Keepalive: Mediocrity Continues

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 10 April, 2011

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Bad Company 2 is still not the greatest game. Perhaps it's simply the reality of internet gaming, but I feel like I get robbed half a dozen times a round. A guy comes around the corner; I'm right there on the trigger. But I die. Or an enemy opens up, I zip behind cover and feel safe. Then I keel over dead because he killed me already, and the game just hadn't told me.

I've never had much tolerance for lag. I didn't care for Quake, and after trying again with Quake 2 and some mods, I swore off modem gaming completely. That was probably to my detriment as I missed Tribes entirely, which I understand was amazing. I came back to it once I had broadband and had some fun, which is confusing me.

I don't get why BC2 feels worse than I remember Joint Operations feeling. Maybe it's my faulty memory. Or maybe it's that Joint Ops was so janky all around that you expected weird behavior.

Regardless, I don't have anything I particularly want to play more, so BC2 is still the game for now. I'm learning to accept the glitches. Still, I played DooM on a LAN a month ago. And no game, especially one played on consumer grade internet, can stack up to that experience.

Part of me thinks I need to get back to making co-op maps so I can DooM more often. But I've got enough projects right now.

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Two Worlds II
I think my time with the game is winding down. I've beaten every level of the adventure mode, and unless I missed something, the adventures don't scale. So there's really nowhere to go but competitive multiplayer. I can tell by how the single player works that that wouldn't be at all satisfying.

I built up my village far enough to know that it's a dead end. Even with an upgraded forge and mining operation to give it the best materials, the weapons in my shops aren't any better than what I see in the NPC shops. Plus despite the fact that the entire village lives and works in buildings I sponsored, they don't give me better prices than the NPC shops. That's gratitude for ya.

Maybe I'll go back and finish the campaign. But I think I'd be smarter to uninstall.