Top Ten Games of All Time - 7: Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe (1991)

It’s been hours. Fraught, imperilled, long, long hours. 

From the base in south-east England we crossed the channel, and not too long after entering Nazi-controlled French airspace we were set upon by waves of German Messerschmitt Bf109s and Focke-Wulf 190s. From the cockpit I made sure all engines were just touching the redline, just enough speed to give myself and my five wingmen a fighting chance. The P-48 escort fighters could only go so far, and those that were not shredded by the Luftwaffe cannons turned for home. On our own now. This is it. 

Checking the engines one last time I frantically begin switching between gun positions, the maddening thunk-thunk-thunk of enemy fire hammering my bomber. By the grace of whatever God looks after us flyboys we make it to the target and I switch to the bombardier position, line up my crosshairs, and let the 2000-pounders fall. I don’t even care if they hit the target now, some goddamn railyard. I just want to get back to England in one piece. I jump into the cockpit again, turn the autopilot off, and bank hard left. A radio message tells me we’ve destroyed buildings in our target area. Hoo-fucking-ray. 

The elation is short-lived: a message also informs me my wingman has been hit. I glance behind us, and see the flaming wreck hurtling toward the ground. Parachutes. With any luck those boys will make it home. My attention has to be on my own aircraft. We’ve taken too much fire. The right outboard engine is done. I feather the props and hope the old girl has enough juice to get us home. I stare out the front. The channel is not even visible yet. I take her down to 10,000 feet. The other engines are okay, but our fuel is looking shaky. Please, God, just let us get over the channel. I can handle a forced landing as long as it’s on British soil. Hell, at this point I’ll try our luck ditching in the channel, as long as it’s swimming distance from shore. 

The left outboard engine begins to release great puffed-up clouds of black smoke. I watch them trailing away into the blue sky behind us. And I also notice a lone Fw190 hovering out there, just beyond the range of our tail-gun. The engine seems to be holding, for now. Come on, old girl, don’t let me down. 

A little melodramatic perhaps? Maybe. But such was the sense of realism I felt playing LucasArts’ 1991 WWII flight simulator, Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe. Affectionately known to us flyboys as ‘SWOTL’, the simple graphics and limited sound effects were no match for the sheer beauty of the design of this game. For starters, the view was cockpit-only. There was no ability to switch between third-person and first-person view. This made the dogfighting especially hairy, as depending on what type of aircraft you chose, the visibility could be downright non-existent. 

The freedom of choice was fantastic. You could dive in for a quick dogfight, pitting your flying skills against one or several opponents of varying skill levels. You could choose to have wingmen or go it alone. You could fly a campaign as an American, wheeling a shiny silver P-51 Mustang over Nazi-occupied Europe, or you could see what it was like from the other side and become a German Luftwaffe recruit desperately trying to down a few B-17 Flying Fortress bombers in an experimental German jet fighter in the dying days of the Third Reich. You tracked your pilot’s progress by way of a status screen where you would be awarded medals based on your accumulated ‘points’ – basically how many enemy planes you shot down.

The game had some truly awesome replay-value. Not only did every mission play out differently, and I mean EVERY damn mission, there was a Mission Editor too. You could design easy ‘training’ missions to hone your skills, or brutally difficult suicide runs pitting a single fighter against unlimited waves of Veteran-level Luftwaffe jet fighters. It allowed massive amounts of creativity. There was also a really challenging Campaign mode where you took control of the American or German air war from 1943-onwards, the only goal being, win the war.

The controls were simple – joystick left and right, up and down. This game did not even have rudders, but it was totally fine, amazingly realistic physics for a flight sim made in 1991. 

I’ve never quite experienced the same level of thrill since this game. There really was nothing close to it for me, at that age, playing this game. The incredible feeling of relief when my bullet-riddled, smoking hulk of a bomber was finally ‘feet dry’ over England, and on one engine I’d guide her in, the merciful little sound effect it would make as your wheels touched down. And the game seemed to realise this: it would not automatically quit you out of the mission upon landing. It would leave you there to savour the moment, the room suddenly quiet after long hours of the steady drone of the B-17 engines. And I mean hours. You had the option to speed up time (5x, 10x, 100x) for the long flight home from occupied Europe to England, but if your bomber was damaged you didn’t dare do it – if you were not present, to keep an eye on the engines, fuel gauge, etc, you could risk your plane nose-diving, and that was something you did not want happening at 100-times normal speed. 

I’ve never been a huge flight-simulator fan. It has something to do with the fact that flight sims are much better on PC, and I’m a console gamer. But I think, ultimately, it has more to do with the fact that no flight sim I’ve ever played since has had the same impact on me, as SWOTL did, all those years ago. It damn near scored higher on this list, but it’s got a worthy place at number seven.

Top Ten Games of All Time - 8: Syndicate (1993)

Syndicate was developed by Bullfrog Productions and released in 1993.

