Monthly Archives: March 2007

So in addition to the Nitro Family featuring a guy searching for his abducted son while carrying around his wife in some sort of seat, and this combo system where you shoot enemies into the air and shoot them again and again to get points, it also ends weird. Once you beat the final boss the credits start. However, the credits are only on the bottom 3rd of the screen. On the top of the screen you can run around a town out in the mountains with a bouquet of flowers in your hand. As you run around the enemies from the game all stand outside houses (inside fences so you can’t get to them) and wave at you. Then you find your wife and if you click the left button you give her the flowers, but if you click the right button apparently you can hit her with them. I say apparently because I gave her the flowers and I didn’t feel like trying to beat the final boss again just to try to hit her with the flowers.
Oh and did I mention that throughout the game there is a woman who appears on each level who sells you weapons and tells you that if you find 20 gold credit cards you can get a special surprise? Once you find 20 cards, she fives you the number of her hotel room. On the final level, your wife gets off your back and attempts to break into a room. While she’s doing that, you go to the weapon saleswoman’s hotel room and they play a movie full of oil wells pumping and rockets going off and moaning. Then you go back to your wife and fight the final boss.

While I’m sure there are weirder games out there, I officially pronounce Nitro Family to be the weirdest FPS I’ve ever played.

In the past I was lamenting about the fact that I didn’t have any games to play and nothing interesting seemed to be coming out soon. Now I seem to have more games than I know what to do with. They are all old, but they are still new to me. In addition to Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich, I’ve finished Tron 2.0. On the deck I’ve got Brothers in Arms and I bought Battlefield 2 and Call of Duty: Finest Hour for X-Box.

Right now though, I’m playing one of the weirdest FPS games I’ve played in a long while. That game is Nitro Family. Never heard of it? Neither had I. The reason I’m playing it is that it is by the same team that is making Huxley.

In Nitro Family you play a guy trying to rescue his son. The weird part is that you go through the game carrying your wife on your back in some kind of seat. If a bad guy gets to close she automatically uses a whip to sever their heads off. You can also hit a button and she will fly into the air and carpet bomb an area.

It used the Serious Sam engine so it looks like and kind of plays like it, only there aren’t as many bad guys at a time. However, they do still just run straight at you. They also get stuck a lot of the time so you hear footprints and have to look around to find the stuck guy if you want to kill him.

It uses a neat combo system where you have two guns at a time with the left and right mouse buttons controlling the left and right gun. If you shoot a guy into the air, you can shoot him again to get a combo which gives you points that you can use to upgrade the guns.

The level design is not that great. There are lots of places where there isn’t anything, but it looks like there should be and they just ran out of time. There are also some places where I’ve been able to get to places where htey obviously didn’t want me to go so I could walk through stuff. Unlike Serious Sam where there were secrets everywhere there aren’t really any here. Also there are lots of places where it looks like it would be fun to jump up and climb on stuff and either you can’t because they just made it too tall, or if you can get up there, there’s no point.

It is quite possibly the greatest flawed game ever.

Lately I’ve been thinking about WWII games and themes of games in general. Why are there so many WWII games? In a previous post I talked about the fact that I don’t really like them and that it felt kind of odd playing Call of Duty 2 and hearing the enemies talking German.

I think that there’s also the fact that the games whitewash over the tragedies of the war. Which got me thinking, why do so many games avoid the hard topics? Why aren’t there more games that deal with significant issues? I’m not saying that I want games to be meaningful. I don’t want games to be art. I would just like some games to try to touch on these topics.

Have there been any games about slavery? Abe’s Oddysee is the only one I can think of that dealt with it in any significant way. What about civil rights in general? If we need another war game, can we at least have one that features people who aren’t soldiers and who aren’t one man killing machines? Just one. Then I’ll go back to playing Serious Sam or Counter-Strike.

So I managed to get my paper submitted to Digra’s 2007 Conference in Japan. Hopefully I’ll get in. And then hopefully I’ll be able to afford to go!

I’m also working on editing the template on my new version of the blog. It isn’t going to look all that different, but I’m just no expert at html and css, so I have to muddle through the best I can.

I’ve also been putting in marathon sessions on Freedom Force vs The Third Reich. It shouldn’t be surprising that I’m really enjoying it. After all, I am a comic book nerd, I liked the first one, and I like City of Heroes. (On the other hand though, I thought Ghost Rider was not that good.) I’ll probably go finish beating the final boss as soon as I upload this post!