Codename Panzers: Phase One

Developer: Stormregion

Publisher: CDV Ent USA

Release Date: 10/01/2004

ESRB: T

Genre: strategy

Setting: military

Last week GamersInfo.net was invited out to Sherman Texas to see and play the gold version of Codename Panzers: PhaseOne. The following is an account of the two days of fun, good company, and heavy machinery.

Day One:

Here I sit in a hotel room in Sherman, Texas; thoughts of tomorrow’s fun racing through my mind. The truth is, I’m sure we’re going to have fun. Beyond that, I have no idea what to expect. I wish I could remember the exact words that a member of our crowd said. Essentially, every one of us is ready to make huge hunks of metal make a lot of dust and noise. Tomorrow I’ll be driving a tank.

Codename: Panzers

CDV is hosting what I like to call a “press junket” to promote their new game, Codename: Panzers. Mario Kroll of CDV had the chance to show off his organizational skills by trying to round up (we are in Texas and “rounding up” is what you do) ten people arriving from all parts of the country. Including a British guy from West Virginia (I might be the only one that finds this amusing).

The last two stragglers finally showed up; one with a weak excuse about a dead battery on a plane causing him to miss his flight, and the other without a cell phone. Since we were picked up in a Hummer Limousine, we all thought there would be plenty of room. However, once you load up eleven people it gets pretty cramped. Add a two hour drive from the airport and you’ve got an uncomfortable situation. Everyone was a good sport though, and we all got there in one piece; one sore piece.

Dinner at Tia's

That night we walked down the road to Tia’s Tex Mex for dinner. We met our contact from Incredible Adventures as well as our contact from Tactical Tanks, both great people. Appetizers were served, beer was served, and finally dinner. It was a good chance to get to know those around us. Unfortunately, I’m terrible with names… sorry you guys!

Being on Eastern Time, it got late for me earlier than most, and I decided to head back to my room. I did have to be up and ready to meet our troop transport at 0800 hours, so it was time for my beauty rest anyway.

Tomorrow’s going to be an event to remember. It’s not everyday that a civilian gets to drive a tank (legally), so I’m definitely looking forward to it.

Day Two:

I was right. It was an event to remember. Holy cow. I’m sitting on the plane headed back to Atlanta, and I can still hear the rumble of the tanks and the explosions. The whole day was just plain amazing. Here’s a recap of the day.

0600 appeared on the alarm clock for about three seconds while I reset the alarm for 0700.

0700 appeared on the alarm clock… ok, ok I’m up. By 0730, I was showered, checked out, and eating breakfast in the lobby with the others. I think we were all a bit nervous, maybe anxious would be the better word, to get out there and see what exactly we were getting ourselves into. Like me, no one really knew exactly what we were going to be doing.

At 0800 the transports arrived and whisked us off at a speedy 20mph to Tactical Tanks. Luckily for our lungs (diesel anyone?) it was only a ten minute ride from our hotel. Stepping out of the transport, the first thing we set sights on is a row of tanks… oh yeah! After being taken inside and suited up for the mission, we all gather in a command room to hear the sitrep (that’s situation report to those of you not in the know) and be divided into our teams.

Team Devil Dogs
(me, Rui, and Kat)

I was put onto the Devil Dogs team which was made up of myself, Kat from GameFeed.com, and Rui from MrFixitOnline.com. We learned that a German 88 was firing on one of our tanks, and eventually our mission was to take out that 88. But first, we had to train.

Our luxury vehicles
for the day

We were gathered up into transports again, and taken into the heart of the Tactical Tanks domain. Arriving at our staging area we saw the tanks we would be driving. Someone will correct me I'm sure, they aren't actually tanks. But they were big; they were metal; they had tracks. Good enough for me! We flew through our training which included communication, navigation, and driving.

Communication was easy. Step one, put helmet on. Step two, talk. Voice activated communication allowed us to talk with our team only, and a push-to-talk button allowed us to talk globally (i.e. request firing support from central command).

/loc anyone?

Navigation was a bit more difficult, but if you’ve ever dealt with a massive multiplayer game’s coordinate system, you would be able to handle this. We used handheld GPS systems with a simple x/y coordinate (North 33.68.954 by West 31.98.128 for example) to get to our destinations.

And finally we learned to drive those beasts. It was really very simple. Two levers in front control steering and braking, and a pedal at the right foot is the gas. Pulling a lever back applies the brake on that track. So pulling back the right lever stopped the right track, turning us right. Pulling back on both stopped both. Simple.

German Infantry

Having graduated training we were given our first mission. We were to track down an unknown German tank by going to its last known location. I started as tank commander, Kat was driver, and Rui was our navigator. We spent a couple minutes looking at our map getting our bearings based on the coordinates we were given. Once Rui and I had it worked out, we took off. No more than 3 minutes later we saw our first sign of enemy contact… firing on us! The proper procedure would have been to call in the sighting and get support. But we were new to the whole thing, so just rode right on. Oops.

The next excitement came as we bumped into a tree. Kat, you knew I couldn’t leave that out of this. Rui and I are yelling, “brake, brake!” but it requires a whole lot more strength to stop those things than one would think. No harm done though, we just barely bumped it. After that our driver had no issues.

A few minutes later we made it to our first destination. We were supposed to find a leftover ammo box from this mysterious tank. Being the tank commander I promptly deployed my driver and navigator to locate the box. Ah the joys of power… ok, it’s the simple things. Once Kat and Rui found the box, we had a new set of coordinates to head to. We switched positions at this point. I took over the driver’s position, Kat moved to navigator and Rui became commander.

