Seen Battlefield: Heroes yet? No? Well, take a glance and tell me what I should be more shocked at: That EA aggressively continues to whore out existing franchises in their continuing efforts to wallpaper their offices in cash or the fact that their latest attempt in doing so is arguably their most daring idea to date. But, uh, it’s free, which leaves me little choice; I will play it, regardless. I am being indirectly forced to by my subconscious will to oversell my loyalty to anything that doesn’t take self-regard to an overwhelmingly insulting level.
You know, I think that’s why I’m so hasty in giving short-shrift to the FPS genre as a whole. It’s such a simple, emotionally vulgar distraction but you name one title and chances are that it’s fans often talk of it in the same tone of voice that film buffs use when talking about The Third Man.
When coupled with the fact that most FPS fans often regard a product that invokes visual elements of anything other than gritty (even in hardcore, outlandish Sci-Fi) as strictly for teh kiddies then we’re looking at a genre
whose purpose seems to be more of a security blanket and less of a good time. Take note of one of the selling points of that BF:H trailer: “The key element is ‘fun’”. Now, I may be waaay off base here, but who here plays games because it brings them provocative philosophical challenges? Sure, BioShock runs objectivist thought up a flagpole in terms of both story and gameplay and the game is enriched because of that, but if the play wasn’t good, it wouldn’t be a game. It’d be a movie.
So then I wondered why there were certain games of this type
that I have been actually able to get into in the past. For this exhibit, we have XIII, Armed and Dangerous, Timesplitters: Future Perfect, Giants: Citizen Kabuto, and Metal Arms: Glitch in the System. The gameplay between all of these titles can be comparable with most other shooters but the one other thing that sets most of these games outside the norm is a goddamn sense of humor with the possible exception of XIII. Let the record show that this approach often results in high marks from the gaming press but low regard in the general FPS gaming community, despite the excellent fucking writing that is the hallmark of some of these examples, particularly from the Timesplitters series.
All the more reason for casual player to scoff at the “core” gaming community’s interests. Who the fuck wants to hang around someone who keeps trying to convince you of their own self-importance? That sounds like egomania run amok to me, and that’s the only thing I think of when people try to reconcile the popularity of a very humorous, stylized product like Team Fortress 2 for themselves by linking it’s origins to the forefathers of contemporary illustration, especially when the end result more closely resembles something altogether more important but less impressive when it comes to namechecking.
Further case in point, and I’ll continue to use BF: H as an example as it could be (and is) construed by some thin-skinned bitches to be a mockery of one of the biggest tragedies to ever befall the human race. Fine, make that criticism, if it makes you feel all “insightful” and reverent, deep in that endless well of bullshit that you call a “soul”. But in doing so, you’ll need to tell Harvey Kurtzman, The Zucker Bros., Mel Brooks, Spike Milligan, Mort Walker, Bernard Fein and Albert Ruddy and all of the aforementioned gents at Termite Terrace that their insensitive treatment of anyone who’s lost a life in that bloody typhoon is not welcomed. I mean, how dare they try to decode a smile or a laugh from the extranatural, gore-washed insanity that was the Second World War? There’s no laughter in war! None!
…but we can turn it into shallow cash-in for desktop he-men to show everyone in the digital world what impressive deaths they could have made if only they’d had the balls to join the army. Don’t laugh at war, don’t distance yourself from it, don’t cast a critical eye to it, be it satirical or otherwise. Just emulate it. That’s honor.
