Anyone who’s even remotely into first person shooters on the PC has probably heard of, or come across, the Battlefield series from Electronic Arts. The first one was release way back in September of 2002, and its captivating online multiplayer scheme enthralled thousands. So, it wasn’t much of a surprise when EA followed up on the success of 1942 with its next installment, Battlefield Vietnam. Although it didn’t fair quite as well with the critics as its predecessor did, it wasn’t a failure by any stretch of the imagination.

The Battlefield series had already established itself as a franchise capable of delivering, but the true show of EA’s potential came in June of 2005, with Battlefield 2; the first true sequel. Instead of transporting the player back into yet another war of the past, the game was modernized into a fictional, present-day conflict between the Chinese, an undisclosed middle eastern nation, and of course the good ol’ US of A. Once more, the game was a stunning success.

But then, perhaps due to their success induced high, Electronic Arts let down a sizable portion of its fan base with their next effort, Battlefield 2142. Jumping from the varied theaters of the Second World War, into the claustrophobic jungles of Vietnam, and then to the present was a progression that seemed logic and apt to many. The series started out with the most significant military conflict of the last century, and then it series took players in a logical progression through all the major engagements that the United States’ military has seen.

The main reason that 2142 never really caught on was probably due to the fact that players suddenly found themselves more than 100 years in the future in a conflict with weapons and vehicles that seemed incredibly out of place in a series that seemed to be focused on realistic military engagements.Luckily, though, the upcoming entry in the series, Battlefield: Bad Company, is a true return to form — and what a form it is! Reinvigorating a series is one hell of a challenge, and as such, Electronic Arts has decided that what better way to field test a game, than to actually put it out in the field. The beta, available to those who have access to the beta codes, has been available for several days now, and I must say that the multiplayer component looks really promising.

The last few weeks, I haven’t played much else besides Call of Duty 4, which is another series that started out by pitting players against the Nazis. As such, I’ll probably make quite a few comparisons to that game.

The beta only includes two maps so it’s pretty obvious that the purpose of the beta is to vet the fundamentals, like gameplay, instead of play-testing a series of maps. When it comes to gameplay, though, Bad Company does quite a few things spot on, leaving only a short list of gripes.

The fundamentals of the series as still present, and perhaps stronger than ever. Players are divided up into two opposing teams, each tasked with accomplishing their goal of destroying enemy depots, while preventing the enemy from performing their task. Once killed, players will continue to respawn into the game until the reinforcement reserves deplete.

One of the changes that veterans of the series will notice immediately upon joining a game is that players are no longer presented with a map from which to choose a spawn point; you either spawn from a set insertion point, or next to your our teammates, your choice. This change might have been made to simplify the game for the console, or it might represent a premeditated departure from the status quo. Either way, the change didn’t have an averse effect on my experience.

The major new addition to the gameplay this time around is the fact that environments can be completely destroyed; everything from trees and terrain, to entire buildings can be completely demolished. This seemingly tiny change has devastating affects on gameplay. No longer can a single, well positioned sniper pick off hordes of enemy soldiers, while simply hiding behind a door post. Traditionally, a sniper positioned in such a manner would have free reign until some fool-hearty soul makes a mad dash for the door and engages the sniper in close-quarter combat. No more, though. Now, you’re free to be as creative as possible with your shots and kills. Let’s see here: you can still go for the direct, zig-zag as you go, approach towards the front door; or you can, for example, sneak around to the back of the building, blow out the rear wall with a well-paced grenade, and make a dramatic entry that way.

Unfortunately, the one thing you can’t do the scenario I just described is take out the poorly supported ceiling above the sniper once the walls are gone so that the rebar studded chunks of concrete will crush or impale the sniper. The most damage you can do to any one of the buildings is reduce it to a smoldering cocoon of support walls and ceiling. In other words, if you were hoping to unite every tank, chopper, boat and Humvee on your team to launch a joint attack aimed at decimating anything and everything in your path, think again.

A destructible environment not only makes the game a lot more fun when you’re the one going the shooting, but it will also produce some truly awesome scenarios. At one point, having already taken out several enemy combatants with a M24 sniper rifle, I was about to fire off another round when I heard an approaching tank. Within seconds this metal beast had rounded the corner of the building ahead of me. As the turret cranked its way slowly my way I knew, then and there, that I was fucked. And I was right…but, the effect was awesome. That tank may have ended my short spree, but seeing the building that I was in blow to smithereens was definitely worth it.

