BF1942 continues the legacy that Counter-Strike brought to the world : team-based gameplay. In BF1942, you have different classes you can play : the soldier, the medic, the engineer, the anti-tank guy and the sniper. The class you choose defines the weapons and special abilities you have. Any class can drive anything, but :

• the anti-tank guy is the only one with a bazooka
• only the engineer can repair vehicles and plant mines
• only the medic can heal wounded soldiers (well DUH!)
• only the sniper can kill from really very far

But even if you start out as one class, you can change class buy picking up the gear of a dead soldier of another class. Neat trick, but difficult to abuse since you rarely have a dead soldier of exactly the class you might need nearby. View this more as a means of reloading in case you have no more ammo.

The best example of computer AI is currently Battlefield 1942. While BF1942 is a great game, lots of fun with a good group of friends, it does not equal the Half-Life experience. Bots in BF1942 tend to bunch around at locations instead of taking part in the war on the front. They are subject to spells of blindness, meaning a good number of bots can converge on the same spot at the same time, without apparently registering the fact that there are enemies in the zone. Which means you will witness times where ten or twenty from both sides are milling around next to each other. Shoot one and all will go berserk, but a guy from one side should never allow a guy from the other side to get anywhere if there is line-of-sight between them.

Some sequels have been made, which globally have the merit of substantially enhancing the game without breaking it. Unfortunately, no amount of patching seems to have any effect on AI artillery requests - they are still useless if you play alone.

When you play on-line, you do indeed do away with most AI problems since you have human adversaries. What is devastating is that, quite often, it is not the enemy you need to be wary of, but your own so-called teammates. It never fails to enrage me when I see some prick gun down a teammate because the other guy got the plane first. What a show of sportsmanship. And since most servers do not allow direct damage from another teammate, you can't even shoot the bastard. Hey, stoopid ! If you wanna shoot the blue guys, get on the RED team. Sheesh !

There are, nonetheless, advantages in playing on the web. You can get together with a group of friends and go kick ass as a team. I bet that a real group of players applying teamwork correctly will beat the proverbial shit out of anybody in the field. There is simply no other possibility. Just picture it, while the boobs on the other side are busy killing themselves to get the effing plane, your team can just walk right in and take all the flags. Whatever is actually trying to defend will probably be killed by one of their own before you need to worry about it. And those who actually survive their own side don't have a chance on their own in the face of a well-knit group playing by the rules.

Regrettably, I have yet to see such a team in the morass that is the Internet.