Burke's Joystick

In the much revered martial art of "Tankery", they say that "you don't choose the tank, the tank chooses you."  I have found this to be true...well, at least it is with Wargaming.net's World of Tanks . Going into World of Tanks with its over 200 armored vehicles is a lot like stepping into a Walmart:  I mean, where do you turn first?  There is so much to choose from that picking just one from the massive pile of tanks often comes down to an arbitrary criterion.  For me and WoT, that criterion was simple patriotism:  if I was going to have a favorite tank, it was darn well going to be an American tank!  With that in mind, I decided to go with the WWII light tank classic, the M3 Stuart: Some background:  built by Cadillac, a total of 13,859 vehicles were manufactured from 1941 through September 1943.  Initially, it was armed with a 37mm M5 gun, and five .30-06 Browning M1919A4 machine guns, but later the main gun was upgraded to a slig...

It is one of those things where one game leads to another, which leads to another....  In this case the instigator was Red Orchestra 2 .  As I detailed here , I've been having a blast with the Rising Storm expansion.  Well, after playing on a bunch of servers that also hosted the core Ost Front content, I started to notice that maps which favored armored warfare were coming up quite infrequently in the rotation.  Truth be told this is no big loss as I hate how RO2 restricts armored vehicles to players who choose the role of crewman/tank commander.  As someone who prefers to play infantry, I rarely get a chance to hop in a tank because of this restriction - how I wish Tripwire would ditch this limited class thing and embrace the more open system used by Dice's Battlefield 3 !  Regardless, even though I do prefer gritty infantry combat, I did become wistful for the chance to slug it out in some armor. So I started looking for a replacement and remember...