An Unreasonable Amount Of Excitement Over A Videogame

When the Battlefield 1942 “Wake Island” demo first came out, my coworkers and I spent countless lunch breaks playing that little gem of a map, with many a daring, brazen Allied raid repulsed by the defending Japanese forces. When the full game hit the shelves, we knew we had to acquire it.
While BF1942 was fun, its novelty began to wear a bit thin as the overall slowness of vehicles and relative weakness and ineffectiveness of the weapons available to the infantry units created an unfortunately slow-paced, almost methodical game. However, when some enterprising young software designers whipped up Desert Combat and released it upon the world, (almost) all of our gripes were answered. The modern day weaponry and the faster gameplay that they brought with them breathed a much-needed bit of life into our BF installs and for a long time, DC reigned supreme.
Skipping forward a couple of years, it pleased us to note that EA/DICE (the creators of the Battlefield series) had enlisted the help of the team responsible for Desert Combat in the construction of an entirely new BF game, Battlefield 2. The long-awaited demo was finally released last week and if it serves as any indicator, the full game will be even more engaging than our previous DC sessions. I am ridiculously excited about this release, and Gamespy’s preview of the game, as well as parts one, two and three of their overview of the maps included in BF2 have got me stoked even further. The combat in the demo is intense and the additional gameplay elements are great motivators for team-centric behavior, as opposed to the Lone Gunslinger behavior that BF1942/DC tended to encourage. The only downside of the demo is the fact that all games are limited to a paltry 12 minutes, which is barely enough time to get a decent strategy and gameplan going.
All-in-all, though, it’s definitely worth a download and play (if your machine can handle it, that is). See you on the public servers!