Even though the beta provided me with some truly awesome moments, the experience wasn’t completely without fault. What follows is a short list of some of the gripes and observations, both positive and negative, that I encountered during my play testing. Granted, some of the things listed may not necessarily be issues of real concern, but bare with me:

• One of the first thing I noticed was that whenever I died, the game would kick me back to a menu that conveyed to me that I had to wait a certain number of seconds before I could respawn. It wasn’t so much that I had to wait that bothered me, but rather that this menu took me out of the experience. The menu also allowed me to change my weapon class along with a few other things, but I would have preferred it if, when I died, my view switched to that of a teammate, with a small countdown somewhere off to the side of the screen, and maybe a message telling me that I’d have to press Y, for example, to change my class. Not only did this menu take me out of the experience visually, it also killed the audio; I heard nothing of the ongoing battle until I was able to rejoin.

• I loved the way the sniper scopes his rifle. Instead of immediately switching to the scoped view, as is done in so many games nowadays, there’s an actual transition animation where the rifle is brought up to the character’s face. This simple touch really lent itself to the authenticity of the role. Unfortunately, though, my high hopes for the sniper were immediately brought back down again when I noticed that the sniper seemed to have arms (and nerves) of steel, allowing him to eliminate all vibrations from his aim. I realize that this has been the norm with the entire series, but I feel that perhaps packing a little more punch with each round would go nicely with an unsteady hand. On the positive side though, reload animations for the bolt action look pretty neat, if perhaps a little mechanical.

• Another neat touch is that fact that whenever a player experiences trauma severe enough to lower his or her health down to 30% or less, that player’s vision becomes impaired. The concept is really neat, but the execution is slightly lacking. To me it seems a little hackneyed, but the players vision is simply flooded with a red haze, nothing all too special. It would be cooler if the players vision got worse and worse as his or her health deteriorated. One might start out with perfectly clear vision, go to a red hue at around 30, and then add a slight blur and maybe some camera wobbly as the Grim Reaper approaches.

• Of course, since it is the Battlefield series, there are plenty of vehicles as expected; everything from jeeps and tanks to boats and choppers. I don’t have all too much to mention about the vehicles, since the series has always done this pretty well, but I will mention that I am starting to grow slightly weary of the whole arcade style approach to vehicles. I understand that a console game needs to be accessible to a large audience, but it couldn’t hurt to make the vehicles handle a little more realistically. Maybe I’ve been playing a little too much Crysis as of late, but I want to be able to shoot out tires to bring a car to a potentially spectacular halt — ya know, stuff like that.

• Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not too fond of the grenade control scheme. I want to be able to pull out a grenade and throw it immediately; I don’t want to have to worry about how long I have to hold down the trigger to be assured that the grenade will go far enough. I want to be able to pull the trigger once, and just have it go. I’m perfectly content to have to aim up higher if I want the grenade to go farther. Oh, and another thing: please, please increase the effective radius of a fragmentation grenade. There have been plenty of occasions were I have thrown a grenade to within a yard or two of my target, only to find that after it went off, my target was making me his target.

• Graphically speaking, the beta isn’t all that spectacular. If you’ve been following the development of this game then you have, like me, probably also seen a good portion of the screenshots that can be found floating around the Web. I’m sad to say, though, that the screenshots don’t quite live up to the hype — but, hey, when isn’t that the case?

It’s not all too often that you’ll be playing a game that does something new; something that hasn’t been done over and over again in almost every other game. One such game is Portal, a clever three dimensional puzzler based on the incredibly popular Half-Life universe.

Portal got its beginnings when a group of students from DigiPen were invited over to Valve to show off their little project, called Narbacular Drop. Walking out of the demo room, little did the students suspect that they’d soon be hired and encouraged by Valve to further flesh out their project.

Since the inspiration behind Portal started out as a Senior game project, it’s no surprise that the game feels a bit like a technological showcase. That being said, however, Portal is incredibly fun – even if it can be quite frustrating at times. If you’re a fan of the Half-Life 2 universe and enjoy the occasional puzzle, this game is guaranteed to please.

Set in the world of Gordon Freeman, players control a female test participant, named Chell, as she makes her way through the test labs of the Aperture Science Enrichment Center. The games starts out with Chell waking from a cryostasis bed enclosed in an otherwise empty cell, in an empty room. The only other form of intelligence in the room, and throughout the game, is the mechanical voice of GLaDOS (Genetic Lifeform and Disk Operating System) – think of her as a female version of HAL 9000.

After being told what you are expected to do, GLaDOS releases you from your cell, and instructs you to head towards the only exit in the room. I’d better not say much more about the story line, because there really isn’t all that much to it. But, what little there is, is cleverly crafted and quite entertaining while it lasts. An added bonus to the puzzle element of the game is the humorous quality of GLaDOS’s commentary as you make your way through the game: “And remember, Aperture Science’s take-your-daughter-to-work day is the perfect time to have your daughter tested.”

