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If it sold well once, repackage it one-thousand different times and sell it again!
I’m a huge fan of the original PC release of Medal of Honor. No, not this Medal of Honor, stupid-piece-of-crap-game, I’m talking about Medal of Honor Allied Assault. The game took an honorific if somehow humble look at WWII. It was solemn. The music was inspiring, filled with muted trumpets. The game felt like being in the front-row seat of a series of desperate missions, each with a slimmer chance of success. When I finished levels in MOHAA, it always felt like I had cheated death somehow. Then there’s this piece of garbage that doesn’t even bother with a subtitle. It just claims the entire franchise as its own. “Medal of Honor” distinguishable only by it’s stupid (TM) at the end of its name. And as a side-note, how the heck do you trademark “Medal of Honor?” When a military official receives the Medal of Honor, does the US Army have to pay EA royalties now?
You’ve seen this game a hundred-thousand tired times before and we’ll see another hundred-thousand forgettable titles before we’re dead again. Health regens. Hyper-acting-realism in the face of utterly non-realism-gameplay. A lot of “cool” and “gruff” gritty talk, code names and code words. A lot of “go here” and “do this” because you’re too stupid to make your own choices. I’m sorry, but it’s a point and click adventure. You can’t convince me that what’s going on is important. Checkpoints everywhere. Run out of ammo? The guy next to you hands you more. Eat 3, 4, 5 bullets and you’re fine. Walk it off in 5 seconds. Could you eat tons of bullets in MOHAA? Of course. FPS’s generally don’t work unless you can. However, you couldn’t round the corner and suck your thumb and be okay miraculously. You needed to actually go out and find health kits. And yes, I know that health packs restoring you to life barely makes any more sense than rounding a corner for a few seconds, but that’s not the key difference–the difference was uncertainty. The difference was a finite supply of ability to make mistakes.
I’ve got nothing good to say about this Tier 3 pile of slop except that it jumped ship to suddenly have all of its plot centered in the Middle East as a result of the Trade Tower incident. Yep, better jump right on that patriotic bandwagon EA. Why try to create something meaningful or new when you can simply profit off the xenophobic anger of an entire nation? Well done. And don’t tell me that MOHAA did the exact same thing with Germany because it didn’t. MOHAA came out 57 years after the end of a real-life war. It attempted (loosely) to reflect actual events from history. By compariosn, MOH(TM) came out one year BEFORE the War on Iraq ended and wasn’t based on any real event at all. It was primarily directed towards teens with patriotic parents who would be motivated to buy their stupid kids a game where they got to shoot the country our country was at war with. Don’t worry though, EA’s not racist. They made sure that your army friends were all Middle-Eastern so that you didn’t have to feel bad about shooting the bad ones. Classy.
