I may have been behaving impulsively, and ignoring team efforts, but the thing I've found about DOD is that while it encourages teamplay - and truly organised teams thrive - it's aware that most people coming to it will do so individually, and is set up just so to oil the rails for these. I'll see you on the beach! I'll see you on the beach! I'll see you on the beach! Simultaneously, word of my remarkable endeavours spread over the wires (mainly because I typed 'Allie spawn gto cap othrs ffs' in a mad panic), and through a feat of Hitlerean boisterousness the others took the central point, and managed to hold it long enough to claim the square as well, thus giving us the round completely - a success that hinged entirely on my courage, quick reactions and ability to type semi-legibly under fire.ДЄs the music of success died away, we all respawned and started again. Daring to lower my weapon to sprint, I raced up a hill and took the crucial spawn control point, even managing to mow down a pair of enemy reinforcements who emerged angry and organised several seconds latter. Emerging already semi-delirious into sunlight again, blinking away the HDR effect, I took two of the Yanks entirely by surprise. Through the doorway and down some stairs I went, leaving nothing to chance by sending a smoke grenade off ahead of me (following my customary routine of bouncing it off a wall and my own head), dove outside and quickly into another nearby doorway, and followed the carpeted ventricles of the interior toward what I knew to be the throbbing heart of the Allied campaign against me.

Surprising the enemy with my unexpected guile (read: reckless behaviour), I raced past their central stronghold, even avoiding the crosshairs of a rubble-clad heavy machinegunner, and dived through the blown-off corner of a building into someone's kitchen. This is World War II! Containment is a proven failure! So I switched to assault class - which, with its machinegun-that-is-effective-even-while-moving is handily suited to suicide runs - and darted forward. I decided I'd had enough of this pansy sitting around containment nonsense. The left was a bit more solid - it housed one of our two points - but they were coming close to breaking through thanks to their control of a central hall where half the walls had been ripped away. Anybody who ventured there was sniper fodder - even if you just wanted to nip inside the tempting doorway near the top, or chuck a grenade. The right side, down the train tracks toward their spawn point, was a total no-go. I'd been getting better as the round progressed, and figuring out where we all were. Especially if you shoot them in the exposed face shortly after. Seeing helmets blown off is all part of the fun. Whoever has all five wins the round, netting lots of points. DOD works by putting you and your comrades on one side of an asymmetrical map and the enemy on the other, a bit like something out of Counter-Strike, and then having the two of you charge forth and break waves of lead across each other's faces to establish the initial balance of control thenceforth you respawn and charge back into the fray, trying to help your team control its share of the map's five capture points - big flags - and perhaps seize the others. So there I was, fighting the gritty war for the Fuhrer (I'd decided to switch allegiances because the war cries were more amusing), sneaking around a railway yard trying to get a bead on the enemy.

My stories are several and varied, but obviously I'd rather talk about the ones where I was a success rather than that one where I walked up the stairs, turned inside a doorway, instinctively shot one of my snipers in the back of the head and then bounced a grenade into my own face to celebrate. Unless you're playing it in East Croydon station, obviously, in which case it's only a matter of time.

The good thing being, of course, that nobody has to die for it. Following a tolerable pock- and occasionally spack-marked period of adjustment, Day of Defeat: Source is a delightful memory machine, rumbling along and preparing to catapult you to glorious victory or heartbreaking defeat. But, I thought to myself, perhaps a little cynically?ДЄs it turns out, he couldn't have been more right.

'Ah, you just need a couple of war stories for that,' he said, truthfully. Speaking of lovely places where shootings happen, I was in Croydon on Saturday and found myself talking to a friend from one of those paper magazine things about this here review. Ah, the ruined landscape of wartorn France.

Day of defeat source