Over and over again, I’d send in commando teams and rescue them with chinooks. I’d stage mass clashes in the tiberium fields, or rescue prisoners of war from their SAM site facility to the south. It wasn’t – to use a tacky phrase – “The way it’s meant to be played”, but it was using the game world to have fun. And that’s one of the best things a game can offer you – a second way of playing.

I’ve been like it ever since, really. Following the main gaming thread is great. But the reason certain games are special is because you can use your own imagination to inject something of yourself into the game. The difference between Oblivion’s NPCs and my A-Team in Half-Life 2 is that I made the drama between my resistance fighters myself, whereas Bravil’s inhabitants are plonked there, fully-fleshed out. My team of City 17 liberators were, in part at least, my own creation.

It’s a furry, fluffy side of gaming that’s a guilty pleasure. It’s like singing into a hairbrush. Or using a pool cue as a lightsaber.

Maybe.

Found BF environments sparse, bland, designed too much for vehicle combat rather than multiple use levels (on foot etc.) COD1 – much nicer and dead good esp. in an office ïÅ

More plainly said, the stunts done in Battlefield 2, in the office, are possible because it has planes and boats and jeeps and huge maps. All that would be considered when reviewing or numerically placing the game in the world of PC gaming.

So the potential for crazy antics can’t help but be recognised when we say BATTLEFIELD 2 IS NOT QUITE AS GOOD AS YOU THINK IT IS.

It’s about three places worse than that.

Although as you say, should a game be marked higher or lower for what it lets you do, or what it doesn’t let you do? And then, is it being marked as a “game” or an “interactive enviroment”?

(Thanks for the formatting by the way)

If a “game” is something that we “play” then, even if we are not sticking to the rules of the original “game”, are we still not playing a game, or are we playing different game?

To that end, should indivudal “games” that are in the box be classed as such, or are they simply the foundation on which we make our own “games” from the world/enviroment provided on the disk?

Example: Oblivion. Sure, I could do the story, do the quest, whatever. Or I could set myself my own goal of attempting to run through as many Oblivion portals as I can wearing nothing but my dignity? I’m a still playing a game, yet it’s not one the designers hard coded into the game. And, as a result, it’s also only my own self satisfaction from “completing” my “game”.

That’s also a hell of a lot of speech marks. I’d format this thing into paragraphs, but I’ll mess it up. End of rambling.