I got on my computer tonight and got on FH2. I haven't been playing much, because work has been really busy. Working 7 days a week, ~12 hours a day isn't very much fun and most of what I do with my free time is sleep. Maybe part of what happened was my tiredness, maybe it was because of the good music I was listening to......who knows.
I sat there, looking through maps, just looking to go kill some bots with a sniper rifle or take out some tanks. I couldn't decide what to play. I just sat there, and so many memories came back. I've been playing FH2, mostly offline due to bad internet, since about July 2010. I had downloaded FH2 accidentally, along with FH, somehow. I had just gotten better internet (from dial up to something else less crappy; rural Texas doesn't have many options), so me being 16 and bored during the summer, I was downloading mods like mad. I remember going into my BF2 custom games section and seeing it, along with a myriad of other things. I clicked on it, and the game crashed. I found a fix (it was the old hi-res monitor issue) and I was off and loading up the first map I could click on....which was Alam Halfa.
I've always been fascinated with the North African theater. I'm not sure why. I've just always loved it and I probably have half the books published on it. Well, for someone used to rather mediocre WWII games like Call of Duty 2 and the like, FH2 was an amazing miracle, borne from some kind of odd gaming world where historical accuracy mattered and good gameplay came along with it. For some reason I only had North Africa maps on that version, and when I looked on the FH website, I quickly (well, slowly, considering my internet still wasn't fast) downloaded a newer version. I introduced the game to one of my best friends, and we were quickly playing on LAN very often. Most weekends we'd play. It became pretty much the only game either of us played.
In 2012 we graduated high school, I got a new girlfriend that ended up trying to separate me from my friends (that's a long, irrelevant story), and him and I stopped playing. However, FH2 remained one of the most positive things in my life, along with a few other things. Once that was over, and I was in a better place in life, him and I started playing again. It's been five years since we left high school, and seven since we started playing FH2, and we still try to play every Sunday. I'm having to skip this Sunday because of work, and I'm really wishing I didn't have to.
FH2 isn't like any other game I've played. It has that something that other games don't have. It always has, from the first time I played Alam Halfa to the round on Alam Halfa that I ended up playing tonight when I finally decided what to play. FH2 isn't just a game to me. It's an integral part of me, of my life. It's had a very real and measurable effect on my life, and it still does.
People talk on here about FH2 "dying". Yeah, it seems the team is pretty small now, and updates are infrequent. But this game has life. Mine, yours, all of ours. I'll keep coming back to it, even if development stops and the servers are gone and the forums are shut down. I'll always have a computer that can play it. Because it's not just a game, it's a piece of history, and a piece of my personal history.
So cheers to seven years of playing, and many more.