I'll come right out an admit it... I've been sitting on my review for Battlefield 1943. Well, okay, not sitting on the review itself so much as simply sitting on the idea of writing the review. I picked up the game on launch day for Xbox LIVE. That would have been nearly two weeks ago, July 8th. I've since played it a hell of a lot. My profile online has me sitting at around a full day of time played, most of which is from the turret of a jeep. I can't help that people just LOVE running in front of my bullets.
How about a little explanation? Well, there are two reasons for my delayed writing of this review. First of all, Battlefield 1943 launched with an absurd amount of server and coding issues that made playing the game near impossible for basically everyone. I couldn't connect to a match for the first 10 hours on launch day. That nonsense repeated itself for 2 hours of the second. Then, once I could connect to a match, friends couldn't join me. We couldn't form Squads (parties) or join each other's matches. Quite simply put, the launch of Battlefield 1943 was a shit show. But the title was developed by DICE and backed by EA. The folks from DICE have an incredibly active Twitter account which they use to keep players abreast to everything concerning their project. They swore up and down that they were working round the clock to make things right, and they eventually succeeded. I can say now that I've been playing Battlefield for over a week without a single issue. So there's your first excuse; I didn't want to short-change the folks behind the game simply because of some traffic mishaps. Their title succeeded, how can you fault them for that?
My other excuse? Coral Sea. Coral Sea was a community accomplishment for both the PS3 and the 360. It was content that shipped with the game but it had to be unlocked by the community itself. Each console had to, separately, reach 43 million kills in order to snag it for the masses. That happened a few days after launch for LIVE, so I figured I'd spend some time with that map in order to complete the picture for myself. More on that later.
