Battlefield 1942

Oh, Battlefield 1942. Before we get into the ins and outs of this game lets talk about a bygone era of video games, "the LAN party." I think LAN parties are kind of like a lost forgotten part of the history of video games in a similar vein to dedicated arcades in the late '70s and early '80s. Every medium to large sized city had at least one "LAN center" in their town around the late '90s and the early 2000's and ours was called "Insomniacs." The appeal of the LAN center around this time was the fact that most people's internet was slow as shit and a dedicated LAN network of computers could have a much faster and immediate multiplayer experience over a Local Area Network (LAN). Computers had also always been ahead of consoles in terms of technology for most of both of their existence but they started to pull really far ahead at the end of the millennium due to advances in home computer processors and graphics cards. There were computer enthusiasts before this, but around this time people started to really get into the idea of pushing computers and their computational power to the limit some even overclocking them to the point that homemade liquid coolers had to be made out of pool and plumbing supplies for the first time. The point is computers got real gud and while it was sometimes debatable that a console could be better at certain things before this after this point consoles would always forever be chasing the tail of technology home computers had already had for years before. Well most people knew intuitively at the very least that computers were a superior platform for games in most ways at this point, but even people who might be interested in the jump were priced out of buying most of them because the cost of even a rudimentary home computer was still prohibitively expensive for most people. As an example, my Compaq Presario in 1997 cost around three thousand dollary-doos and it didn't include a video card or anything luxurious for that matter and it made mince meat out of almost every computer game I tried to play. So a lot of people that were interested especially younger people who didn't have a job and hence really couldn't afford these machines flocked to LAN centers to see what the difference computers offered really gave you. I think a huge factor in the death of most lan centers only a few years after this was the massive drop in the price of most home computer parts and affordable entry-level prebuilts/parts.
Well history lesson aside, at Insomniacs people always wanted to play Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat which made me sick of both "games" really quick. I preferred playing RTS's like Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and Command & Conquer: Generals which I never really cared for as a single player experience but that I thought was an excellent multiplayer game. More on both games in the future. The first night I got invited to go to Insomniacs, my friend from school told me to go there and after a few rounds of hearing "terrorists win" the owner of Insomniacs suggested we try a new game he just bought called Battlefield 1942 we opted to decline that night. After hearing another friend say it was good we tried it on my third time going there. OH MY FUCKING GOD this game was awesome, I remember a few other people there seeing me and my friend playing it and wondering what game allowed you to use tanks and planes against each other. Within the next hour and a half, most of the LAN center was playing Battlefield 1942 that night. Operation Battleaxe was the first map we played and it always remained a personal favorite after that. We were only supposed to be there until twelve but we got so into the game including the owner of the place that we ended up staying until 4 in the morning. I remember calling my very confused parents and saying we would be home soon on one of my earliest cell phones. Half the people playing Battlefield that night at Insomniacs were people around my age range in high school. We ended up becoming quick friends that always hung out together at school and almost every Friday through Sunday for about half my high school life was going to Insomniacs and playing this game. We actually formed a dedicated clan for the game and we tried doing an EA-sponsored tournament, after the first few rounds we got our asses beat hard. Other people at the same school also formed rival clans and guilds all based around some of the games at the time and the subculture surrounding Insomniacs.

Possibly funny side story here before we move on, up until going to Insomniacs I had only been on the internet at home and at a friends house and we both had AOL so I thought the extent of the Internet was what they gate you into seeing in their "browser." I thought Internet Explorer was like a rival service provider so I always deleted the icon, when I went to Insomniacs for the first time this kid opened up Internet Explorer to find a mod and my mind was blown knowing that you could do more with the internet than just what AOL wanted to believe you could do with it. I also used the arrow keys to move in CS and when my friend noticed he started laughing and told me to use the WASD instead. Our first clan was called the WASD after this and because this one kid got so pissed after losing a game of Warcraft 3 to another friend of mine that he took those four keys off the keyboard and threw them at my friend before storming out.
