Tom Vs. Bruce: Battlefield 2

Bruce: In a time before the global war on terror made me spend most of my waking hours hiding in my house writing Guild Wars fan fiction, Tom and I played a game called Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis. It was good, except for the fact that Tom won, which made it one of the worst games ever. Actually, every game that Tom wins is a bad game because that means it has fatal bugs. But for one of the worst games ever made, Operation Flashpoint was pretty good. Tom says this game is just about exactly the same.

Tom: Unfortunately, there��s no way to play multiplayer games with bots enabled, so Bruce and I have to take it online. Here��s the deal: We��ll each play on opposite sides and see who can get the highest team score. The winner will be the one who scores highest in two out of three games. I start us out on a nice 32-player Mashtuur City map. I��ll take the Middle Eastern Coalition so Bruce isn��t confused by the non-English speaking.

Bruce: It��s good that Tom explained what sides we were on, because I thought MEC was short for Mexicans. I don��t remember a lot of dune buggies in Operation Flashpoint, but maybe that was because Tom didn��t install the dune buggy hack. I also don��t remember helicopters being this tough to fly��ever. I crashed the helicopter three times on takeoff before one of my teammates requested that I ��GET OUT OF THE HELO DUMMASS!!!�� I guess I shouldn��t assume that was me��maybe he was talking to an actual ��dummass.��

Tom: On a few occasions, I could actually see the helicopter taking off from the gas station on the rise over the city. It would rise way up into the air, keel over to one side, arc back downward, and then plow rotor-first into the ground. At the time, I remember thinking, ��Ha ha, some dumbass newbie is keeping the American Black Hawk out of circulation.��

Bruce��s team score was -12 after the first game, probably from landing upside down on his teammates. Now he��s trying to talk me into playing into some obscure Napoleonic war game for this article instead of Battlefield 2. I told him I��d find a more fair way for us to play and promised that if he won, we could play whatever he wanted for the next article. So the new idea is that we��ll be on the same team, in a squad, and he can stick with me. Whoever gets the highest team score wins.

Bruce: I��ve agreed to Tom��s terms because I��m pretty good at team games, like that Lord of the Rings board game that you have to play cooperatively or else the dark lord will win. I hope this is that kind of game.

Tom: This time, we��re on an Operation Clean Sweep server as the Americans. I start out at the airfield, hop into a Super Cobra, and take off. Since I��m the squad leader, Bruce spawns as my nose gunner. I can hear him sort of randomly shooting the machine gun, and occasionally he seems to figure out how to launch a missile. Eventually, he wises up and starts bailing out to fight on the ground.

Bruce: After doing some research on message boards about how overpowered airpower is, I realize that Tom is just trying to make up for my superior skills by using the better equipment. That��s fine, because I am more of a stealth commando type anyway. I bail out of the helicopter a few times, and then Tom finally explains that there��s a parachute key, which is 9, for ��parac9ute,�� I guess. I manage to sneak up to an enemy flag all by myself and start the complex flag-capturing process. About halfway through, another soldier shows up and starts investigating the little sandbag barrier like he has never seen one before. He must be a newb.

I start to type some kind of friendly greeting when I realize that the name above his head is red. I think that means he��s an enemy. Panicked, I empty my whole clip into him from point-blank range. He must be playing with an invulnerability hack, because he doesn��t die. Then he kills me one second later.

Tom: Bruce isn��t getting a lot of kills, but he is keeping the enemy busy and depleting their ammunition. I have to remind him not to bail out over the ocean while I��m heading back to repair and rearm, but otherwise, he seems to be getting the hang of it (although in the chat he keeps typing things like ��/wave�� and ��/bow��). There are only about 10 people on each team, so it��s easy to keep the helicopter, knocking back the MEC vehicles as they try to hold us off the northern tip of the peninsula. There��s only one MEC player using their jets, which would normally shut down my helicopter shenanigans in short order. Luckily for me, he doesn��t know what he��s doing, which is one of the advantages of playing a game like Battlefield 2 the same week it��s released. By the time the round is over, I have 68 team points. Bruce has -3. At least it��s an improvement. I��m going to have to work out something else for us to do. I think I have an idea.

