Battlefield 1942

2026-10-17
Milling about on a Japanese air carrier with the rest of the schmucks waiting our turn to fly a plane. Jamming that E key hoping I'm the next one. A bomber spawns and I instantly pop into the backseat. Fuck! The other guy beat me. I hop out. I turn down a free ride to the island--Wake Island, my favorite map, and basically the only one I'll play--because I'm not interested in helping my team or winning. I'm a flyboy through and through and it's cockpit or eat shit.

It's a frustrating life. A lot of times you watch someone take a plane, spin up that propeller, and then hit a bit of the carrier, blowing up before the wheels leave the strip. Or they fly off the edge without enough speed and crash in the water. Or the worst one: they know how to fly but are just using the bird to get to the island quickly. You can spot 'em when a rigid low-poly man floats out the back, pops a parachute, and then the plane divebombs into the earth. Pour one out. That's another 2 minutes till the next plane spawns.

There's some real skill here and not everyone's equipped for it. Most of these dinguses are flying with mouse and keyboard. Poor souls. Me, I'm a pro. I got my dad's HOTAS joystick he uses to play Descent so I'm flying like a real ace. Catch me in a dogfight and you best say your prayers because your ass is going to be lit UP by a 10-year-old with premium Logitech hardware.

First we gotta learn to take off. Make sure the runway's clear of other planes, teammates not paying attention, and mines planted by TKing trolls (classic). Slam that throttle and keep her straight. Now we're in the air but this bad boy is a prop plane, ain't no F-16, and she ain't too quick to move or climb. Every crash you get better. Nope, that's too sharp of a turn, nope you can't recover diving at that angle unless you pull up earlier, nope that's a tree, nope that's another tree. It's like Tom Cruise in Edge of Tomorrow: each day starts the same, waiting in line to get a fighter or bomber, then you get your next shot to fuck it all up again.

My guess is most people bail at this point. They learn to not crash, to fly to the island, and to parachute out to drop in and actually do the command point capturing that leads to a W. But the real joy is in bombing. Each plane has 1 to 2 bombs on board and each one can kill infantry in a pretty wide radius or one-shot a bridge or a tank--if you're dead on. Remember how I said these planes were slow and hard to pilot? Well now imagine trying to land a hit with a bomb that slowly falls out of the bottom with whatever specific velocity your plane has at the exact moment of release. It's like playing Worms without the arc for your shot showing. Oh, and the important part, you can't fucking see below you. You could fly in third person to see your target but that's what you do if you enjoy crashing planes. That means you have to learn to line up your approach from the cockpit, eye your target, clock their velocity and where they're going, and then intuitively know the exact moment to drop your bomb. Now do all of that and imagine you're being shot at, sprinkling in some evasive maneuvers.

So when I tell you the feeling of landing a direct hit and seeing a kill--or, fuck man, multiple kills--pop up on the left side of the screen for everyone to see is a high I've never quite reached since, I think you'll believe me.

I could go on about the nostalgia of playing my first online multiplayer game, of connecting through that creaky GameSpy server tool. The joy when you finally saw another player on an empty server. The joy when you finally got into a full server and played the game as it was meant to be played with planes, tanks, and infantry all milling about. How crazy it was you could even pilot the air carriers themselves, massive mobile spawn points with planes and guns. How funny it was to have one of the first games you had to actually work with your team to win, and still have servers full of lone wolves like me inevitably losing as a result.

But I think it's better to just leave you with the image of a 10-year-old kamikaze-ing a tank because they ran out of bombs and didn't want to fly back to the carrier to fill up, a big smile on their face as they and the two people inside the tank all die in a big plume of fire. Ain't war grand?