It seems Muslims the world over are picking the strangest things to get upset over. When a kid names a teddy bear Muhammad (after himself, even) the Sudanese mullahs take it as an insult to their prophet. Like their god can’t take an allusion of an allusion, or they just want something to stir the masses up and make them forget, just for a while, trifling issues like economic failure, starvation, and corrupt officials who filch whatever they can.
(Watch out; one of these extremists may take offense at my use of “allusion” twice, just from what it sounds like.)
Which is why thepeoplescube.com have prepared a list of symptoms, case studies and medical data for sufferers of “Offended Muslim Syndrome” that should, if you’re mentally healthy in any way, raise a few chuckles at the very least. If you DON’T, then you’ve bigger problems than one website putting up content that riles your selfish little heart.
(Watch out; one of these extremists may take offense at my use of “allusion” twice, just from what it sounds like.)
Which is why thepeoplescube.com have prepared a list of symptoms, case studies and medical data for sufferers of “Offended Muslim Syndrome” that should, if you’re mentally healthy in any way, raise a few chuckles at the very least. If you DON’T, then you’ve bigger problems than one website putting up content that riles your selfish little heart.
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Seriously though. If anyone from the Media Development Authority or any Singaporean sees this page and calls for it to be banned, he'd be on the same level as the damned Grinch. At least he repents and returns Christmas, which I hope can be said for you. And I take no responsibility other than the fact I thought it was funny and worth sharing with anyone, Muslim or non; it’s a sad sign of the times that I must declare I mean NO disrespect to mainstream Islam or any other faith. I’ve no patience for people who see Web content and think just because it offends THEM no one in the entire country should read it. That’s selfishness at best, and thought-policing at worst.
Satire is one thing, sedition quite another. Get them straight.
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OK, so games are now in furious competition with my exams, sleep and writing stuff like this for the 24 piddling hours a day I have. Which is why when I pick a game off the shelf and pay good, hard cash (hear that, you NETS fee-hiking clowns?) for it I expect it to be worth the price stuck on the cover.
I’m sure you know the feeling: “Money well-spent” ideally shouldn’t even enter your head, but at worst you feel like marching into the developers’ office and demanding all that hard-earned money back that you traded for software worth barely more than the DVD it comes on.
So I was slaving away on my new gaming rig (Core 2 Duo E6750, Asus Striker Extreme motherboard, 3 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT, blah blah—sorry, couldn’t resist) when I wondered just what titles I’d dump in when everything was up and running. Must-buys like Medal of Honor: Airborne, perhaps, or the genre-shaking Bioshock?
Okay, so my standards of a game are different from a professional reviewer’s, seeing that I actually paid for the right to do my review rather than the other way round So here are my opinions of the shooter duo. Bear in mind I’ll diverge a fair bit from other online reviews, so please don’t quote me this person or that, or tell me I’m some freak of nature if I don’t think this game or that is the very best and anyone who says otherwise is crazy or lying. I can only speak for myself, that’s all—and if I’m either crazy or lying, may lightning strike me.
That said, introducing the HONOUR system:
H – Honesty. Don’t you just hate it when deus ex machina solutions pop up from the writers’ collective minds and announce “We’re too lazy to think of something that makes more sense! Take it or leave it!” or when crucial information to a game’s storyline is left out till the writers can pull it out with a flourish? Or worst of all, if a game has plotholes you can drive an elephant, an SUV and a monster truck through, side-by-side?
Writing a good story AND sticking it in a player-action game instead of a book or movie isn’t easy by any standard. Game developers who know their storytelling and do it well, however little of it there might be, deserve our praise.
But what is it about game designers that they cannot seem to write proper endings?
O – Originality. There’s something to be said for brave new ideas that may or may not score with the gaming populace. (Think Assassin’s Creed, for instance.) Even if, say, a shooter consists of nothing more than chopping up one wave of baddies after another, what does the game do that hasn’t been done before? And was that even a good idea to start with?
Now many good games are decidedly un-original, preferring to stay on the safe side. That’s great—but at some point you have to applaud designers willing to take an untested new idea to sea.
N – N-joyment. What good’s the newest idea on the block if it’s a drag to play? Face it, a game can muck up its storytelling and just be a clone of the one before it, but so long as players care and love enough to invest those bursts of time, energy and nerve to enjoy what you’ve laid out, great. If I can have fun, I’m more or less sold—or at least I would be if games weren’t so freaking expensive.
But if only “the game sucked” and “I spent more time fighting the developers than the enemy” were good enough excuses and actually counted as technical problems.
O – Overhype. In the Mr. Men cartoon Mr. Dizzy Promises the Moon, the fat, absent-minded brown um… blob with limbs tells (human) children he will get the moon from the sky for them. Of course, he fails… and the other characters have to cut out a cardboard moon and trick him into thinking it’s the real one.
