SOCOM: Confrontation (PS3)

Late-'90s PC gaming revisited
10/21/2008 6:38 PM | 3 Comments | Page 2 of 3

It's notable that the game's community seems oblivious to other games in the genre. SOCOM: Confrontation players seem to have played only SOCOM for years and have no inkling that recent titles like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Frontlines: Fuel of War or even older games like Battlefield 2 are much better modern combat games. The game's numerous technical problems are glossed over in chat, as if other titles were just the same. I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but this game is on another level of busted.

Our own Kyle Orland tried to play over lunch and instead spent that hour waiting for the game to install and update. I figured this had to be overstated, but even with a very fast cable connection, it took me just as long to get to the title screen. I even had to delete a corrupted profile the game had created before the patch was applied. Once I finally got past title, I found a terribly dated interface that was barely functional. You'd think that in 2008 you could at least have a "quick-start" button of some kind. Instead, you have to slog through a massive, unsortable list of servers that only support 256 players each. Good luck getting you and your friends onto one of them together, too.

Once you make it safely onto a server, you get a choice of ranked or unranked games, but don't be fooled! You're unlikely to gain any rank -- because that's broken, too. Out of about 15 hours of playtime specifically in ranked games, the game only registered 17 minutes and two games. A handy message warns you of this potential pitfall every time you fire up the game, and it really starts to grate after you've seen it a gazillion times because you had to force shutdown of your PS3 after a lockup. Your PS3 will sometimes crap out when you quit the game, too. I've been disconnected from seemingly stable games, waited at menu screens while nothing happened, and seen all sorts of glitches in the geometry. No one seems to have found invulnerable spots in the maps yet, but it's probably only a matter of time for that too, as it's a long-running problem with SOCOM.

What's most frustrating about these issues is you simply can't troubleshoot any of them. At least with PC games, there was the hope of a fan-created patch that could get you around minor problems (or maybe it was just your PC acting up). With consoles, your only option is to get up and hit the off switch, turn the console back on, and pray the problem doesn't happen again. But Confrontation's long load times between maps, glitchy frame rate and shoddy network code make you want to turn it off for good. You eventually start to question the long-term health of the hardware itself, too. Will all this rogue code cause your PS3's hard drive to become corrupted? There's no telling how bad it can get when you're essentially paying to beta test for Sony.