My stance on Battlefield 2 making its way onto the Xbox in the same general manner as the PC version is a bit mixed. Yes, getting some more exposure for the game is a good thing, but does such an intense, customizable, and precise game really have a place in the rigid environment a console offers – the Xbox in particular? Intrigued, I took a few moments to dig into Battlefield 2: Modern Combat at E3 to see if all the fuss was really going to turn out for the best. Sure, the PC version looks utterly bad-ass, but how would a reduced console version compare to it? From what I saw during a good chunk of gameplay time, this game might be as big a hit to the Xbox markets as the PC version will. As a matter of fact, the Xbox version of the game has followed a moderately separate design path from the PC release in development, allowing the team to juice the game for its full potential on the Xbox rather than being concerned about directly scaling everything down and tweaking the hell out of everything to compensate. The game will actually support up to 24 players (quite a hefty amount for an Xbox Live title), and the maps have been designed differently to accommodate this. The game itself still relies on the same tactical class-based gameplay, but certain elements have been modified to make for a much more optimized console gaming experience. Voice chat and general communication is slightly more streamlined, base / spawn point selection is handled in a totally different way, and of course the available input binds have been scaled down to accommodate the controller in a more fluid and quicker-to-access manner (in some cases, at least). For better or for worse however, none of these modifications deteriorate the fact that the game is addictive as hell and incredibly fun to play once some teamwork action gets going. Watching other players snipe chopper pilots through their cockpits or plow through obstacles in a tank was cool enough, but when I finally sat down to play and began escorting other players and helping out with combined offensives, the game experience truly became delightful. The single map I played was a barren, war-torn urban city with plenty of bombed-out buildings and high areas to use for cover and ambush tactics, and one of the objectives in the middle of the map involved holding a control point in a narrow area on a highway overpass, with gun emplacements and sandbag bunkers covering both directions and making for some really intense offensive and defensive situations. Probably my proudest moment however involved parking a chopper on top of a building high above the action, and then using my bazooka to rain death down on enemies until I ran out of ammo – sadly, my return trip was ruined by some crack-shot jerkface in an M1 tank. The game's graphics are almost on-par with the PC version (especially in terms of animation quality and artistic detail), and framerates were also perfect on a consistent basis, making for a very playable game. I experienced no problems involving latency or control failures (though of course I'm fairly sure this was based on mostly local connections), though it'll be interesting to see how the game handles the wild, unpredictable jungles involved in the average home-user's internet environment. BF2: Modern Combat has the potential to offer a really solid team-based online experience for gamers abroad, and I definitely think that the differences between the Xbox and PC releases of this game are sufficient to make both titles able to compliment each other nicely (although BF2PC comes out long before BF2:MC does). Xbox fans can look forward to picking it up towards the end of this year.