Bruce: Tom really likes medieval fantasy games, so even though we��re playing like the most advanced combat game known to nonterrorists, he devises an elaborate setup in which he��s a knight and I��m the squire. He makes me the squad leader, which doesn��t seem appropriate for a squire, but whatever. He tells me to pick a support class and says I can ��support�� him by giving him more ammo when he runs out. Since I plan to make every ammo handoff a perfect, in-your-gut, Peyton Manning exchange, I assume my 100 percent success rate means I��m going to win.

Tom: Now I have my own private Sancho Panza. The trick will be having Bruce stick close enough not to get lost, but staying far enough back not to get killed so I can spawn off him. This time, we��re playing as the MEC on the Kubra Dam map, which is bad news, since it��s got a lot of vertical displacement that makes it more confusing to navigate. We hop into the tank at the end of the map, and I let Bruce drive; he��ll be less likely to get shot out of the cupola if he��s safe inside.

Bruce: Now Tom��s mad because he got confused while driving the tank in one of our very first games and didn��t realize that he had turned so many times that the base he was attacking was actually the base we had originally spawned from. I guess in the spirit of international fairness and reconciliation, I should clarify that when I say Tom did that, it would be more fair and balanced to say that I did that.

Tom: We��ve got all the flags along the dam, but the Americans have the flags at the far end of the valley. I hop into a buggy and tell Bruce, who is safely hidden between a building and a mountain, to get in. For some reason, it��s taking him forever to reach me.

Bruce: When Tom tells me to quit hiding and jump in the buggy, I get a firsthand demonstration about why you should only play games the way EA legally says you can in the user agreement. My punishment for deleting the ��Challenge Everything�� movie that plays before the game starts is that I can��t sprint. I��m probably being tracked right now by EA cheat-prevention commandos who will come to my house and confiscate all the stories I��ve been writing about Guild Wars. I want to use this forum to formally apologize to the ESRB and RIAA for using this game in a nonapproved manner.

Tom: I finally have to hop out of the buggy and go find Bruce to help him figure out why he can��t sprint. None of his explanations����maybe my character is out of shape,�� ��maybe my character tore a ligament,�� ��maybe my character is a conscientious objector����makes any sense. Instead, I find him lying prone on the ground, slowly creeping toward me. A quick press of the Z key solves his problem.

Bruce: Just like Tom not to tell me about the Z key, which apparently makes your character quaff an energy drink or a stamina potion or something.

Tom: As we��re speeding down the path in our buggy, an American soldier pops up, running away from us. Bruce fires wildly, and bullets patter in the dirt all around the fleeing enemy. When it becomes clear that Bruce is about to overheat the gun, I tap F3 and kill the guy with the SAW mounted on the passenger seat. Bruce accuses me of stealing his kill and asks if there��s a button he can press to not forgive me.

Bruce: I got 12 points this time, which is pretty good work, I think. Tom has 9 or 5 or I guess 95, but that��s not the point. The point is that Tom is really getting into the Mexican role-playing thing because he keeps calling me ��Sancho.�� That��s cute.

Tom: While looking online for a trainer or aimbot or something to enhance Bruce��s in-game performance, I find a way we can play with bots. If I start up a single-player match, Bruce can type in my IP address for a direct connection, and voil��! We��re both in the same game with bots. So we��re going to decide this thing not based on reflexes, but on leadership skills. We will each play as commanders with a team of bots. To keep things simple, we��re on the Zatar Wetlands map, in which each side starts with a single base and fights over a single spawn point in the middle. The rules are that we can direct bots and we can defend our main spawn point, but we can��t leave the confines of our respective bases. Here goes.

