Yup, I went there. I’m not taking refuge in nuances. Unlike many critics, I’m not weaseling out of making a tough call by saying that they are both great games.

Of course they are both great games, but no one can honestly reply, “I don’t care” when asked if you should pull into Burger King or McDonald’s. (Other suitable analogies: Toscanini versus von Karajan, Red Sox versus Yankees, Ginger versus Mary Ann.)

When it comes to these global mass-market products, everyone has a favorite. And when it comes to the latest generation of hard-core first-person combat shooters, I find Bad Company 2, released recently by Electronic Arts for Windows PCs, the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, more sophisticated, more immersive, a boatload funnier and simply more interesting than Modern Warfare 2.

I think that phone ringing is Bobby Kotick, chief executive of Activision Blizzard, publisher of the Call of Duty series, calling to tell me that he’s going to eat my heart for breakfast tomorrow while he enjoys his world-class art collection. O.K., I’m just joking about the threatened ventricle roasting. But those are the sorts of passions involved in the fight between E.A. and Activision for the loyalty (and money) of the serious shooter fans who collectively spend millions of hours every day playing these games.

The Call of Duty franchise, after all, has sold more than 55 million copies and generated around $3 billion in retail sales over the past seven years. The most recent game in the series, Modern Warfare 2, was the biggest commercial hit of 2009 and has already become one of the best-selling games of all time.

John Riccitiello, the chief executive at Electronic Arts, had only one hope of cracking Modern Warfare 2’s stranglehold on today’s shooter fan: the Stockholm game studio E.A. acquired in 2006 that is known as DICE.

As recently as five years ago the Swedish company’s Battlefield series was riding high. If you were a serious online PC shooter fan in the middle of the last decade, you were certainly playing Battlefield games. But then Activision swiped the market. Moving the Call of Duty games from World War II to the modern day made the games more exciting for many players.

The Call of Duty games included a robust offline component, allowing players to progress through a scripted story surrounded by computer-controlled opponents and comrades, while the most popular Battlefield games were essentially built to be played only online against other people. And players of Call of Duty were able to build a persistent online identity, so their virtual soldier would become more capable and deadly over time; earlier Battlefield warriors would almost always begin with the same abilities.

With Bad Company 2, the Battlefield series has now matched or exceeded the Call of Duty series in each of these areas.

First, modernity. Each franchise is actually quite similar in its fictional setting. In both series you play a Western soldier confronting a menace originating from the former Soviet Union.

But Bad Company 2 allows players to use a much broader range of modern military materiel, including tanks, helicopters, Humvees and other vehicles. More important, the virtual environments in Bad Company 2 are much larger and more diverse than those in Modern Warfare 2. Multiplayer battles in Modern Warfare 2 feel like chaotic arenas with people running all over the place looking out for themselves. In Bad Company 2, teamwork and voice communication are essential; the combat environments are more interesting and feel more akin to what I imagine a modern war zone to be.

Yet the biggest leap in Bad Company 2 is in its single-player campaign. It is only six or eight hours long — comparable in length to the main story in Modern Warfare 2 — and while it is not propelled by scripted set pieces as cinematic as those in the competition, Bad Company 2’s narrative glistens. The characters in Bad Company 2 — the redneck, the hippie pilot, the geek, the weathered sergeant — are profane, quirky and usually hilarious. By contrast, the characters in Modern Warfare 2 are somber, even dour. War is obviously serious business, but the characters in Bad Company 2 seem to be having a lot more fun.

And third, DICE has now fine-tuned the persistent role-playing components of the online game, by giving players a panoply of ways to advance their characters and garner recognition from other users around the world.

One final technical note for consumers: Bad Company 2 is a game that needs to be played on a powerful PC, rather than a console, in order to be fully appreciated. I played mostly on a big rig from AMD, the chip maker, that was able to produce some of the most beautiful graphics I have seen in a shooter. Perhaps more important, the AMD machine came with an ATI Radeon HD 5870 video card that is able to support three monitors at once.

The experience of playing on three monitors, with the peripheral vision it allows, has simply been a revelation. I will continue enthusiastically to use Intel and Nvidia-equipped computers as well, but it may be impossible for me ever to return to a single-monitor setup.

As for the battle of the first-person shooters, let it rage. It is players who are reaping the benefits of this arms race between Activision and Electronic Arts. For now Bad Company 2 is on top.

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In a competitive environment, there’s no substitute for team communication. Whether you’re bombing sites on de_dust , or wiping in Molten Core because somebody didn’t realise they were the bomb, typing on the fly doesn’t cut it. So what do you do when you want to “voice” your concerns?
Welcome to a three-way fork. Well, really, it’s a three-way fork with a dark alley behind a few crates off to the side that your mother warned you about. Ahead of you are three roads: an over-populated tollway, Ventrilo; the road everybody used before, TeamSpeak; and the cool road that the edgy crowd uses because nobody else has heard of it, Mumble. Let’s start with Mumble.

Mumble
Could Mumble be any cooler? For a start, it’s open source. Add in the Mensa puzzle logo and the ability to skin the interface, and we’re talking ice cold. Thankfully it’s free of the pretension.
Mumble’s greatest asset is its simplicity. Setup is painless, as the wizard will help you configure volume and whether you want a push to talk button, and the UI makes sense in a simple but functional way. The in-game overlay in Mumble continues this theme using plain text and an avatar pic. It’s easily the best overlay of the big three because of how unobtrusive it is. You can also configure the font and colours if you so desire. However, a few games will crash or not display correctly when the overlay is enabled – for a full compatibility list check out mumble.sourceforge.net/Games.

Mumble’s audio quality performed the best of the three in our testing, thanks to its implementation of the Speex codec, one handy feature of which is positional audio. Mumble will adjust the direction and distance your teammates voices will come from in correlation with where you stand in the game. Got a couple of mates backing you up? Hopefully they’ll sound like they’re right behind you so you know they’ve got your back instead of letting you rush to your death. Or if your team splits up – a few to the left, a few to the right, while you hang back – you will be provided with instant audio clues as to where the action is. This obviously has more benefit and utility in an FPS, but MMOs also appear on the list of supported games, of which there are currently about 26. Gimmicky? Maybe. Necessary? Maybe not. Awesome? Hell-yes!

Options at first glance appear pretty basic, but hit the inconspicuous “advanced” checkbox in the bottom left corner and you can access more audio and plug-in options. Mumble’s downfall however is its server – Murmur. It’s not for the faint hearted or those not willing to delve into .ini files or plug-in apps. You’ll need to dedicate some time to setting it up. Commercial hosts will help ease the pain if you want an easy way out.

Why choose Mumble? Completely free, great quality, simple but useful client-side UI, best looking overlay, positional audioHopefully from here, things will only get better as more games are added to its compatibility list.
Score 4/5

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