Becsta.COM

I hate Microsoft with a passion, yet I bought an XBox360 in late 2006, because I found that the gaming experience was quite enjoyable. In the end, it’s been an experience that’s cost me dearly - I’d bought three copies of Call of Duty 4 for various reasons, broke four or so controllers, spent _way_ too much time addicted to the games, made friends, lost friends, and really needed a break.

I bought an XBox360 and two games:

• NHL07; and
• Call of Duty 3

CoD3 was a lot of fun, and I ended up being quite good at it towards the end, especially when I bought an LCD panel to play the games on, and upgraded the ADSL link. I’d often play until the wee hours of the morning, chatting away to people, having fun, and sometimes getting frustrated with the game play. Generally, it was possible to play with the various bugs, most of which were annoying but tolerable. Lag, and the effects were pretty minimal in my experience. Sniping was pretty easy - even with the BAR.

You hear some ridiculous things over XBox Live in-game chat some times. There was one American guy we were playing with one night, and he’d written a very rhythmical song (and sang it beautifully too) which completely denigrated African Americans - it was a laugh to listen to with the way he sang his song, but at the same time, rather sad and upsetting. He eventually left, and thank god for that!

Australian gamers get the raw prawn when it comes to online gaming through XBox Live, because there are no servers here in Australia. As a result, our lag is quite noticeable, but at least CoD3 hid it to some extent. I stopped playing when CoD4 was released.

Call of Duty 4:Modern Warfare didn’t hide the lag at all. We could tell (through watching what happens to the player list when people join and leave lobbies) who was the host, and if it was an American player, we’d be shafted as a result - they’d have a green ping time, but we’d be red. Infinity Ward released a patch towards the end of last year that tried to resolve various issues around the host, but in the end made things worse.

Whenever you join a game in CoD4, a quick check of the “quality of service” is performed. If the game deems your link to be bad, you don’t get host. It will (generally) choose a host with a good ping time to the servers, and a host with a network pipe fat enough to take all the p2p traffic. The unexpected consequence of this was that if the lobby was full of Aussies, we’d get green pings, and have quite good games. If a lone American joined (so there’d be 1 American and 11 Aussies), the American would be given the host, and the game ultimately suffered from major lag for the 11 Aussies.

Infinity Ward refuses to fix this problem.

Generally, CoD4 was a blast to play - fast, exciting, graphically amazing, but suffered from a short single player campaign, and otherwise uninspiring multiplayer experiences (at least for me) due to lag and a serious bug in the Ranking system.

My friends used to wonder why I always played as a sniper in the game. I’m no good at the classic running-n-gunning play style, which this game basically forces you into, because the levels are so up-close-and-personal. I use the sniper class, so I could hang back, slow the game down (for me), and take my time with the shots. For me, sniping was effective - for the others, some didn’t mind, but others hated me for it.

So what? I’m gonna play these games the way _I_ want to play them.

In the end, I started having real issues with the Ranking Up bug, with Infinity Ward refusing to do anything about it - sure, they got in contact with Microsoft, and eventually pointed the finger at the Microsoft servers, but the issue has been going on now for three months, with no workaround, no resolution, and silence from both companies. I was being disadvantaged in the game, getting fed up with the problem, and thus not caring about the game, that people started abusing me over XBL because I wouldn’t plant the bomb.

It’s stuff like this which really annoy us gamers - a fantastic game gets released, and then no support from the developers. We want new guns, new maps, new perks, bugs fixed in a timely fashion - we also want international support, international competitions, and servers spread out around the world. Everything seems just so US-centric. Infinity Ward have hosted several CoD4 competitions, all geared around US gamers. What about the rest of us? Not just Americans are playing this game!

Goodbye CoD4. Goodbye CoD2.

Anyway, I needed an FPS fix, and bought Battlefield:Bad Company. The online multiplayer is a bit “meh”, but the single player campaign is addictive. There are four characters in your squad, three of which you can’t control. There are lots of points within the story which had me in stitches - the Sarge would call up “Miss April” over the radio, to receive instructions, whilst in the background the other two squad members are seen playing rock/scissors/paper!

The story starts off with you contributing to the war effort. At one point, the squad discovers a gold bar, which starts rumours floating around the members for a few missions, and then they discover more gold in a box. So, contributing to the war effort takes a back seat whilst the squad finds where the rest of it is. Intriguing stuff.

The graphics are great (not on par with the detail in CoD4), but the levels are huge (bigger than the CoD3 maps), which forces the squad to ride a multitude of vehicles - hummers, SAS-like buggies, armoured cars, light tanks, battle tanks, golf carts :), boats, and a helicopter.

Awesome fun.

I’ve yet to deep-dive into the multiplayer aspects of the game, because I’m having too much fun playing the single-player game.