'Running, jumping, climbing trees, putting on make-up when you’re up there!’
This bizarre but hilarious skit by Eddie Izzard about wanting to be in the army, minus the make-up, is the perfect anecdote for the feeling of adventure that all young boys surely feel at some stage; that need for an adventure, an excuse to chase friends with a cap gun. It’s what drives us all in our early years to break away from our mothers’ apron strings and go and see the world, or council estate in which we live. Izzard is describing a world where every street corner, every alley and lane brings a sense of new danger and ultimately excitement. This anecdote was the first thing I thought of when booting up my first online game of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and perfectly sums up the game for me.
BC2, more than any other FPS I have yet played, carries all the excitement of those young attempts at adventure and danger and there are many, many reasons for this.
The online mode sees you take control of one of four types of soldier. You can be an assault troop, medic, sniper or an engineer, each comes with there own specific weaponry and skill sets and you can either switch between these mid-game or you can stick with one particular type. During combat you gain experience for carrying out objectives and gunning down enemies and this will lead to levelling up and the unlocking of new weapons and skill upgrades. For example, snipers earn the ability to call in mortar strikes while engineers will grow to fix vehicles that have taken damage. All fairly straight forward stuff then. What makes this aspect of the online game such a great addition is the pacing of the levels and the balance between the character types. The rewards are heaped on you fast enough to keep you playing but slow enough that when they do come, they feel well earned. This also leads to a great sense of being wet behind the ears when first starting off with no skills and bog-standard weaponry. Having said this though, the game never feels unfair whichever specialist you chose to be. Although snipers can be a real pain when taking enemy positions, the feeling of reward when you sneak up on one and put a well placed knife in his back and thus steal his dog tags makes it all worthwhile.
The game is fought out over a variety of game modes, mainly being Rush mode which sees an attacking team try to destroy communications stations while defenders hold them off. Conquest mode sees you capturing and holding as many flags as possible while time ticks down faster or slower varied by how many flags you hold, and there is also a group death match mode. It is the Rush and Conquest modes that will take up the majority of your time though and both are executed brilliantly. This is thanks mainly to the fantastic maps which see you fighting through built up town areas, claustrophobic woodland and rocky deserts.
Of course, none of this would matter if these online battles weren’t backed up by the tight controls and game mechanics. The use of vehicles throughout multiplayer adds real drama to the game. To hear the metal on metal scrape of an approaching tank brings real fear into the play, and to watch as players scatter in all directions searching for cover when faced with a helicopter gunship is truly hilarious. Also, the need for team work to win battles leads to a genuine camaraderie between players who ultimately, have been chosen at random.
The key element to this online experience though and the trump card of Bad Company is the use of terrain destruction. This is brilliantly implemented into the online mode. Such a feature could lead to frame rate drops in busy games but this never occurs and it really does add to the battles. Almost nowhere is safe for cover. If a tank is chasing you, holing up inside a small building will do little to help as this will surely be razed to the ground within seconds of you taking up position, killing you in the process. Blowing holes in walls and leaving craters where shells hit leaves the map looking like a genuine war zone post match and it is truly brilliant. If a sniper is giving you trouble from a watch tower, a well placed grenade will not only kill the sniper but also leave the tower in an un-usable state. Fantastic! So, the use of destruction becomes a tactical tool as well as a graphical effect.
All these features together with the great controls and graphics from one player add up to make Bad Company 2 the best online multiplayer I have experienced this generation. If you’re looking for a well-balanced FPS with genuinely exciting combat that can give you that youthful running, jumping, climbing trees (putting on make-up if you’re that way inclined) sense of fun then this is it.
[9]
Thursday 13 May 2010
Sunday 25 April 2010
The joy of offline multiplayer
The joy of offline multiplayer
Fetch me my Saturn
I’m sat on a rare patch of grass in the tourist infested Cardiff Bay enjoying a pint of bitter, the scorching sun and listening to a friend rant over the current state of the games industry. A typical Saturday afternoon it seems.
“I just don’t get online multiplayer!”
With this said Ben sits back with a painfully familiar smug smile which suggests he’s made his point clear. This is where I would normally become defensive, or simply insult his mother, depending on the level of drink involved. Today is different though. For once I join him in the smug smile, as the opinion he has just angrily put forth is one which I completely relate to.
To explain further, we have been discussing the lack of offline multiplayer in a game widely considered to be one of the outstanding titles of 2009 on ps3, Uncharted 2. I suggest to him that the 3 player online co-op mode of Uncharted 2 is a pretty fun, if remarkably difficult jaunt. His reply is simple:
“It’s just not as fun as when you are all in the same room!”
I nod agreement. It is this shared opinion that gives us our problem for the evening. With Ben visiting for the weekend, what can we play when the vast majority of exceptional titles offer no kind of split-screen? We decide that we can play Little Big Planet and maybe some Fifa 10, but the rest of my meagre collection of ps3 games simply do not offer offline multiplayer, and these are big hitting titles like Dirt 2, Uncharted 2 and Battlefield Bad Company 2. No split screen between them.
