Behemoth BattleField

With that title, i shall now give you the update on BF2 that i promised for friday.

Ill start with the gameplay. Now this would entail both a singleplayer campaign and a multiplayer run about in most games, with BattleField 2, the singleplayer might aswell not be there, its completely useless, they said they completely revamped the AI for the bots to play against, however for some reason... i think their not even on the same level of the ones from BF1942, their just plain stupid. Okay onto the Multiplayer. The game is Conquest: Assault, plain ande simple. Run about grabbing outposts, those outposts if you controll them, you can spawn there, if you dont, and the enemy does, they spawn there. Plain and simple. Each side has "tickets" which are really lives, each time a person on your team dies, the "tickets" of your side go down. One team can gradually get the other teams tickets to go down by controlling all of the outposts or flags as i shall call them from here on in. So in a nutshell, the gameplay of it all is basic BattleField 1942. Tanks, Helicopters, Jets, boats, and dune buggies all grace the field of battle. Three different factions are availabe, all decided by which map you play, but their all pretty much the same. US Marine Corps, People's Liberation Army of China, or the Middle Eastern Coalition Troops. Now these are all fictional battles of course heh. One thing i dont like is that since those are the sides, with BattleField 1942, you had the Axis and Allies, so it made sense who you were fighting. This time around, the USMC are in every map. I dont think it would be that hard to have a Chinese against the Middel Eastern Coalition (MEC). Ah well thats just me. The kit system for your choice of fighting is as follows.

Spec Ops= Your a soldier armed with a small assault rifle. Fully autmatic for all sides. Your pistol is scilenced. You have grenades and specific to your class alone, C4 that can be used on vehicles, traps, bridges, or enemy instalations such as artiellry guns and radar tower.
Sniper= The soldier appears in a Ghillie suit and carries a sniper rifle. The rifle for the USMC is bolt-action, High Power, High Accuarcy. For the MEC and PLAC, semi-autmatic rifle with less accuracy and less power. Your pistol is also scilenced. Your aslo blessed with grenades and specific to this class only, Claymore mine. Now this mine can be used effectively best if you suituate yourself ontop of a building that only has one ladder to get up on to, Take your spot on the building and put the claymore at the top of the ladder, and your safe from the enemy trying to take you out. Of course that is if they dont have helicopters.
Assault= The basic grunt. Your equpied with an assault rifle. For the USMC, you have an M16A2. This limits you to only 3 shot burst or semi-automatic. For the MEC, you have the AK101, medium-high power with high accaurcy, good rifle. the PLAC has the AK47, higher power with less accuracy. (side note: the MEC and PLAC should have switched assault rifles, doesnt make sense to have the more advanced to the MEC and the less to the PLAC) With this your also given a single smoke grenade that can be used effectively to cross open ground. Your assault rifle is also graced with the ablitity to have a Grenade Launcher (no hande grenades for you!). Your given a limited number and are able to lob them some distance.
Support= This is where we get really into the squad combat. The support class is given light Machine Gun. (side note: I know your spose to prone with this gun to be accurate, but even proned and firing only 3 shot bursts, you still cant hit anything more then 100 yards, you can with some skill but its a little discouraging) Your given a grenade and an ammo pouch. Heres where we get squad based. Since there are virtually no ammo crates in the game, only given from supply drops, the way you get more ammo is from these Support classes. The ammo pouch, when you have it out, gives you ammo and a freinds ammo who are nearby. You can throw the pouch down, it will give out ammo but if a teammate runs over it, he gets the full amount of ammo back but he pouch disappears, your given a limited number to throw away but you always have one left that you can hang on to. When in a vehcile, you give your team mates inside it ammo and any team mates that walk along next to the vehcile ammo.
Engineer= Your given a shotgun. USMC gets a high power pump one, the PLAC and MEC get a semi-automatic one but not nearly as powerfull. Grenades aside, your also given Anti-Tank land mines, limited number of course but one tank rolls across it, kaboom. Finally, your also given a trusty wrench. With this wrench you can fix tanks, jeeps, bridges, artiellry, radar, UAV trailers, the works. Its a all in one powertool thats not powered but anything the a flick of the wrist. Quite impressive. If your in a vehicle, you can fix the vehcile automatically if it gets hurt, if a freindly vehcile drives along side yours, you fix his too.
Medic= Your given the rifle the Assault Class has however no grenade launcher, oh boo hoo. However your given hand grenades and thats about it, except of course for two more items that are so vaulable squads. One is like the Support class ammo pouch, its a medic pouch, having out gives health, throw on ground, full health is given back. Same deal inside vehicles, heal freindlys inside and those who walk along. Now here comes the best weapon in the game. You can get a kill with it, its rare but it can happen. The defilibrator, ala Shock Paddles. If a freindly dies and is only critically wounded, you will see an extra icon above his head that would normally represent his head, one bar represents his health, if dead it is black with the extra icon. Run over to your fallen comrade, give him a shock and boom, we have a soldier back on the field. Its all good you konw, even if it was a head shot. If you are however shot with a large caliber weapon, lets say a Tanks 120mm round to your face, your labeld as "killed" and not "critically wounded"
Anti-Tank= Your given a Sub-Machine gun. USMC gets a MP5, MEC gets the 45 round Bizon (only 2 magazines though) and the PLAC gets a new varaition of the WW2 PPSH41, instead of a round 100 round drum mag, you get a 30 round banna clip round. Its effective, however you only get the one mode of Automatic fire. Hand-Grenades are also there. Your also given an Anti-Tank rocket launcher. The USMC gets the SRAW and the MEC and PLAC gets the Erynx. Both are single shots however one does reload it and you get about 4 rounds out of it. Both of the anti-tank guns, when one right clicks, when one fires, if left-mouse is held down, one can guide the missle in flight by moving the mouse, the middle of the screen is where the rocket will land, so that way its pretty much lock on target to a tank, that is of course if you dont get shot while doint this.

