Completeion Update: Battlefield - Bad Company 2

After starting several games which fizzled out after only a few sessions, (namely Dirt 2 and Red Faction Guerrilla), I finally found a single player game good enough to hold my attention. I wrote yesterday of how Bad Company 2 has saved my online multiplayer soul, and now it seems it's done the same in single player campaign mode. I'd already bought the console version before I got the message to try it out on PC, so when it came to the campaign I figured I'd try and get some of my moneys worth by playing through the campaign on the XBOX, giving me the added bonus of all that lovely gamer score!

The game starts off with the obligatory training mission, presented here as a World War II based prologue to the main story. The tutorial is pretty much spot on for what it needs to do. There's plenty of action without ever overwhelming the player, and the gameplay guide is well integrated into the mission. From this promising start the game just gets better and better. The rest of the campaign is set in the present, as you take control of Pvt. Preston Marlowe, part of a four man team who in turn are part of "Bad Company" as they head off into the jungles of South America to try to stop a rogue Russian colonel getting his hands on a piece of secret and deadly weapons technology that could spell disaster for the good ol' U.S of A. Ok, so the story is about as unoriginal as it gets, but it never takes itself too seriously and it certainly makes a hell of a lot more sense than the plot of Modern Warfare 2's single player campaign! A smart and funny script, (including some cracking little jibes at MW2's expense), and some fine voice talent in the four main characters makes it easy to overlook the shortcomings of the plot itself.

The game is played out over a variety of terrains, from steamy jungles and snowy mountains, to barren deserts and ruined city's; mostly on foot, but often gunning helicopter mounted mini-guns, driving tanks or racing ATV quad-bikes. There's plenty to see and do, and, despite the generally linear gameplay, usually several ways to do it. The obligatory collectibles come in the form of weapons that you take off fallen foes or find lying around the maps, ticking one off on your collectibles chart every time you pick up a gun you haven't encountered before. A neat little feature also sees the guns you find added to your weapons caches that are placed at the beginning of each level, and at other useful points along the way. Thus enabling the player to try out new weapons combinations if the one they are currently using suddenly becomes useless for the task in hand. The other type of collectible hidden throughout the game are the M-COM satellite uplink stations, (pictured below), which need to be destroyed. There are 24 of these hidden throughout the game, and despite their rather large size they are indeed well hidden! I got about 15 of them on my first play through and had to go back in with the aid of a guide to find the last few... I know, I know... I feel bad about it, don't look at me like that.

The achievements are split 30/20, with the former being campaign based and the latter obtainable through online multiplayer. I managed to pick up most of the campaign based ones on the first run through, which is always nice, and coupled with the fact there are no "Kill 10,000 enemies" or "Find 500  pointless things" type achievements, it's good incentive to play through again to try to pick up the ones you missed first time. Fortunately the game is fun enough, and the campaign short enough, for this to not feel like a huge waste of time as it so often does in other games. One small gripe would be that the campaign feels a little short, but it's probably a couple of hours longer than the one in MW2, and like that game, the meat of BFBC2 is its massive online multiplayer. Having some achievements tied to multiplayer isn't always a good idea, but there aren't any here that are too outrageous, (such as "Beat one of the Development Team in a race" Yes Dirt 2, I'm looking at you), and i think they'll probably have the effect of enticing a few people who wouldn't normally touch a multi-player FPS with a barge pole into giving it a bash. I don't feel the need to espouse too much on the virtues of the online experience, as I've already hailed it as my savior of the genre in my last post.

Taken as a whole, this is a hell of a game. EA/DICE really did a fine job with Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and if you are even remotely interested in the First Person Shooter genre then you really should play it. Bring on the new Medal of Honor game I say, and let's see if these two companies can bring something new and exciting to the table once again!

