Battlefield: Bad Company First Impressions

First, an anectote: One time I rented Fuzion Frenzy 2 for the 360, long after the initial release.  One achievement was for playing an online match so I picked "Join a quick match" to which the game responded "There are no matches available."  That's what happens to a bad multiplayer game.  It dies online very soon after release.  On the other hand I played Battlefield 2 on the PC, which came out in 2005 and there are still scores of people playing in online battles.  Battlefield has multiplayer down.

So with that in mind I will review my early impressions of Battlefield: Bad Company, the newest Battlefield game, released on the 360 to a fair amount of praise (Metascore 83).  DICE has tried before to include a single player campaign into their games, and they've done so poorly.  Most excuse it because they want the multiplayer fun.  Battlefield: Bad Company is yet another attempt at a single player campaign, and clearly they put more thought into the story, but ultimately they still failed because they incorporate so many elements of their multiplayer success into their single player campaign.

It might seem strange that successful elements in multiplayer can be failures in single player but I'll explain.  In multiplayer, you die, you have to wait through a punishment pause, and then you respawn at some base.  There is no attempt to suspend belief that you are actually one soldier fighting a battle.  If multiplayer had people die and not come back till the end of the round do you realize how slow and careful everyone would be for fear of waiting the next 5-10 minutes without playing?  So all multiplayer games have respawning.  Now what if a single player campaign tried to introduce this?  In Bad Company if you die, you wake up at a respawn point (usually the last marker where you accomplished some task) but all the damage that you did has still been done.  You're now good as new, even freshly full of ammo, and the 3 people on your virtual squad are back by your side, even if they were 2 miles away before you died.  This just doesn't make sense for a single player campaign and it doesn't make you believe in the characters or story.

Next, in multiplayer Battlefield one of the key elements is segregation of duties of characters.  If you choose to be a sniper you will be equipped as a sniper.  You can't have a sniper rifle and a rocket launcher (just in case) and so there is a segregation of responsibilities that encourages everybody to play their part in the battle.  In the single player campaign you are similarly teamed up with 3 characters that would each seem to have their own responsibilities (especially the big guy who always carries a rocket launcher.)  So I'm left wondering why in every situation where a tank is coming at me I have to be the one throwing grenades to kill it when there's a guy with a rocket launcher on my team.  Apparently the only reason to have a team is for funny comments during the cut scenes because they sure don't seem to do much good during the actual missions.

Massive Levels!  They make sense when fighting 12 on 12 because they leave you room to maneuver.  In single player it just means more walking/driving and since they hid gold in far corners of the map it means you should probably explore it all if you want to get an achievement.

My other small complaints are with the controls, which use the bumpers and have an accelerated and twitchy mechanic with the aiming controls (you have to try it to understand how it's not like COD4).  I also think the enemy AI is a little too good at targeting you after your first shot is fired, even if I'm in excellent cover in a patch of trees with a sniper rifle from far away.  Not too realistic.  And enemies in the brush seem unusually hard to target.  Somehow they stood out a little more in COD4 and just blend in with Bad Company.  That's all for the single player.

Multiplayer is fun.  There's no two ways about it, if you like big battles and a good skill progression (very similar to COD4) then you will probably like Bad Company.  They didn't mess with the formula, and it creates more of a teamwork atmosphere than COD4.  In COD4 I felt like every confrontation was a who-saw-who first match because health was similar, damage was similar, so the person shooting first won.  As long as you don't come across someone else really soon you'll heal and be ready for the next confrontation.  In Bad Company you don't heal.  Some characters can take med kits that heal themselves but others like the sniper will just be hurting until they die.  It means even if you survive the first confrontation you can't just hide and recuperate, you may have to fight it out or be more cunning.  I like the overall feel of multiplayer and that's mostly because they didn't mess with the Battlefield formula too much.  My only issue with the Battlefield formula is that vehicles seem too powerful and take some of the fun out of not being in a tank/helicopter.  Maybe I should just suck it up and jump in a tank but I want to be a sniper sometimes!  

Video Game Reviews

Playing a fair share of video games in my free time it seems appropriate that I should post reviews of what I am playing in case others like me are hopelessly behind on the current offerings and just want to play the good stuff.  Unfortunately I even find that some of the good stuff has its bad points that are worth mentioning.

I've decided that my format will be to post a first-impressions post regarding the first few hours spent with the game and later a conclusions post.  This would have been interesting in hindsight for Ninja Gaiden 2, which I was initially frustrated with but by the end couldn't get enough of.

The one unfortunate aspect of being a cost conscious consumer is that I have signed up for Gamefly, the Netflix-for-video-games alternative to buying.  It has afforded me the ability to play many more games than I normally would, their shipping times are pretty good, but not netflix good since they only have 4 shipping locations, but one of them is in LA so it gets to me fast.  The other negative is that unlike Netflix's almost instant availability to all games, new releases are difficult to get, which has me playing a lot of stuff that's a few months old.  But from what I can tell most grown-ups who still play video games are in the same boat of catching up so my late reviews might come in handy.  But if anyone wants to send me review copies of games I'll be sure to make that my #1 priority (like that's ever gonna happen!).

