So Battlefield 3 is out soon, but we just got hold of the Vietnam expansion to Bad Company 2 and had a three hour blast on it last night. Hughie’s, flamethrowers and NAPALM. Oh yes.
Paul
I have Battlefield fever and I had a severe urge to shoot lots of (virtual) people online. Vietnam is an awesome expansion to BC2, but christ is it difficult.
Matt
We were unfortunate with the teams, not to mention being rather late to this particular party. We had no idea what any of the maps were or where to go, or what good guns were…but I’d forgotten how much raw fun you can have just by squadding up and going for it.
Paul
It’s certainly a different experience when you make an effort to sneak around, picking off targets carefully, instead of attempting to impersonate Rambo. It took me about 100 deaths to realize it wasn’t working.
Matt
Ha, yeah, running across open rice fields is a sure way to get sniped. Some people have godly skills with that thing. You haven’t lost your touch with flying choppers – mowing down Charlie with a mounted m60 on the side of a Hughie hasn’t been this much fun since the original Battlefield Vietnam…
Paul
It’s a pity the snipers you mentioned also had the sickening ability to shoot us out of the cockpit or passenger seats of the helicopters, regardless of how fast you’re flying.
Matt
At least you get a nice view as you fall to your death. This game is gorgeous. Hill 137 looked particularly spectacular – it put Black Ops Vietnam level to shame.
Paul
Was that the one with the incinerated jungle, scorched to oblivion by the napalm bombs? I was astonished by that level, the change from the first segment of lush green foliage to charred, black, burning hillsides had me looking around longer than I was fighting. It would explain my extremely poor performance.
Matt
There was a moment where we both crept around by the river, and looked up at the hill as two jets flew past. We literally stopped and both gawped at the horizon as it lit up in a bright flash, and smoke started to rise. The next section of the map was set in that utterly destroyed jungle and it looked amazing. Even if it wasn’t dynamic level changing, it did an awesome job of convincing me otherwise.
Paul
Absolutely. The new selection of weapons available in VIetnam have given us so much stuff to play with that I still haven’t even used it all – in fact I haven’t even driven a tank yet.
But the flamethrower. Oh god, the beautiful flames. Sneaking up on two enemy soldiers camping at the top of a hill and then burning them alive with a hose of firey liquid death was extremely satisfying, but also kind of.. horrific. (Note: I am not nor have I ever been an arsonist in real life)
Matt
It’s the best flamethrower since Return to Castle Wolfenstein. It’s safe to say we like Bad Company Vietnam. It’s the perfect way to kill the time between now and Battlefield 3.
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
The first horror game I ever played, and I never got beyond the room in the attic where the wolf attacks you. All 5 polygons of the terrifying beast were enough to send me fleeing from the room, leaving my father to deal with it.
I’ve got an enormous backlog to catch up with, so my gaming time has been pretty varied lately as I jump from one thing to another. I’m squeezing every spare moment I can in between work, life, and fatherhood duties, and enjoying some side-scrolling platform action, blasting zombies in one of the best remakes around, and scaling a literal mountain.
I’m currently enjoying getting down and dirty with nature. Taming dinosaurs in Ark: Survival evolved is exciting and frustrating in equal measure. Exciting because I’m taming friggin dinosaurs. Frustrating because bigger dinosaurs keep eating them… And when I’m not playing that, I’m exploring the freezing mountains in Rise of the Tomb Raider – seriously, I have never felt so cold playing a videogame. It’s the way Lara hugs herself in the chill wind as the snow clings to her jacket. It’s one of the most beautiful games I’ve seen in a long time.
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