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ANNOUNCED: Big Freakin’ Deal 1942

It’s no secret that Battlefield 1942 is one of Beatdown’s favorite games, he plays it daily, and he even enjoyed Road to Rome despite the tiny amount of new content for the price. Beatdown often haunts the Husky and Monte Santa Croce maps. But I have to wonder about the recently announced Secret Weapons expansion pack. It adds speculative weapons like a V-shaped bomber, a grenade launcher (like grenade spammers aren’t annoying enough) a (sigh) jetpack, and a jetpack. Sounds like BF1942 is becoming a Tribes game, doesn’t it? Anyway, new maps and more stuff sounds fine, even though Beatdown vastly prefers historical realism to science fiction. What the problem is is that EA is obviously trying to turn BF1942 into The Sims.

No, don’t worry, you’re not going to have to pause in combat to pee in the Berlin map, but you will have to endure marginal expansion pack after marginal expansion pack when what you really want is a sequel. Beatdown wants BF: 1917, BF: 1972, or maybe even BF:2003 instead. It says something when the efforts of your mod community are far more interesting than what you’re putting in your expansion pack, isn’t it?

TECH: Xbox Under Fire

Apparently someone has finally come up with a way to hack an unmodified Xbox. The method used was to take advantage of the EA James Bond game 007: Agent Under Fire. CNet reports that the hacker, Xbox Habibi, accomplished this by exploiting a bug in the save/load file system. He is also apparently eligible for the $100,000 reward being offered by Lindows guru and CEO Michael Robertson.

Pity you have to buy such a crappy game to exploit this and Microsoft is probably real happy with Electronic Arts right now, but Beatdown wonders why this is so important? The Xbox is an underpowered PC at best. 700Mhz, great video card, DVD player, etc., you can build a much more powerful, and lighter weight, PC. So why would someone waste their time trying to accomplish this? … Oh yeah, $100,000 from Robertson.

SPORTS: Baseball. What year is it?

Sports games are weird, aren’t they? Not only do we have to buy a new edition every year, but also, every year, it seems like it’s the wrong year. Look at Madden this year. This year was called: Madden 2003. It was released in August 2002. “Ah, but Mr. Beatdown,” you say, to which I interrupt and say, “Please, why so formal? Call me Beatdown.” To which you reply “Thank you, Beatdown,” you clear your throat, “…it was the 2003 football season, was it not? Since the NFL season ended in early 2003 the Madden year is correct.” “Quite so,” I reply, impressed with your ingenuity. And we laugh and have a drink together….

Anyway, the point is that Football is correct. Basketball and Hockey, both of which began in 2002 but end in 2003 are also correct. But baseball…. tsk, tsk, Baseball is never correct. Who knows why but the crop of 2002 season baseball games (baseball runs from April-October of the same year) are all marked 2003. Last year’s High Heat, Triple Play, and console World Series, SlugFest, All-Star, etc., all of them are incorrectly marked as 2004 (in Midway’s SlugFest’s case it’s 20-04, but that’s because they’re idiots over there). So, if you want this year’s edition, you have to look for 2004. Fine. But this year EA Sports is bringing forth MVP Baseball (they busted Triple Play to the minors) and calling it MVP Baseball 2003. Wha? I don’t get it. Kudos to EA Sports for making an effort to get it right but when fans walk into stores to pick up a baseball game and they see MVP 2003 and High Heat 2004, which one will they buy? Luckily, they’ll buy the better game. (Watch it High Heat, MVP is good, watch out next year!)