Modern Warfare 2: Glitchers Paradise

Since the beginning of time man has looked for the easy option. We're like water, we look for the path of least resistance and then exploit it as best we can. When it comes down to it, it would seem that hundreds of thousands of years of refining our competitive edge means that when there is no-one there to keep order, our natural instinct is to cheat.
Imagine what a boxing match or a premiership football match would be like without a referee.... Welcome to the world of Online First Person Shooters!

I've just been playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. It's a fine game. The single player campaign is dramatic and exciting, but the meat of the game is in the multiplayer. Get online and fight with and against fellow gamers from around the globe in a test of skill, tactics and blind luck! A huge array of game types, more weapons than you could shake a stick at and the mother of all stat-tracking systems... rank up your character, level up your weapons, unlock new guns and equipment, adorn yourself with rare and collectible titles and emblems! All this over various and diverse maps, from the deserts of Afghanistan to the snowy wastes of Siberia, from close quarters house-to-house combat to the snipers realm of open farmland.

There's so much to do you'll never get bored! And if you aren't very good at it, don't worry, Infinity Ward have made the code so full of holes that you'll just be able to glitch your way to the top! First there was the Javelin glitch. This involved running around with the Javelin Missile rocket launcher equipped and performing some shenanigans with switching between it and the equipment slot, then, once you died the missile would explode in your hands taking out any nearby enemies, so what did a seemingly endless stream of people start doing? That's right, running around with the Javelin equipped, combined with the Lightweight (sprint faster) perk and just rushing into the middle of a group of enemies. Hey presto, get shot, blow up the entire enemy team.

Fair play to Microsoft who were whaling on people with the ban-stick during this whole episode, and to Infinity Ward who quickly implemented a patch to stop the glitch from happening. A patch that also fixed the less often seen glitch of getting inside a wall so you could shoot people without being seen.

But then, no sooner had that been fixed than some enterprising young scally realised that if you ran around with a care package grenade equipped instead of a gun you could actually move faster than the server could keep track of you, meaning you jerked from place to place on your opponents screen making it incredibly difficult for them to shoot you. Combine this with the Commando perk, which increases the range of your knife attack, and you need never carry a gun again! Again, IW were quick to get on top of this and a patch including a fix is winging it's way through the system as I write this.

Earlier this morning I was listening to the Vanhemlock News Show which included an article about how some people had found a way to hack the system resulting in anyone they killed losing experience points, which is a fairly sinister turn of events; a glitch that doesn't give the glitcher any benefit, but that exists solely to annoy and upset others.

Then, as dawn was breaking and my nightshift friends were getting home and online I decided to fire up MW2 myself, only to be confronted with a brand new and blatant glitch in the very first match I entered! Pissed off with this we left that lobby and joined another of a different game type and guess what, the same glitch was being exploited in there as well, only this time by someone on our side so I was able to watch what he was doing. It seems that repeatedly changing weapons while doing something else i won't mention here so as not to give anyone any ideas, will grant you with a free 'Emergency Airdrop' killstreak reward. You get killstreak rewards for getting a set number of consecutive kills, eg, 3 kills gives you a UAV, which highlights the enemies locations on your radar, 6 kills in a row grants you an airstrike to call in where and when you want, etc, etc. For 8 kills you get to call in an Emergency Airdrop, which consists of 4 crates dropped from a C130-Hercules plane which can contain any of the other killstreak rewards. So you can basically call in several high powered killstreak rewards without actually having to kill anyone, whenever you want, as often as you want. An 'Instant Win' button! Brilliant! My research done I promptly reported his ass to Microsoft, I just wish I'd taken note of his gamer tag so I could name and shame him here. Hopefully a ban will be finding him soon enough.

After quitting that lobby, joining yet another lobby and finding the same thing going on in there I quit out completely and booted up Forza. I'm not going to willingly pad the stats of some cheat. I just don't understand the mentality of people who feel the need to do stuff like that.

If you can't win on your own merits then either practice more, live with it, or quit!