You know in these current reviews I'm doing I'm trying to cut into the idea of nostalgia a little bit and I really tried to ask myself with this one if we lost anything in "LAN party age" that we should miss since online gaming killed it the way consoles killed Arcades in the west? Well, you see arcades are a good point of comparison because some games you could only play there as they were made specifically with arcades in mind or the arcade experience was the best possible port of that particular game. Arcades could also offer a unique gimmick or type of input experience for certain games. Arcades could often be a showcase for certain types of technology in this regard. I argued this exact point in a post about motion controls and people comparing them to light guns. Both have users claiming that the technology is unreliable at home, but light gun technology works fine in most games that utilize it in an arcade experience, showing that the varied user experience at home doesn't negate the technologies functionality. The lack of a similar foolproof experience for motion controls shows the opposite. There is also different player psychology in mind when playing something that you absolutely know is limited by your own amount of change and games are designed to be harder and have more quarter sucking mechanics. It gives you more of a cautious and careful mindset when playing the game and knowing that your chances at playing it are truly limited. So whether or not you like arcades you can't argue that we didn't lose something with them that we can just easily get elsewhere.
By contrast, aside from the things people usually place value into in an "era" like this with their youth, past friends and a very limited lost sense of community, I can't really say you're missing much of anything by not having lived through the Lan party age. I mean it was fun for me, but there is also a bunch of drama and bad memories that go with social situations like this too. There wasn't anything particularly unique about the experience with any of the games or a type of experience you have with them aside from the inherent social one of having people around you that really makes it stand out the way arcades did by comparison. I wonder if there is a corollary to LAN parties and arcades for kids today that my old out of touch ass ain't know about in vidya?

I get to mention the Command and Conquer series a second time. Before the Battlefield series there was a little game called Command & Conquer: Renegade and it was the first game in its series to use a first person viewpoint rather than the top down perspective. It was also one of the first FPS games to have reliable vehicle controls and combat that felt as smooth as the shooting sections. Popular consensus has always been that since this game came out shortly before BF1942 that it was most likely the game play inspiration of that game and EA/Dice merely used that engine and changed the setting to World War 2 to make BF1942. EA also had the Medal of Honor series which was a more realistic take on a world war 2 FPS. That series is the spiritual predecessor to the Call of Duty games as a lot of the people who initially made that series left to form the company that would start making the first COD games a little bit before Battlefield was made which might have been a second incentive in that since almost their whole team left on a flagship title, they might have wanted to try a backup franchise in the event that they couldn't continue the Medal of Honor series. Whether or not any of this speculation is true, Battlefield 1942 was made.

The gameplay of BF1942 is pretty basic from a shooting perspective, it has all the type of weapons you would expect in a game like this and they function and use is similar to most games. It had a single player option but it was pretty useless "bot" practice that I would only suggest playing now so you can get a general idea of what the game was almost like with real people. This game was made to be multiplayer and everything about it was designed with multiplayer play in mind. Before a level starts, you would pick a "class" which were things like medic, engineer, anti-tank, assault etc. They each had weapons specific to their class for example engineers got to use mines and carbine weapons. Anti-tank specialists got heavy weapons. These classes had a lot of the obvious advantages and disadvantages you can imagine if you played any other first-person shooter.
I liked assault because I wanted to be the Audie Murphy of this shit, but every action hero needs a support group and my friend Rick loved medic because he was the supportive nice guy in the crew and he was also the first one to have a Gee FFF, go figure. This dude Santos was so good with anti-tank he could shoot planes down by calculating in his mind where the arc of the missile would hit. Basically, he was sherlocking it out there and to this day I ain't even understand how he do that shit. This motherfucker Waldo was the super nerd of the group, he was usually strategizing in an artillery vehicle. Ho Chi was the designated plane flyer and he could do literal dive bombs that looked like some shit from the movies. Look, my man, Craig Tizzle was the engineer and this dude was my main wingman when we went assaulting some places in the jungle or through them European woods. Bryan was the hyper crazy kid in the group, he, of course, was the guy we had on explosives. Pierre was the one token suave talking French guy you have to have in every World War 2 movie and Alexey was the dour no-nonsense Soviet who came to see fun and relaxation in our free loving capitalist ways. I have like fifteen other friends to describe, but I'm sure you get the point. This game rewarded particularity over generality and it got certain people to love certain roles. It also fits the general LAN party era really well since it played to the weird personalities and characters that inhabited these places. At least more so than other shitty shooters I'm sick of mentioning...