Guess what, developers—we’re smarter than those kids in the cartoon. The more expectation you build up, the more you set yourself up for a fall. It’s like which seat Jesus said you should take at a function. Would you rather be told “Sit over there at my feet” or “Friend, move up to a higher place”?
U – User-friendliness. Because we only have a limited amount of memory space and dexterity. When the control scheme requires way too much finger contortion and examination of diagrams and charts and whatnot that bloody make me feel like I’m back in school… that’s a big ouch. (A good control scheme in a hardcore flight sim, and I can forgive the back-to-school part. If and when I decide to pick one up.)
R – Revisitability. Whether it’s the Whack da Ratz mini-game in Sam and Max: The Mole, The Mob and the Meatball or fighting for Guadalcanal’s Henderson Field in Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault, the sentiment is the same: Max’s cry of “Let’s do it again and again!”
Bang for your buck, multiple times over. If a game has this intangible charm, thanks. You’ve just extended the pleasure of this normally-grumpy cynic.
That said, on to Airborne, a.k.a. The Subject Of My Narrative Studies Term Paper.
MEDAL OF HONOR: AIRBORNE
Nazis? Thompsons? M1 Garands? Shooting Thompsons and M1 Garands at Nazis? Yawn. Been there, done that. At eight years old, the Medal of Honor franchise is showing its age. So Airborne, its latest progeny, needs something to differentiate it from the glut of WW2 shooters and save it from just being a by-the-numbers Nazi kill-fest. So you’re a paratrooper. And what do paratroopers do?
They parachute. Parachutes are steerable. Bingo! someone says. Why don’t we do a game where the player drops onto the battlefield and he can literally land anywhere he wishes?
Of course, real-life paratroopers didn’t have that luxury; drop zones were littered with hazards like machine-gun nests, trees where your ‘chute could get caught and leave you at the mercy of Krauts patrolling below, and flooded canals you could (and often did) drown in. And this is where Airborne’s oddly-twisted sense of realism comes into play.
You see, Airborne isn’t a hardcore squad shooter like Brothers in Arms, nor an arcadish romp through tons and tons of Germans like the Call of Duty games. I’ve really no idea what to call a game with great and realistic-sounding weapons and breathtaking jump sequences, in the same package as invulnerability, weapon upgrades that spawn in mid-air, and guns that magically prop themselves right-way up as they fall from the cold, dead hands of their late owners. I suppose Airborne’s biggest problem is that in its attempt to cater to as many different players as possible it strengthens the gameplay with one hand and weakens it with the other.
Come on, EA! Would it kill you to write a story and characters like the Pacific Assault team did? I don’t know who was behind the mission-oriented structure of the game narrative, but apart from the blank-slate player character PFC Boyd Travers (who, for all the game’s character development, could be named Major Aladdin Muckraker the Seventh) there is ABSOLUTELY NO characterization to be found. It doesn’t help that Airborne takes what made the Medal of Honor series so historically accurate and throws it right out the window.
No historical figures. No wartime footage. No heroic Medal of Honor-worthy feats you actually had to read up to appreciate (for an example, see the level where you defend Guadalcanal’s Henderson Field with anti-aircraft guns alongside Lt. Colonel Merritt Edson in Pacific Assault.)
D-Day’s Operation Neptune wraps in just 20 minutes of game-time, Market Garden in 30. Now I don’t know about time-dilation and don’t think it was possible even in the Nazis’ most ambitious plans, but the historical record shows these battles took much, much longer than that.
And I really can’t think of anything nice to say about the game’s “affordance” AI system. Put simply, this means characters (I use ‘character’ as in non-player-character, not in the narrative sense of human-like entities in story) will seek the best place to take cover depending on player position and how the opposite side is advancing or retreating. Sounds good on paper, but clichéd as it sounds, the system in practice seems to fall apart.
For one thing, I think it’s a safe bet no paratrooper unit in real life has fought or will ever fight like this—absolutely no attempt has been made to model actual infantry tactics or adjust it in any way given changing circumstances. I was more than a little surprised when I landed on a church steeple in Njimegen during the Market Garden mission, pulled out my Springfield sniper rifle and proceeded to snipe one enemy—only to have another prop himself right where his comrade had fallen a few seconds previous.
One more thing. I’ve seen Allied paratroopers and Nazi soldiers stand ten metres apart, and instead of firing they mutually agree to a melee joust and rush at each other. Usually this results in a quick death for one of the participants when the loser could just have shot his opponent dead. How this slipped past the QA team I’ve no idea.
But… but… in spite of all its flaws and design gaffes too numerous to list here, Airborne is actually fun, immensely replayable and, in my opinion, the most worth-it game I’ve played recently (except for Crysis, which I haven’t got yet and I think is cheaper and better). I’ve no idea why. Fun is just what Airborne is.
