Archive for May, 2010

Battlefield Bad Company 2

It’s pretty rare that I buy a game on release day as I don’t typically buy into the hype of most mainstream games, or at least try not to.  I decided to give Bad Company 2 a try.  I’ve been looking for a good FPS since I played Call of Duty: Modern Ware (the first one).  Modern Warfare 2 was simply not an option for me.  Infinity Ward/Activision’s practices regarding the PC release were unacceptable to me and I decided against buying it even though it went on to sell like hotcakes because of the hype surrounding it.  Most people I talk to that that did buy find it pretty lackluster overall so if nothing else it’s a good example of what an aggressive marketing campaign can yield for you.  The slanted reviews giving it an almost perfect score on most major gaming sites also bring a lot into question about the integrity of these sources but that’s another topic.

So anyway, I had the urge to shoot people in the face so I decided to pickup the latest entry into the Battlefield series.  Battlefield games were always pretty decent to me, I played the original 1942 and Vietnam games and thought they were pretty good.  Fair warning: If you’re playing with me and see me get into a helicopter, under no circumstance should you ride in it.  There’s a 98.7% chance we will be crashing into the side of a mountain together if you do.

On my way home I decided to pick up the game at my local Best Buy.  I’ve been buying stuff on Steam lately but I didn’t feel like waiting for the client to download so figured I’d pickup a hard copy for once.  Installed and patched up without issue and decided to start the single player campaign first to get all my graphic settings tweaked and such.  The age of my PC started showing on this game pretty good.  It’s a beautiful game but you’re not going to get by on budget hardware if you want all the bells and whistles.  The engine scaled down pretty well for me on medium settings, still looking impressive but yielding a playable frame rate.

I didn’t stick with the single player campaign too long on the first night.  Just got introduced to the characters and then decided to jump into some multiplayer since that’s what I really bought the game for.  Things were a little rocky the first few days with EA’s servers having a lot of problems and various dedicated servers not being updated to the correct PunkBuster versions.  Overall, things smoothed out over the first week though and the multi-player is pretty fun.

My current stats:

So I’m not great but I’ve been improving.  Been playing most Assault or Medic depending on what is needed more so far.  Some games are a little sniper heavy with people trying to pad their k/d ratio’s but most of the matches are still fun.

I did finish the single player campaign as well, it’s pretty standard fare for these types of games so nothing with really knock your socks off in the story but it’s presented well and it’s good enough for a little 5 hour or so side game.

Overall, was a pretty good return to FPS games and will continue to play it off and on for a good while.