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Battlefield Bad Company 2 (Retail) Initial Impressions

Bad Company 2 main menu!

So I’ve been indulging a little guilty pleasure lately, playing Battlefield Bad Company 2, and delaying the HP Elitebook 8440p review. But rest assured, it was well worth the small compromise (plus, the review of the Elitebook 8440p will be out later this week). I’d like to take my big pair of headphones off and some time off the game to share a few impressions I’ve had so far about the game:

• The retail box is pretty
• The very FIRST map you play in single player is set in the World War 2 era. You don’t get your full set of gear and gadgets at first, destroyable elements are present along with a few explosions but not yet to the ‘full’ extent of modern day maps – think of the graphics in the WW2 map as a marriage between Call of Duty: World at War and Crysis.
• Despite the idea of the first map being set in World War 2, you still get 1) the rest of the game set in ‘present’ modern times and 2) you still get to man a machine gun mounted on the back of some Japanese truck while getting driven around by your AI teammates at full speed!
• Absolutely LOVE the vast variety of destructible elements in the game. Pretty much anything you see can be blown into shreds using explosives, or torn through using your gun!
• Optimization seems to have been done since “Beta” versions and the game now runs smoothly on many systems, including a Core 2 Duo wielding notebook. Nice! I also noticed a decent performance boost if you use a quad core system and/or graphics card supporting DX11 (like the ATI one used in the 2010 Envy 15)
• Again, if you have at least just a decent/midrange laptop, you CAN run this game well (albeit not at high settings) so don’t fret
• Multiplayer is as promising as it looked/looks in early videos around the net. Try the real deal in the retail game and it’s even more awesome (I’m gonna keep that a bit of a surprise till my “final” review of the game which I’ll be posting in the next 24 hours)

More to come in my final review of Bad Company 2 coming really soon!!!!

Just reminds me of Voodoo PC

Yesterday while going out for dinner, I came across this ornament on a wall near the restaurant (picture on the right) and almost instantly, the word “Voodoo PC” came to mind (see the screenshot taken of the Voodoo PC logo on the left, from one of the pictures posted by Rahul Sood on his blog).

And this other one I came across today totally reminded me of Call of Duty: World at War, and the reason is pretty obvious: