The snow-based Port Valdez is the one playable map in the demo
The Battlefield: Bad Company 2 demo was just released last week on the Xbox 360, so I got a chance to play around with it for a couple hours in the last few days. PS3 owners have been lucky as they had access to the beta since last November.
Read on for my likes and dislikes, as well as my initial comparisons to the first Bad Company.
World of Warcraft & Team Fortress 2 continue to give PC gamers updates
It’s interesting for me to see the “evolution” of the PC gaming landscape. Growing up on Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem, I’ve lived through the rise and decline of the PC gaming scene, from the introduction of first person shooters, real-time strategy games, online multiplayer, 4X strategy games, and now MMORPGs. If you’ve also grown up with fond memories of Doom & Quake, I highly recommend checking out the book, Masters of Doom. It’s a well-written book that chronicles how John Romero and John Carmack met, formed id Software, and completely shook up the gaming industry. Having said that, today’s entry will contain my more general thoughts on the PC gaming landscape, and why I’m still excited for its present and future.
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In Part 4 of the Awards/Shopping Guide, Leveling Down will be tackling some of the more controversial categories: Best Story, Best Value, and Most Overrated. Admittedly, these categories are VERY subjective and are only our opinions, and on some counts even espion4ge and I don’t see *exactly* eye to eye. Nonetheless, controversy is a lot of fun, so might as well give it a shot!
One of the Xbox 360′s strongest features compared to other consoles is its multiplayer gameplay, which can probably be attributed to the Live infrastructure. It is thus not surprisingly to see strong multiplayer games on this system. For today’s awards, I will be discussing the best multiplayer games released this year, and the one better than the rest.
I will also be discussing the best new IP and best sequel of the year. It’s good to see that in 2009, there were nearly an equal number of good new IPs and sequels. The moment we begin seeing only sequels releasing and new IPs no longer developed is the moment the game industry stops advancing. It’s easy to support sequels since you know what you’re getting yourself into, but this year was perhaps the year with the largest number of development studios shutting down. Continue to take a chance by supporting new IPs – the developers need this type of support to stay in business and come up with new and exciting games to push our industry forward!
Rounding out our main categories, today we will be looking at Best Action/Adventure, Music, Real-Time Strategy and XBLA games. Looking at the list of titles from this year, there were a surprising number of good action/adventure games out this year, and even though neither of us owns a PS3, you can’t talk about action/adventure in 2009 without mentioning Uncharted 2. I’m glad I didn’t have to nominate that game though, since that would probably have made for some tough decisions. Music games, on the other hand, seemed to take a step backwards, or maybe we are just getting sick of them. Meanwhile, Live Arcade continues to put out good titles worth taking a look at.
It’s that time of the year again…as 2009 draws to a close and the holiday season is upon us, cmfl3x and I decided that we wanted to do our own “Leveling Down” gaming awards for 2009 where we choose winners in several categories for Xbox 360 games that have been released in 2009. At the same time, we also wanted to preserve the holiday shopping guide that Leveling Down produced last year but felt that the awards and the shopping guide were too similar.
Instead of separate 2009 awards and holiday shopping guide posts, we’ve decided to combine them this year into one. Every game we’ve nominated within our awards are games worth considering for the holidays, but at the same time, we’re also declaring the winner. Consider the awards as, if you can only buy one game from the nominees of the category, buy the winner. But if you are further interested in other games from the category, you should definitely pick them up as well as they have aspects that all make them worth considering. Game boxes have been provided for all nominees, and all of them link to Amazon, our gaming retailer of the year due to not only their ridiculous gaming deals, but their constant vigilance in price matching practically all competitors.
Our 2009 awards/shopping guide will span all week, with cmfl3x and me alternating posts and writing about a few categories each day. This will culminate on Friday when we both share our own nominations for Game of the Year, and our picks for Game of the Year. I will kick things off today with three categories: 2009′s Best Fighting Game, Best Role Playing Game, and Best First Person Shooter for the Xbox 360.
Obviously my claim that Left 4 Dead 2 will ruin the holidays is a little far-fetched, but let me explain. While I didn’t love the recently released Left 4 Dead 2 demo, I think the game will still be an enjoyable co-op title. I still have it pre-ordered, yet the primary reason for my crazy accusation is this: Left 4 Dead 2 is releasing 1 week after Modern Warfare 2.
The USS Arizona Memorial – a reminder of a world at war
When Call of Duty: World at War was released, I remember reading a bit of hubbub about how the developer Treyarch wasn’t treating the source material with enough respect. Some people had a problem with the Pacific theater, where fighting was much more brutal. I didn’t think much of it at the time, though I did think a little bit about how video games treat historical wars properly.
Last week I visited the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor, the one ship they never raised out of the water, and I began thinking about video games’ treatment of war again. It is a very solemn place - 1,277 American soldiers lost their lives there in an instant, and it is a memorial in their honor. The two hour experience is spent mostly in quiet contemplation (by design), and it’s one of the few places you’ll ever see where there are hundreds of people but barely any talking. At a few times during my trip around the memorial, I was reminded of Coral Sea, the air-only map in Battlefield 1943. As I imagined Japanese Zeroes coming over the mountaintops towards Pearl Harbor, the images in my mind were formed using what I’ve “experienced” on Coral Sea.
