I decided to check out the demo on Xbox 360. Wait… what? People had to fight tooth and nail to get a beta key for the PC but everyone and their retarded mother could download the demo for Xbox 360? BTW the beta and the demo are exactly the same thing. Whatever. Some people I knew had already downloaded it so we rounded up the gang and deployed for battle.

Team Play

The Battlefield franchise has always proved to be a great gaming experience, but I think they’ve done an extraordinarily great job with this latest release. In general, DICE has managed to once again encourage teamwork. They don’t force it down your throat and you can be as independent as you want in the game, but still you find yourself working with squad members almost automatically. Many of the vehicles require a second person to fully utilize, and you’re rewarded with experience for helping teammates. A few points for healing this person, some more for giving ammo, or even targeting enemies. All of which is normally increased if you do the same for a squad member.

The Environment

The levels are nothing less than beautiful. Everything is destructible and structures can even collapse if you blow them up in the right places (which makes for a really cool way to kill people). You can find yourself sprinting across and open area and into a house where you think you’re safe, only to have a wall or three blown open by a tank…  exposing you and your squad and filling your pants with shit. They added enough details  to provide places for hiding and flanking around enemies, yet the maps aren’t cluttered or crowded. You’ll also find great visual effects like sand clouds and fog and bloom and whatever else the level needs to help bring the world to life. But I think more than anything you find the most pleasure in seeing the destruction. A match starts and there is a completely intact city in front of you. Piece by piece the entire thing gets blown to tiny bits. Its awesome when you find some dickwads camping in an attic, sniping down on a group of your friends like a turkey shoot. Instead of risking your neck trying to sneak up on them from the stairs, you just blow a fucking hole in the roof and kill the sons of bitches.

Weapons and Unlocks

What can I really say… the weapons look great, sound great and respond fairly realistically. They didn’t bother over exaggerating inaccuracies and such. Most weapons just fire where you shoot them. Sure if you spam and spray the recoil will kick your ass, but that’s what you get for shooting like an idiot. You have to invest a little bit of time into each class, but each one has its own set of weapons and other unlocks that come pretty quick if you score decent.

Not only do you unlock weapons but you unlock gadgets. I won’t go into detail on all these because there are already tons of sites you can find that have more information than I feel like typing.

Classes

As you can see in the chart above, the classes are pretty standard: Assault, Engineer, Medic and Recon.

Assault is your run-of-the-mill trigger happy bastard with an assault rifle, gun mounted and hand thrown explosives, and provides his team with ammo.

Engineer is your demolitions expert, sub machinegun wielding Mr. Fix-it. He shoots rockets at the enemy tanks but fixes friendly vehicles.

Medic is the huge gun carrying guy who can heal and revive teammates.

Recon is the dude who sits way back with an excessively overpowered rifle, blasting away at enemies and calling in mortar strikes.

Vehicles

Oh yea… what’s Battlefield without vehicles? This game does not let you down. Tanks, UAVs, helicopters, Hummers, mounted weapons and ATVs. They all pretty much fucking rock. The tanks blow shit up, Apaches terrorize EVERYTHING and the ATVs are the ultimate flanking vehicle. Each one has its strengths and weakness and are balanced pretty well. Except for the Apache. If you get a good pilot in there with a good gunner… all hell breaks loose! Once again you’re going to find much more information on other sites, so I won’t bother.

Conclusion

Get. This. Game. You won’t regret it. When you get to the multiplayer games I highly recommend playing each class and unlocking their basic items first. It sucks being Assault and not being able to resupply ammo, or Medic and unable to revive people. I will warn you that at first you’ll be pretty frustrated because everyone has unlocked stuff like the Magnum Ammo (every gun does more damage) or body armor or shit like that. You feel weak in comparison to everyone. But just grind through it and soon you’ll be unlocking stuff too and kicking major ass.

I rate this game 2 cookies + win.

A few years ago my dad was using a really archaic method for keeping track of what vehicles he was in charge of. Like… where they were stationed. He wrote the vehicle number down on a magnet and placed it on a white board and moved them from square to square depending on where the vehicle got shipped. So I wrote him a digital version of that and since he struggles with computers, I totally mimicked the look of a board with magnets on it. Except you could double-click any “magnet” and open up extended information and tools on it. Needless to say this worked many times faster and he instantly fell in love with it. I spent loads of time in the UI so it was extremely user friendly.

Well he has since left that company and moved on to bigger and better things. Little did I know he continued to use that program and one day his boss saw him using it and one thing lead to another… next thing I know I’m in a meeting talking business for writing this company a custom software tool. So a lot of our time is being dedicated to that…

BUT THEN…

Garry decides that he wants to start a Fretta gamemode contest with some high dollar incentives. So now we’re working on THAT at the same time. Our goal is to submit two gamemodes so we really gotta bust ass on everything. We’re not going to sacrifice quality though, so its just time dedication.

BUT THEN…

All these new games have come out/are coming out and ahhhhhhhhhh. I’m deep into Fallout 3 right now, I’ve got Borderlands to focus on, Left 4 Dead 2 soon… Modern Warfare 2– fuuuuuuuuuuuuuu–

AND NOW FOR SOME COMPLETELY UNRELATED MEDIA

Awesome:

I really think I have a grasp on most of the characters of TF2… sure I’m not a pro at all of them (except Pyro & Demo) but the Spy has always been my worst class. This video explained things to me… from the OTHER point of view. Too many times I would chase a Spy and end up being killed by them in some unexpected way… now I know how they’re doing it!