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Twelve years on, Operation Flashpoint is now known as Arma: Cold War Assault, and while a busy mod community kept the game active for many years, the subsequent Arma games have long since overtaken it. It's only natural that it should look so weathered, and yet I find those barren, angular vistas to be oddly chilling. I remember running across them, so often by myself, so often for miles at a time, and while I smirked even then at the game's eccentric music and gyrating soldiers, I knew that there was death in that distance. It might be a machine gunner five hundred meters away, a sniper even further, or it might be something much larger that would find me exposed and alone, a single soldier as helpless as any other when caught in the open.

This helplessness was the true horror of war. Nothing had captured it before and, all these years later, still few have captured it since.

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