You Found a Secret Area!

Tag: Electronic Arts

  • Medal of Honor: Airborne – Where are we dropping, gentlemen?

    Medal of Honor: Airborne – Where are we dropping, gentlemen?

    I’ve been playing a good chunk of World War II games lately. Mostly Return to Castle Wolfenstein and the RealRTCW mod, where I got to sample the various custom campaigns made for RTCW over the years, which was pretty darn neat. Cursed Sands, a set of prologue missions exclusive to the console versions of Return to Castle Wolfenstein finally got ported to the PC recently, and I got to play those, which was fun.

    This sent me down a brief rabbit hole of getting back into old World War II shooter games. This old genre that was once incredibly ubiquitous 25 years ago has been dead now outside of small pocket niches within the genre. Why am I talking about this genre specifically? Well, killing nazis in video games has been a national pastime, and lately it just seems like the best time as any to celebrate.

    During my search, I started looking back at the various World War II shooters I own. One of which is arguably a progenitor of the genre: Medal of Honor. I’m gonna look at one of the last entries in the WWII era of Medal of Honor, one that ended up being swept away by Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and the modern military shooter glut we’d start seeing more of throughout the late 2000s.

    Once more, into the airplane…

    Medal of Honor: Airborne is one of the last major WWII entries in the series, and the last mainline WWII MOH title on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. (Wii and PSP owners would get Medal of Honor: Heroes 2 the following year.) Developed by EA Los Angeles and published by Electronic Arts (natch), this came out in September 2007 to above average reception, and would’ve probably held out as a modest success had the Modern Warfare train not started barreling through just a few months later.

    My personal experience is finding this for ten bucks on discount at a Best Buy a year or so after it came out, alongside copies of Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando and one other thing I don’t remember. This was just around the time that physical PC games were slowly being phased out of stores, but before Steam became the digital juggernaut it would become, so it was pretty common to find stuff like this on clearance.

    These title cards being rendered in the wild is a neat touch.

    You play as Boyd Travers, a soldier of the 82nd Airborne division in World War II. A successful graduate of the Gordon Freeman School of Character Development, Travers is the only soldier who’s actually named, everybody else is a soldier with a gun with no other defining characteristics, which is funny because there’s cutscenes with random soldiers chit-chatting at specific points to break up the monotony, but these soldiers don’t have a name and don’t really matter. I could get they’re trying to make one feel sympathetic for these characters, but that only works if there’s, y’know, actual characters with a profile and backstory to care about.

    (more…)
  • Medal of Honor, the mostly forgotten 2010 reboot.

    Medal of Honor, the mostly forgotten 2010 reboot.

    Hey folks. Sorry that my posting is still somewhat erratic at the moment. Things have been going on in my life, and for a good while I didn’t have anything interesting to write about. I’ve amassed so many junk items over the years that they’re all strewn about in my room, hoping one day they’ll be played and/or written about.

    So instead of struggling to think about something, I’m gonna do some posts about some of the games I’ve beaten throughout 2018. Surprisingly it is a small list, as I had fallen into the trap of playing the same quick pick up and play games instead: Killing Floor 2, Payday 2, Asphalt 8: Airborne, and more recently, Quake Champions.

    Despite having a massive backlog, I still did finish a few games throughout the year. This was originally gonna be a post with two reviews, but this particular review got so lengthy that I had to split it up.

    So let’s talk about a failed reboot of an iconic franchise, shall we?

    327982-medal-of-honor-windows-front-cover
    Mr. DudeMcLargebeard getting ready to shoot the evil people.

    (Warning: Spoilers for the story of Medal of Honor 2010 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 lie within.)

    Back around 2014, I had written (but oddly didn’t publish) a thing about Medal of Honor: Airborne, which I had replayed because a friend was streaming the game. It’s one of his personal favorites, and while I liked some elements of it like being able to drop anywhere on the in-game map, or even the creative weapon upgrade system, it just felt like a tired shooter going through the motions, and was going beyond the more historical angle of Medal of Honor, even having Nazi super soldiers wielding MG42s like it was nothing.

    At the end I had written something to the effect “It’s not as amazing as Frontline or Allied Assault, but it’s probably better than Medal of Honor: Warfighter.” At the time, I hadn’t played the most recent Medal of Honor games, and 2018 felt like the time to tackle Medal of Honor 2010 – as I’m gonna call it from here on in, to distinguish it from the 1999 original – and I felt disappointed all the way through.

    20180101134508_1
    I finished this back in January, as the very first game I beat in 2018. This was not a good start to the year.

    Realizing World War II games were on their way out after a near ten-year period of them constantly coming out, EA was in a bind. Medal of Honor was considered this prestigious franchise, and they didn’t know where to take it. Their solution was to see what their competition already did three years prior and follow suit: Go modern, and see if it stuck.

    The problem was that this came out right after the extremely successful Modern Warfare 2, and was out the same year as Call of Duty: Black Ops – probably in my top three favorite Call of Duty games for various reasons – so already EA was climbing a very, very steep hill. With Medal of Honor 2010, EA didn’t get to the top, but instead slipped and started rolling down the hill, giving themselves bruises and broken bones along the way.

    Gameplay wise, it’s a boilerplate roller coaster of a modern military shooter. Shoot the bad guys, reload, occasionally use a grenade launcher or call in airstrikes. Right click aims, Left click shoots. Occasionally you get medals for headshots or multikills, a holdover from Medal of Honor: Airborne that doesn’t make sense here. There’s even a level where you’re in a helicopter. Occasionally soldiers go “hooah” and speaking military lingo so frequently that it’s almost self-parody.

    Even something like this has been done, and done better elsewhere.

    It’s clear Danger Close was glancing at what Call of Duty 4 did years prior, and tried to copy it, but didn’t understand what made Call of Duty 4 such the blockbuster success.

    (more…)