You Real Soldiers: Take a Breath for a Minute About Us FPS Gamers!
by Spawn of Shooter
I wanna take a minute to tell hard core real world combat veterans to throttle back on laying hate on FPS gamers. Here’s why — not all of us think BF3 and MW3 is “real combat.” In fact, MW3 is the furthest thing from it. You can’t assume all of us think that way any more than off-base civilians should assume all military personnel are crusty warriors or for that matter that all infantry guys and doorkickers deserve awards for valor. There are douches everywhere. I think we should keep things in perspective.
This poster appeared a while back on Gruntworks — I know, because I think Gruntworks is awesome. Go read some of the comments from people on this poster though. It’s like they believe we’re all complete morons without a clue. +Continue Reading
Battlefield 3’s second DLC. Close-Quarters, dropped a few days ago, though only to members of Battlefield 3 Premium, EA’s counter to Call of Duty Elite. At $50.00 (if you want to spend $50), you get all BF3 DLCs two weeks early and a little bit cheaper than it would cost to buy them separately. Oh, and you get to show off with a special look at me I bought premium knife when you shank people as well as 5 new challenges that give you some pretty cool looking dog tags. +Continue Reading
Battlefield 3 players can buy Close Quarters in June, a DLC pack that focuses on indoor gameplay and promises “HD Destruction.” The above trailer features the Donya Fortress gameplay, but the pack includes four new maps that emphasize tight hallways and blind corners. Battlefield executive producer Patrick Bach tells The Verge that “it’s a marriage of both old school Domination and Conquest modes. Only we’ve made this an infantry based, indoor version of Conquest. Domination usually took place on a small map so we developed Conquest style play for a Domination map.”
The Donya Fortess evokes a Middle Eastern palace, while the Ziba Towers structure looks like a drug lord’s high-rise apartment. No word yet on what the other two maps will look like.
Click through to watch the Gameplay Premiere trailer that features the Ziba Towers map.
How much realism do you like in your entertainment? For me, it’s a “you got peanut butter in my chocolate” situation. There’s a balance to be struck, a form of realistic whimsy. Take, for example, the sandbox. A child can play in the sandbox with an exact replica of a John Deere 75-D excavator (oh yeah, I looked it up), and build a moat for a wizard’s castle. He’s taking a realistic tool into an imaginative environment that allows him the freedom to do whatever he wants.
Battlefield 3 (BF3) works in much the same way. BF3 is a first-person shooter, yes, but it’s an FPS that allows you to hop into a tank, a jet, a RHIB, or an attack helicopter without even attending an operator’s course! So in that sense BF3’s realism takes a distinct nose-dive, but it does so in service of a much broader gameplay experience. Unlike MW3 (with which we are forced to compare BF3, even though trying to draw a parallel between the two is like trying to find common ground between apples and an entire Thanksgiving dinner), there’s more to the game than running and gunning through a collection of tight semi-urban environments. There’s something to be said for that form of gameplay; MW3 is fast-paced, frenetic action that can’t be topped as far as pure, adrenaline-pumping action goes, but BF3 goes much, much deeper. +Continue Reading
As you may already know, assuming you’re smart enough to read Under the Radar, we reviewed the BF 3 campaign last week. If you aren’t reading us, despite our adoxographic record of excellence then you’re as wrong as two grunts in fishnet hose.
So, Battlefield 3: Multiplayer. The verdict? Phenomenal. In fact, at the risk of eschewing sesquipedalianism and waxing unnecessarily pedantic, it’s unexpurgatedly awesome.
(Note: we’re writing this one special for some of the officers who might be reading it, if you couldn’t tell. They like big words and powerpoint slides.) Just between us knuckledraggers though, this game is bad ass. Bad. Ass. Badder Ass than that dead donkey on the Jaji Bridge that one St. Patrick’s Day. Badder ass than that towering 6’ skank who used to work the door at Big Louie’s outside Ft. Leonard Wood. Badder ass than…well, you get the point.) +Continue Reading
Okay, so…we finished campaign play over the weekend and ended the game wrung out. This game is bad ass.
Bad. Ass. Not like one of those strippers in the Pegasus Club near Ft. Polk with all the scars and needle tracks, but awesome.
Frustrating at times, but bad ass. If you’re not prepared to work your fingers into tenosynovitis battling your way through to the end, stick to the multi-player modes. We’re going to go through some of the highlights we particularly liked. It will not be a piece by piece analysis, but there may be a few spoilers. Bug out now and quit reading if that’s gonna ruin it for you. +Continue Reading
The initial response to Battlefield 3 is mostly positive, except some folks absolutely hate the single-player version. We’re not finished with our own testing here in the UTR labs, so check out these reviews until we give our definitive verdict next week. +Continue Reading
So we’re only days away from the Battlefield 3 street date and here are the game’s launch trailers to get you through the weekend. The single-player looks pretty great (above) but it’s the multiplayer action down below that looks to be the real jewel for this one. If anyone’s managed to procure a leaked copy from the darker corners of the online universe, give us an early review in the comments. +Continue Reading
Only 3 1/2 weeks until Battlefield 3 hits the street and now we have a gameplay video featuring quotes from advance reviews and Jay-Z’s “99 Problems.” We’ve also found an article over at GamersMint giving a shot-by-shot comparison of images from the Xbox and PS3 versions of the game.
Under the Radar is commentary. We don’t report the news; we offer our take on what happened.
