Rainbow Six Black Thorn Campaign Mission One

Operation Desert Dragon (Caracas, Venezuela 05-26-04 0600): An unknown terrorist group has taken over the Japanese Embassy in Caracas, Venezuela during a party being held for visiting Japanese dignitaries. My mission is to subdue the terrorists and rescue all of the hostages.

For this mission I opted to go with the default HQ’s plan provided by the mission designers. These default plans for the most part are tactically sound; utilize the appropriate BDU patterns and kitting for the commandos chosen based on their skill set match to the mission.

The plan provided divided the eight operators into four two-person fire teams. The kitting consisted of medium green battle dress with Kevlar helmet and goggles, 9mm MP5 SD SMG (FMJ) with six magazines, a .45cal M23 SD Pistol (FMJ) and three flash bangs (for each).

I took control of Blue Team which consisted of Ding Chavez and Kazimier Rakuzanka for the operation. During the op Ding Chavez was incapacitated on a roof top when I moved him out onto a balcony and to the left, not noticing a tango across the way that fired into my back spinning me around.

At that point I took control of Kaz and moved her around based on the waypoints specified while the other teams did a decent job of clearing areas and holding at their waypoints. The only loss came when we breached the main hostage area at which time Eddie Price was shot and killed during the assault.

That kind of sucked and almost made me restart there, as Eddie is solid secondary character in the book Rainbow Six by Tom Clancy. I identify with him quite readily these days as he was by far the oldest operator in that storyline (in his late forties if I remember correctly).

First Person Perspective During Actual Game Play

Third Person Swing Camera Perspective from Game Replay Mode

Mission Statistics and Results

R.I.P. Virtual Eddie

Other thoughts: I still have the Wal-Mart receipt in the CD jewel case from when I purchased this game back on 11/02/01. The game is distinct in the Rainbow Six series because in my opinion it was the last great iteration of what made the series fantastic at the time of Quake clones before the slide into twitch shooter oblivion.

It is the last game that ran on the core engine before Raven Shield was released using a heavily modified version of the Unreal 2 engine, and then the series went totally into the toilet with Lock Down (don’t even get me started on Vegas…)

It was also delayed in the United States due to the September 11^th Terrorist Attacks – the original game set for release in October included an airport mission which the developer hastily decided to change to a bus terminal mission instead due to perceived sensitivities.