When DICE launched the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam expansion they also pulled the trigger on a race to unlock a hidden fifth map. The challenge was for players on each platform to perform 69 million team actions. DICE have thrown up the tally so far, and PC gamers have performed more team actions than the Xbox 360 and PS3 combined.

A team action is any action that a player takes to help out team mates, including throwing down medipacks, ammo crates, marking enemies on the area map, repairing vehicles and reviving fallen allies. So far PC gamers have amassed more than 60 million team actions, compared to 31 million on the Xbox 360 and 23 million on the Playstation 3.

The map is called Operation Hastings, and is a remixed and updated version of an old map that originally appeared in Battlefield Vietnam. The map will not unlock on each platform until that platform has reached the 69 million team action mark. It looks as though PC players will get access to the map way before the consoles do.

You can keep up with the latest stats on the race to unlock the Operation Hastings map on the Battlefield: Bad Company 2: Vietnam site. We recently made Battlefield: Bad Company 2 our choice for PC Gamer UK's best shooter of 2010.

DICE brought out the big guns this year with Battlefield: Bad Company 2

They don’t teach you proper military tactics in the army. It’s all about climbing six-foot walls and cleaning guns, and useless junk like that.

Bad Company 2 shows you the way real soldiers fight: leaping full-pelt towards windows, tucking themselves into a tiny ball, then unfurling like an umbrella made of guns on the other side. War is all about standing far away from buildings and firing endless streams of grenades that appear in mystical green packets that grow just above your arse. It’s about performing little feats of individual skill so brilliant that you stop and stare at your own fingers, believing for a second that they’ve got tiny brains of their own.

In comparison with the 64-player murderfests of Battlefield 2, Bad Company 2’s slimmed-down servers and four-man squad seem reductive. But in limiting the mental scale of the conflict and making it so easy to signpost your intentions to your squad-mates, BC2 gains a constant and tangible sense of teamwork. Unless you’re lumped with ten sniping morons, anyway.

Class action
I spent most of my time in-game with three online chums. Our four-person death squad only got to be so ruthlessly efficient because we knew our assignments. One man played combat engineer, with a Saiga autofiring shotgun and a Carl Gustav rocket launcher. We’d stick him at the front of the pack, deployed to core out buildings and drill new holes into defensible positions. Supporting him, we sent our assault class, ready with a new round of ammunition and a hyper-accurate burst-fire rifle. I followed up in the line o’death, playing medic and wielding the once ludicrously good M60 machine gun. Then, right at the tail of our snake, was our recon soldier – a dead-eye shot and a human spawn point tucked into one ghillie suit.

We were monstrous. Bad Company 2 does better than any other multiplayer shooter at engendering teamwork among strangers, but there’s almost no response to four people with a plan. A good, communicative squad in BC2 is a thing of beauty. We didn’t need the insane reflexes of a 13-year-old after too much Fanta – with liberal application of tactics and battleawareness, we surgically sliced through objectives like a hot knife through war-butter.
Behind enemy lines
Of course, we all developed severe cases of post-traumatic stress disorder along the way. Bad Company’s best vignettes are flashes of doom, sections where time slows down and you’re all too aware of the fragility of pretend life. Both main modes – Rush and Conquest – depend on players forcibly inserting themselves into enemy territory and staying there a bit too long to complete a job. These positions are fixed, so your defending opponent generally knows where you are – cue for them to drop the sky on you. Mortar strikes and rifle grenades are accompanied by more standard bullets – and thanks to DICE’s superlative sound engineering, you can hear every last bit of superheated metal as it whistles past your face.



Other shooters decorate their experience with nice audio; BC2’s sound is woven into the fabric of the game. Early on in its life, I remember standing on the second floor of a two-storey house. I’d taken up a defensive position with my squad: I had my M60 trained on the stairs, and my friend poked his shotgun over a banister at any oncoming foes, while the other two busied themselves with an M-COM station. We were inside an unbroken, impenetrable fortress, waiting for assailants. We were thinking wrong.