Thats it for the classes. When one drives a tank, or helicopter, or Jet, your player actually changes so as to represent the head-gear of what that would look like. You get an oxygen mask if you hop into a Helicopter or a Jet. Thats cool to me heh. With that, not all of the surfaces are completly bulletproof. If you stand behind a tin gate thats compelte, and rounds are shot through it, you can get killed. Ive allready explained the commander mode to you in the other post so its not necessary for me to talk about that indepth here. I will however talk about the Squad System. I told you about how communication is broken down heh. The squad system is as follows, one can make his own squad or join an existing one. While in the squad, the squad leader can hold down a key and request artierllery, UAV, or some other such thing from a radial menu. Holding down another key will bring up another radial menu of Attack, Defend, move, fix, so forth, where you point in the middle of your screen, a marker will be placed, from that marker, your squad will see it on their mini-map, and see it on their screen. It actually places down a little smoke grenade, Orange=Attack, Purple=Defend and some other such things. The commander can aswell give you an order and with a click of either page up or page down, you can accept or decline. When you accept, the order of move here or attack here will be sent to the rest of your squad and acts as if the squad leader put it down himself.

Ill get onto the graphics which goes hand in hand with some of the bugs and conflicts ive experinced. Ive allready talked about how good it looks. It looks spectacular, on lowest of low its not really though, i mean low low low, it looks quite bad, but hey Medium looks good. On from that heres a bug ive expereinced, that every does... well its not really a bug actually, a game engine problem. As one loads up a map and starts to play it from the first minute to the next 5 he will experince a extreme drop in FPS. This is because the game engine since the maps are pretty big on some of the 64 player servers, does not require you to fully load up all the textures, and only allows the textures you see right in the screen in front of you to be loaded. Its a weird type of streaming technology and it doesnt work that well. If you have the top of the line Graphics card like the X850XT, you will still expreince this problem. The next bug i have found comes from two sources that dont have such high standards in this area. Customer usage of their products... heh. EA, well we know how EA acts towards Customers, either it works or it dont, complain to us and we shall just laugh in your face. The next comes from a company who i do like because they do build a great product, ATI. Their drivers on the other hand arent the best in the world. Nvidia is a good competitor against ATI especially now with their new GeForce 7800 and 7xxx series. However what kept them in the game this long was their drivers. Their drivers are top notch and never have problems. However with ATI, first they had all ATI users not able to play Call Of Duty for 4 months because of a driver conflict. This time around, they installed programs with the latest drivers for cards that are really old. Such as the ATI bios Poller, that conflicts with BF2, on top of that, the ATI destkop manager also confilcts with BattleField 2, i suppose this is spose to happen with BF2 mainly because the graphics engine and rest of it were all made by Nvida. Okay with that, the only real problems ive had playing the game were from that stupid streaming of textures.

