Five of the worst WW2 games you might play

The FPS genre is already saturated with more ways on how to destroy the Third Reich than the Allies had probably come up with during the actual war, but I can’t get enough of the stuff. MSNBC ran a list of their top five choices for WW2 gaming with titles such as Call of Duty and Company of Heroes and it’s a pretty solid collection, but Medal of Honor: Frontlines over MOH: Allied Assault? Really?

One bad thing about being a fan of WW2 titles is that I’ll usually go against the popular grain and try even the dogs out to see what was so bad about them. Unfortunately, in most cases, the critics were absolutely right and no matter how much time I spent with them, they never got any better. So on that note, here are five WW2 based titles that I thought were absolute crap.

5) Ubersoldier (PC)

With a badly optimized engine that can force a box built around its recommended specs to run as if it were constipated, Germans that speak with a country boy accent from the Deep South, and a hokey story straight out from the reject bin at the Sci-Fi channel, this is one title that could have been a lot of fun if all of the above were fixed in some way. The repetitive action and psychic shooters that could hit you with pinpoint accuracy a mile away didn’t help, either. Unfortunately, instead of getting into an exciting twist on Nazi occultism mixed in with X-Files flavored mystery and the action of Medal of Honor, you get something like this. And if you don’t want to play the game to find out just how bad this title is, you can always try to rent SS Doomtrooper from the Sci Fi channel which almost does the same thing, but in less than two hours.

4) Medal of Honor: European Assault (Xbox)

In European Assault, the Nazis have managed to find a way to use American ammunition with their disappearing MP40s that they drop on the battlefield. In case they die, the Ministry of Dumbing Down have also provided giant floating icons to show you where the Wehrmacht’s soldiers have dropped ammo for your BAR along with giant red crosses for the health packs that they’ll leave around. Thanks to the wonders of Nazi science, they’ll also be able to utilize pop-in spawns to feed the battlefield with soldiers, automagically appearing before their foes. Hitler’s greatest intelligence operatives have also debunked the whole story of an OSS officer heading into the heart of the Third Reich, confirming that he’s been replaced with WW2’s version of the Terminator. To protect the assets of the Fuhrer, they’ve also employed a number of bosses:

Hopped up on National Socialism, their ability to absorb bullets and dish out damage make them supersoldiers that will stand in your way. At least until you kill them with uber adrenaline. Seriously, EA, what the hell?

3) Mortyr II (PC)

I was as surprised as anyone that Mortyr actually got a sequel, but it’s apparently a hit in Poland where it had first come out. I felt tempted to rank this one above the original because of the fact that it is a sequel to something that most everyone who had played it in North America remember through the pain of trying to forget it. But it’s only “almost as worse” as the first game thanks to the fact that the gameplay was a little more tolerable and that it completely forgets that the first one had ever happened. That’s not saying much since it still manages to come up with a litany of replacement crap to help continue the tradition much like how Hollywood continues to try and market vehicles for Paris Hilton to star in.

At least the soldiers speak in German which is nice but don’t get too attached to it. For every good idea, there are several that go tragically wrong whether it is the soldiers that run in silent, slow motion or the artillery shells that instantly kill you because you are given no warning or forgiveness for simply not knowing any better. At one point, you get to fly a gyrocopter to drop bombs on top of machine gun nests. It’s too bad that it’s made of explosive paper mache that goes off as soon as it gets too close to anything. Even if you pretend to come close to a tree, nature will emit a high powered death field that will detonate the explosive skin of your gyrocopter. I left it behind and took out the nests myself. I should have left this game behind and bought a chicken sandwich instead.

2) Mortyr (PC)

Yes, that’s a walking mech you see onscreen because by this point in the game, you’re in 2093 after traveling from 1944. Forged out of angry German metal and powered by Teutonic technologies with all of the excitement of a toaster, it’s par for the course with Mortyr.

For its time, Mortyr wasn’t that bad of a game if you could forgive the pseudo-disco lighting and the brain dead AI. Or the incessant key hunts, the nonsensical level design that often felt as if the Third Reich had been staring too long at maze puzzles, or the lame feel to most every one of the weapons. Unlike Doom which made stomping through each level fun with exciting levels and monsters, Mortyr manages to make it feel like a chore of epic proportions. But the ending is one of the worst that I’ve ever seen in a game, rivaling 1941’s “Congraturations”, since I had no fracking clue as to what had happened thanks to the hokey sci-fi story that it was tied to. What was up with the giant Icon of Power at the end? WTF?!

