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!

Turtle Beach Earforce X1 Gaming Headset

With the remnants of my Christmas and birthday money I figured I'd treat myself to a Turtle Beach headset. After all, the majority of my XBOX time is spent playing Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer and everyone says that to experience the game properly you need Turtle Beach! Their exponents promise great things from them, not least of which is being able to hear when someone is coming up behind you, something I could really use! Let's just say that my deaths outweigh my kills by quite a significant amount, which really isn't ideal! So in my hunt for non-hacking, non-glitching ways to get the edge and try to improve my stats I figured I'd give a set of these bad boys a try.

What you get in the box is a well made set of over the ear headphones with a built in mic that is substantially larger and much more positionable than the standard XBOX one. You also get a profusion of leads which enable the X1's to overcome the biggest problem with gaming and headphones. You see, if you want to get the 3-D sound experience without shelling out for a home theater sound system, or you just want to play late at night, then headphones are the obvious answer. Unfortunately, if you've got a set of headphones on for the game sound, what are you going to do with the XBOX headset? How can you talk to your mates over the in-game chat? Answer: You can't wear two sets of headphones at once, so it's one or the other buddy! The way the X1's get around this is by a clever system of interconnecting leads.

The headset itself terminates in the traditional green and pink (speaker and microphone) jacks traditionally found on any PC compatible headset, which means that the Turtle Beach's are PC friendly straight out of the box. When connecting to the XBOX though, the green jack plugs into the end of a stereo splitter lead. First up, you take the red and white audio leads that run from the console to the TV and you unplug them from the back of the TV, then you plug the stereo splitter lead into the red and white sockets on the TV and then plug the red and white leads from the console into the back of those. So now you've got the audio signal coming out of the XBOX going straight to the earphones and straight to the TV, so you get no sound quality loss by going through the TV's headphone port. The second clever bit is that there is now a third cable that connects between the X1s and the XBOX controller in the same way as the regular XBOX headset does. You've got seperate volume controls for the voice chat and the game volume so you can get the balance just how you like it. Also, the quality of the mic and the fact that the live chat comes through the X1's built in amplifier means that the usually weak and crackly voice signal comes through loud and clear.

The first time I used them I played on the Favela map, (a small section of a shanty town in Rio de Janeiro), and the overload of sound had me playing like a total n00b for a while as I adjusted to my new and vivid aural surroundings! What was once just a cacophony of gunshots and explosions was suddenly enriched by myriad ambient sounds! Birds singing in the trees, dogs barking at all the noise, the distant murmur of traffic as the rest of Rio went about it's daily life in the background. I was quite shocked at the depth of sound design I'd been missing thanks to not wanting to turn the TV up too loud.

Overall the sound quality is very impressive. It's a little bass heavy, which I personally like, but which may not be to everyone's taste. You end up feeling totally immersed in the game as all outside distractions disappear once you have the headset on and the volume up. Since getting the X1's I've even started watching DVD's through the XBOX, something I would never normally do as the machine itself is so loud it would ruin the movie, but the X1's not only drown that noise out, but enhance the movie audio to the n'th degree. I saw Transformers 2 in the cinema and was very much underwhelmed by it, experiencing it again with the X1's I was (almost) blown away!

It's quite astonishing the difference fully realised audio can make to the gaming (or movie) experience, and if you can afford one I would thoroughly recommend getting a Turtle Beach Headset. That is the key issue here however - if you can afford it. They aren't cheap. The X1's are the bottom of the range and don't actually offer positional 3-D sound as I thought, (though the high quality stereo is still very useful), they weigh in at a hefty £50. As you head up the range and go wireless with surround sound you are looking at over £200 in some instances! Availability is something of an issue in the UK as well as they are an American product aimed mainly at an American market. I had a lot of trouble finding one online, with many reputable retailers having them listed but all of them were currently out of stock. Good old Game came to my rescue though. You may be lucky enough to find a set in your local Game shop (ask at the counter, they don't seem to want to put them on display for some reason), or failing that the Game website seems to have an abundance of them.

To PC or Not To PC, That Is The Question

I think I'm finally ready to admit that the PC is not a good gaming platform. First of all I must profess my love for my PC, it's seen me through thick and thin for several years now with hardly any complaint. It's been my main gaming platform for most of that time too; I may have had an XBOX 360 for two years now but I've only really gotten into it heavily in the last few months. Most of my PC gaming experiences have been positive ones, until recently anyway, and I have some very fond memories of nights in front of the Keyboard. From the original Unreal Tournament and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, through MMOs such as PlanetSide, LOTRO, Warhammer Online and City of Villains, it's been a blast. But the shine is starting to wear off. I first noticed that something my be wrong when I tried to play Section 8, a futuristic first person shooter that played well, looked stunning and had some fantastically innovative ideas that would have brought new life to the genre.... only no-one played it. Yes it didn't do as well as it could have on the consoles either, but there appeared to be NOBODY playing it on PC. Not a good sign for a multiplayer centric game. I tried several times to get into a match and failed every time because there just wasn't anyone else online.

I recently bought the new Ghostbusters game off Steam... ah Steam, both a blessing and a curse, incredibly useful for buying games whilst being utterly infuriating as a means of playing them. So yes, Ghostbusters, for a start it took something like seven and a half hours to download. What the hell is the point of the "convenience" of a digital download if it takes longer than it would take me to drive the 20 miles to the nearest game shop, buy the disc, drive back again and install it myself? And that's assuming Steam doesn't crash while it's downloading. Sorry, I was tangenting there, Steams quirks aren't meant to be the focus of this post, although they do have a bearing on it. Anyway, Ghostbusters on PC, it looks wonderful, but even with the graphics settings minimised it runs like a lame pig, even on my not-inconsiderable gaming rig. Terrible frame rate when there's any kind of on-screen action, long load times, freezing... it's not fun. It takes what could very well be a great game and makes you notice all the bad things instead. Would I have got this on the XBOX version of the same game? The graphics may not be quite as pretty as a PC running it all in high detail, but then again, I couldn't run it in high detail anyway.

I've been using the XBOX a hell of a lot recently and as a result I haven't really touched the PC for weeks. Today though I thought I'd have another crack at Ghostbusters as I'd like to finish it so I can get on and free up the 11Gb it's currently hogging. I turned on the PC, all fine and dandy, I sat back and waited as Steam and Xfire automatically ran their updaters, no point trying to play a game that already struggles by itself, let alone if the processor is busy doing other stuff, while that's happening. So fifteen minutes and a restart later I was all ready to go, only as the game was starting up Steam crashed out on me and locked up the whole system. Right, ok... another restart, Steam launched without complaint, the game (eventually) loaded up to the menu screen and I clicked "resume game". And then nothing happened for ages. I ALT/TAB'd out and opened task manager to find that 'Ghostbusters is not responding', so I ended the task and again  nothing happened. Then after a few more minutes of not being able to click on anything the screen went blank and I was booted back out to the desktop. I'd spent almost half an hour in front of the keyboard by this point and still hadn't got to play anything, while all the time thinking how much simpler it would have been if I'd bought it on XBOX instead! All this on a machine that runs Left 4 Dead smoothly and sweetly and without complaint, (most of the time). It just seems to be the fickle nature of the beast.

I really miss keyboard and mouse controls for 1st person shooters on the xbox, and I'm still dying too often in MW2 simply because I can't use the controller properly, but that sacrifice is a small one compared to the benefits of the simplicity and reliability you get from a console. I've recently bought Mass Effect for PC, (the reason I wanted to get Ghostbusters finished and uninstalled to make room!), but I'm seriously considering giving it up as a bad job before even installing it and picking it up for the 360 instead.