Lunchtime!

The rest of this mission went without much incident, and we finally found ourselves back at field command for lunch. I’ve grown up in Atlanta. I’ve been eating barbecue all my life. Call me a connoisseur if you must. I know my barbecue. I knew we were eating barbecue for lunch, and since we were in Texas, I was looking forward to comparing to my own local barbecue hotspot. It was pretty darn good, but score one for Georgia today folks. Our barbecue is better (/me ducks the insults being thrown at me from Texas). :)

After lunch we found ourselves back in our tanks headed out on our second mission of the day, only this time we were going to be up against a minefield and another tank. The idea is that the two tanks arrive at the minefield, and then work together to clear it. We had to find a few mines and then navigate our way through to the other side. After exiting the other side we would receive new orders, and then the race was on.

Clearing the minefield

Once we arrived at the minefield, our team realized that the metal detector was not in the tank. We had to switch tanks earlier due to a malfunction, and our metal detector had been taken out. Without a metal detector all we could do was wait for the “Jolly Roger’s” to find the mines and clear a way for us.

Once we were through the minefield our new orders came in. A pilot had to bail out before his plane crashed, and we were to go behind enemy lines to extract him (actually the flag he is holding is all we had to extract). We had his last known coordinates, so off we set.

After a wrong turn we made it to our coordinates. We found our pilot hung up in the trees by his parachute, so Kat got out and helped him back to the tank. As we were loading up, the Jolly Roger’s came rolling past us waving their flag. They were going to beat us back. However, in the spirit of competition, I whipped us around and made chase.

You're going the
wrong way!!

As we came around the corner, following their dust, I noticed that their dust went up the left road at a y-intersection. To the right was field command. We all noticed at the same time that the Jolly Roger’s had made a game killing decision. They went the wrong way! The look on their faces as they watched us take the right hand turn was classic. You could almost hear them cursing themselves! Of course, we knew they’d try and catch up, so we floored it. I hope I didn’t shake Kat and Rui around too much, but I wasn’t about to lose when given that kind of opportunity!

Victory is ours!

The whole ride back Kat and Rui were looking over our shoulders letting me know that they were back there. As we got closer to field command, Kat got ready to hop out and hang our flag and it’s a good thing she was ready. One of the guys from the Jolly Roger’s team was on foot and racing towards the flag. Not fast enough though, because the Devil Dogs flag was on top!

Our third and final mission of the day was to take out that 88 that we had been briefed on earlier. However, it was going to require the coordination of all four teams. We were briefed on the mission, got our new coordinates, and set out to bring that 88 down.

Taking down the 88

As we got closer to the position of the 88 we called for a smoke screen. A few minutes later we had a nice wall of smoke in front of us and were able to safely proceed. As the smoke started clearing, the 88 could see us, and started firing down on us. So that we wouldn’t get hit, we displaced and advanced while returning fire. Eventually the fight was won, and we overtook the 88. The Germans came down the hill, hands on helmets, gladly surrendering.

Unfortunately our tank riding fun ended there, but after we cleaned up we had some time to talk, drink a few beers, and talk about each other’s victories and defeats. We even managed to find about three minutes to talk about the game we were invited to see! :)

1600 hours rolled around, and we all had to pile back into the Hummer Limo for the long ride back to the airport. This time we left a few people behind that weren’t flying out tonight, so the ride was much less cramped.

I’m sure that Mario would agree, the event was a huge success. Everyone had a great time, and given the chance, would do it again in a heartbeat! Good job Mario! As for the game that we went so far to see… keep your eyes on the site. We will have a preview coming in the next week or so.

If you've enjoyed reading this, then you might like to check out these links:

All 293 images from the event

Codename: Panzers Screenshots

About the Author, Sean Williams (A.K.A Sean)

Where to start? I'm 28, work in the corporate world, and I'm desperately trying to get out of it and get into the game development world.

I've been gaming for just about as long as I can remember. I think my first gaming experience was with an old Atari 800 (XL?). You could boot this thing up and it would allow you to type in Basic. I can't rememberif it would allow me to save it or not, but I do remember that I had a big book of Basic games. I would pick one, and spend hours typing it in, hoping that I hadn't made a type in a couple hundred lines of code.

Since then I've played on just about every platform available. I'm mostly a PC gamer now, so i fondly remember my first real gaming experience on a PC. My parents bought an Apple IIc, and it came with a mouse. But the mouse was pretty new then, so the computer had software to teach you how to use the mouse. One of the tools in that software was a fly swatting game. That was some fun stuff!!

Once I got out of high school my horizons broadened a good deal. I went to school for computer animation with the intention of going to work for a game company as an artist. However, I ended up learning more about 2d graphic and web design than I did about 3d animation. When Ultima Online was released, I started stumbling across the "network sites" (Crossroads, Stratics, etc). Finally I got around to applying for work at Crossroads. They brought me on as the Site Manager for the unnamed Starwars Online game that was in the works (now known as Star Wars Galxies).

Since that time, I handed over the reigns to the SWG site and Crossroads changed to the WarCry network. I worked with them for a few years doing site design mostly, but it was about the best learning experience I've had to date. I had the chance to get my name known in the community, and at this most recent E3 I had a developer recognize my name... woo!

So that's me. I love doing this kind of work, and one day I hope to be getting paid for it. :)

Event – Event: Tank Ride with CDV

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About the Author, Sean Williams (A.K.A Sean)