Now on too some of the maps. Some of them are down right fun, others... not so much. Many maps (and since their are only 12 this is a large part of them) Have the USMC attacking from a base that cannot be captured against the rest of the map. All of the outposts are controlled by the other side and they are on the defensive. 3 maps i can vividly tell right now, out of the 3 only 2 are really fun to me. Dragon Valley is one of those that is fun, having the USMC attacking the Chineese outposts, it becomes a really good battle because though water is all around the map, alot of areas are shallow and can allow all types of vehicles to cross not just amphibian ones. The next one i find a great deal of fun is Strike at KarKand. Again the USMC is attacking the entire map with no base of their own, starting out with only about 20 more tickets then the other side, these maps will always be a fight for the defense since none of their bases is safe from capture. Strike at KarKand features a entire city battle in a middle eastern city. Dust swirls in from here and there and at the very end of the map, the Factory for the MEC force. This is a very hard map for the MEC force if they do not know how the map is won for the USMC. The USMC wins this map easily by sneaking by at the very early stages of the map and aquiring the Factory from the MEC. A well organaized squad can do this within 5 minutes of the round start, from there they can take the armor that spawns from it (the only armor that the MEC can get) and from their, take it along with Jeeps and spread out and capture the remaning city outposts from the MEC force. If that happens, a giant pincer move can be put onto the MEC force, slowly but surely exterminating them from 2 front war. If the MEC force can play well enough, having one squad protect the factory or at least the route there, they can force the USMC armor down the streets and take them out from multiple angles from the tops of buildings. Its a fun map. The last map is Operation Clean Sweep. This features a string of islands all connected in a half circle shape. Again all controlled by the MEC. The USMC has one lone Carrier of the shore and is spose to capture each point. Now this is a map thats not fun because A: The USMC does not have enough boats and helicopters to make one good stand and B: On the 32 player server, the map is too big, on the 64 Its crazy big. All combined with night, the map becomes not a defense against offense but run around in dune buggys trying to hold positions from helicopters that fly in low and capture points. The map is simply no fun, if this was a driving game, the game would resemble this map down to a T but its not a driving game, this is WAR folks!

Okay you think im done, well i am, almost, one more thing to talk about thats new in BF2. Ranking. Ranking, if one was smart and thought about how to do it inside this type of game would be like this, have a set amount of skill points and kills the player needs to get, and just have it update when they reach those points, all this being not server side or EA side but on the user side. Now of course this might lead to the cracking of the program, but hey EA lets make a program that actually is good! With that Ranked servers (not all ranked) cost way more to rent, perhaps around $500 a month for 32 player server, not fun on the wallet. Along with that, all of the skill points and promotions and ribbions and basic awards have actually take screenshots of your game, and they upload them to EA. With that EA will have to take the screenshot, though automatically with the line code it tells them what it is, it actually takes them a while to update your ranking. So if you play your heart out on a Ranked server from Dusk till dawn, and little messages pop up saying you been promoted and so forth, when you disconnect, and check your stats its not updated. This is why i thought you had to do the round rotations fully for it to register. It only registered once correctly after a game and that was on launch day before everyone else got the game heh. With that, ranking is updated overnight, its not even tried though on the weekends as if they shut off and stop working completly, however they promise that everything has been recorded and will be updated tommorow. I just hope so heh.

And thats all i can really write about Battlefield 2. Its a massive game, its fun to play if you can get by some of the drawbacks on what they try to acomplish. They are being very ambitious with what they try to do and build the ultimate online first person shooter experince. I think they pull it off well enough to warrent a complete good either 9.5 or 10 out of 10 score. Okay then, im gonna go off and play some more, my account name is HellStorm obviously heh. One more thing though, and this is just me boasting. People say the game is alot tougher, one can not kill anything and one cannot live 3 seconds without dieing, yet i do the opposite of it and often become best player on the server in all accounts of combat kills, teamwork skills, flags captured, driver assists and so forth. Its a fun time, and thats all i have to say.

Keith

Time to Spare...

Okay then, BattleField 2 shipped out yesterday, arived on store shelves today, which then proceded to take my money and give me a copy, yay capitalism.