One of the biggest innovations of this game was multiplayer vehicle combat in an FPS. Others games had vehicles in them like the previously mentioned C&C: Renegade but 1942 and subsequently the rest of the series really popularized this. I've always been surprised that these titles weren't and haven't been imitated more and that EA essentially has gotten a free pass on having the only FPS that tries to have vehicular combat as a staple of their series. Maybe because COD took off really big only a few years later and then quickly after that cover based shooters with Gears of War the industry was too busy mimicking other slightly more successful games in the genre to care about this, but it still seems baffling anyway. Even the most minor of successes in this industry seem to spawn countless unnecessary imitators.
One of the things I really liked about this game especially after playing CS and DoD was that this game was very anti sniper. Long range rifles were relatively weak in this unless you land a dead center headshot, which wasn't that easy to do and planes and artillery equalized the advantage snipers usually have in a lot of other shitty shootans. I remember the first time I played this game I saw someone trying to snipe me and a friend and I went and got an artillery vehicle to kill him, it was one of the best moments ever seeing some cheesy ass sniper get their comeuppance. I wish I could go back and make a GIF of this moment that I could then convert to a higher quality WEBM that I would have playing in the background for all eternity while I laugh at this shit. If you can't understand this feeling, then you just haven't played enough games, I'm sorry.
Cheese existed in BF too and I wasn't completely against it. One of the funniest ways to cheese in this game was to play engineer on Coral Sea, parachute over the enemies carrier, land behind the planes and place mines underneath them and watch as like five people die hilarious deaths after starting the plane. I like cheese done in a creative way, seeing people do the same sniping tactic I got bored of twenty years ago in every multiplayer FPS game since the dawn of time is what bothers me. I think the above partially answers why this game wasn't as imitated in that a big appeal of the CoD games is that you can be a cheesy ass sniper who sits in a glitched area they discovered and kill hapless people who boot up the game and don't know about the current exploit of the week. People like that feeling of elitism and power, so having gameplay mechanics that equalize this might be detrimental and more trouble than they're worth in regards to playtesting and making sure every vehicle works as it should and be balanced in a gameplay sense. Am I claiming that EA is less lazy than another company for once? Let's never speak of this moment again folks.
Operation Battle Ax, Stalingrad and Coral Sea were my favorite levels. One of the things I loved about this Battlefield that most of the other games in the series never quite lived up to was the maps tried to utilize every vehicle to their fullest extent and some maps were especially tank or plane heavy. I absolutely loved the plane levels. Most of the other battlefields aside from Vietnam and 2 tend towards smaller deathmatch arena like levels that have vehicles in them but their relatively small size makes it hard to really utilize vehicles as well as they were in the first BF.
I don't think I ever liked a multiplayer FPS quite as much as I loved BF 1942 in it's prime. I remember looking at screenshots of the maps online so I could know where the vehicles and ammo/health boxes were by memory when playing later in the week. When I eventually got my own computer capable of playing computer games my senior year of High school I played this near constantly for the first half a year. Every time I hear the first Battlefield's theme I stand at attention, salute my fallen comrades as a single tear dramatically comes down my face. This is one of the greatest gaming experiences 95% of the people reading this will never have because you were too young to play this when you actually could. You can't be a veteran of every war soldier, Battlefield 1942 was fucking awesome.

Alright so it probably isn't as great as I remember, this is a game I admit having heavy nostalgia goggles for. I also won't claim expertise. I'm sure a lot of multiplayer FPS games are just as fun today and my ass ain't know it because I just got bored with the genre a long time ago and I no longer have the aforementioned friends to really enjoy this type of game. I'm just fuckin on you kids a little bit here if you have fun playing COD, Modern BF or that deck building shit, you ain't need my approval but I'll give it anyway. Go get those fucking head shots and snipe one for me. Pretend it is me, do like Franz and take me out. Benny Hungmen, "Take my life please!"

