Battlefield 1942: Desert Combat

This is the thirty-second post in our Game of the Day series.

Sometimes there are game mods that transcend their host game. Team Fortress, for example, was a mod for Half-Life which in turn was built on Quake 2's engine (or Unreal, I can't remember now). Likewise for my friends and I, Desert Combat became more popular amongst us than Battlefield 1942 which it sat on top of.

We didn't have enough players to have giant, people-controlled pitched battles, so we padded out the slots with AI-controlled companions. It must be said that the AI in BF was ridiculously stupid, but then again the entire game was more than the sum of its buggy parts. In that regard it reminds me of Daggerfall! The problem with the computer participants is their high shot accuracy which made them like sniper savants. On the one hand they couldn't navigate around a bush or drive a jeep, but you'd die from a head-shot so far away their model wasn't even a single pixel on your view.

Thus we spent a lot of time running back to contended battle points after unlikely fatalities. Additionally we ended up doing more cooperative work than competition. My peers and I would crank up the number of AI players and then try to take a map or at least survive it. This ended up becoming even more entertaining when Greg brought the Desert Combat overhaul mod to our attention.

In the spirit of the core Battlefield 1942, Desert Combat was about as buggy as something can be and still be playable. Patches for it would appear almost daily during the period we spent mining it for enjoyment. Yet it was also incredibly fun, at least with other people. New, vast maps made the original ones feel cramped. Modern vehicles enabled exhilarating speeds and dogfights opposed to the creepy crawly feeling of mid-century ancient hardware. And of course the weapons were more responsive too.

Combining idiot artificial intelligence with contemporary equipment, however, was usually hilariously terrible results. One of the bigger planes had spawn points and it always ended up being "flown" by a blank-faced moron who you'd have to kill with friendly fire to save yourself and other passengers from fiery death. Inevitably there'd be another one in the cockpit too, lined up to pilot the plane into a mountain. And of course the helicopters ... yeah.

Overall the constant, free-flowing fighting of Battlefield is what kept it fresh and fun. You could typically spawn at a fairly close point to the action and get right on getting killed. The different classes allowed for a bit of variance in your play style and then the multi-person vehicles afforded destructive joyrides combined with something of a rail shooter mechanic. While I lamented how such a terribly programmed game could be successful, I also played the crap out of it.