Okay then lets see some first off impressions, so far pretty damn good. The bugs that i was plauged with by the Demo are now gone... for some reason heh, dont know how its posible either, since the game went gold before the demo was released, perhaps when they compiled the Demo they messed up badly heh. Now your gonna ask, you didnt play enough for a full review. Your right i didnt, then you would ask with deductive logic, The Hell are you Doing? Why arent you still playing it? Well, earlier today at around 6, the game was playing smoothly and fantastically. Now at about 10:00, every server is being played with terrible netcode problems. My only reasonable explanination for this is that so many are pingning the Authentication servers and the Multiplayer uplink servers that the entire system is bogging down. So that chopper in the air stops, then jumps, then stops. If one throws a nade, it arcs, comes back, arcs foward more, arcs back and so forth. So im currently taking a Break. I tried out the Chienese Peoples Liberation Army, its nice enough, they have cool weapons, all distinctly Chinese by their design since they were al made in China, even their reproduction of the AK-47 because their communist, and just stole everything off the russians heh. With that ill talk a little bit about the ranking, which is cool. When one gets a medal for outstanding combat or teamwork, or pioliting or so forth, while in game a little drum starts playing and says you were nominated for an award, so the next time you log on, you will have a new award. I got the highest award a Private can get, Gold Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Combat and Teamwork. I was squad leader and my squad was always best, i was always top player, and i killed 58 guys in one round. Thanks of course to the Support and Medics in my group, would never had the ammo or health to acheive that heh. Okay thats it for now, ill update again on Friday, i should be doing something "entertaining" tommorow. In the mean time Check out this dudes Site and read up on his stories, their freaking hilarious. http://www.tuckermax.com/stories.html

The Bi-Monthly Update... Yay!

Okay from popular demand im wanted back and writing this stuff. Okay then... lets see what i have to say....

I did promise you guys a extensive review of Guild Wars. Heres a short quicky. I was and am still a fanboy of Guild Wars, dont get me wrong. The action is extremly good, the effects are beautifull, the story is quite good although there is some really really really bad dialouge here and there... (mostly from the dwarves and ancient witches... go figure) I mean this aint shakesperean writing but the delivering of the lines could be better. Now lets ask the big question, "But Keith, if you loved the game so much, why dont you play it endlessy with out end to the endth power?" Well my mathmatical freinds i will tell you why. Though the action is good, the game took a wicked turn. The game says "no grinding" and i played with the "skill" they wanted their players to play with. I then came to a part called the Crystal Desert. This place was FRIGGIN HARD AS HELL AND REQUIRED ME TO GO BACK AND "GRIND" TO A HIGHER LEVEL. Tsk Tsk Tsk. When i arrived there i was a low level compared to all the 20's around me. Me a lowly level 16 with not nearly enough power to just run up against a lvl 40 Hydra (heres a little info on the levels, for human players the levels go from 1-20 which is good since its mostly a skill based game, some where between about 10-18 it becomes pretty compettitive with the AI monstors you fight after that it just ups everything and becomes a little depressing) Where was i? Oh right the crystal desert, well heres the thing, throughout the whole game there is one combination of class based that can do anything and is a bitch and should be removed from the records, that is the walking tank that is the Warrior/Monk. Of course they can walk through everything even at level 1 because of their ablity to just mow through everything and then proceed to heal themselves.... *huf* Okay with that out of my system lets go on to the next few questions, "But Keith, does this mean you didnt finish the game?" Oh hell yeah i beat it, i liked the game through and through baby! "But Keith, what about the compettive play you so swooned about months ago?" Ah here is where this game shines the most, the compettive PVP play and GVG play is soo thrilling it gives me goosebumps. So why am i not playing it now? Because i played the PVP combat for about 4 weeks straight non-stop, up untill about last week heh.

Here i will chop up my video game ranting with a heart filled story about Graduation and a Mentor leaving for Florida... the lucky man he is. Tuesday night was my brothers Graduation from the hell hole that is High-School, it was a nice enough presentation. One of the speech givers was Justin Monticello whove i known since ive been in Kindengarden. The dude lives right up the street from me. Okay onto my mentor, Mr. Don Malko. He is leaving this year, which is soo sad since i had from all of my life at Crim School and this year for Art History. The man is a legend and has the mind of someone that has reached nirvana, and no not that crappy Kurt Cobain band. He really has one of the touches that can brighten any life. With that he will hear from me through email perhaps all through the rest of my High-School and into my Colledge career. On tuesday we also went to the Middle school to harress some teachers we knew heh. Immideatly we see the line of teachers getting their final pay checks heh, and who do we see at the end of it? Mr. Russel of Course! We spoke to him about robotics and video games and World War 2, well i spoke to him about video games and WW 2 casues were both fans and it just fits heh. He will most likely be coming around to some of the off-season events next year, see how i can fit it in.