<Ironically joyous big band music from the '40s starts playing over still pictures of the boys smiling from the game.>
After the war, Rick married the first girl he ever met. He went through a few medical research jobs, but to be closer to home he became a school nurse. When helping a kid with a sprained ankle he accidentally cured aids and pharmaceutical companies killed him and his family before he could take his findings public.
That dude Santos ended the war with the most amount of confirmed hits on a plane with an unconventional weapon. He took his ability to calibrate intense arcs and landings to the world of athletics. He became the first kicker who could call exactly where his shit was going to land every time. He then died abruptly from unrelated alcoholism.
Craig left the war earlier than most to pursue a career in mathematics, he was then put on a side part of the Manhattan Project and he died from allegedly unrelated radiation poisoning. By the Manhattan Project I meant he helped make the Ninja Turtles NES game of the same name, hopefully, nobody was confused by the lack of context in my previous sentence there.
My boi Ho Chi had a gambling problem before, during and after the war. He didn't have any skills but he had a knowledge of planes that gave him a crazy idea. On November 21'st 1971 he hijacked a plane under the pseudonym D.B. Cooper because of his time in that war and the previous wars he knew a lot about planes and he had friends in commercial aviation he would talk to on a regular basis. He knew enough to know the parachute they gave him would fail, but because he was so far into the debt game he decided to jump anyway. On a fluke he landed with no complications, he lived a relatively quiet life until the FBI caught wind of where he was in the late 80's. On the run from the law he ran into Michael Jackson, he killed him and assumed his identity making up a convoluted story about how he had vitiligo to account for why he seemingly changed race and you should know where his story went from there.
No one is really sure what became of Waldo after the war...
Brian stayed in the military by doing a tour in one of the seasons of MASH our countries longest running foreign engagement yet. Aside from the never ending middle eastern wars we have been embroiled in since my teenage years that have led to literally nothing good happening. He died of auto-erotic asphyxiation.
Pierre used his charisma and charm, fucking his way to the top of a local Walt-Marts management board. He had tried to return home but his town had been blown to bits in World War 1, this silly bastard would sometimes paint his face green and talk to sock puppets of the people who used to live in his town. He later became the inspiration for Salad Fingers and Suddenly Susan. After smoking three packs of cigarettes a day for twelve years, he died in a car crash outside of Kansas City, New Jersey in 1987.
Alexey was given every possible award the Soviets could throw at him, but his inherent lust for blue jeans, Coca Cola and those American lads that made him feel himself for the first time in his life got him to flee the Soviet Union. As he was fleeing he got killed by an extremely sharp object through his ear and he was subsequently erased in pictures of him and Stalin dancing the night away in a cottage outside of St. Petersburg one night mid winter in 1939.
Me, well a few days before the big bombs dropped on Japan, I was doing a routine pass over the Pacific and another plane from the same unit had low visibility and I got friendly fire on the tail end of my plane. I cried "Swampass31 you nub piece of shit! Stop shooting me, but to no avail, he continued to shoot. My plane started to nosedive. I had a lot to think about as my plane drifted towards the water. I wondered if I made any difference in this war or if my friends and family would remember me. As my plane hit the water and I felt the icy cold Pacific chill start to creep in, I thought of all the things in life I was going to miss out on, I didn't even want to be a hero anymore, I just wanted to be back home. My plane floated there for what seemed like an eternity, I thought I saw ships on the horizon, but I realized even with my fading vision and faltering consciousness that it was just the dark outline of a growing ice sheet on my window. I could feel myself dying now and all I could think about was my... I died there without any rescue and my plane a reminder of the war still rests in the Pacific to this day. There's a moral lesson to be learned from all this and that is that this is still a better story than Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor. Dated joke for a dated game, written from a past his prime worthless fuck. Thanks for reading.