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Great Game No. 2: “Battlefield: 1942”
My list of “Ten Games That Have Had Probably Way Too Much Influence On My Life” continues …
No. 2: “Battlefield 1942” (2002)
The Game: A first-person shooter set in World War II was nothing new, even when “BF42” hit shelves three years ago. Neither was online multiplayer, with at times dozens of combatants fighting on teams and on their own.
But “BF” was my first real taste of these things, particularly the latter, and its nifty combination of deceptively simple gameplay, cool graphics, navigable server selection and multi-vehicular gameplay was a door that opened to the purest of timesuck experiences.
You’d look up at the clock, convinced it’d be something like 7:30, and it was midnight.
What Was So Great About It: Part of it was the community aspect of it. Part of it was the widely-varied map selections that each required different approaches to achieve consistent success.
Part of it was the joy of knowing some guy in Omaha was cursing your very name as you sniped his “Cpt.Dooglypants” avatar out of existence for the sixth straight time.
No way you could put a pricetag on that.
Impact On The Rest Of Humanity: Imitators lined up, and the game spawned a fantastic sequel that is, in many ways, vastly superior to the original.
But there’s nothing like your first time.
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