I love Battlefield 2, I think it is one of the best games out there. I have always wanted to write about it here on The Reticule, I have probably had two or three different drafts of articles about the game hidden away here. This time is different.

I’ll admit, I will publish one of those drafts after I touch it up a bit, but after playing some more Battlefield over the past few days I want to write about the special moments I have had in the game. The jeep races around Mashtuur City, the pistol duel 20ft in the air on Sharqi Peninsual and the knife fights in the Pell of Doom in Karkand.

These events all took place with my Battlefield 2 Clan -=256=-. Back in the hey day of the game we ran a nice little server, we looked after it well and had lots of fun games working in our little squads. Once in a while though we would shut down the server for the evening and let ourselves go.

The three events I mentioned above were all born out of what really went on in the game, during that lull whilst waiting for players some of us would jump in those light-weight US jeeps and race around. On Karkand we sometimes found ourselves in the Pit of Doom at Square, knife time it would be. Alright, I’ll admit that the pistol duel was a bit contrived, but who cares?

There were several forms of the jeep races, I mentioned Mashtuur City earlier, but they could as easily take place on Fu She Pass, Dalian Plant or many other maps. The usual routine would be to take the flimsy US jeep or the proper MEC/PLA jeep, one person in, no getting out at all, though a bit of bashing into each other was allowed. To turn up the heat, and turn down the speed, we would jump into the Vodnik, MEC’s heavyweight jeep. This monster took massive amounts of punishment so bashing each other off the road was encouraged.

The pistol duel on Sharqi Peninsula was perhaps the most tense of all the games we had. It took some preperation though, both players need the exact same kit, usually the medic one. This involved a lot of messing around amongst each other to get the combatants ready to fight. They would climb that nervous climb to the girder spanning the two buildings on the Construction control point, usually one would fall off leading to the whole mess starting again. Once everything was ready the two brave souls would stand at either end of the girder, on the count of three they would turn, and simply using their pistols try to kill their rival. Falling off at this point when trying to evade the shots was not uncommon and much ridicule would be heaped upon the fool.

It was the Pit of Doom on Karkand that was the original. That little well next to Square was the perfect place for some knife action. There was limited room for manouvere yet accidentally leaving the pit led to disqualification. Two men, two knives and the pit, that was it. There is something you must note, if you thought the backstab detection could be dodgy in Team Fortress 2, you never saw the knife detection at some points in Battlefield 2’s history, it was awful. Shouts of ‘I gotcha! I sweat I got ya, I saw the knife go in and heard the noise!’ were common during these knife fights, only one man would emerge victorious from the Pit of Doom, more often than not they won because of luck not skill.

These are just three reasons that allow me to look back at Battlefield 2 and smile, they may be unique to just a small group of people but they show what you could do with the game. I expect I will put something else up soon enough about the game that I can still go back to and love.

Keep your eyes open later this week for another piece about Battlefield 2 where I discuss the game in greater depth and look at how it has influenced recent games.