I wonder whether it’s okay to have so much fun recreating events that caused such pain and loss. I can see how war veterans might be offended that legions of kids are “killing Japs” and getting a rush out of it without necessarily understanding the significance or cost of such wars. I’ve never bought into the argument that playing violent video games makes people more prone to violence, but I do think it can desensitize us a little.
Anyway, I still have Modern Warfare 2 on preorder and I’m not canceling it, although I did consider it briefly. What is important to me, I think, is that video games do their best to honor the source material just as some war movies do the same. In that sense I think World at War did a decent job highlighting the large costs and losses that were experienced in the Pacific theater. Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway also tried to highlight the psychological damage that soldiers experienced.
In the end, video games are just games, and I’ll continue to enjoy them as just that, but like any form of media, I think it’s a good idea for the industry to consider some of the “deeper” things every once in awhile.
My initial thoughts on hearing about Battlefield 1943 were not quite positive. I wondered, “Are people really that interested in returning back to WWII when we’ve gotten so used to modern warfare and especially so in the Battlefield series? And why pay $15 for this title, when we can buy Battlefield Bad Company for only a couple dollars more?”
After playing it for a couple hours, I know now. Bad Company’s main gameplay mode was Gold Rush, a new mode that had one side attacking and one side defending for lengthy periods of time as the attackers tried to blow up the gold crates and push the defenders back. Battlefield fans complained about the mode, as the mode that we are so used to is Conquest: capturing and holding five flags all over a map and killing the enemy enough to reduce their tickets to zero with the more flags you hold, the greater the significance of each death from the enemy team. The developer DICE agreed, and put together a free DLC pack of the Conquest mode for Bad Company, but it was honestly a poor shell of what it could have been.
Fortunately, 1943 is straight up Conquest and is a true return to why we fell in love with the Battlefield series in the first place. For what the game is, it does everything right: three classes that are unique and effective, covering the spectrum in how you want to play: up close with an SMG, midrange with a rifle, or long range with a scoped rifle. Each class has a secondary weapon and function: the rifle class has a grenade launcher for assaulting areas, the SMG class has a rocket launcher for attacking vehicles, and the sniper has C4 to lay traps to destroy bridges, walls, and vehicles. Kills are quick (a few shots from a rifle, and also two-three shots from a sniper rifle, unless it’s a headshot), vehicles and airplanes are effective, and there is persistent stat tracking and leveling.
Plus, the game allows you to join games with friends as a squad, although it’s limited to 4 players per squad just like in Bad Company. It’s also running on the Bad Company engine, so it really feels like you’re playing a simplified, yet still engaging Bad Company. Whether that’s a good thing or not really comes down to the player. I liked Bad Company so I’m finding 1943 quite good, and to be honest, I can’t think of anything bad about the game: it’s solid, balanced, and enjoyable. Maybe a few more maps would have me playing longer, but if you’re on the fence, I’d say go for it.
After having pretty much sold off most of the mediocre games in my backlog, I proceeded to replay BioShock. Having beaten that, I honestly didn’t know where to turn to next. Part of me was thinking, maybe I can replay Oblivion, since I just picked up the Game of the Year edition with the extra content that I never got to see when I played the original release. I got a bit nervous though about really getting into that timesink, so I decided to tear off the shrinkwrap on Pure and give that a spin. It’s a decent game, but whether it has enough for me to beat the entire game I’m not sure.
At the same time, I started playing the Survival modes in my recently reacquired copy of Left 4 Dead on the 360, and have had a great time there and want to keep continuing it until I can get the Gold time on all the levels. In contrast to my enthusiasm for Survival, the Versus mode is just terrible. While there’s new maps to play Versus on, I tried playing with a buddy and the lack of any sort of matchmaking or stat tracking really drags it down.
The amount of time it takes to even join a Versus game with your friend(s) can be like 15 minutes, as each of you frantically tries to join a game in the lobby and invite the other before the room fills up and you both can be on the same team. And if you’re playing with randoms, it’s definitely not fair at all when you get paired with split screen teammates that don’t even use mics. If it’s one thing that I wish for in the sequel this fall, it’s a Halo/Call of Duty like matchmaking and stat-tracking system that allows you to play on the same teams as your friends and also level up so that when you play in random public games, the teams are more balanced. There isn’t even functionality to start a Public Versus game so you can invite your friends right away before the room fills up – instead it’s all on the server side whether you are forced to create a new game or join an existing one.
On a brighter note though, I tried out the Battlefield 1943 demo and liked it so much that I ended up buying it. I guess I’ll be playing that for my adversarial online gaming and stick with just Survival in Left 4 Dead. And finally, of course there’s BlazBlue, the game that I thought I would devote the next couple of months to getting competitive at before Left 4 Dead’s Survival mode and Battlefield 1943 started crowding my gaming time. But after the drought for the past couple of months, I guess this is only a good thing…
