As I come to the end of Call of Duty, I realize that I've been playing an atrocious number of first person shooters lately. I blame this on Battlefield Vietnam, though why I picked it up in the first place is beyond me. Having almost nothing to play but Half-Life while I was overseas didn't really help me not playing them any, and then the month Whir and I spent blowing the crap out of each other in BFV when I got to MI made me realize that, for whatever reason I didn't like FPS games before, this attitude was stupid and wrong, because really, sniping pixelized NVA dudes is fun.
Or, if you're Whir, you'd note that watching me crash a jeep into a wall and go flying 50 feet in the air is more fun.
So I guess it's natural that I'd then pick up Battlefield 1942 and the xpacks. These weren't really as much fun as BFV for a whole host of reason's I've talked about before, but fortunately there is Battlegroup 42, and it is good.
We are sad that we cannot play these things at the moment.
But what I really want to do right now is to compare the various singleplayer FPS games I've played, because I never really talked a lot about any of them, and they're a lot of the reason why I've dropped off the planet since December.
So. I got Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault for my birthday. And it was real, real fun. Zoom aiming essentially didn't work, and there was a very annoying part where I had to use a craptastic AA gun to shoot down some planes, but for the most part it was sheer me-and-my-squad-hunting-Japanese-soldiers-on-jungle-islands goodness. To top it off, it was like playing a movie, if that makes sense. The level of immersion was just that good. Your squad yells stuff, there's morale, and the main menu screen has this radio thing that plays news reports and stuff that's very very cool.
Then I got Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and it's xpack Breakthrough for Xmas. What I expected out of AA was along the lines of what I got from PA, just with worse graphics. To put it shortly, no. You're alone most of the time, doing screwy secret agent missions by yourself. While we miss out on the AA gun level, we pick up a couple of sniper levels that are the height of ludicrousness. I don't understand why anybody thought that roaming around a town full of camoflauged snipers who kill you in one shot and probably see you before you see them is going to be fun. Yes, I realize things like this actually went on. No, I don't really want to play through it with useless squadmates.
Breakthrough, thankfully, was a lot more fun, except for the part where I had to guard this dude for 30 seconds against the whole German army, and all I had was 2 M1 Garand shots, 2 clips of pistol ammo, and a grenade. Since there's a whole balcony of Nazis throwing grenades at you, this ends of working not so well. Also some of the "Hold off legions of Nazis!" levels got a bit old, but overall we were happy.
Call of Duty, lastly, is pretty much what Medal of Honor wanted to be, and for once I finally got what I was after - me and my squad roving around Europe shooting Nazis for fun and skimpy combat pay. The guns manage to work zoomed, and in fact are for the most part awesome, and the missions are way way fun, if perhaps too easy for some of them. If I have a complaint, it's that the game is actually too short, and that there's an extremely ludicrous mission wherein you have to shoot down a lot of Stukas with a really craptastic AA gun while lots of Nazis try to kill you on the ground and your squadmates do random ineffectual things.
Needless to say, if I ever design a MOH-style game, there will be no AA guns, and if there are the enemy will not attack you on the ground at the same time. There may or may not be a tank level, but probably not because I am an infantryman at heart in these things.
First, however, I desire to play KOTOR II. But I can't play KOTOR II because I can't get into town and get it yet. Darth Fuzzy is angered.
Posted by Dwip at February 11, 2005 9:17 PM