I lately bought Battlefield – Bad Company 2 and I really dislike how they implemented mouse input control. The game doesn’t feel like the majority of the games I own, and here is the reason why:

Instead of using mouse input directly from Windows (including every feature it has on the desktop such as acceleration etc), they read out the mouse movement from the hardware instead, so they can fuck around with it. This is a really bad idea because it will make every game doing the same feel differently due to different implementations. That’s stupid. The right way would be just taking the mouse input of windows and multiplying it by a sensitivity multiplication for the game (and adding a checkbox which temporarily turns off Window’s mouse acceleration for those who need it).

This brings me to Mouse Acceleration: Many gamers like to say “disable it“, where I like to have it enabled: This allows me using a small sensitivity for precise accuracy while a fast movement maneuver gives me the ability turning around by 180° without moving the mouse 5 times over the pad. Sadly some games force acceleration off with no option to turn it back on.

Here is a small list of games which do it right:

• Half-Life 2, Left 4 Dead 1/2 and every Source Engine bases game
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
• Crysis
• Killing Floor

And these are now some of the black sheep:

	Battle Field – Bad Company 2 You can at least turn on mouse acceleration and adjust the acceleration parameters. But you can neither modify the acceleration threshold nor switch back to “Windows”-like input. So any settings you do here in order to make it feel like in other games are condemned to fail or take ages until you found the one you need.
	Unreal Tournament 3 Here you even can’t enable mouse acceleration at all. You can only try messing around with a config-file but this hasn’t revealed any settings for me yet which allowes me making it feel like e.g. Half-Life 2 (which uses Windows mouse input).

This video is basically one of the best Machinima I have ever seen yet. The story is consistent, funny and really wide range. I love to share it with you

Buhriz, a map of this mod. Picture taken from the developers homepage.

Insurgency – This is the name of a HL2 mod which is distributed over Steam using SteamWorks. It’s absolutely awesome. If you like modern warfare shooters you will like this. It is a mixture of Battle Field 2 and Call of Duty 4. But made as a mod for HL2 and as professional done as BF2 and COD4.

The objectives are easy: Capture points and kill your opponents. And capturing is the most important part which gives more moral points. There are different capture modes such as defend (once you lost a point it’s gone) or capture and recapture.

To the moral points: Every time you killed an opponent, you gain a moral point. If you capture an objective you gain 2 points. But if you do a team kill, you loose 5! If you got too less moral points, you simply run out of reinforcements. So if you got killed, you can’t respawn. As less people of your team can respawn as easier it’s getting for your opponents to win.

One of the sniper riffles of the insurgency

The maps are really well done. I already mentioned it’s as professional as BF2 or COD4: This counts for the graphics. The details are really deep and you often come to the conclusion “Is this still a Half-Life 2 mod?”.

To the gameplay: You can select two squads on both sides, and every squad has several classes. Two of every kind. My favorite class is the Sargent on US Army, because you’ll have an M4 with a really accurate scope.

This leads us to the bugs: The game is still in development. You will notice this when you select a class or team. Sometimes you select your team and class and just after this, you will get back to the teamselect-menu. This can happen several times.

The US Army is one of the most chosen team in this mod. Their weapons are really strong.

Another issue is that if you selected a class someone else selected too, he will spawn on this class first and then you will spawn. But if this class is now full, you will spawn on a random other class. This really sucks. The developers should lock a class as soon as it got selected.

And there is an issue that you sometimes don’t see the cool loading screen. It will only appear gray with the “VAC-Ban warning”.

But the most annoying issue is that the game crashes (atleast for me and Stealthrider) if you got a steamcommunity window open. Such as a steamfriends chat window. We both need to close steamfriends in order to connect to a server without crashing the game. After that, we can restart steamfriends.