A leap foward in multiplayer gaming.
User Rating: 9 | Battlefield 1942 PC
When I first heard about Battlefield 1942 I was filled with mixed emotions. On the one hand the multiplayer was a huge shift in gameplay that would add a new style of strategy rarely (if ever) seen in multiplayer before. However the single player would be the exact same things with bots. A World War II game without a true story? How would this work? The day this game came out I ripped into my new game box to find out. Like all games the first thing I try out is the Single Player. I popped into a quick game and found myself surrounded by mindless bots that ran into each other and seemed more confused than I did. They would run around mindlessly and make little effort to secure the flags (you win by getting these) and would just sit around waiting for someone to shoot them. You A.I. teammates are the same way. Within minutes I already had all the bots flags and had beaten the quick game (this was on a hard A.I. setting). I felt as the fifty dollars which I gave to the young employee at Electronic Boutique had already been wasted. After another two boring and mindless games of single player I was half asleep and decided it was about time to fire up BF42s multiplayer. I was expect multiplayer to be a similar dull and boring experience, but what I saw stunned me. Explosions filled the dead air with a loud roar and gunfire had me pinned down on the beach of Iwo Jima. Planes swooped over my head and bullets snapped around me as I advanced up the beach only to find my self in front of an Japanese tank looking straight at me. One quick mouse click by him and I was dead. It was about here where I realized that this was much more than a game, it was a leap forward in gaming as we knew it. Battlefield is not just a game of action, it is a game of teamplay and coordination. But before I go any further into this, let me explain how it works. In BF42 you and your team play in one of sixteen maps trying to secure as many flags as they can. The more flags you have, the faster the enemies tickets go down. When a team gets down to zero tickets, or has the least tickets by the end of a round, that team losses and the opposing team wins. You choose one of five infantry classes (sniper, assault, anti-tank, medic, engineer) and then enter the fight. While playing as infantry you can enter tanks, planes, and ships and fight the battles of WWII that way. In nearly every vehicle you can multicrew with your teammates and increase you chances of winning. This makes for some great battles and makes for one of the best reasons to join a clan. As I said before this is truly the first multiplayer game that will really let you use strategy to win the battle however you want it. For example if I wanted to help take a base I could to a variety of things. I could spawn as a sniper and pick guys off around their base and then call in artillery to help some ground forces take the base. I could also take a tank and have infantry escort me to blow the living snot out of the enemy. Or I could even take a plane and jump out above their base and silently take it. Its your choice how you play the game and this is why I love it so much. When, and if, you get bored of BF42 you can try downloading one of the many mods available for it. One of the most popular is Desert Combat, a mod that converts the entire game to a more modern theme transforming it into an Iraq like battlefield. There is also Eve of Destruction which turns this game into a realistic representation of the Vietnam War. And my personal favorite is Forgotten Hope, which adds dozens of maps, vehicles, and guns and a high level of realism to the game. Honestly I have never seen so many successful mods for a game since Half-Life. However, there are some downsides to BF42. First off, if your looking for realism you won't find it here. Automatic weapons rule the infantry class and makes it nearly imposable to use a rifle. Grenades can easily damage tanks and planes can withstand a barrage of bullets and hold fifteen bombs, when it reality they hold one. Also if your a hardcore historian you will find that the vehicles have been balanced and don't have the power/armor they did in the real war. Finally some maps are extremely unbalanced and have serious problems with constant camping, and of course the occasional n00b. Aside from these complaints BF42 turned out to be one of the most original games ever created. It will be remember by gamers for decades as the game that sparked a revolution. 
