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There's never been a war simulation.
Oh, they've made lots of games like Command and Conquer, but those aren't war simulations. They're "strategy games," fancy versions of Risk, pushing little toy tanks around a game board.
No, I want a war simulation. The ultimate war simulation, where our noble battle against an international terrorist organization quickly turns into a gut-twisting quagmire.
In S.N.A.F.U., you have to worry about civilian casualties, and fuzzy intelligence, and negative media coverage, and funding ...
... and backstabbing allies and lying politicians and faltering popular support.
Rumors will circulate that the single-player mode is, in fact, unwinnable. People will play online, only to find the map objectives changing half an hour into the game, completely against their will.
We've done a whole separate article about this game, HERE
These games came from the imaginations of David Wong and a bunch of PWoT fans.
Mass Driver, Hard Cell and World War Omega were thought up byHaimoimoi.
Jedi Saga was suggested by The Black Knight and I got ants in my pants and probably millions of Star Wars fans everywhere.
Total Kung Fu was sort of suggested by Vermillion.
H vs. Z was the brainchild of spermus.
This is the gaming version of the flying car. Everybody wants it, nobody wants to give it to us. It was even the subject of a famous April Fool's hoax on Gamespot.com.
Starcraft stands today as the most compelling fictional world ever created in gaming. The three-way intergalactic war between the humans and the Zerg (insects whose entire technology is organic, from their cities to their flying transports) and the Protoss (a race so highly-advanced and civilized they make the humans look like the Zerg).
I realize that knowing all this makes me some kind of sci-fi geek. But that's OK, because the whole world knows a sci-fi geek is about six steps up the social ladder from a fantasy geek and studies show they have more sex.
That's why there are more of us. We're outbreeding them. Even now, even in the shadow of the Lord of the Rings craze, Sci-fi movies and TV shows outnumber anything starring dragons and sorcerers 3-to-1.
There are 8 million WoW players right now. Give me World of Starcraft, with ships and technology and lasers, and the Zerg splicing their genes to create huge-ass bugs that can bite through tanks ... hell, we'll triple that number.
It starts out as a standard zombie-killing game, you and your strike force beating back the hordes of the undead as they slowly take over the civilized world. You take out the undead, you level up in strength and experience, you get better weapons. But in H vs. Z, if you get bitten, or get bitten enough times, you become a zombie.
And, you stay a zombie. You're now preying on your squad mates, eating their flesh to upgrade your own strength. As a zombie you can "smell" their internal organs so you can pick out the choicest meat needed to upgrade your zombie skills.
The whole time your former mates are begging and screaming your name, saying "FRANK! It's me! Don't you recognize me! FRAAAAANK UGGGGHHhhh ..."
Your game is stored on a locked file on the hard drive. Reset the game, you're still a zombie. You can't change it. Not until you finish the game. Hey, that's life.
A puzzle game for people who hate puzzle games and love brutal death. In Killchain you are an assassin who has no weapons, and no fighting skill. What you can do, is freeze time.
So, with each level you'll find yourself in a bustling city, then, time will slow until all of the people are frozen like statues. You can then position any person or object, arranged so that once time resumes you'll create a chain reaction of chaos that will ultimately kill the target.
Cut the brake lines on this car over here, make this lady spill her groceries, set this dog so that it runs across the sidewalk, event triggering event in a ridiculously roundabout Rube Goldberg chain of accidents.
By level 12, you're trying to kill a target who's two miles away, on the sixth floor of a locked office building. By level 30 you'll be studying the TV watching habits of your target, realizing he watches baseball every afternoon, then sneaking onto an airfield, reprogramming a plane's flight path so that it crashes into the stadium where his favorite team is playing, the sight of which will give him a fatal heart attack.
Winning will take thought, patience, creativity and the ability to think outside the box. Who says you can't stimulate those things and have grotesque decapitations in the same game?
Take Whipping Boy even further. Here you work for a demolition company. You got that job because you happen to be a gigantic robot.
Take the Wiimote and nunchuck and guide your crushing robotic hands to tear out walls and roofs and support beams with the satisfying sound of snapping timber and crumbling stone.
It's not just mindless smashing. You've got to take out this building without damaging the ones next to it, you've got to make it fall a certain direction or collapse in its own footprint, etc. Until you get to a level where there's an emergency and you've got to clear two blocks in two minutes, then it is just a mindless, frantic rampage of destruction.
Seriously, you're going to see workplace violence drop through the floor once these bastards hit the shelves. I feel less murderous just talking about it.
Here's the secret of the Wii. In the markets where Wii Sports isn't included as a pack-in game, and you have to buy it separately, it still outsells Zelda: Twilight Princess. Why?
It's the boxing. Punching something with your actual fist wrapped around the Wiimote is enormously satisfying. It taps into something primal, releases those violence endorphins that fuel all mankind. Hell, even in tennis, the satisfying THOCK! from the Wiimote speaker when the racket smacks the ball, plus the rumble jolting your hand with the impact ... you can just feel the frustrations of the day lifting through the soothing salve of simple violence.
So you take Wii Sports Boxing, add in the most detailed character creation system the hardware can handle (after all, wrestling games have been perfecting this for years). Let me create the exact replica of my old boss, or my neighbor who kicked my dog, whoever. Their voices, too, we'll have a huge range of sound clips and accents to pick from so they sound almost like the real life counterpart. And then, we beat the shit out of them.
The Wi-Fi connection will let gamers somehow download and trade whipping boys, borrowing from people who have made perfect Tom Cruise or George Bush dummies. They can even download user-created custom weapons to beat them with ...
And that's it, that's the whole game. What else does it need? You come home, in a bad mood. You turn on your Wii, you pound your tormentor until you feel better. It'll be the first game to ever sell 50 million copies.
Ah, who can forget the first time we directed the guy on the screen to walk across a narrow catwalk suspended over lava, only to have the guy turn to the screen and say, "Eat my fuckmeat, muchacho! In case you didn't know, lava is hot."
Hard Cell is a third-person game where you control an avatar that isn't particularly happy about being controlled. You can see the character and you can give him commands, but he doesn't necessarily agree with your goal.
Doing a good job of not getting your character hurt or killed will make him happier, filling your “Rapport Meter." Filling the meter makes him faster, more responsive, and overall more willing to work with you rather than against you. But lead him into dead ends, forget to take time to find food, fail to look out for his safety ...
... and things get ugly.
You're working with a deep (that is, well-written) and complex character, operating from the most advanced A.I. ever to appear in a game. You'll build trust, you'll become friends.
Which you'll think is great, until the end of the game when you find out you have to sacrifice his life to win. This is an hours-long affair during which he will lie bleeding on the floor, screaming "WHY, DAVID? WHY?!?!?" over and over again at the screen. Did I mention that the guy knows your name?