Ebay Success

Well it seems like much longer than 10 days but the auction finally ended on Saturday, and I'm pleasantly surprised with the outcome.  Sure, I would have been happier if it had gone for more but I can't complain since it's all 100% profit and only a little anxiety/work.  Here's the final breakdown:

Winning Bid:          $ 119.75

Shipping:               $10.00

Insurance:           $    4.60 

Total Received:      $134.35

Paypal Fee:            (4.20)

Shipping Cost:         (12.15)

Insurance Cost:        (2.60)

Ebay Fees:                (9.90)

Net Gain:              $105.50

Try this...

Sniff a newly sharpened pencil...

Ethos Water - Bullshit

For a long time I have gone to Starbucks and seen the Ethos water on display.  Never before moving to Pasadena have I seen this be such a big seller.  People here tend to buy their morning coffee and grab a water for later it seems.

I've always had a pretty big problem with this water and their advertising.  They call it Ethos water, they say every bottle helps people who need water, but there's a limit.  They charge $1.80 for a bottle of water that anywhere else would be much cheaper.  If they said that 100% of the profits went to this global initiative to provide water to poor countries then I would say fine, call yourself Ethos, but only $0.05 goes to helping these organizations.  There is a huge amount of profit being kept by a company that is selling under a charitable pretense.

Going to the Ethos water web-site I discovered that they were purchased and now fully owned by Starbucks, and basically have a commitment to provide $10 million to this water initiative and the $0.05 is going into that fund.  Essentially Starbucks has committed to a $10M donation and will get a deduction for it whenever they contribute it to a foundation (they may already have contributed it to take the deduction) and many other companies do similar things with much less back-patting.  I think that it's pretty dishonest and sad.

There was a show on TV of kids selling lemonade, and one team decided to charge $2/cup but said that "profits were going to charity" while the other team just sold under a normal strategy around $1/cup.  The irony here was that everything was going to charity because the show had provided them with all the supplies and the kids only motivation was to make the most, which is why one went with a lower price.  Turns out the kids who advertised for charity made the most profit and sold the most cups.  People were handing them $20 and saying they didn't want any lemonade.  It said a lot about people's intentions, but companies have been abusing this for a long time as well. 

The pink lid Yoplait yogurts that are supposed to help breast cancer are a shining example of this.  Yoplait advertises that $0.10 will be contributed for each lid sent in.  The fine print says that they're already committed to giving $500k (5M lids) and the max is $1.5M donation.  I'm sure they know exactly how many yogurts they sell so this really isn't an effort on their part to do anything but push their product for a slight social benefit (of which they benefit the most).  I wish that companies wouldn't be so self-congratulatory when it is so clear that what they do is designed only for their own benefit.

So let's get real Starbucks... Ethos = Profits.

Nebraska Safe-Haven Law

To save you from reading the article the short version is that Nebraska wrote a safe-haven law for dropping off your child at a hospital without fear of prosecution.  This is one of those things to protect unwanted pregnancy infants from being left in a dumpster.  But the people worded it so poorly that they didn't define an age and said "child" rather than "infant" so a guy left his 9 kids, ranging from 1 to 17 at an emergency room and he has now given up guardianship...

The law is very simply worded "No person shall be prosecuted for any crime based solely upon the act of leaving a child in the custody of an employee on duty at a hospital licensed by the State of Nebraska. The hospital shall promptly contact appropriate authorities to take custody of the child."

I guess that does away with my idea of kidnapping children and dropping them off at the hospital to get off scott-free... Of course since this was an anti-abuse law it also doesn't protect abusive parents who drop off their kids, because they can still be charged with abuse.  And what exactly does happen when your baby sitter or a teacher decides to take a kid to the hospital and drop them off?  Even the fact that you are "leaving a child in the custody of an employee on duty..." leaves it pretty open.  Your infant is at the hospital, you go home for the evening, it's in their custody if they'd like to call the authorities and have it taken away, but I guess that's not too likely, is it?  Nice try Nebraska.  Keep up the good work!

New Co-Op Experience

Team Fortress 2 is a multiplayer online battle royale which features 9 very distinct character types that are all well balanced and have a specific function, from sniper to spy to big heavy gunner.  My twist on the genre is to take these character types and put them in a co-op multiplayer story driven game, so that you aren't picking up weapons allowing yourself to change the type of character you play along the way.  You pick your class and play through with those characteristics and the game play would be different each time because you have different strengths and weaknesses.  Couple that with multiplayer and trying to figure out what the best team would be for certain situations and you really have a winner.

As always, no charge.  Someone make it happen.