was a neat idea, but the game just didn't support a level of strategic teamwork that would make such a capability useful, at least in my experience. I mean, what could you really learn? "Hey, I intercepted a message from the other team... they're planning to blow us up and capture our bases!" Well, duh, obviously. It just wasn't that intricate.

 

Of course, that could be because I'm a baby, and a pro VT pilot would have a very different attitude about it. Still, I'd think you'd be better off fielding a vehicle with more offensive capability instead of that thing (even though it looks awesome with its sensor equipment).

 

Combat Mission: Black Sea does some nifty stuff to simulate battlefield information sharing and electronic warfare, as detailed in this video:

 

 

But really, I'd love to see that kind of stuff in more of a grand strategy game like they were fantasizing about on the cast. It could be so rad.