We discuss the possibility of breaking out the Wii but we agree that we did the Wii to death when we lived together and neither of us really fancies swinging our arms around at the moment. Plus we guess that no-one will really play our preferred Wii multiplayer game, Mario Strikers Charged Football, online anymore. No competition.
Luckily, there is another option available to us. An option that for most people is little more than a memory long faded. In our search for great offline multiplayer I find myself hooking up the Sega Saturn in the living room and popping in a copy of Athlete Kings. If there is a better summer offline multiplayer game than this on the current generation of hardware, I have yet to find it. We carried on into the night all laughs, drinking Tanqueray and breaking world records that we had set last year. It was an unashamedly fantastic night that eventually came to an end at 4am Sunday morning after a slight detour into Die Hard Arcade.
The problem here is that although we had a fantastic night, we felt forced to skip back two generations of hardware and back to the mid-nineties to achieve it. There is certainly an argument to say that it is my currently smallish collection of ps3 games that caused the issue of what to play to begin with but at some point, it would seem to me, any adopter of this current generation would be faced with exactly the same problem when building up their collection of games. The problem is surely emphasised when it is taken into account the quality of the games involved. Uncharted 2, Dirt 2 and Bad Company 2 have all been lavished with praise, and rightly so, but they all lack something that was taken for granted just a few short years ago. Anyone who remembers working so hard to arrange multi-tap parties on the ps1/psx will remember how important gaming with others face to face was and is. The same can be said of anyone who can recall the astonishing moment that they first played 4 player Goldeneye on the N64.
This leads me onto my next point, and what is really my concern for the future, if major developers turn their back on offline multiplayer for major releases, what kind of gaming culture is this encouraging? I’m sure all gamers have experienced at least some kind of abuse from a faceless gamer via headset. I’m equally sure that we have all seen gamers spamming moves in fighting games, endlessly crashing into others in racing games and of course, camping in first person shooters. It can sometimes seem like an endless mix of desperation to win or desperation to be stupid at all costs. Both of which remove any real fun from the game.
During my formative years as a gamer, which were based heavily around the N64, when playing multiplayer games with friends every action had a reaction. There was a very real accountability created due to the fact that you were sat next to your opponents on a sofa. If someone endlessly spammed moves because they felt like winning, they would quickly receive a cushion to the face. They’d be told to not take the winning so seriously. Also, if someone endlessly ruined a good race for others, driving around a track backwards to take others out for example, a similar punishment would be dealt out. And we all did it of course, pushing our luck and winding each other up, but again, even this process was aided by being face to face as you could gauge the reaction of someone who was about to become the butt of the joke before you made it. Online there is no such system in place. It’s like fitting sarcasm into a text message; it just doesn’t ever come across.
So it seems that due to the lack of this face to face experience there is a danger of creating a generation of detached gamers, gamers who care more for achievements and trophies than for the actual joy of playing against human opponents rather than badly programmed bots. The irony of all this is that before games entered mainstream culture, they were considered a solitary past time, an extension of dungeons and dragons for spotty kids in dark rooms. Now that games are main stream the old stereotype may be truer than ever. By ignoring the importance of offline multiplayer, the industry is effectively encouraging gamers to play alone. MAG may sport 256 player online battles and team communication via headsets but ultimately players are still participating alone.
Having said all this, online multiplayer is truly fantastic. To be able to play multiplayer matches at any time of day is truly the future of gaming. It just seems bizarre to me that I can play co-op Uncharted 2 with Ben when he is 200 miles away but we cannot play when in the same room.
Fetch me my Saturn
I’m sat on a rare patch of grass in the tourist infested Cardiff Bay enjoying a pint of bitter, the scorching sun and listening to a friend rant over the current state of the games industry. A typical Saturday afternoon it seems.
“I just don’t get online multiplayer!”
With this said Ben sits back with a painfully familiar smug smile which suggests he’s made his point clear. This is where I would normally become defensive, or simply insult his mother, depending on the level of drink involved. Today is different though. For once I join him in the smug smile, as the opinion he has just angrily put forth is one which I completely relate to.
To explain further, we have been discussing the lack of offline multiplayer in a game widely considered to be one of the outstanding titles of 2009 on ps3, Uncharted 2. I suggest to him that the 3 player online co-op mode of Uncharted 2 is a pretty fun, if remarkably difficult jaunt. His reply is simple:
“It’s just not as fun as when you are all in the same room!”
I nod agreement. It is this shared opinion that gives us our problem for the evening. With Ben visiting for the weekend, what can we play when the vast majority of exceptional titles offer no kind of split-screen? We decide that we can play Little Big Planet and maybe some Fifa 10, but the rest of my meagre collection of ps3 games simply do not offer offline multiplayer, and these are big hitting titles like Dirt 2, Uncharted 2 and Battlefield Bad Company 2. No split screen between them.
We discuss the possibility of breaking out the Wii but we agree that we did the Wii to death when we lived together and neither of us really fancies swinging our arms around at the moment. Plus we guess that no-one will really play our preferred Wii multiplayer game, Mario Strikers Charged Football, online anymore. No competition.