I’d just hate to see EA making another title like this. One mindless kill-fest is enough for me; now it’s out of the way, I hope they go back to making games that actually make you think, feel and, just once in a while, cry.
You know… like Men of Valor.
(Ironically, the developers of MoV are none other than MoH: Allied Assault developers 2015. And some of its staff left to form Call of Duty creators Infinity Ward. Small world.)
H – Gas-mask, chain-gun-wielding Nazis who need whole magazines of Thompson ammo to bring down. Stupid.
Dumb, supposedly “next-generation” AI. Stupider.
Complete jettisoning of historical accuracy. Stupidest of all.
(Honesty rating: 2/10. At least it stays consistent.)
I’m sure you know the feeling: “Money well-spent” ideally shouldn’t even enter your head, but at worst you feel like marching into the developers’ office and demanding all that hard-earned money back that you traded for software worth barely more than the DVD it comes on.
So I was slaving away on my new gaming rig (Core 2 Duo E6750, Asus Striker Extreme motherboard, 3 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT, blah blah—sorry, couldn’t resist) when I wondered just what titles I’d dump in when everything was up and running. Must-buys like Medal of Honor: Airborne, perhaps, or the genre-shaking Bioshock?
Okay, so my standards of a game are different from a professional reviewer’s, seeing that I actually paid for the right to do my review rather than the other way round
That said, introducing the HONOUR system:
H – Honesty. Don’t you just hate it when deus ex machina solutions pop up from the writers’ collective minds and announce “We’re too lazy to think of something that makes more sense! Take it or leave it!” or when crucial information to a game’s storyline is left out till the writers can pull it out with a flourish? Or worst of all, if a game has plotholes you can drive an elephant, an SUV and a monster truck through, side-by-side?
Writing a good story AND sticking it in a player-action game instead of a book or movie isn’t easy by any standard. Game developers who know their storytelling and do it well, however little of it there might be, deserve our praise.
But what is it about game designers that they cannot seem to write proper endings?
O – Originality. There’s something to be said for brave new ideas that may or may not score with the gaming populace. (Think Assassin’s Creed, for instance.) Even if, say, a shooter consists of nothing more than chopping up one wave of baddies after another, what does the game do that hasn’t been done before? And was that even a good idea to start with?
Now many good games are decidedly un-original, preferring to stay on the safe side. That’s great—but at some point you have to applaud designers willing to take an untested new idea to sea.
N – N-joyment. What good’s the newest idea on the block if it’s a drag to play? Face it, a game can muck up its storytelling and just be a clone of the one before it, but so long as players care and love enough to invest those bursts of time, energy and nerve to enjoy what you’ve laid out, great. If I can have fun, I’m more or less sold—or at least I would be if games weren’t so freaking expensive.
But if only “the game sucked” and “I spent more time fighting the developers than the enemy” were good enough excuses and actually counted as technical problems.
O – Overhype. In the Mr. Men cartoon Mr. Dizzy Promises the Moon, the fat, absent-minded brown um… blob with limbs tells (human) children he will get the moon from the sky for them. Of course, he fails… and the other characters have to cut out a cardboard moon and trick him into thinking it’s the real one.
Guess what, developers—we’re smarter than those kids in the cartoon. The more expectation you build up, the more you set yourself up for a fall. It’s like which seat Jesus said you should take at a function. Would you rather be told “Sit over there at my feet” or “Friend, move up to a higher place”?
U – User-friendliness. Because we only have a limited amount of memory space and dexterity. When the control scheme requires way too much finger contortion and examination of diagrams and charts and whatnot that bloody make me feel like I’m back in school… that’s a big ouch. (A good control scheme in a hardcore flight sim, and I can forgive the back-to-school part. If and when I decide to pick one up.)
R – Revisitability. Whether it’s the Whack da Ratz mini-game in Sam and Max: The Mole, The Mob and the Meatball or fighting for Guadalcanal’s Henderson Field in Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault, the sentiment is the same: Max’s cry of “Let’s do it again and again!”
Bang for your buck, multiple times over. If a game has this intangible charm, thanks. You’ve just extended the pleasure of this normally-grumpy cynic.
That said, on to Airborne, a.k.a. The Subject Of My Narrative Studies Term Paper.
MEDAL OF HONOR: AIRBORNE
Nazis? Thompsons? M1 Garands? Shooting Thompsons and M1 Garands at Nazis? Yawn. Been there, done that. At eight years old, the Medal of Honor franchise is showing its age. So Airborne, its latest progeny, needs something to differentiate it from the glut of WW2 shooters and save it from just being a by-the-numbers Nazi kill-fest. So you’re a paratrooper. And what do paratroopers do?
They parachute. Parachutes are steerable. Bingo! someone says. Why don’t we do a game where the player drops onto the battlefield and he can literally land anywhere he wishes?
