This game is a total dismal failure, doesn't even work anymore
Now I'm not expecting this game to do the same things that newer games have done since it has come out but I enjoyed the BF2 world and the controls. It was fun and you could hop in vehicles, boats, whatever and it was good fun. Admittedly the game ran horribly with my 6600 GT and I couldn't play the game until I finally bought my GTX 260 - or could I?
BF2 is without a doubt the most broken and worthless game I've ever bought. I have countless games in my collection that I revisit from time to time to get a special fix that no other games can provide. I can still play BF1942 with no problems should I choose to. But not BF2. They came out with patch 1.5 in '09 which added those add-on packs that should have been patches in the first place. One little problem though - they don't work. This game is so antiquated and badly made it won't work right on a 64-bit system. And I'm serious when I tell you I've gotten so many older games to work just fine on here. I'm using Windows 7 64-bit Professional and I did try running BF2 in compatability mode for XP SP3 to no avail whatsoever.
First off, I couldn't install the incremental patch. It gave me an error and said it didn't install correctly. I tried it again, same deal. I tried launching the game - crash to desktop with error message. Uninstalled it and installed it again, this time restarting between EVERY step. At first I couldn't even install the 1.5 patch because it said I had a newer version so I had to edit the system registry to tell it the version was older and not newer because the game was too badly coded to install this info into the registry on its own. So I installed the 1.5 patch instead of the incremental. Almost works fine - it has a problem with some Operation Smoke Screen.zip file not matching the setup's .cab file or something and refuses to install so I tell it ignore. I go to launch - black screen, crash to desktop. I found a fix that says you should add a line of code to the end of the target on the shortcut that will allow it to launch - didn't fix it.
So I know I spent $50 on this game when it was new back in summer of '05. I can honestly tell you I got MAYBE 40 hours of gameplay out of it. In 5 years. It refuses to work right now. I'm so close to snapping the disc in half right now, it's a drink coaster. This game is totally broken, and it will not be fixed because if you look at the history of it - the game has ALWAYS been a buggy worthless game since it was released. EA doesn't care, they have Bad Company 2 and they're going to go with that rather than fix this old broken game. Few games do I have that don't work but this is one of them.
If you want your BF2 fix you can either play BF1942 and deal with the dated graphics (not so bad IMO if you use something like Forgotten Hope mod) or you can play BF:BC2. So much for playing Forgotten Hope 2 since that mod is for BF2...EA and DICE are bad companies and really care little for the end consumer. We're running out of respectable game companies, Valve is one of the few left after Activision has turned ot the dark side.