Two days ago I played about 1.5 hours of multiplayer Battlefield: Bad Company 2 at an internet café with 2 friends. It brought back a large portion of the joy i had felt while playing the older games in the series, such as codename eagle, 1942, vietnam, and battlefield 2. It was more fun, better looking, more engrossing and more balanced than all of the previous games. The vehicles felt better, the guns felt better. The squad system was better and facilitated me and my 2 friends’ desire to play together…

I had noted some strange things such as not being able to find the repair or healing items for the engineer or medic classes, nor being able to restock on ammo anywhere. I convinced myself I had probably missed something. Ignoring my worries, I left the session with a sense of discovery. I felt like I had missed a great leap in gaming, and that next-gen games had something to offer. I wanted to go back and play again… I even found myself pondering if it would be worth getting the game myself.

The next day I went back for another 2 hours. At first it was even more fun than last time, but then, a creeping feeling of horror came bubbling through the cracks. Something was amiss, and I had felt it for a while. Teammates killed us for no apparent reason, calling us idiots – for as far as we knew – just playing the game. I remembered a button I had seen during level loading… unlock progress? At first I convinced myself I must have misunderstood, but then I saw it again and I had to resort to making myself not believe it – “maybe it was just some side-thing for people who care about useless achievements…” – It wasn’t.

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I’m not sure when he posted this, but Mr. Phil of Mr. Phil Games has written a really nice review of Harvest. To quote,

Oxeye has done a wonderful job and I pray that they make massive piles of money so we can see what they do next.

… and we couldn’t agree more If you know about other reviews that we may have missed out on, please let us know in the comments!

/jeb

It’s time for the first “Harvest: Massive Encounter” update. The new version is numbered 1.03, and is a non-crucial patch that fixes some errors. In other words, if you don’t have any problems with the current version, you don’t need to download this. The fix list:

• A weird crash bug before “Game Over” which occurred with the OpenGL renderer. This is one of those bugs that make me believe that there’s more to programming than bits and bytes. Somebody or something is out there to get us. Anyway, we added a redundant and “unnecessary” fix, and it seems to work…
• Removed the gamepad controller from the main game since it caused problems for some people. You can still play with a gamepad in the “easter egg” (check the forums for more info).
• On the Mac, files are now stored in your user folder instead of the system folder. This should solve some problems people reported on Leopard.

So… here’s the Mac OS X updater for registered users (2 MB). Open the dmg and run the patcher, then simply drag and drop the Harvest application on to the patcher’s window. Simple and elegant, huh? We have also updated the demo version, of course. You find it on the downloads page.

The Windows update is available here (1 MB). This patcher requires a previous installation of Harvest, simply use the same application folder when you run it. As above, the demo has been updated and is available from the downloads page.

Update: We’ve patched the patcher now Please try again
Hit the jump for more Harvest-related news…

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