Luckily, there is another option available to us. An option that for most people is little more than a memory long faded. In our search for great offline multiplayer I find myself hooking up the Sega Saturn in the living room and popping in a copy of Athlete Kings. If there is a better summer offline multiplayer game than this on the current generation of hardware, I have yet to find it. We carried on into the night all laughs, drinking Tanqueray and breaking world records that we had set last year. It was an unashamedly fantastic night that eventually came to an end at 4am Sunday morning after a slight detour into Die Hard Arcade.
The problem here is that although we had a fantastic night, we felt forced to skip back two generations of hardware and back to the mid-nineties to achieve it. There is certainly an argument to say that it is my currently smallish collection of ps3 games that caused the issue of what to play to begin with but at some point, it would seem to me, any adopter of this current generation would be faced with exactly the same problem when building up their collection of games. The problem is surely emphasised when it is taken into account the quality of the games involved. Uncharted 2, Dirt 2 and Bad Company 2 have all been lavished with praise, and rightly so, but they all lack something that was taken for granted just a few short years ago. Anyone who remembers working so hard to arrange multi-tap parties on the ps1/psx will remember how important gaming with others face to face was and is. The same can be said of anyone who can recall the astonishing moment that they first played 4 player Goldeneye on the N64.
This leads me onto my next point, and what is really my concern for the future, if major developers turn their back on offline multiplayer for major releases, what kind of gaming culture is this encouraging? I’m sure all gamers have experienced at least some kind of abuse from a faceless gamer via headset. I’m equally sure that we have all seen gamers spamming moves in fighting games, endlessly crashing into others in racing games and of course, camping in first person shooters. It can sometimes seem like an endless mix of desperation to win or desperation to be stupid at all costs. Both of which remove any real fun from the game.
During my formative years as a gamer, which were based heavily around the N64, when playing multiplayer games with friends every action had a reaction. There was a very real accountability created due to the fact that you were sat next to your opponents on a sofa. If someone endlessly spammed moves because they felt like winning, they would quickly receive a cushion to the face. They’d be told to not take the winning so seriously. Also, if someone endlessly ruined a good race for others, driving around a track backwards to take others out for example, a similar punishment would be dealt out. And we all did it of course, pushing our luck and winding each other up, but again, even this process was aided by being face to face as you could gauge the reaction of someone who was about to become the butt of the joke before you made it. Online there is no such system in place. It’s like fitting sarcasm into a text message; it just doesn’t ever come across.
So it seems that due to the lack of this face to face experience there is a danger of creating a generation of detached gamers, gamers who care more for achievements and trophies than for the actual joy of playing against human opponents rather than badly programmed bots. The irony of all this is that before games entered mainstream culture, they were considered a solitary past time, an extension of dungeons and dragons for spotty kids in dark rooms. Now that games are main stream the old stereotype may be truer than ever. By ignoring the importance of offline multiplayer, the industry is effectively encouraging gamers to play alone. MAG may sport 256 player online battles and team communication via headsets but ultimately players are still participating alone.
Having said all this, online multiplayer is truly fantastic. To be able to play multiplayer matches at any time of day is truly the future of gaming. It just seems bizarre to me that I can play co-op Uncharted 2 with Ben when he is 200 miles away but we cannot play when in the same room.
Tuesday 20 April 2010
Greetings!
Hi there, how's it going?
As this is my first post I feel obliged to break out the formalities and extend an 'online handshake' to you all.
Just a bit about myself, it will be good for context once I become carried away with my opinionated chatter. I'm a 25 year old history grad/long time gamer. My first gaming memory is of playing Centipede and Joust on the Atari 2600 and since then I have taken in each generation from the 16 bitters through to the current HD age and have also been side tracked by various handhelds along the way. Incidently my most recent gaming memory involves laughing at Jef Jansens weird polygonal ass whilst playing Athlete Kings on the Sega Saturn but I'll get on to that in my next/first proper post.
Anyway, for the time being I'm off down the park to sit in the sun and play Sid Meiers Pirates on psp!
Take it easy!
andyedessa
ps. medal for those who noticed that the blog name is a quote from Goose in Top Gun.
pps. Top Gun rocks!!!
As this is my first post I feel obliged to break out the formalities and extend an 'online handshake' to you all.
Just a bit about myself, it will be good for context once I become carried away with my opinionated chatter. I'm a 25 year old history grad/long time gamer. My first gaming memory is of playing Centipede and Joust on the Atari 2600 and since then I have taken in each generation from the 16 bitters through to the current HD age and have also been side tracked by various handhelds along the way. Incidently my most recent gaming memory involves laughing at Jef Jansens weird polygonal ass whilst playing Athlete Kings on the Sega Saturn but I'll get on to that in my next/first proper post.
Anyway, for the time being I'm off down the park to sit in the sun and play Sid Meiers Pirates on psp!
Take it easy!
andyedessa
ps. medal for those who noticed that the blog name is a quote from Goose in Top Gun.
pps. Top Gun rocks!!!
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