Once your in the first of the 19 levels, you really get a feel for what the game is all about. All of the levels present the player with what essentially amounts to an obstacle course. The levels get bigger and far more complex as the game progresses, but the main challenge in all of them is that you need to get from point A to point B. Sounds easy, right?

Well, not really. The earlier test chambers might be quite simply, with only a small chasm to cross, or a button to press. However, as you get further along you’ll run into all sorts of trouble; for instance, you’re in a room with no immediately discernible exit. You scan the room from left to right, then again from right to left. Nothing. Then you look up and see that the ceiling is a good 200 feet high, and that in the far corner there appears to be a small ledge with what looks like a door. Great. “How do I get there,” you might wonder. The only other structures in the room include a deep pit (without an exit at the bottom) and various pedestal-like platforms of different heights in the middle of the room. The pedestals are way too far apart for you to jump them – and if you fall, you die. So, the only reasonable solution seems to be to first jump to the lowest of the five pedestals, and then, perhaps, to the next one…But you can’t jump those distances and there aren’t any ladders, stairs, elevators, or man cannons available. What do you do?

Bring on the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device! The portal gun is the essence of what makes Portal completely unique. Using the portal gun (which you get in the third level), players will be able to create an intra-dimensional portal between flat planes, allowing physical objects to instantly travel between entry and exit nodes. Portal ends can only be created on certain planar surfaces, which greatly enhances the puzzle factor. As the game progresses, the placements of portals necessary to complete a challenge become crazier and crazier, which will often lead to bizarre and confusing twists in geometry and gravity. A critical component of intra-dimensional travel is the fact momentum is preserved, or as GLaDOS puts it, “speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out.” This effect is very useful when you want to launch yourself across a room.

Despite the fact that Portal is a very unique game on many levels, this only makes it all the more painful when it all comes to an end. In fact, Portal is actually quite short; an experienced played will have no trouble playing through the game in about three hours. On top of that, Portal is a puzzle game, which means that once you know how to solve a particular problem it’s hard to forget, resulting in little replay value. On a bright note, though, Portal (on the PC anyways) comes with an SDK (Software Development Kit), so expect there to be plenty of user created levels in the near future.

Portal is part of a Valve bundle package known as The Orange Box, which is available for the PC as well as the Xbox 360. The Orange Box also contains: Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, and Team Fortress 2. The PC bundle retails for $49.95, while the Xbox 360 version goes for $59.95 – which I think is a rip-off, since the PC bundle provides far more value through the inclusion of the SDK. If you don’t care for the rest of the games in The Orange Box, then you can always get Portal as a standalone game through Steam. If you go this route, it’ll cost you $19.95.

BUY: The Orange Box

As soon as my friends and I heard that Infinity Ward would be hosting a public beta for their upcoming game Call of Duty 4, we rushed over to the site and registered – just like thousands of other eager fans. Fortunately, one of our registrations was selected for entry and so, after a quick download, we eagerly launched ourselves into the experience. And here’s what we found:

GRAPHICS

From a visual standpoint the game looks about average. That being said, however, this does not mean that the game is at all bland, as there are some interesting visual elements throughout the game. One of the more drastic of these elements is the depth of field blur, which helps make the overall experience feel quite authentic. The blur activates as soon as the player sights their weapon by pulling the left trigger. It eases in pretty fast, blurring everything up close so that only the far reticule and the target remain in focus. Upon releasing the trigger to zoom out, the blur quickly fades out to reveal your surroundings – and, of course, your enemies, right as they are about to ambush you. All three maps also include high dynamic range lighting along with all the other lighting and shading techniques that we have come to expect from modern games. But, besides the depth of field blurring, there is nothing all too special – yet.

MAPS

The beta includes three maps so far: Overgrown, Vacant, and Crash; all set in the eastern hemisphere. Overgrown is set in a small, rundown, rural Russian town, and, as the name suggests, features plenty of overgrown vegetation, ideal for snipers. The map is fairly large, with plenty of open and exposed areas, but it also has plenty of cover. If you’re patient and willing to crawl around in the tall grass, you can rack up plenty of kills as a sniper. The map is pretty well balanced, however, making it pretty easy to defeat snipers if you manage to lure them into the more urban parts of the map, where their long range weapons are rendered useless.