Onto my next GAME REVIEW. Okay here this is for the gamer that lives nor dare i say has his computer injected too all his ports on himself... thats kinda disgusting.... With that i bring out the glory that is BF2... well their is alot of Glory in the Game play, but the whole EA part of it sucks, let me elaborate. BattleField 2 is the first real "sequal" too Battlefield 1942. There was that little crappy Vietnam thing but it just wasnt enough to warrent it a sequal. With that lets look into Battlefield 2 itself. The game is glorious to look at, even with a lower end PC but ill get into why in just a little bit more. The interface is quick and easy to use however the original bound keys are a bitch and must be replaced with things more suiting. The interface of class picking, squad choosing, and order giving is a breeze. The Command Mode is a beautifull specimen of online compettive gaming. People on a team can apply for the Command spot, the one person with the highest rank ( on offical release, on officialy ranked servers, you going to be tracked and your rank will go up or down against other players around the world) the highest ranked becomes the Commander, now whats different might you ask if you be the commander? Well you still can play in all the toys of tanks, jets, helicoptors, thats still all there. You can still run around and gun with your Special Ops kit or your Medic Kit, reviving those dead comrades. However, the button to choose your squads orginally (caps lock) now picking that key brings up a map of the entire field, along with a side bar of all the squads. With this, you are able to talk to you all your squad leaders. Your squad leaders can talk to you and other squad leaders and their squad, and the squads can only talk to people within their own squads, its a nice breakdown of communiciation and ordering with the lovely headset microphone. Okay with that, what can you do with this mini-map beside giving ordres? Well for one, you can zoom up pretty damn far into it and at a certain point you actually see the modeled terrain and the little people running around, freind and foe, its still in color so its not complete satelitite uplink. Okay what else can you do? While a slew of 4 different things... Yeah i know only 4 but there all damn cool. We shall start from least cool to utterly banging! Least cool would have to be the SCAN. It bassically takes one scan and it runs across the map, with doing this, you see all th enemies as little red blurbs, but also everyone on your team can see the enemies on their mini-maps thus rendering their hiding spots helpless. Onto next coolest. You can give Supply Drops. Which means, a capture point being attacked, you can drop down a little box of supplies onto your minnions and they can get ammo and health from it. The next coolest would have to be the UAV-Unmaned Aerial Vehical. Its bassically a little drone that you can put over a capture point that lets say your guys are attaking. Using this little bird in the sky a sonor type deal starts to happen with the circle pattern, and as the ray goes over an enemy he shows up for a period of time on the mini-map. Now onto the BANGING. ARTIELLRY BABY, DEATH FROM ABOVE! While there is alot of death from above in the Migs and the Joint strike fighters and the Attack Helicopters and so forth, the most death from above would have to be the Artierllery. With this you can launch on artiellery onto a target area that you see has bunch of baddies, lets say from a UAV or a Scan you can see them, with that, put down the cursor of death on them and within seconds, fire from above will reign down on that position killing all who havent took cover. Now i have to add you might think that this would be very "cheap" if the commander cant be stopped, well he can. For everything the commander can do of the 4 things, the opposing team can render him from doing all with the lovely power of C4. A special ops man can go over to the enemy artiellery, and perhaps seeing it allready up and running, currently fireing off rounds into the sky that will kill many of your compadrades. What could you do? Oh how bout laying some c4 on the bastards and blowing them SKY HIGH. This goes all the same for the others, taking out the RADAR tower can kill the enemies ablitty to Scan, taking out the UAV trailer renders no more UAV's. Now all of the special ablities the commander can do have to reacharge, so one cannot "spam" the whole map with artiellery. So then you have to ask "well weve heard your Fanboy rant, now what dont you like about the EA part of the game?" Oh ho ho lets just see. This goes hand and hand with the way the game looks good even on the minnimum specs. The game requires a beastly machine to play the game. Most gamers are gonna have two choices with this game, not buy it, or severly upgrade their machine to be able to run it. It requires a high high high requirement. Heh Require! Anywho lets go onto the oh so lovely Publisher EA. With requiring DICE to have such high Requirements, they also required DICE to have a deadline, and what does that bring might you ask? SYSTEM BUGS, ive had many times the game just crash to desktop, for no apparent reason, on top with that ive had the game actually Shut off my computer, by crashing me to my desktop then proceeding to turn off my computer me being helpless to its awesome power. Since the game has allready gone "Gold" that means its currently being published like this which means, the Gameplay is GREAT, if you can get past the SYSTEM REQUIREMNTS oh and you can get pass the GOD AWFULL BUGS!

Ill give you a semi-updated review of the game when i play all of its amazing 12 maps when its released June 21. *huf* *huf* *smoking cigerrete* Was it as good for you as it was for me baby?


Keith