Battlefield Blues

By Thomas McDonald
If there’s one thing I love about console gaming, it’s that you know what hardware you’re getting when you buy the thing, and you know it will be good for about four years. There are no upgrades, no patches, and no problems.

This situation is even more appealing to me these days, now that Battlefield 2 has shown me exactly how pathetic my PC is. Sure, I could wait until it comes out on the Xbox, I suppose, but a gimped version of Battlefield 2 on a console would be sick and wrong.

The funny thing is, even though Battlefield 2 has become my new upgrade temptation game, I still cleave to it. Like an abused puppy continually returning to its cruel master, I fire it up every day and suffer through the long loads, choppy performance, and curiously fluctuating pings.

I have no choice, being a pretty hardcore Battlefield: 1942/Vietnam junkie. Objective-based shooters have long been my drug of choice. Deathmatch bores me to tears, and pretty much always has. Compared with solid CTF and control-point action gaming, it’s thin gruel with little reward.

The shift happened when Tribes hit, and proved that FPS games could be so much more than mindless fragfests. They could blend action, tactics, team play, and even elements of role-playing into something greater than mere deathmatch. As in any RPG, people quickly fall into their roles in Battlefield, and there is no shortage of jobs to fill. Few sessions seem to lack for drivers, gunners, pilots, anti-armor, snipers, demolition, medics, infantry, and the rest. I never fly, for instance, but there are players who do nothing but. This kind of wide-ranging design plugs right into the desires of a huge cross-section of the gaming public, and then pulls them together into a flawless synthesis.

And that quality is what makes it so frustrating. Slouching toward middle age, complete with kids, minivan, mortgage, and the rest, I can’t spend money on new hardware every time something tickles my fancy, although I often wonder if socking away money for my kids’ college is a better investment than a GeForce 7800 GTX. At this point, I’d almost rather not know about Battlefield 2 than be cruelly taunted by its 2GB memory demands.