Vacant is probably my favorite map so far. This map is centered around a dilapidated, single story, Russian office. The small rooms and narrow hallways are the perfect catalyst for some very intense close quarter combat, where the player has to be on constant guard. Thanks to a plethora of large windows and numerous doorways, it’s impossible to hold yourself up in a single location for very long, without getting ambushed or running out of ammo.

The last map in this beta is Crash, set somewhere in a small desert town, presumably in the Middle East. The setting of the map would suggest a Black Hawk Down type of scenario, where the good guys had to crash land their helicopter in midtown and then fight off the enemy in an attempt to survive. Like all of the other maps, this one is pretty balanced as well, and there aren’t any glaring advantages to being on either side. Like any good urban map, this one is honeycombed with plenty of alleys and roads, making it once again very tough to hold out for very long without some serious backup.

GAMEPLAY

Okay, so here’s the most important part: it’s a blast. Out of all the games in the Call of Duty series, this one is far and away the best: it’s intense, rewarding, and pretty clever – yes, clever. And here’s why: the developers have done an excellent job at rewarding players for certain achievements, while not making it impossible for mediocre players to get their fair share of kills as well. One of the major new gameplay elements that CoD 4 brings to the table is the addition of perks and rewards.

Let’s start off with the perks. Upon choosing your class, you get a choice of how you would like to modify your character’s abilities. Each player can choose three perks that he (or she) would like to have during online play. There are 15 perks in total, divided up into three subsets. The first perk category allows you to choose if you would like: the ability to seek out enemy explosives, remotely detonate explosives, place trip mines, carry an RPG-7 with 2 rockets, or if you would like to carry three special grenades. The second perk category allows a player to choose whether to: increase their health, reload faster, boost the explosive power of their weapons, increase the damage of their rounds, or make themselves undetectable to the UAVs flying overhead. The third, and final, category let’s players: improve the penetrating power of bullets (so that players can shoot through thin walls), improve their physical speed, drop a live grenade upon death, increase their hip-fire accuracy, or – and this one is quite popular – upon being shot, pull out a side arm in an attempt to kill any aggressors before finally bleeding to death.

Not all of these perks are available right away. As a player gains more and more experience, he’ll unlock more perks as well as weapon upgrades. Much as is the case with the perk system, players will need to gain experience before they can unlock the best weapons and the best mods. Gun modifications include the addition of a silencer (which renders you invisible on enemy radar), various scopes (you start with iron sights, then go on to reflex sights, and eventually you can equip low-power scopes), and camo patterns for your guns (urban, rural, and digital).

Another neat gameplay element is the notion of actually rewarding players who manage to achieve a killing streak – instead of just announcing it to everyone a la Halo. If you kill three in a row you’re allowed to perform a radar sweep using a UAV, so that your team temporarily knows where the enemy is and how to best attack them. After five consecutive kills, you’re allowed to call in an air-strike, which has to be designated on a map. And finally, possibly the best one, when you kill seven in a row you’re allowed to call for backup. When you do so, you’ll hear the low roar of propeller blades cutting through the air, and pretty soon your enemies will be mowed down my automatic gunfire from a CPU-controlled attack helicopter.

GAME MODES

The four overall game modes that the beta includes are: Free-for-All, Team Deathmatch, Team Objective, and Team Tactical. The first two are pretty self-explanatory, so I’ll just explain the other two. Team Objective consists of a variety of different modes, including: Domination and Search and Destroy, Capture the flags in Domination (with respawning), and objective-based Search and Destroy (without respawns). And then there’s Team Tactical, where players form small two, or three, man teams and simply go at it.

GRIPES

Since this is a beta, the game is obviously not entirely bug-free. So, here’s a (very short) list of issues that I’ve seen so far:

• The helicopter might be too good. At one point, I was prone, half-way under a bush, and when the helicopter flew by he had no problem seeing me at all, and I got owned. This would be acceptable if I was a machine-gunner or so, but I was a sniper, wearing a Ghillie suit, which should have made me a lot harder to see.

• Since the game strives to be pretty realistic, I would like to have the ability to switch between firing modes (i.e: semi-automatic, burst, and full-auto).

• …and that’s about it for now. More to come later.

The whole thing started when a man, who calls himself “Magus,” in Atlanta, Georgia, went out to his local Target and bought himself a brand new Xbox 360 Premium for $350. After unpacking his new console, he noticed that there was something out of the ordinary on the rear of the console: an HDMI port, right alongside the standard component connection. Not expecting to discover this port, Magus snapped a few pictures and uploaded them to ShackNews.com. From there it wasn’t too long before almost every Xbox fanboy on the net found out about it, and asked the inevitable question: is it true?

Well, according to a Microsoft e-mail, it most definitely is.

