Battlefield 2

After a LAN party a few weeks ago, wherein the crew played this very game, I got the urge to pick it up. I already had it installed (I'd used some community CDs at the party), but now I had my new key. Don't worry, this isn't another rant about piracy.

I let it sit for about a week and a half before I actually got the urge to play it. Boy, did I stink it up the first few hours. I'd be lucky if I got one or two kills a round. It was just the learning curve for the game, though, as I didn't experience anything I could consider bullshit (like the common occurence in CounterStrike of putting a whole AK clip into an enemy, just to have him turn and put one bullet in your forehead to get the kill).

Until last night. I found my preferred class (Support. I like's me some light MGs), and I was owning bitches in the face. Then the bullshit happened.

I came around a corner and dropped to my belly. My radar showed an enemy about to round the opposite corner, not 20 feet from my position. I lined up the barrel and waited. He came around the corner, and I opened up. I must have put, at the very least, one bullet in him. At the most? 15. In the middle of my hail of fire, he leapt into the air, and came down on his stomach, facing me. I adjusted my aim downwards, still firing, when he put a snap shot right through the top of my head. I was dead, he wasn't.

What? What the fuck is that? This game prides itself on putting you on the battlefield. Join the Marine Corps and go to far away exotic places and blow Afghanis away. Maybe it's just me, but I don't think our troops, or anyone else's troops, have ever used tactics like that. "Oh noes, someone is teh shooting me! I'd better jump as high as I can, do a belly flop, and then pwn them in teh face!!!11"

And this is as much of an indictment against the players of the game as it is the game itself. Just because the game allows you to do bullshit like that, doesn't mean you should. Certain servers have rules against stupid bullshit that the game allows you to do, and that's a very good thing. Like say, for example, taking a plane and crashing it into the enemy's spawn point. That might have been the historically accurate thing to do if you were the Japanese forces in Battlefield 1942. But Kamikazes don't exist anymore, and it's a stupid bullshit way of racking up kills in a game, where there are no consequences for death.

On the other hand, there are things the game allows you to do that make perfect sense. For example, the support gunner is called so because he has extra ammo bags to resupply teammates. When I get caught dead-to-rights by the enemy with my ammo bag out, I know I don't have a chance to switch to my weapon and gun him down. But I'm not going down without a fight. So what I do I do? I pull out a grenade and toss it. He gets me, but they never notice the grenade. Boom, baby! Death from beyond!

BF2 is really fun, if you're playing with good players. As with all human interaction, though, there's always the complete fucking idiots that bring everybody down.