Battlefield 2

So here I am a couple of weeks ago, tooling down the internet superhighway in my 1500 pimp-mo-beel, and there's this Battlefield 2 demo people are talking about. Remembering the excellence of BF1942, the rad choppers of BF Vietnam, and the glorious modernity of the Desert Combat mod, I had to get it.

A fateful decision. I spent untold hours getting to know every inch of turf in the Gulf of Oman. Then something infinitely worse came along: Battlefield 2 - the full game.

"Worse" is a perverse/subjective term. Kind of like "bad" meaning good. Perhaps it's more apt to use a direct word. How about: "epic"? Not good enough? Try "brilliant", "inspired", or the one I've been taking to increasingly... "best".

Yes, you hear it so often, but from this point of view, right here, this is the best multiplayer (and that's where the juice is nowadays, no doubt) FPS ever. Now before you get your counterstrike PJs in a twist, let me explain the definition of "best (xxx) ever", so we're all on the same (web)page.

"Best" means, all things being equal, the best game of it's type the average punter can get hold of. Yes, you're wedded to Half Life 2, Call of Duty: United Offensive, Doom 3, Unreal Tournament 2004 - whatever - and you know that they are a better FPS, right? Maybe for you, if you suspend objective judgment. We all grow partial to the titles that we "master". I personally still regard QuakeWorld as the best FPS experience ever, because I played it for so long and damn, it just is so fast and demanding - traits that many other FPS players loathe in a FPS. Sure I get the daylights smacked out of me now, but time has given me a deeper appreciation of the brilliance of the game. Just like how Joe Bloggs will swear nothing comes close to GoldenEye or (insert game).

The beauty of BF2 is that you don't need this "deeper appreciation", borne of countless hours grinding away, to see how remarkable this game is. It's the only one of the "big three" graphically rich FPSes to make a real mark in multiplayer, as opposed to it being an afterthought. Yeah, we're looking at you, Doom 3 and you, Half Life 2. And don't EVEN come up in here with that Far Cry talk, or you will get smacked upside the head.

True, Digital Illusions CE (DICE) took an interesting path to get to the final product here. If you've played the Desert Combat mod, there's an element of familiarity about the gameplay, no doubt. But this is one game where the play mechanics are really only half the story - the other half is in one of the most extraordinary facelifts in games history - almost on a par with the jump from Grand Theft Auto 2 to 3.

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