"Weekend Warriors" - Let's Play Coop In ArmA 2

So I was playing ArmA 2 in coop with some of my e-buddies the other day, and, since we all really like writing and reading about ourselves playing games, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and write about our mutual experience. If you were not part of said experience but still managed to derive entertainment from those memoirs - good for you, I guess.
  
We have been playing a user-made coop scenario called "Cipher" , which has you attack a heavily guarded enemy base, kill a renegade Russian general and steal a suitcase with a macguffin vital for saving democracy or whatever. It's supposed to be played by a team of 10, but since there were only 3 of us the other 7 were replaced with bots, which we used as spare "lives", since you can take control of one of the remaining bots when you die.

Chernarus.

The Task:

A multinational team of US Marines has been sent on an important mission - assasination of a rogue Russian general and retrieval of WMD's a suitcase with a secret cipher.

The Team:

Team Leader Sekundaari; callsign: Sniperman - "SEE YOU IN HELL, PUMPKIN!"
Corpsman Heavy Gunner bucaneer; callsign: bucaneer - "I take no orders"
Corpsman Someone; callsign: GAME - "You could have thrown the corpses out, at least"

The mission starts with a short cutscene showing us the general, surrounded by his forces, with the suitcase, in his fortified village base.

A transport chopper drops us off on a nondescript meadow, about 3 kilometers away from the target village of Orlovets. There, we are provided with a weapons cache and 3 bikes for transport. While we sort our gear out, the local civilians make an introduction: refusing to cooperate with the liberation forces, an angry driver runs over our bikes, smashing one of them irreparably, stops, gets out of the car and very sarcastically gives the Traditional Charnarussian Liberation Greeting (laying face-down on the ground, with your hands behind your head), before promptly returning into the car and driving away. The whole scene has such a stunning effect on the team that by the time Sniperman snaps out of it and delivers two warning shots into the rear of the offending car, it's too far away for them to have the desired effect.

With the bikes out of commission, we have to walk to the objective on foot. 3 kilometers.

This is not a short walk.

We run through some woods. Then through some meadows. Then through some woods again. Finally, an encounter with an enemy patrol snaps us out of the comfort of running: about 3 men notice me in the tail of the group and open fire. I go prone and try to crawl behind some trees and determine the direction of incoming fire, while my two comrades deal with the threat, and before I can figure out where the enemies are, the patrol goes down.

Not pictured: me, crapping my pants.

We loot some grenades from the corpses and move onto a hill overlooking the objective, when the proverbial hits the fan. We start firing on the enemy soldiers patrolling the village, which alerts an enemy APC and an Anti-Air vehicle, as well as a gunship circling above. Bullets dig into the ground and trees around us, as we return fire to the targets scattered all across the horizon, and the alerted gunship makes strafing runs trying to flush us out of the thicket on the hill with cannons and missile fire. Some bad news come up: First, that we didn't bring any Anti-Air weapons, and second, that I ran out of ammo and inadvertently threw out all of my extra magazines while picking up grenades.

The situation is looking grim, but we still have two Anti-Tank missile launchers, and decide to team up and take down the Shilka AA vehicle, which has been lashing our nest with it's multiple high-caliber cannons, but before I can poke out of cover and properly take aim, an APC drives up the hill to the right of our position and points it's many many guns at my exposed torso. Unfortunately for it's crew, I happen to be clutching a primed rocket launcher and they happen to be 3 meters away, which is just close enough to be impossible to miss, but not close enough to kill me with the splash damage. They go up in flames and I bag my first armor kill of the day.

WOO! GET SOME!

Meanwhile, Sniperman takes down the Shilka, and we are left with a batallion of angry infantry and a gunship spraying our position with hot death. Having spent my rocket tube and my machinegun bullets, I'm left completely spent and virtually useless - there isn't even a melee option! I still have the damn grenades, which I throw somewhere vaguely in the direction of incoming fire.

The gunship problem is intensifying and, after it manages to land a few hits and injure us, Sniperman decides on tactical doctrine: hide and hope the bad chopper goes away, so we crawl underneath some trees and carefully listen to the sounds of rotorblades zooming past us.