A brief round up

Just a quickie to take note of the last few days games:

Modern Warfare 2 - Standing proud at level 66 at the moment. No chance of hitting second prestige by the time I go back to work though, which was my original goal, mainly because of playing too much of the next game...

Forza 3 - Just hit level 36 and a little over halfway through season 3. The races are starting to get a bit long now, lucky to find one under 15 miles, nearly all taking well over 10 minutes a pop.

I was going to make Forza my next target for completion, but I think it's going to take way too long, plus I think it may get a little tiresome if I play it too intensely. I think I'll pick at it over the next few months, just dipping in now and again when I fancy it, similar to what I'm doing with MW2 really. As such I nominate Red Faction Guerrilla as my new main game. Been playing it on and off for a couple of weeks now and finding it quite enjoyable, so I think I'll step it up a gear and see if I can get it finished.

Getting My Money's Worth

Why don't I ever complete games? And in this day and age of achievements, side-quests, collectibles and online multiplayer goodness, what does it even mean to complete a game? I suppose the standard definition for most games would be to get to the end credits, playing through the main story arc of the game and seeing it to its conclusion. I've managed this a few times in recent years, most notably on all the Guitar Hero games. Though while I've seen the end credits on all of them, there are still plenty of achievements outstanding, I've never finished a tour on expert difficulty or more recently completed the tour for every instrument, so can I really say I've completed any of them?

Some other notable "completions" in the last few years have been Prototype, (still a dozen or so challenge missions to do and loads of orbs to find), and the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series. In the case of these last two, the single player campaign is finish-able in one (admittedly long) session, but getting all the achievements involves playing through on Veteran mode, which is so hard the game stops being fun. Then there's the HUGE multiplayer aspect to the series! Can I truely feel comfortable saying I've finished the game without trying it? Without hitting level 70? Without going into prestige mode at least once? Without hitting 10th Prestige? Without leveling up all the guns and completing all the challenges and earning every single title and emblem the game has to offer? The scary thing about the online play in these games is how much of a time-sink they become, a fact pointed out quite blatantly in the online leaderboards. For example, in MW2 I'm coming towards the end of 1st Prestige and I've spent a total of FIVE AND A HALF DAYS getting there. That's a measure of actual online gaming time mind you. Five and a half of the finite number of days allotted to me playing one computer game. Getting to the end of 10th Prestige is going to take over a MONTH of actual online time at this rate! That's quite a frightening prospect.

Of course, my most recent game completion has also been my most... er, well, complete. Assassin's Creed II saw me finish the main storyline, complete several collecting quests and earn every XBOX achievement along the way. It's still not 100% complete though. There are still a few side missions left in some of the cities, a race here, an assassination there; and that's not to mention the scores of treasure chests left littered about the place. But the question then must be, 'Can I be bothered?'. There aren't any achievements hanging off any of them, and there are plenty of other games sat on my shelf that I'd like to be playing, and as we've already seen, some of them are real time-hogs!

If I look at this list of completions and then look at my shelf of games it strikes me that the completed titles are heavily outweighed by the uncompleted ones, some of which (yes Halo 3 and Gears of War, I'm looking at you) I actually got with the console over two years ago! This then begs the question 'Have I got my money's worth out of these titles?', and the answer surely has to be 'No'. Some of these things are forty quid a pop! That's a lot of money to spend on something that's played once and then put on the shelf never to be touched again.

I'd been thinking about this for a little while anyway, but then I was inspired by Jon Shute over at www.Vanhemlock.com to actually do something about it. He's set himself the goal of completing all his old games by the end of the year, setting complicated targets for achievement percentages and stuff, and he's got hundreds of games so it's quite a daunting prospect for him. I on the other hand only have 20 or so games in my 'to-do' list. so here are my goals:

By the end of 2010 I aim to have:
end credited all of my old games,
achieved roughly half the achievements for each (100% where possible),
got to the mythical 10th Prestige in Modern Warfare 2.