Of course, real-life paratroopers didn’t have that luxury; drop zones were littered with hazards like machine-gun nests, trees where your ‘chute could get caught and leave you at the mercy of Krauts patrolling below, and flooded canals you could (and often did) drown in. And this is where Airborne’s oddly-twisted sense of realism comes into play.
You see, Airborne isn’t a hardcore squad shooter like Brothers in Arms, nor an arcadish romp through tons and tons of Germans like the Call of Duty games. I’ve really no idea what to call a game with great and realistic-sounding weapons and breathtaking jump sequences, in the same package as invulnerability, weapon upgrades that spawn in mid-air, and guns that magically prop themselves right-way up as they fall from the cold, dead hands of their late owners. I suppose Airborne’s biggest problem is that in its attempt to cater to as many different players as possible it strengthens the gameplay with one hand and weakens it with the other.
Come on, EA! Would it kill you to write a story and characters like the Pacific Assault team did? I don’t know who was behind the mission-oriented structure of the game narrative, but apart from the blank-slate player character PFC Boyd Travers (who, for all the game’s character development, could be named Major Aladdin Muckraker the Seventh) there is ABSOLUTELY NO characterization to be found. It doesn’t help that Airborne takes what made the Medal of Honor series so historically accurate and throws it right out the window.
No historical figures. No wartime footage. No heroic Medal of Honor-worthy feats you actually had to read up to appreciate (for an example, see the level where you defend Guadalcanal’s Henderson Field with anti-aircraft guns alongside Lt. Colonel Merritt Edson in Pacific Assault.)
D-Day’s Operation Neptune wraps in just 20 minutes of game-time, Market Garden in 30. Now I don’t know about time-dilation and don’t think it was possible even in the Nazis’ most ambitious plans, but the historical record shows these battles took much, much longer than that.
And I really can’t think of anything nice to say about the game’s “affordance” AI system. Put simply, this means characters (I use ‘character’ as in non-player-character, not in the narrative sense of human-like entities in story) will seek the best place to take cover depending on player position and how the opposite side is advancing or retreating. Sounds good on paper, but clichéd as it sounds, the system in practice seems to fall apart.
For one thing, I think it’s a safe bet no paratrooper unit in real life has fought or will ever fight like this—absolutely no attempt has been made to model actual infantry tactics or adjust it in any way given changing circumstances. I was more than a little surprised when I landed on a church steeple in Njimegen during the Market Garden mission, pulled out my Springfield sniper rifle and proceeded to snipe one enemy—only to have another prop himself right where his comrade had fallen a few seconds previous.
One more thing. I’ve seen Allied paratroopers and Nazi soldiers stand ten metres apart, and instead of firing they mutually agree to a melee joust and rush at each other. Usually this results in a quick death for one of the participants when the loser could just have shot his opponent dead. How this slipped past the QA team I’ve no idea.
But… but… in spite of all its flaws and design gaffes too numerous to list here, Airborne is actually fun, immensely replayable and, in my opinion, the most worth-it game I’ve played recently (except for Crysis, which I haven’t got yet and I think is cheaper and better). I’ve no idea why. Fun is just what Airborne is.
I’d just hate to see EA making another title like this. One mindless kill-fest is enough for me; now it’s out of the way, I hope they go back to making games that actually make you think, feel and, just once in a while, cry.
You know… like Men of Valor.
(Ironically, the developers of MoV are none other than MoH: Allied Assault developers 2015. And some of its staff left to form Call of Duty creators Infinity Ward. Small world.)
H – Gas-mask, chain-gun-wielding Nazis who need whole magazines of Thompson ammo to bring down. Stupid.
Dumb, supposedly “next-generation” AI. Stupider.
Complete jettisoning of historical accuracy. Stupidest of all.
(Honesty rating: 2/10. At least it stays consistent.)
O – Original land-anywhere idea that unfortunately drags the rest of the game down. Otherwise, no different from any other run-n-gun shooter. Good health system. (5/10)
N – It’s fun killing Nazis in the myriad of ways Airborne opens up for you; a Springfield headshot has never been more satisfying, nor giving the nearest Kraut a faceful of buckshot. Not too many games these days appreciate the value of a shotgun. And weapons both look and sound (unfortunately they don’t act) like the powerful beasts they are. (9/10)
O – I was led to believe the AI would actually be smart, and each level would have the corresponding historical depth the MoH series is known for. How wrong I was. Boo! (3/10)
U – Control scheme and cover system takes a little getting used to, but it works well. Excellent production values save somewhat a game crippled by poor design choices. (7/10)
R – Even after a flood of WW2 shooters I could still snipe Nazis all day. (9/10)
OVERALL RATING: 6.5 (out of 10)
OVERALL RATING: 6.5 (out of 10)
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