The chopper seemingly loses our scent, but keeps patrolling the area above. We don't have a choice: carefully, we crouch out of the thicket and down the hill, into the enemy positions, have a few brief shootouts with the remaining infantry forces and finally get blown up by the gunship missiles.

First Attempt - Moderately successful.

Thankfully we still have 7 more "lives" in reserve, and so "possess" some of the AI troopers standing idly around the Landing Zone, get 3 more bikes spawned and gear up again. Armed with foreknowledge of the likely engagements, I pick up a sniper rifle and an AA missile launcher.

Remembering what happened the last time we dallied, Sniperman hops onto a bike and pedals to the objective, while me and bucaneer have another encounter with the civilians. Another car pulls up, and the driver gets out and starts the Traditional Liberation Greeting. Trying to avoid the mistakes of the recent past, I hop into the driver's seat and investigate the car.

It appears that a couple of local stoners have kindapped a member of the clergy, and were taking him away in an unknown direction. We briefly contemplate the picture, but ultimately decide that bikes are superior for our goal and the priest doesn't seem all that bothered by his captivity, so we leave the driver to have his withdrawal-induced violent breakdown, hop onto our bikes and try to catch up with Sniperman. I actually get a head start, but bucaneer quickly overtakes me due to my overwhelming desire to take pretty screenshots instead of watching the road, and general ineptitude unfamiliarity with the apparatus.

If Tom Clancy and Tony Hawk had a baby...

While I repeatedly smash into trees, fall off the bike and hurt myself circumvent difficult terrain, bucaneer and Sniperman assault the village. The helicopter is nowhere to be seen, and we slowly advance into the village. Without armor support, enemy troopers quickly go down and we move to take cover between some houses.

It doesn't take long for the attack chopper to return, and I propose to try and take it down with the ground-to-ground missiles on hand, before being reminded that I've been lugging an AA rocket tube on my back this whole time and trying to take aim. There is no time to figure out how to use the launcher guidance system, so I just assume it's locked on when I see a square bracket surrounding the smudge in the air, and fire away, just when it goes over a forest. At first I assume the missile got caught by the trees, but after a few seconds of intense listening, the rotorblade sound slowly dies down, earning me bragging rights for a second piece of armor successfully disposed.

Meanwhile, the remaining enemy forces attack us from behind. Me and bucaneer go prone and scan the hillock behind us. Several enemy soldiers go down when, suddenly, an enemy "light recon vehicle" (and I can't type that with a straight face) with a mounted grenade launcher shows up and slowly drives past us. I cannot have that and, after some unfortunate misses and lag compensation, manage to shoot the exposed gunner and the driver in the neck, earning me bragging rights for what can be, with some gratuitous, military-grade overexaggerating, considered to be an armor unit, with bonus points for getting rid of the crew without blowing up the vehicle, earning us a ride with a big gun.

Woo? Um, get..some?

Still, I can't take all the credit. bucaneer manages to save my skin, when a soldier, catastrophically late to the party, emerges from a house behind us and starts wildly blasting away at our unsuspecting backs. While I try to take cover and locate the source of enemy fire, bucaneer coldly turns around and blasts the unfortunate camper.

We move on to the final sweep. Sniperguy literally goes to town with the grenade launcher while I suffer an unfortunate car accident, which I won't dwell on, and am forced to respawn as another bot and drive all the way back to the objective. The stoners are gone, so I have to drive the newly-spawned bike to a nearby village, where I steal take borrow requisition another civilian car. By the time I get back, bucaneer and Sniperman have already wrapped up the cleanup, and are trying to remember what was it that we were supposed to do, aside from killing everyone in the village. The general appears to have been killed during one of the attacks, so we thoroughly search Orlovets, retrieve the macguffin, call an EVAC chopper and pose for goodbye pictures, which I will not include out of fear for the audience's bandwidth.

Well, maybe except this one:

bucaneer reasserts his stance on taking orders

And this one:

The local populace salutes it's liberators with the Traditional Greeting.