There was a dull thunk as the wall I had my back to disintegrated. I spun to see the white of the level’s snowcovered ground, and sprinted to a new position. Another thunk, and my friend’s body went sailing past my face and out of the gap the first explosion created. A third, and a fourth, and we were running out of solid things to put our bodies behind. Coming out of a crouch, I poked my head through a window just in time to see a rifle grenade come sailing out of a nearby bush. I shouted the location to my sniper buddy, and as another wall vanished, he lanced a shot straight through the grenadier’s skull. It went quiet for a second, the staccato explosions halted. “Yay!”, said we over Teamspeak.



Then a horrible lurching sound, a creaking that came from no gun. Myself and my surviving squadmates looked at each other – actually spun our character models and looked at each other in turn – before simultaneously deciding to launch out of the nearest hole, pulling our parachute ripcords and floating the few feet down to snowy earth. Turning around in unison, we looked back to see the house a pile of rubble. There was only one thing to do.

“Oh man, that was so awesome. Let’s do it again!”

Thanks to the Steam sales, a flood of new players have been diving into the hectic warzones of DICE's superb military multiplayer shooter, Battlefield: Bad Company 2. If you're new to the game, it's well worth checking out Pixel Enemy's excellent tutorial video, running through some of the important ways Bad Company 2 differs from other military shooters like Call of Duty: Black Ops. For many useful tips and some straightforward, no-nonsense advice, check out the video embedded below.

The tutorial contains many pearls of wisdom, from encouraging players to tag every enemy they see, to the essential technique of kit switching on the fly. You'll save yourself a lot of frustration, and be a better player for having a quick look at the video below. Once you've mastered the basics, move up another level with our guide to being a smarter soldier in Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

Logan, Dan, Evan, Josh and Andy share their holiday wish lists and exceptional gaming moments of 2010 on this end-of-the-year podcast.

Download the mp3, subscribe and call in with your exceptional moments, questions and predictions of the future, toll free: 877-404-1337 ext 724.

PC Gamer US Podcast 253- Year Of The Trackball

If I was going to get a crippling psychological condition brought on by the horror of ceaseless war, I would want it to be from Vietnam. It had all the coolest music, you see. Now, thanks to the hours I spent crouched in foxholes praying for my life in DICE's multiplayer-only expansion to  their class-based online FPS, I'm as close as I'll ever get to suffering debilitating flashbacks. In that - and many other ways - Bad Company 2: Vietnam is an unbridled success.

Vietnam's warfare is not modern. It's ragged and frantic, and despite a smaller weapon-pool than its daddy, more noisy and lethal than Bad Company 2. I found no safe spots in the jungle or in the scree of open ground. Everywhere I ran, I heard the pop and whizz of super-fast metal. When I did manage to settle into a sniper spot - in a bush defending an objective, or up on a ridge in the superlative Hill 137 map - I'd regain a few seconds of blessed silence. Silence that became the harbinger of explodey death, as a counter-sniper on the opposing team brought his binoculars to his eyes, confirmed his target, and dropped a mortar strike through my skull.



Vietnam's maps are set up for modes identical to its parent game (which you'll need to play this £10/$15 expansion). Rush and Conquest mode return as the primary game types - the former has a team of attackers try and destroy a set of objectives through a changing map; the latter is a more standard capture-and-hold positions mode. Battles are filthy. At long range, bursts of machine-gun fire rip through undergrowth, highlighting channels of fire that the sensible avoid. But most fights happen up close, both parties firing from the hip and dying fast. The game's new flamethrower is a terrifying addition: less immediately lethal than you'd expect, it's a psychological game-changer. I stood in the back of a four man squad as we moved in on an objective through a trench. We rounded a corner, sights raised, to be confronted by a six foot jet of flame attached to a skinny Vietnamese man. Immediately our meticulous plans were fucked, and I was treated to the scarring image of three men backpedalling as fast as possible while their skin charred and their characters shrieked. It was harrowing, in the best possible way.

