"I have no idea what time it is."
me, several days in
One hundred matches is a lot. For any game. It is a lot more, however, in a game that hypnotizes you with the kind of aural and visual gore so often perfected these days in games and films depicting World War II. It is even more when the game in question is pared down for bare-bones multi-player madness, leading to hours and hours of continuous play without any natural stopping points, and you have no way of telling if you've played twenty matches or ninety-nine. You lost count some hours earlier. Your best educated guess is deduced from the empty Mountain Dew cans piled around you. Estimating one can for every three to five matches, you place yourself somewhere between twenty-eight and forty. Not even halfway. Arrrrrgggg. On the way to only forty, you've managed to collect every other achievement the game has to offer. But you only set out to get this one.
Tour of Duty II is so disproportionately time-consuming, compared to all the other achievements in Battlefield 1943, that it is not at all worth striving for. It is the kind of achievement that any sane person would come by accidentally. After months. I managed to get halfway there in a day.
Tour of Duty II is so disproportionately time-consuming, compared to all the other achievements in Battlefield 1943, that it is not at all worth striving for. It is the kind of achievement that any sane person would come by accidentally. After months. I managed to get halfway there in a day.
The absence of an in-game achievement monitor ala Left For Dead 2 is annoying, but you can hardly blame DICE or EA for that. They set out to make a Battlefield game (read: intense multiplayer, war shooter action) in a downloadable size. That means size restrictions. That means cutting out the fat. The menus are simple and rarely go more than two levels deep. Unit selection is boiled down to three options: Rifleman, Infantry, and Scout. There are only four maps, one of which is only playable in Air Superiority mode (more on that later). And it is otherwise uncustomizable. For this very reason, though, it is remarkable because your experience of the game is not one characterized by limitations. Rather, the opposite.
The Frostbite engine is largely responsible. Developed for 2008's Battlefield: Bad Company, the engine not only makes each map highly visible but also highly destructible. Take off in one of the USMC side's F4U Corsairs or the IJN's A6M Zeros, head for the ceiling, and bail: you will be treated with an impressive view on your way down. If you think an enemy might be hiding in a building when you roll up on a capture point with a tank, just aim your main gun at the walls and take a peek inside. The effect of this graphics engine on the gameplay is immeasurable (in a positive direction, for once). It means you have full view of the battle from a plane or aircraft carrier. It means you can use that view to put anti-aircraft guns to effective use. It means you can track troop movements from the air and make strafing runs across enemy lines to help your teammates advance. It means hiding, sniping, or camping are terribly ineffective strategies. It means distraction, flanking, and other cooperative methods of waging war are extremely effective strategies. It means the battlefield will be chaotic, in a really good way.
The problem with this chaos is that it adds a bit of a learning curve. Fortunately, I was bent on playing a hundred matches and found plenty of time to get the hang of it. But I wonder how many casual players purchased the game and shut it off after only a few rounds because they were caught by surprise a few times too many by the constant onslaught of enemy troops, enemy planes, and enemy tanks--many of them seemingly suicidal. It's tough to figure out if you don't get a little suicidal yourself. The game is won by, essentially, being the team that needs to respawn the least. The experienced players are the ones that will gladly give their own life if it means taking out two or three of the enemy or capturing an important objective. You'll often find these guys assaulting\defending the air raid objective, from which any player can launch and guide a bombing run against the opponent. The bombers can easily dispatch four or five (or more depending on how much they cluster) enemy soldiers at a time, and their vehicles, even if they try to take cover in a trench or bunker. To defend this objective for five minutes can mean the difference between getting slaughtered and doing the slaughtering, as long as the opposing team doesn't have any ace pilots roaming the skies.
Image by Colony of Gamers via FlickrThe beginners will be found either rushing headlong and unaccompanied into enemy lines or squabbling over the fighter planes parked at various spawn points. Honestly, as irritating as these people can be, I'd rather have the latter than the former. Constantly hurrying toward a certain death does your team no good and drains respawn tickets rather quickly (check just about any other review of the game for more on the respawn tickets). The people that fight over planes spend a lot of time standing around, waiting, and not dying. And this, if you give it some time you'll soon figure out, is the key to making sense of the chaos: managing death. Too morbid? Maybe, but true. If the enemy is defending the airfield on Wake Island, with full complements of infantry, cavalry, and air support, the best plan of attack is to wait a minute. Limit your own deaths and wait for them to start moving out, looking for new ground to conquer, then roll in with a jeep and make some evasive maneuvers. Drive circles around the tank just long enough to grab its attention, allowing your teammates to get close enough to hit it with their bazookas. You'll probably die in the process but your death has allowed your team to take the high ground. Your death is more than offset by those of your opponents. This is death management.
With this strategy I was doing well. In addition to the 360 Achievements I was racking up the stamps and ranks that are part of the in-game reward system. I finally found out that I could track my progress on the Battlefield 1943 website and my record reflected this sound strategy. But it also revealed just how far I was from my goal: still thirty-two matches away. That's about thirty more than my admittedly optimistic estimates. Insert sound of palm smacking forehead. Argh. Ok. No problem. This can be overcome, I thought. I can do this in one night, in fact. I'll keep playing, keep pushing forward. At this point it's not about winning; it's about the trophy. And I will have that trophy. Those 30 beautiful points appended to my gamerscore.
A week passes.
Turns out trying to play this game all night, alone in my basement, is the most effective cure for insomnia I know. I passed out, on average, midway through the fourth game. And the games I did play I spent trying to find new, fun ways to die just to speed up the progress, a strategy which ruined that respectable record I mentioned above. Oh well. It took me longer than I hoped, but I persisted. The achievement is mine.
With this strategy I was doing well. In addition to the 360 Achievements I was racking up the stamps and ranks that are part of the in-game reward system. I finally found out that I could track my progress on the Battlefield 1943 website and my record reflected this sound strategy. But it also revealed just how far I was from my goal: still thirty-two matches away. That's about thirty more than my admittedly optimistic estimates. Insert sound of palm smacking forehead. Argh. Ok. No problem. This can be overcome, I thought. I can do this in one night, in fact. I'll keep playing, keep pushing forward. At this point it's not about winning; it's about the trophy. And I will have that trophy. Those 30 beautiful points appended to my gamerscore.
A week passes.
Turns out trying to play this game all night, alone in my basement, is the most effective cure for insomnia I know. I passed out, on average, midway through the fourth game. And the games I did play I spent trying to find new, fun ways to die just to speed up the progress, a strategy which ruined that respectable record I mentioned above. Oh well. It took me longer than I hoped, but I persisted. The achievement is mine.
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