In the year 2142, two Superpowers are at war….

Wondering where I’ve been all week? Geeking out.

This week, The Hot New Computer Game of the Season was released, Battlefield 2142. And yes, I was playing it. It was not an easy road to this point. And that brings me to today’s post.

First thing, it was supposed to have been released Tuesday. And it was, if you were in Canada. We Americans had to wait until Wednesday. And nor was it as simple as walking in to your favorite retailer and picking up a copy; I had a couple on pre-order. Let’s just say I had one of the first copies and the very last copy out the door of the local Best Buy on Wednesday. By the time I arrived home Wednesday night, I was ready for action!

Or so I thought.

The box clearly stated that an 8x or better DVD drive was required. No problems, as my desktop box sports a snappy 12x drive. Unfortunately, an undocumented requirement for the installer is a 16x drive. InstallShield is apparently not smart enough to tell this is a problem; it pretends to start installing, and 5 minutes later when you realize the status bar has not moved, you check and find that no processor cycles are being used. I think InstallSheild and EA Games share the blame for this problem. One helpful soul from one of the grown-ups only gaming clans suggested a new DVD drive. Nope, not happening at 10 PM on a Wednesday night when all I want to do is play. This problem was solved by
putting the disk into a notebook computer on the other side of the room and mounting it remotely from the installation box a couple of reboots later! Kludgy, but functional.

At this point, it was time to download the patch. Yes, that’s right, brand new first-day-of-release game and there were already patches to download. Let’s just say I didn’t have any of the problems reported by so many others and leave it there.

Now, even before it was released, people were complaining that it contained Spyware. Those of you who understand how the internet works, move down to the next paragraph while I get everybody else up to speed. Simplified content follows: When you clicked on the link that sent you here, or typed my url into your browser, you were actually doing something pretty complicated. An IP (Internet Protocol) address is a number that is assigned to every computer on the internet. Most of you probably have “dynamic” IPs, which are randomly assigned by your internet service provider when you log in. Sites like mine have “static” IP addresses, which stay the same and allow people to find them. So when you told your browser to display my page, the first step was to ask a Domain Name Server what my IP was. Once your computer knew where to find me, your browser sent a request to my server to send the contents of this page to your IP address. As you can see, you cannot get any content without the server knowing what your IP is. Furthermore, many sites use something called “cookies” to keep track of you. This is what allows Amazon.com and Yahoo! and eBay to know who you are when you log in to your account. Anyway, back to the so-called spyware.

Here’s what the alleged spyware does:

2142 includes monitoring software which runs while your computer is online, and records “anonymous” information like your IP address, surfing habits (probably via cookie scans), and other “computing habits” in order to report this information back to ad companies and ad servers, which generates in-game ads.

Now, Battlefield 2142 is a mostly online game. You play head-to-head against other players, who might be anywhere. The only way the information about what these other players are doing can possibly be sent to you is if the server knows your IP address. As for the adware, already lampooned here, apparently the system might use information about where you shop online to determine what ads they should place on the in-game billboards. Of course whether or not Martha Stewart would still be a viable brand in the year 2142 is anybody’s guess. That’s not important! Of course, maybe I’m not as worked up as I should be about this because the box on whilch I play the game is strictly a gaming box. Let’s see them figure out what to advertise based on the fact that Jedi Knight 2 and Lego Designer have run on it recently!

Yesterday — the day after release for those of you counting — I encountered a different and utterly frustrating problem. I was consistently kicked off servers wihtin minutes of joining by PunkBuster, a widget that is supposed to prevent cheating in online games. Rest assured I was doing nothing wrong. After a number of attempts at fixing the problem, I googled and found a thread on EA’s site that referenced the problem. Let me save you the reading. If you are being kicked off 2142 servers by Punkbuster, download the manual update tool from EvenBalance.

By the time I got this sorted out, a new and exciting problem I couldn’t solve came up. The master server at EA — the one that keeps track of how well everyone is doing and hands out rewards accordingly — wasn’t working right. As a result, nobody was getting promotions and nobody was able to unlock new skills or weapons. Since at this point people were working on basic stuff like the ability to run more than 50 meters without getting winded, this was a big deal. Luckily, EA was on the problem and fixed things within about 18 hours.

Even with all these problems, the gaming community still rates it a nice solid B+/A-. Now if you will excuse me, I have some shooting and fragging to do.

In closing: it’s all Iraq, Iraq, and more Iraq. Would you like some extra Iraq with that?