Tuesday 5 June 2007

One of your favourite games in 100 500 words.

Note it didn't say the favourite but "one of". So I'm going to pick an oldie but a goldie: Medal of Honor: Allied Assault on PC.

I would have to pick this because I was in and lead a clan for the game back in 2002. So I've spent enough hours on it ;) Built on the Quake 3 engine, Medal of Honor played a very different game. It was so successful that it spawned the entire range of WW2 theme shooters we have now such as Call of Duty and Brotherhood of Arms. If you had come from another shooter or Quake 3 you would find the player character would move painfully slowly as you ran for cover or from an exploding grenade. But indeed it wasn't overtly slower at all, only in comparison, in it's own right it was quite fast movement and the game play gun battles were furious but the slower paced character would ramp up the tension as you jump through a window to avoid a grenade, fought in a gun battle or ran from cover to cover avoiding a sniper. Everything was tense. Especially in objective type matches with no respawn. Deathmatch was intense and frantic to match. Also the sound was excellent with background cannons firing, explosions, and gun fire mixing with the live action, each surface really could be distinguished when walked on and this made for some incredible stealth action if you so wanted, I much preferred out witting my opponent and sneaking up on them than simply relying on pure aim skills, although I was very good at that also ;D The graphics may look dated by today’s standards but they still hold up, and there's something about the weight of the character, the bobbing from side to side and the over all game play which just makes the experience so much more real and involving. I mentioned sound before, but there was also speech, any player could use set commands shouted out in game to fellow team mates to command them or warn. It was often possible to hear the enemy to shouting in German. The maps were incredibly detailed and made for excellent play, I only wish there were more like them. There were map packs, skins, mods (try realism) and user content available, though the maps couldn't be said to capture the original artistry. There were also a couple of expansion packs to AA, which I played for a while, but they just didn't seem to capture the same feel of the original for me, I think it had something to do with unbalancing of the weapons of both sides and also changing the game speed. It didn't feel the same. No game since has really captured that feeling of running along jumping as high as possible and lobbing a grenade down the map, or avoiding the iron cross of that eagle eyed sniper scopeing the lanes quite so much as Allied Assault has.