Bruce: I see that after all that business, Tom managed to finagle a way to turn the whole thing into an RTS, which is his favorite kind of game. This kind of reminds me of Sacrifice, which is a great game that Tom refuses to play since he says it��s just a glorified version of Quake. ��All Tom��s mana hoars have been slaughtered!�� According to the map display, my robots seem to be doing pretty well. Tom��s score is going down, and the white flag just turned my color. I jump in the dune buggy and consider heading for the action, but then I think better of it, since if I break the rules, I��ll never hear the end of it. I tell some of my wingmen to ��attack my target�� and then sit around hoping they follow my orders to victory.

Tom: I start as an engineer and mine the entrances to my compound to fend off any approaching vehicles (these bases are far enough back from a spawn point that no one��s going to hoof it). Then I set up a steady cycle of scanning followed by artillery shelling. It��s pretty easy to get a fair number of kills this way, since the bots tend to move along predictable paths. Unfortunately, even though I��ve plotted attack orders for my three squads, Bruce��s bots manage to get to the central flag first. They��ve got an APC parked up there and they manage to chew up my men and even a tank.

Bruce: I have more tickets than Tom, which is good, but there isn��t much for me to do here, which is bad. Or maybe that��s good. I hope the robots know what they��re doing. I kind of want to get into the helicopter one of my robots is flying around, but that ��dummass�� comment kind of stung, so I don��t. Tom��s robots take back the flag I had, but I��ve still got the most tickets. Every now and then one of my robots spawns and goes running out the northeast gate. Sometimes the tank goes out the west gate. I say ��Roger that�� a lot.

Tom: An American APC just rolled over one of my mines and blew up at the entrance to my base. Shortly thereafter, a few bots came in the other side of my compound, at which point a tank came rolling in where the APC had cleared the way through the mines. I think Bruce is setting up some kind of elaborate pincer maneuver with his squads.

Bruce: My robots sure bought a lot of tickets, so that was smart of them. I drop some artillery on a bunch of red dots and Tom��s score goes down a few points. Success!

Tom: I��m on the wrong side of my base to get that tank with the TOW launcher. I get killed three times trying to drop mines near him, and then Bruce hits me with a well-timed artillery strike. He must be watching my base pretty closely.

Bruce: I��ve found some kind of cool missile-launcher thing at my base, but I can��t get it to work. Maybe it��s just binoculars.

Tom: By the time I take the tank out, he��s neutralized my flag. Once I get it back, all my bots come spawning in at once and then proceed to just sit there. I��m screaming the ��follow my orders�� macro at my squad leaders, but they don��t seem terribly interested. We��re below 100 tickets now, and Bruce still has 148.

Bruce: While I��m sitting at the binoculars, which you don��t even have to put a quarter into, I call in supply crates and watch them parachute down. I��m not sure about them, though��it sounds suspiciously like some sort of world government oil-for-food scheme. My base is otherwise pretty boring.

Tom: A couple of my guys loop around toward the American base but don��t get very far. Bruce must have seen them coming with his radar scan and sent a squad to head them off.

Bruce: Every now and then I see my helicopter off in the distance and think about how much more fun it would be if I was flying around out there. I figure my robots have everything under control, so I go into the kitchen to make a sandwich.

Tom: Bruce seems to be very carefully orchestrating two separate axes of attack. My troops are boxed in, and I��m doing my best to take out vehicles with the TOW missile. Occasionally, a Super Cobra does a few passes with rockets, and I try to dash to the AA emplacement. And now my guys have run off, leaving me under attack by Bruce��s bots. I��m down to 83 tickets when they take the flag, leaving me in Battlefield heaven to look down and wait for one of my bots to grab a flag. After nearly 15 interminable minutes, during which J. Gonzales is my only surviving soldier but is off doing something that doesn��t include grabbing a spawn point, Bruce wins the game at 97 to 0.

Tom wins the war but Bruce wins the final battle��or at least, his bots do.

PUBLISHER: Electronic Arts DEVELOPER: Digital Illusions CE GENRE: Shooter

Copyright © 2005 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in Computer Gaming World.