I bought Battlefield 2142 through the EA downloader service. The best thing about it was that it only took about a 20 minute chat with some Indian fellow from Customer Service to get my fifty dollars back from EA and those shady swedes (DICE. Pfft, what a joke.).
Lemme run on down the list of things I hate about Battlefield 2142 (and, by extension, Battlefield 2, because they might as well be the same game, except one has more pimp shine and the other has more dust):
LOADING. THE. FREAKING. MENU. Hello? Am I the only not-a-ridiculous-swede-game-designer in the room who recognizes the flaws inherent in a menu that takes more than zero seconds to load?
The menu itself. Say I need to change a key.
If I'm playing Day of Defeat or Counter Strike, I hit escape (instantaneous menu), click options (instantaneous menu), keyboard (zoom!), buttontochange, button. DONE. Ten seconds if I'm retarded.
Battlefield ooh-look-the-future: Hit escape, wait a half hour or so for the menu to open, hit back (wait), hit back again (wait), mash options (wait), controls, keyboard, land guy controls, button I want to change, button I want it to be. This might take up to three days, and as many as six to eight fiscal years to take effect.
The zooming whozits and gleaming whatsits and shiny geegaws are what makes BF2142's menu suck so fiercely, because they take (comparatively speaking) FOREVER to load, and entirely too long to transition. Combine that with the fact that you don't just automatically get the main freaking menu by pressing the button, and you've got yourself a severe case of crappy interface.
Speaking of crappy interfaces, how about that server browser, huh? Boy, if it could take just a little bit longer to find a game to jump into, or if I could waste just a little bit _more_ of my time fighting with the damnable interface to get the POS to display servers with a ping of less than an hour, I might just squeal.
As for actual gameplay, _are_ there any guns in the game that don't overheat if you give them a hard look? I swear to goodness that it's roughly 2007 right now, and there's a somewhat _old_ video clip of some guys with an M60 (surely, a clunky POS compared to the support weapons of tomorrow-morrow land) putting 850 rounds downrange with one fiendish mash of the trigger, and at no point does the gun start making nonsensical hissing noises. The overheating in the game is utterly over the top. Every rapid fire gun in the game that is even marginally legit overheats at the drop of a hat.
Add to all this the standard Battlefield game shadiness (ooh, check it out, the game is choppy and worthless despite being run on a top of the line computer, think DICE'll ever fix it? Think again, Jacques.) and you get a game that is fundamentally crappy.
The thing that _really_ sucks is that I'm utterly in love with BF2142! I think 2142 is Tribes sequel that never was, and Titan mode rocks _so_ hard that I can't even believe it. I want so badly for it to be good, but its various deficiencies and instabilities and et cetera crappiness along with DICE and EA's track record of just not ever bothering to fix Battlefield games, I don't have any hope for it at all.
But hey, at least EA gave me my money back.
~GnSx