At least Mortyr II gave you an ending that kind of made sense. Mortyr’s box cover was also a lot more exciting than the trip to get kicked in the nuts at the end. Way to go!

1) Hour of Victory (Xbox 360)

Epic’s fancy new Unreal Engine 3 has powered some winners…Bioshock, Stranglehold, MOH: Airborne just to name a few. And it has also powered a few titles that should have spent more time in development…like this one. I was excited about the premise which is ripped from the idea that the Third Reich was much closer to building a nuke than history actually tells us. I read the reviews which already said that this was the stuff next-gen nightmares were made from, but I was bored and I wanted to see it for myself. I was wrong. Midway pushed this one out way too early and seemed to ignore every other WW2 shooter ever made.

Pick from any three die-hard soldiers with different abilities in order to execute the mission ahead to stop the Third Reich’s atomic dreams, and you have the potential for some exciting stuff. Unfortunately, European Assault did the whole nuclear thing much better than this one which drops you into an ugly world backed by body physics that turn every enemy you shoot into a stuffed bag of styrofoam chips as soon as they die. Brain numbingly one-track action, weak sounding weapons, broken scripting, awful special effects, and cinemas where you’ll be staring at mannequins await you when you sign on for this tour of duty. If you don’t believe me, download the demo on XBLA and see for yourself. You’ll get more action out of that than the multiplayer in the full game which might as well not exist because no one is out there playing this.

So there you have it. My five picks for the worst WW2 titles that you might ever play today. If there’s one thing players can probably count on, it’s that the WW2 genre will still be on the frontlines on either consoles or PCs, offering up as much excitement as disappointment.

monster

I was tipped off about this fighter from Sho Kawakami, character artist for Capcom’s Vampire Savior series of fighters, who put his skills to work on his own fighting game when the series had ended. Monster features a mix of human and beastly fighters, just like the series that he had worked on with Capcom. It’s a few years old, actually, having come out in December of 2006, but it’s still a lot of fun if you like fighters.

The main site, 8105graphics, is located here so if you want to brush up on your Japanese kanji, you’ll get a better idea of what is there. The main page for the download is here. Or, you can go to the Wiki that’s been set up for it and check out the links to information concerning fighting combos, setup, and an extremely in-depth analysis of what the game has to offer fighter fans. Monster also has some sort of online capability from what I’ve been able to gather allowing you to find fighting fans on the ‘net, if there’s still anyone out there playing this.

As for me, I just wanted to try out another fighting title from one of the creators of Vampire Savior as I loved that series and Monster feels like a knock off of the old castle block. It’s good stuff so if you’re interested in a great, free, and good looking fighting game from a Capcom alum, try out Monster.

Destroy all robots, shoot giant faces, and fight the devil

Midway has just made several of its classic games available via web browser/Flash plugin here. Robotron 2084, Defender, Tapper, Sinistar, and Spy Hunter are a few of the games that you’ll get to play through and rack up as high a score as your reflexes will let you. I tried Robotron and it was all there…the sounds, the explosions, the screaming bits of death reminding me that I hadn’t played it in years…just like being in an arcade. Only without the smoke, neon lights, and the smell of food. I kind of miss the food.

Captain Goodnight lives

My Apple //c days are in mothballs right now with my 5.25 floppies stored away, but I usually get the hankering to relive some of the nostalgia with an emulator, or on the web with the Virtual Apple 2 archive that allows you to play your favorite titles from yesteryear in a browser. This makes it easy not to have to pull all of it back out and find a spot where it can sit without having to rearrange any furniture.

One of my favorite games from the Apple era was Captain Goodnight and the Islands of Fear. The box, which I had at one point, sported the captain with leather flight cap and a smirking salute with yoyo in hand, painted in the style of an old pulp serial which is how the game kind of presented itself. Fighting against the nefarious Doctor Maybe, the side scrolling action game put you in a plane, a boat, submarine, jeep, and on foot as you fought your way from island to island in order to stop Maybe’s Acme Doomsday Machine. It was also timed with 99 game hours, which is much shorter than you think especially if you keep dying which will happen often.