Earlier this spring, HDMI already found its way onto the Xbox 360 Elite, but there was no mention at the time that the Premium console would soon sport the same feature. In an e-mailed statement, Microsoft told ShackNews that only the Premium model will have the HDMI port and that “retailers are gradually introducing HDMI-enabled Xbox 360s into the channel to meet demand.”

From the looks of it, Microsoft wanted to sneak this new update into market channels with as little fuss as possible. Probably because the Playstation 3 already had an HDMI port from the beginning, and as such this new addition to the 360 is a year late in comparison. In response to whether other changes were made, Microsoft responded that the company is busy “constantly updating the console’s more than 1700 internal components and therefore will not comment on details of specific components.”

HDMI might be all the rage, but please keep in mind that you might not see any visible improvements over your current setup. The two big draws of HDMI are improved image quality, and fewer cables; however, both of these claims might be a little exaggerated. Most will probably not notice the subtle image improvement, and that cable mess behind your TV will remain.

HDMI is capable of carrying both video and audio information over the same connection, but for the majority of setups you’ll still want multiple cables. For instance, if you have a Dolby Surround setup hooked up to a receiver, you’ll have to choice whether you want the HDMI cable to lead from the console to the TV or from the console to the receiver, and from there you’ll also have to decide how the other supplementary components will be invited into the loop. If I were to switch over to an HDMI-enable Xbox right now, I’d still need two cables to hook up both the plasma and the receiver; that would be the same number of cables I use to get the job done now.

Unless you are really keen on having a slightly better picture quality, you’ll be hard pressed to find a compelling reason to upgrade. And on another note, please keep in mind as well that the Xbox “Falcon” is slated for release this fall, and it will also feature an HDMI port on top of the new 65nm components. However, if are you planning on getting the new Premium, you can tell if it has the HDMI port by reading the spec information on the side of the box.

In short, many will be quite pleased with this addition, but if you can hold out a little longer, I’d suggest waiting for the “Falcon.”

Even though the Xbox 360 is statistically speaking the current leader in the next-gen console wars, it’s pretty far from perfect as many disappointed users will gladly tell you. From the beginning, the console has suffered from a variety of problems: some overheat and die, some scratch discs beyond repair, and all of them make you think there’s a jumbo-jet in your living room. However, there might still be hope for a better console, since Microsoft announced that their current project, code-named “Falcon,” is well on its way to deliver a completely revamped 360 to consumers.

With summer in full swing, temperatures are on the rise and so are the complaints. Over the last few months, Microsoft has had an unusually high number of complaints about its consoles sticking it to users with the now infamous “Red Ring of Death,” meaning that the console suffered one or more fatal hardware failures. Many have come to suspect that the failures are due to the consoles inability to deal with heat – a problem that has plagued the 360 since the first batch.

Earlier this month, Microsoft crunched some numbers and came to the conclusion it would be in their best interest to extend the warranty, again. However, this new extended three year warranty only applies to the consoles that have been afflicted by the ominous red ring. So, this means that if your console suffers (or has suffered) a heatstroke, you can send it back to Microsoft to have it repaired and shipped back to you; all of this, free of charge. All of this benevolence does come at a cost to Microsoft though. According to the press release that went out, the company is expecting this move to cost them an estimate $1.05 billion to $1.15 billion – for this quarter alone!

So, what’s the solution to this entire mess? Well, redesign parts of the console, of course. Microsoft wasted no time Monday evening at E3, and was quick to announce that the gaming division was already hard at work designing a cooler 360, based on a 65nm design. The goal of the “Falcon” project is to have the more robust console on store shelves by this fall. The redesign will apply to both the triple-core CPU as well as to the AMD/ATI GPU.

Updating the console with smaller, cooler parts will not only improve the airflow and heat dissipation inside the unit, but will also mean cheaper fabrication costs for Microsoft. In the long run, keeping current with the manufacturing cost curve will allow Microsoft to save tremendous amounts of money. Sony’s latest redesign of the PS 2, for example, allows the company to produce smaller, and thus cheaper, chips all the time. The current chip costs of the PS 2 is a mere 13% of what it was originally. It’s not all simply about the heat.

For Microsoft’s sake, let’s hope that the Xbox “Falcon” 360 will be able to mitigate the tremendous failure rates that have been rumored about on the Internet. The rumor mill has put the failure rate for the current console somewhere between 30 to 50 percent!

So, to sum it all up: warranty on red-ringed consoles extended to three years; a new 360 console, codenamed “Falcon” is on its way; the 90nm chips will be replaced by 65nm chips; console longevity will improve, but technical performance will stay the same…