This combat ethos is echoed in level design. Where BC2's locales were clinical and modern, Vietnam's maps are mucky, messy, and missing a leg. New map Hill 137's first set of destroyable objectives are plonked in the midst of a lush jungle, with tight architecture and a lack of sight-lines for snipers. The second stage opens out into a yawning, smoking abyss of fire and tree stumps. It looks like some war poet's vision of hell, and completely changes the map's play-style, rewarding accuracy and planning. In the space of five minutes, Vietnam asks players to rethink class loadout and strategy.



The classes themselves haven't changed much, beyond a Vietnamification: the medic now has a syringe instead of defibrillators, and the assault class has a separate grenade launcher (with potentially the most satisfying 'thwunk!' noise in gaming). There's a slight problem with the engineer at the moment, as the lack of a tracer dart and a general dearth of vehicles means he's mildly less useful than in Bad Company 2. Still, his era-specific SMGs are an accurate and fast-firing choice that is potentially better suited to close-up duels than any other kit selection. All have their place, and all kill well.

During ten hours in the jungle, I've seen enough shit to ruin my psyche for life - my immediate response is still to helicopter myself back in for another tour of duty. DICE's take on the unwinnable war is a total victory.

The Steam Christmas sale has launched, kicking off a series of deals that will throw ridiculous bargains at us every day from now until the new year. As well as the daily deals there's a selection of developer and publisher packs offering as much as 86% off entire game catalogues. Read on for more on the spectacular deals on offer.

Today's sales have the rock solid platformer, Super Meat Boy going at 75% off, Fallout 3 at 33% off, the excellent action RPG, Titan Quest at 75% off. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is also on sale at a third of its normal price.

Every day one of the new offers will be eligible for a special holiday bonus. The discount on these games will increase if you own a certain game. For example, today's special deal is on Portal. It's 75% off everyone, but if you own Half Life 2, you'll get an extra 10% off.

The huge game packs and publisher catalogue deals will be available from now until January 2nd, and offer the biggest savings. The THQ pack is currently offering 21 THQ games for the price of one, and contains gems like Company of Heroes, Stalker, Dawn of War and Dawn of War 2. The Square Enix & Eidos bundle is also another great deal at 86% off, and that includes Batman: Arkham Asylum, Deus Ex, the Hitman series, Just Cause 2 and much more.

You'll find the full list deals listed on Steam. What will you be buying?

There's only one thing better than a huge bundle of great games, and that's a free bundle of great games. You know what's even better than that? Five free bundles of great games. By stunning coincidence that's exactly the number of EA Store game bundles we have to give away today. There's more than £1700 worth of games up for grabs, so read on for a chance to get your hands on Battlefield: Bad Company 2, the Dragon Age 2 Digital Deluxe Edition, both Mass Effect games, Crysis, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit and more.

Five lucky winners will scoop a copy of each of the following games, courtesy of the EA Store.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Digital Deluxe Edition

The huge, destructible battlefields of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 play host to some of the most frantic and explosive multiplayer scraps on the PC. As well as a wide range of tanks, helicopters and attack drones, there are tons of unlockable weapons for each of the game's four classes, so you can customise your load out every time you go to war. You'll also get a copy of the recently released Vietnam expansion which adds four new maps and a collection of new weapons and vehicles to fight with.

Dead Space
Dead Space is a third person survival horror set on board a spaceship infested with aliens. The key to taking these creepy beasties out lies with Dead Space's arsenal of surgical weapons that let you clip the limbs off your foes one by one until all that's left is a wobbling torso. Disgusting? Yes. Satisfying? Even more so.

