Bad Company 2 Demo Survival Tips
Read more about Battlefield Bad Company 2 - Prima Essential Guide Game Guide
Are you as addicted to the Battlefield Bad Company 2 demo as I am? I’ve been playing the game for nearly three months now and I still can’t get enough, squeezing in at least one hour of multiplayer every evening. But if you’re having a tough time grasping some of the new (and old) concepts, here are a few quick tips.
Tag Those Targets: You may have noticed the red/orange icons above enemy units. This is the result of your knowledgeable teammates tagging targets through the new Comms system. To tag a target, aim at an enemy unit and press the Comms button; “Q” on the PC, “Back” on the Xbox 360, or “Select” on the PS3. Tagged targets are visible to all teammates both on the HUD and minimap. This is an easy way to communicate with your entire team, plus if a teammate kills a target you tagged, you earn a 20-point Spot Assist bonus. A target remains tagged for approximately five seconds, but you can tag it again as long as you maintain line of sight.
Pass the Ammo: Hey assault guys! Would it kill you to drop an ammo box? The assault kit’s ammo box is the only source of ammo. So when playing as assault, be generous with the bullets. You’re rewarded with a Team Resupply bonus (10 points) every time a teammate retrieves ammo from an ammo box. Engineers and recon players often need more rockets and sniper rounds, so consider dropping a box at their feet to keep them firing. And for you medics, don’t be so stingy with the medkits either.
A Tank is not a Battering Ram: To all those players who drive their tanks headlong into enemy infantry: Stop it now! All it takes is 2-3 rockets to take out a tank, so keep it a safe distance from enemy infantry. Instead, use it as a stand-off weapon, blasting enemies from long range. The machine gun turret on each tank is equipped with a zoom function, making the weapon extremely accurate and deadly at extreme distances. Also, consider playing as an engineer, so you can repair your own ride.
Alt Fire Specialization: This is the only specialization available in the demo, so always equip it before spawning into the game. This perk allows drivers of tanks to fire a coaxial machine gun by holding down the alternate fire button. The UAV even benefits with a deadly machinegun of its own. But the AH-64 Apache gets an even bigger bonus with this feature. The gunner can use the secondary fire button to shoot tracer darts at vehicles while the pilot can launch Hellfire missiles, homing in on the gunner’s traced targets.
Destruction 2.0: In Bad Company 2, structures can completely collapse if they take enough damage. This is a great way to take out M-COM objectives located inside houses. In the demo, objective A at the Construction Site and objective B at the Office Site can be destroyed in this fashion. Simply target the building’s outer walls with explosive munitions until you hear creaking and moaning sounds, indicating an imminent collapse. Collapsing buildings not only destroy M-COM stations but they’ll kill any opponents inside.
For more multiplayer tips and tactics, be sure to check out our guide, releasing next month. Inside we cover every kit, weapon, vehicle, and specialization in detail, complete with stats, tactics, and unlock criteria. The guide also contains labeled maps showing the locations of all bases, objectives, control points, as well as spawn points for all vehicles and stationary weapons. So look for it on store shelves when you buy the game.
I have 300+ hours into Dragon Age: Origins, and I’m still going back for more. Not to replay the quests (I’ve done them all), not to load a new character up with fancy loot (though, admittedly, there are some cool weapons I still want to check out), not to discover a secret location in Ferelden (the unknown frontier has been colonized for me a while back). No, I miss the party scene.
Galactic Adventures has only been out for a few days and there’s already more than 1,000 community-created adventures available for download. So with so many adventures, how do you make yours stand out from the crowd? There are a few simple things you can do to increase the visibility of your adventure in the already crowded Sporepedia. Think of the Adventure Title Interface as the marketing panel; click on the blue “Name Your Adventure” button at the bottom of the screen in the Adventure Creator. Here you can write a description for your adventure, enter keyword search tags, define the genre, and assign detailed view pictures. While all of these fields are important to fill out, the detailed view pictures are critical. These four images appear on your adventure’s title card in the Sporepedia.
One of the most exciting features of the Galactic Adventures expansion is the new Adventure Creator. This allows you to create your own planetary adventures consisting of a variety of activities and goals. Even more exciting is how easy it is to share these adventures with the Spore community, allowing others to edit and tweak your adventures. But don’t worry, every time an adventure is edited, the original author retains credit within the adventure’s legacy, listing all contributors. So what does it take to create an adventure from scratch? I spent a couple of days at Maxis talking to the producers about their process. After all, why not ask the pros? They break the process down into several logical steps:
