BATTLEFIELD PLAY4FREE

Buyers of video games, and indeed software in general, have come to accept that they're not just customers. They're also unpaid beta testers. If that's true of expensive retail games, imagine the situation with 'free' online games.

Battlefield isn't truly free - it might more reasonably be described as freemium - but it's still a platform where you are guinea pig as much as you are gamer. It's worth putting up with the sometimes rather clunky game mechanics though. If only for the sheer joy of jumping into a Hummer, gunning it across a map to where the enemy team is camping, and lobbing a grenade through the window — all in a browser window.

One note: Battlefield won't run on a Mac, but it'll let you get a pretty long way in to signing up and downloading content before that gets mentioned. Most modern Macs will boot into Windows just fine, so it's not impossible to get it running, but it's worth bearing in mind.

Battlefield is by no means the slickest online FPS, but it is by far the prettiest. And if we keep on sending in the bug reports, maybe one day it'll be the best.

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