Dragon Age: Origins Digital Deluxe Edition
Whether you start out begging for scraps in the Elven slums or fighting rebellion in your castle as a human noble, in Dragon Age: Origins you're ultimately destined to become a hero of Ferelden, one of the Grey Wardens responsible for putting down the menace of the Darkspawn uprising. You'll also get Dragon Age: Awakenings, an expansion set after the events of the main adventure of the first game, and a copy of the Dragon Age: Origins Ultimate Edition which comes with all of the game's nine content packs, adding extra armour and quests to the game.

Mass Effect
If you've ever wanted to command your own spaceship and save the universe, Mass Effect will let you do exactly that. There are few better lead characters than the charismatic and occasionally violent Commander Shephard. Spend your career through the universe punching out reporters and shooting suspects, or play it cool and become the saintly saviour of the cosmos.

Mass Effect 2
Commander Shephard returns to once more take on the galaxy's greatest foes. Mass Effect 2 builds on almost every aspect of the first game, adding even more characters, more spectacular locations and a brace of satisfying new combat abilities.

Crysis

It's been out for more than three years now, but Crysis is still one of the best looking games you can buy. The sandy beaches of the game's massive island are a beautiful setting for the game's superhuman firefights. Your character's nanosuit lets you tear up your enemies with invisibility, super strength and super speed.

Crysis: Warhead
Crysis: Warhead explores the emotional range of Psycho, one of the background characters from the first game. He even sheds a tear at one point. Then he pulls himself together, leaps onto a gatling gun and mows down an alien invasion singlehandedly.

The Sims 3
The best soap opera sim in the world, The Sims 3 lets you create your own family and control every aspect of their lives. Help them find a better job, true love and happiness, or just trap them all in a windowless room and watch the fireworks. You'll also get three expansion packs. The Sims 3: World Adventures lets you take your sim adventuring abroad and hunt for treasure among famous monuments. Ambitions lets you control your sim on the job, letting them become a firefighter, private investigator, doctor and even a ghost hunter. The Sims 3: Late Night takes the game to the nightclubs, letting you take charge of your sim's big nights out.

FIFA Manager 11
Take command of your favourite football team and lead them to victory in FIFA Manager 11. You'll have to manage every aspect of your team, from their finances to player signings, to your tactics on the pitch if you want to have a chance of taking home football's finest silverware.

FIFA 11
If you'd rather be scoring goals than managing your strikers, you won't find a footballing sim better than Fifa 11. The revamped engine means even more realistic ball control than ever before, and a sublime animation system adds extra crunch to every tackle.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

In Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit it doesn't matter if you're a crook or a cop, you'll always be behind the wheel of a steaming supercar. As a cop you'll be enforcing the law at 200 miles per hour, ramming boy racers off the highways of Seacrest County. As a criminal your job is to beat your fellow racers while evading capture, earning rep and buying new cars as you go.

If you fancy entering, there are a few terms and conditions. The offer is valid in the UK on www.eastore.co.uk, and is valid for PC Download only, and that no pre-orders, points packs or time cards are included and that offer can not be redeemed in conjunction with any other offer.

The best thing about the space-borne survival horror, Dead Space is the array of ridiculous weapons you can use to cut up your alien enemies. To win, post in the comments below with a weapon capable of dicing the toughest monster. Tell us what it is, what it does, and give it a name. You must live in the UK to enter. The five entries that make us laugh the most will take home a bundle.

Come back tomorrow for another great giveaway. The gift giving will continue all the way up to Christmas day.

Winners!

JamesG

tomo123456

talon03

MrCazzah

Faceinstien

I will get in touch with the instructions on how to claim your lovely prizes. Huzzah!

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam is out now. It was released on Saturday on Steam and the EA Store, and is due to hit shelves next week. The expansion takes Battlefield: Bad Company 2's class combat and experience based weapon unlocks to the jungles of 'Nam with new maps, weapons, vehicles and '60s tunes. You'll find plenty of jungle violence and flaming helicopter death in the launch trailer, embedded below.

Our best operatives are battling it out in the undergrowth right now. We'll have a review of the expansion up soon. The game's available now on Steam and the EA store for £9.99 / $14.99. Here's the new launch trailer.