Keeping Bad Company: Did you just see that?!

By: Gavinox | February 6th, 2009
Editorial | Exclusive | Feature

Sometimes in life you will find that you have seen or experienced something amazing, and nobody was there to share it.  If you’ve ever seen a shooting star whilst walking alone, or watched a bird of prey swoop down and snatch a mouse before winging away, you will know how it feels. You find yourself wanting to shout “hey! Look at this!” but nobody hears you. You are left standing alone and in awe. These things happen in games too, but now that multi-player is bringing everyone together you never need be alone again. “Did anybody just see that!” you will ask, “yep” will come the reply.

“There’s more to life than beef jerky y’know…”

This is a good thing. Some games just have that “Wow factor.” Sports games are fast becoming a conduit for the amazing. They say if you left a thousand monkeys with a thousand type-writers, they’d eventually write a Shakespearean play. Personally I think that you would be mad to find a thousand monkeys and give them typewriters. I would give them all joy-pads and multi-player games. Give enough people enough games and people will do amazing things. The law of averages says that if something is possible, it is only a matter of time before it happens.

Get the monkeys playing FIFA09 and eventually one of them will score a 40yard overhead kick. Get them on a basketball court and they’ll three-point from under their own basket. Get them on Halo and you’ll see them stickybomb someone through a grav-lift from half the map away. Give them Battlefield Bad Company and you’ll get something that just happened to me…

Ridiculous is just a matter of opinion.

Battlefield Bad Company online multi-player is awesome. The explosions are loud, the sound effects so realistic that you’ll be ducking incoming fire and the visual effects are mighty indeed. Walls blow in, glass shatters, barrels of fuel erupt into the air chased by billowing fire and craters pot-hole the road. It was whilst playing this, something happened, something I will never forget, a moment of majestic madness, utter absurdity, total hilarity and beyond the shadow of a doubt, completely amazing.

Reaching the top of a small sandy hummock I take cover in a shell hole. Hearing an enemy attack chopper closing I hunker down hoping it will pass me by. No such luck however, it starts to come to a low hover, lining up it’s rockets to blast me to pieces. I start to unload my automatic rifle, it won’t do any good but as it’s trailing black smoke already I keep firing. Ignoring my fire it jinks to the right a little…

Then I hear the faint noise of a light jeep cruising up along the road beside me, music blaring, the chopper’s next prey I presume.  Then, just as I bend over to kiss my behind good-bye the jeep veers off the road, the top-gunner blazing away it hits the hill at speed, deflects into the air and launches it self forward. Only two metres off the ground the chopper was a sitting duck and the jeep literally ploughed straight-through it.

Casually, as if nothing had happened the jeep continued on it’s merry way down the road playing rock music as debris and black smoke replaced the chopper in my crosshairs. “Did anybody just see that?!” I ask. “Yep!” comes the reply.