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Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30

Although I’m not fan of WWII games, this one was fairly cheap, so I bought it. I ended up liking it a bit more than other WWII games. Perhaps it was that it didn’t glamorize the war or maybe it was simply that you generally didn’t get that close to the Germans and so they weren’t humanized very much.

Unfortunately, there are also some rough spots. First off I can’t ignore the question, “Why another WWII shooter?” Like Susan Jeffords’ Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era, I suspect that they are reflective of the current political climate. The USA is in the midst of a very unpopular war so perhaps there is some attempt to recapture that feeling of the “good” war or like Faludi argues in her book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, men are attempting to negotiate a modern way of performing masculinity. I guess someone is going to have to write a dissertation about that…

So if we must have to have another WWII shooter, how about one about the experience of African Americans during the war? That would at least be different.

Another thing I noticed during this game as well as while watching movies like Saving Private Ryan is that while this is supposed to be taking place in France, with the exception of one scene in Ryan, there aren’t any French people. Where were all the French people during World War II?? I don’t know any specific details about France during the war, so maybe there were all evacuated or something, but it sure seems odd going through these cities and through buildings and not seeing a single French person.

The effect is to make the game sterile, as if there weren’t any innocent people and that everyone who died was a soldier. Specifically in WWII, with all the deaths, it is difficult to play a game like this and not think about all the atrocities that occurred.

Brothers in Arms” Road to Hill 30 is a pretty good game, but with more depth it could have been much more interesting.


Welcome to the new version

After many threats and/or promises I’ve tried to switch the main page to wordpress. It seems to work but I’ve had the old site pop up so this may not be seen by anyone!

If you do see it, let me know what you think. More important than the look should be the fact that the comments should be working. So leave a comment!

The missing link

I know I’m a bit late on this one, but in my defense the only Zelda game I ever played was Ocarina of Time. However, I can’t believe that they made Link right handed for the Wii version of the game! Miyamoto said:

Although Link is [traditionally] left-handed, at E3 we noticed people seemed to be using the right Wii controller to swing his sword. That’s why we decided to make Link right-handed.

As a lefty I find this outrageous! Of course the funny thing is not that they chose to change it because most people are right handed, but that on the message boards I checked out there was always at least one person who said something like, “For the lefties, it isn’t that hard to hold the Wiimote in your right hand.” OK, let’s assume that is true. Then why wouldn’t it be just as easy for right handed people to use the Wiimote in your left??? Funny how that doesn’t seem to get mentioned…

Lefties of the world unite!

learning what not to do while playing is important too…

The semester is over. I’ve got my grades all done. I just have to turn them into the university and then the summer will officially start

Last week I was playing Halo with someone who wasn’t familiar with playing first-person shooters. I explained to her the controls and started playing. While playing she had a hard time moving around. This is to be expected, but the reasons for this weren’t immediately obvious. She didn’t have much trouble actually moving the character. Instead, she had a hard time controlling where the character was looking. She would frequently end up looking at the ceiling or the floor, unable to see where she was supposed to be going. This is not the first time I’ve seen people who are new to FPS games on consols have this difficulty. This got me thinking.

In the past I have thought about the ways in which players have to learn what to do in order to be good at games. They have to acquire skills which are not obvious to those who think that games are mindless entertainment or killing machines. However, in this case it wasn’t so much a matter of learning what to do, but learning what not to do.

Of course we can argue that not doing something is actually doing something, but the point is that I at least had not thought that one has to learn restraint. In Halo you have to use the right stick to look left and right, but you also use it to look up and down. However, you look up and down much less than you look left and right. So you have to learn how to move the stick in one direction without accidentally moving it in another. (or move it on one axis but not the other).

Broadening it out I can see how learning when not to do something is a skill that I myself have yet to master. In online games like Counter-Strike it isn’t that I don’t know how to do something, but that I’m too impatient to learn how not to run around that corner or whatever. And by failing to learn when not to do that is at least one reason why I stink at the game. This is not an Earth shattering insight by any means, but I at least found it interesting.

A picture says a thousand words …about the status of videogame studies

I was looking up some stuff about videogames in the library yesterday and I noticed that they had The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto. Since I have talked to the editor Nathan Garrelts at a couple conferences, I thought I would go check it out. I haven’t gotten a chance to start reading it yet, but it looks pretty interesting.

Once I found it in the shelves I took a second to see what was on the shelves next to it in order to see if there were any other good books near it. This is what I saw:

If you can’t read the titles they are books about teaching kids with games, tailgating, chess, and mental puzzles. I think that says more about the status of videogame theory than any rant I could write.

Damn you Library of Congress Classification System! Damn you to Hell!!!!!

Must… Defebd… Desktop…

I’m still going to switch over to wordpress sometime in the future as soon as I get back to hacking around on it.

However, I’ve become distracted by my new addiction: Desktop Town Defense. Just going there to get the url tempts me to play it. I must resist! I must resist! But who will defend the desktop if I don’t?

It is basically kind of like the tank game I used to play in junior high where you and a friend would draw tanks on paper with a pencil and then take shots by scribbling dots on your half, folding it over and then scribbling over the back side of the paper where the dot is to transfer the graphite to the other half of the paper and hopefully on top of your friend’s tank. (I hope that makes sense)

Only in this one you lay out little automated towers and the little creeps crawl across the playing field in waves. You get points for shooting them and the more levels you go the harder they get so you have to upgrade your towers and such. I’m totally addicted…

Nitro Family may be the weirdest FPS ever

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.

Death to the Doldrums

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.

Why are games so conservative in their themes?

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.

Digg is being ruined by self-promotion and spam

This isn’t really related to gaming, but it is something that i’ve noticed most in digg’s gaming news section.

Back in the day I was a huge fan of ZDTV and then later TechTV so I’ve followed Digg pretty closely almost from the first time Kevin Rose mentioned it on the The Screen Savers.

When Digg first started it was a pretty good source of news and info. Lately, however, it seems like 99% of the stories submitted to the gaming news section are just lame asses who take a press release from Sony or Nintendo, put it on their crappy blog and submit the link to their crappy blog to digg. They don’t submit stories from anyone else, and they don’t digg or comment on anyone else’s stories. OF course, if the people on digg would take ten seconds and look to see that a story was submitted from some site they never heard of, and that site is the only one the submitter ever submits, then the quality of digg might be a little better.

I realize that self submission isn’t against the rules or or anything, but it is just lame. Do we really need fifteen submissions to some crappy blogs telling us what games are going to be on the Wii this week? Call me crazy but I think if your crappy blog was any good people would submit it for you… …which is, of course, why my blog has never been submitted to digg.

There’s a lot of good gaming news in diggs gaming section, which is why the new version of the site is going to have my digg feed in a sidebar, but even after the diggs there is still a lot of crap. Does anyone else agree with me or am I the only one?