But the game was also loaded with humor. Enter the briefing hut after you were already briefed, and the commander will tell you to get your ass back out there to save the world. Keep doing it, and you’ll get sacked, ending the game. At the start, you’ll also need to hop in a jet and take off. Or you can decide to run down the runway and into the minefield at the end, ignoring the signs that are there to keep you from losing your legs. Doctor Maybe will also mock you as you die from a floating laser, quipping “here’s looking at you” while the Captain stumbles to his feet. If you left the game running with the Captain standing there, he’d start stomping his feet and eventually whip out his favorite yoyo to pass the time before the world ends. The manual was also a product of the time before they began turning into glorified warranty cards, filled with more information on how to fry and cook bugs to survive in the desert than in how to work the joystick. And before Unreal Tournament and Halo made it fashionable to have vehicles in an FPS, Captain Goodnight had you flying, boating, driving, and running through the entire adventure.

And it didn’t take you hours to solve, either. It was still priced like a full game at the time, I think I remember it going for thirty or forty bucks for what amounted to be less than an hours worth of action making it something less than an arcade game that you might find on XBLA today despite being crazy hard. Fun times!

Now where did I put that decoder wheel…

Valkyries are coming to the DS to steal your soul

Thanks to Japan’s manga mag, Jump, the word is out that the DS is getting the third chapter in the acclaimed Valkyrie Profile series by Tri-Ace. Square Enix hasn’t come out and officially announced the game to anyone yet, but it’s a safe bet that they’re going to now that sites from IGN to forums such as NeoGAF are reporting the excitement of fans itching to get back to playing the reaper. But from the scans that I’ve seen and in reading some of the details pulled from the kanji, it seems that you won’t be playing as any of the Valkyries this time out.

Instead, you’ll play as a guy named Wilfred and apparently, he hates the Valkyries, the gods, and seeks bloody vengeance against them for some wrong using a magic feather that turns darker and darker every time he uses its power. There are also a few screenshots already out there, courtesy of those same scans, that show the game to be taking an isometric view.

Does this mean that the game will be a tactical title and not so much of an action RPG as its predecessors? A Tactics-style interpretation of Valkyrie Profile could be really cool to get into as much as the original Tactics was, but I suspect that not too many fans hoping for another RPG intensive treatment in the same style as its predecessors would be as happy. Still, it’s encouraging to see that the DS is getting more RPG love and right now, it seems to be collecting the lion’s share of RPGs in this generation so far.

Can’t wait to pick up one for myself.

Project Origin gets a site

Monolith’s Project Origin gets its own site with a teaser trailer and some background information on the game to help set your nerves on edge for what promises to be the sequel that everyone who had enjoyed F.E.A.R. is waiting for.  F.E.A.R. was an awesome game, showcasing the new engine from Monolith as well as putting together enough creepy material to make it more than a simple run and gun shooter for a lot of players, me included. Bicycle kicking your enemies both on and offline was also a lot of fun, and so was pinning them to the wall with an impact gun shooting big, metal spikes.

The reason why I’m saying that this is more of an official sequel than the ones released by Sierra is that after F.E.A.R. was made, Monolith and Sierra parted ways. The two expansions that came out after F.E.A.R., “Extraction Point” and “Perseus Mandate”, were made by TimeGate Studios instead of Monolith who is going ahead with Project Origin. The other reason for the name change is that Sierra owns the rights to the franchise name, but it looks like Monolith owns the IP rights to the characters and the general theme of the title which can be confusing when you imagine what these games would be like side by side on the shelf.

Dreamcast 10th anniversary love?

A post on the official Sega forums hints that Sega might be up to something and a link to Dreamcast.com asks if you still own one. This year would mark the ten year anniversary of Sega’s swirly eyed system and it could be that owners will have something to look forward to. Clicking on the logo brings you to…a suspended service. From what I’ve read, you can use your console’s serial number to register an account so I’ll keep trying to see if I can get in to actually get that far. To what end? I have no idea, but I suddenly have an itch to play some Tech Romancer.

Update: Turns out that it wasn’t such a bad thing after all that I couldn’t get in as, unfortunately for Sega fans, it looks like someone else is banking on their love of the little white box.  According to Joystiq, Sega has confirmed that the whole love affair is only skin deep complete with fake registration information. Other astute investigators have also taken a closer look at the site on NeoGAF, going so far as to traceroute the server and see where it was hosted which turns out to be an ISP that has nothing to do with Sega.

raise your flagons in memory…

Well…this is pretty sad news.

Gary Gygax, ‘Father of D&D’, dies at 69 (Wired)

An RPG pioneer and the ultimate Dungeon Master whose legacy of imagination and storytelling will continue to influence players everywhere…thanks for the adventures past, present, and those yet to come.