Remember the dot-com bubble? When every man, woman and child was investing in the future of this crazy series of tubes Al Gore dubbed the Internet? That's the era of PC gaming that Sony's SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Confrontation seems to have come from. In those halcyon days of computing, it seemed like every PC game was unfinished -- arriving with a little note regarding missing features or hungrily downloading a giant patch on day one to get you to the start screen. It made people hate PC gaming so much that many turned to consoles. Enter PlayStation 3 and this iteration of SOCOM: a game so perfectly broken and lacking in content that it might just send PS3 gamers happily scurrying back to their PCs.

Back alley beatdown.

What you get in the Confrontation box is about as much as Splash Damage and Activision gave away for free in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Confrontation is online-only and features seven maps of varying sizes, some of which have expanded terrain to support up to 32 players. A remake of a popular map from the previous SOCOM games and some all-new battlegrounds are set in North African villages, towns and war-torn urban centers. There isn't much variety in the color palette, but that keeps with the series' traditional focus on realism. Despite this, the over-the-shoulder camera provides a terribly unrealistic line of sight that allows you to see things your character cannot. Use cover properly, and you always get the drop on enemies because you can see them coming to a doorway long before they know you're on the other side. Never mind that the eyes of your commando are looking at a stone wall.

The shooting comes in at slightly above average. Whether you end up a commando or a mercenary, there is a wide variety of guns to choose from, including assault rifles, pistols, shotguns, heavy machineguns and sniper rifles. Many of the weapons are faction-specific -- an odd, artificially limiting design choice seemingly intended to better differentiate the sides. Then again, assault rifles (which crackle to life with superb audio) are the number-one weapon choice for either side. Map size dictates this unequivocally; you almost always end up competing at a range either too close for long-range rifles or too distant for shotguns. Making shotguns less appealing violates an unwritten rule of engagement, as far as I'm concerned. Nothing packs a greater visceral punch than pumping out lead with a USAS-12 autoshotty at close range, but Confrontation makes this an irresponsible weapon choice. Because it only takes one or two bullets to put you down, the higher firing rate and relatively high accuracy of an assault rifle will almost always win out.

There is a meager helping of game modes. The maps seem too big for deathmatch unless respawning is on, but elimination play is there if you just want to shoot people and forget about them. If you dig more complex objectives like planting bombs or rescuing hostages, some maps offer these game types, and are easily the high point. However, the capture point mode ("Control") feels broken because most don't understand how it works -- and those that do will capture each point within a few minutes of round start.

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.

Unless you're one of that community of SOCOM fans who doesn't know a Counter-Strike from a Battlefield, steer far clear of this game. Sure, the developers might fix it sometime in the future. The gunplay is good enough to pass a weekend or two, if it ever comes together -- but as it stands, this is a $40 ($60 with headset) game that needed at least another six months in the incubator before ending up in the public eye. To add insult to that injury, the developers didn't have the time or the impetus to give you a single-player game you could play while waiting for them to fix the online play. SOCOM: Confrontation feels like a tech demo of a launch game that had to ship on time to fill a niche in the PlayStation 3 lineup -- only it's 2008, and the system's nearly two years old.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game purchased by the reviewer.