MoHGoW, the dreaded beast of Acronymia strikes again! He is come, filled with wrath and the desire to reboot your stale franchise, or continue it if it doesn't suck yet! The result is a much shorter post than last week! Read on!
Medal of Honor
Call of....I mean, Medal of Honor!
- Platform: 360
- Release Date: 10/12/10 (2 months behind!)
- Achievements: 500/1000
- Playthroughs: 2 @ 20+ hours
As I mentioned in a previous entry, I played my share of Medal of Honor back in the day, when WW2 shooters were still novel and cool (and before we'd been making them longer than the actual war went on), but lost interest after the excellent Frontline. After the success of Call of Duty (which, ironically enough, was made successful by the same guys that made the really good MoH games), EA decided to resurrect this series to do battle with the CoD juggernaut by setting it during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, 2002. The campaign is based around the idea of the scalpel and the sledgehammer. As the scalpel, a Tier 1 operative (are they Delta, SEALS, CIA? Who knows! They all have beards though!), you undertake clandestine missions to assess enemy strength, eliminate High Value Targets, kick Al Qaeda in the nuts, and rescue your buddies when they screw up. As the sledgehammer, an Army Ranger, you assault Taliban positions, try not to get shot, and rescue your buddies when they screw up.
I had a few technical gripes with MoH, mainly that as pretty as it is, it still only runs at 30 frames a second. I've come to regard the sense of realism that 60 frames provides as necessary for a military shooter, and I guess CoD has spoiled me in that way. This and the fact that MoH's default control scheme is practically identical to CoD's (who can blame them, it's a great setup) most likely led to to the campaign's dismissal by many critics, predisposing them against what, after a while, I came to regard as a very solid and occasionally memorable experience. Not so much in the way of providing anything new (CoD has pretty much taken all of that in the military shooter genre) but the occasional moment in the campaign (most notably part of the Ranger campaign) made me think : I've heard this story, from friends and relatives who were/are actually in this place, fighting this very real war, and that's a feeling I haven't gotten from CoD in a long time.
That's not to say the story is a masterpiece, in fact, as strong as the narrative is on the ground, the interstitial cinematics featuring bickering between the field commander and the general in Washington derails it considerably, and the story would have been far better without it. The Tier 1 guys occasionally come off as dorks, but I'd never tell that to any of their heavily armed and heavily bearded faces.
One thing I've always really liked about the Medal of Honor games is the reverence it has always held for the veterans, and this entry is no different. I come from a military family, so solemnly acknowledging the sacrifice of those who have served our country is an easy way to get in my good graces. If you're a fan of military FPS's other than CoD, I'd definitely give this a shot.
And before you ask, No, I didn't play multiplayer on this one.
God of War: Ghost of Sparta
A well deserved se-prequel, or is it a pre-sequel?
- Platform: PSP
- Release Date: 11/2/10 (2 weeks behind! Thanks job!)
- Trophies: None!
- Playthroughs: 1 @ 8 hours (will play again in the future)
It's a tough thing for developers to share a franchise. Just look at the bad vibes between Treyarch and the late Infinity Ward. A great deal of resentment came out of the fact that IW had to share (and by share I mean give away) an engine and assets they created to another studio so the publisher could count on steady, yearly releases.
Santa Monica Studio and Ready at Dawn don't seem to have this problem, and it shows in the latest from each of these developers, the grand epic God of War 3 from SM, and the excellent Ghost of Sparta from Ready at Dawn. Chains of Olympus (RaD's previous PSP GOW) was certainly surprising in its scope, grandeur, and quality of it's execution, and Ghost of Sparta builds upon that to an unprecedented degree (the jump from God of War 1 to 2 notwithstanding). It's important to note that during my playthrough, no less than 5 times did I hear myself say, “I didn't know the PSP could do that!”
Apart than and above from it's razor sharp graphics and gameplay, which we expect from this series, the greatest achievement of Ghost of Sparta is it's story. Ghost of Sparta takes place between GoW 1 and 2, and manages to incorporate some exciting ideas from 1's extras that I had given up on seeing. Ready at Dawn gave us a great deal of insight into Kratos as a character during Chains of Olympus (some of which was actually incorporated into GoW3), but Ghost of Sparta ties up so many loose ends from the series that that alone makes it a must play. One of my biggest questions from 2 was if Kratos was made a god of Olympus, why is he still so pissed off at all the rest of them? Oh, you'll find out.
This deft handling of Kratos' fiction, as well as all of the epic scale of the God of War franchise in this HANDHELD title demand the attention of any serious gamer.
Next time! Wii Stab!
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