Tweet
I should probably begin with an admission: I'm a little bit addicted to Battlefield 1943. It's my favourite online multiplayer game and I've been playing it fairly heavily ever since it was released as a digital download almost four years ago. Yet even I was surprised - and slightly embarrassed - to discover just how much time I've spent on it. One thousand and sixty hours. That's more than 44 days of solid play.I guess I like Battlefield 1943. I particularly like the way it presents all players with a level playing field. There's no levelling up or benefiting from upgrades only available to those who've bought a special edition from a certain retailer. The fact that there are only three main maps is another plus, as it doesn't take long to learn them inside out and that speeds up the path to domination. Above all, I love the fast, arcade-style action that plays out under brilliant Pacific skies. In every session, if not every round, something amazing and surprising happens; the sort of whoop-inducing event that would probably see me tapping the 'share' button if I was playing on PlayStation 4.
So yeah, I really like Battlefield 1943. You can imagine my Grumpy Cat expression, then, when I was recently halted by a 'Network Error' message that prevented me from logging on to play the Xbox 360 version. I wasn't the only one. It's believed the problem may have been related to a DDoS attack which interrupted Battlefield 3 play in early May, but that game was quickly fixed. Battlefield 1943, meanwhile, was busted for around a month for many players. There seemed to be no reason why some were affected and others weren't. It didn't matter which country you were in, or whether you had an EA/Origin account or not (my educated suspicion was that it affected people with the letter 'a' in the usernames). And of course, the usual cache-clearing and clock-resetting 'fixes' were valiantly tried by many.
Read more…
More...