Syndicate uniquely ranks among my favourite games for one reason and one reason only: it gave me my first taste of open-world gaming. The ability to approach mission objectives in any way you saw fit was completely new to me, and I was immediately hooked. You were given an objective, and then set loose in a Cyberpunk-inspired game world that was as challenging as it was rewarding. 

And Syndicate’s game world was one of the best I’ve ever encountered. A future where corporations slice and dice up the world up into territories and when they enter into ‘hostile takeovers’ they mean exactly that – they send in ruthless cyborg ‘Agents’ to eliminate the competition. As the shadowy head of one of these corporations it’s your task to take over the entire world, sector by sector, using these agents for missions including hostage snatch and grabs, assassinations, or all-out massacres of every enemy agent in the place.

As you undertake these various missions you must also take control of your corporation’s research and development – the game’s clever way of progression giving you the ability to equip your squad of agents with new and devastating weapons (oh, those miniguns…salivate) and upgrades to their cybernetic enhancements to make them faster and tougher to kill.

The game was presented as a map of the world, divided into sections, and you take your squad in to complete a single mission in each province. Succeed, and the province is yours, so eventually the sections of the globe turn to whatever colour you have selected for your corporation. The game itself is a very cool isometric view of futuristic cities (complete with Bladerunner-esque billboards), military bases, and funky floating installations, and you direct your squad of four agents using a simple point-and-click interface. 

One of the most interesting and challenging aspects is that you are supposed to be viewing all this from an airship floating above the location, so you cannot see your agents, or the enemy agents, if you direct them to move behind a building or through a narrow alley. This made some of the missions downright nerve-wracking, hearing gunfire open up and not being able to see what was happening. 

Another really interesting aspect to the game was the complete lack of punishment if your squad happened to gun down some of the many civilians wandering about the various cities. On the one hand you never needed to worry about them being caught in the crossfire (which happened a lot) but on the other hand if you wanted to round up a horde of innocents using a ‘Persuadertron’ (a gadget that would put anyone within range under mind control, forcing them to follow your squad like lost puppies), and then mercilessly mow them down with a minigun, the game would do nothing to stop you.

Just a word about the graphics. They are truly remarkable and were quite unique. As you’ll see from the in-mission screengrabs, they stand up well even now, a quarter-century after the game’s release. There are not many games from the early nineties you can say that about. 

Sound design was a brilliant part of this game too. I will never forget the roar of those miniguns, but everything was spot on. I will also never forget the scream sound effects when enemies were on fire. It really was a pretty brutal game.

The only real drawback was that there was no real reward for finishing the game. This was especially galling given that the final mission was among the most punishingly difficult I have ever encountered in any game, ever. My first attempt to complete it ended after about five seconds as enemy agents swarmed in and gunned my hapless squad down before I had time to click on anything. This was the first game I’ve sat back and gone, ‘Oh, okay, game, that’s how it’s gonna be? Alright then. Let’s do this.’

But the difficulty of the missions progressed well in general (there was no difficulty setting selection) and you really needed to manage the RPG elements such as the R&D (and the taxation of provinces, which paid for it). In later missions you would come up against multiple squads of heavily-armed agents. If you went in with shotguns you were mincemeat. This required some trial-and-error to get the right mix of research for weapons and upgrading your agents, but thankfully the game had a great save system with ten slots and you could save before and after each mission.

Syndicate was also my first introduction to DLC. Not long after its release, Bullfrog put out an expansion called American Revolt, where you basically got to replay the North American continent section of the world map with new missions. Needless to say I dove right in to that.

The very fact that simply compiling this article, doing screengrabs etc, had me wanting to begin a new game and play this one all over again, is testament to how great this game is. Its sequel, Syndicate Wars, was not a bad game, but it was more geared toward consoles and was damn disappointing when compared to this one. The story, gameplay, UI, almost everything about Syndicate just fires on all cylinders. It’s a truly great game that actually does stand the test of time, and is a no-brainer for inclusion in this list. 

Top Ten Games of All Time – 9: Medal of Honor (1999)

Medal of Honor was developed by DreamWorks Interactive and published in 1999 by Electronic Arts.

Okay, so really I could include the entire franchise as among my favourite games of all time, as I have loved every release in the history of Medal of Honor. But, this is about a top ten, so I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the original game. 

It is hard to imagine a time when World War II games were not everywhere, on every platform. But as it says right there on the back of the box, Medal of Honor, in 1999, was ‘the only game that lets you fight Nazis in World War II’.

In Medal of Honor you are James Patterson, a special forces operative tasked with taking down the Nazi war machine by going deep behind enemy lines with nothing but a machine gun and some explosives.  

This was not the cartoony fun of mowing down hordes of brown-shirt goons with a minigun, ala Wolfenstein. This was gritty realism. The missions were based on real events, like the sabotage of the Ryukan Hydro-electric plant in Norway to stop the Nazi development of nuclear weapons, and the scuttling of a U-Boat as it sat ready and armed in its heavily-guarded pen. 

The series’ tendency toward basing individual missions, as well as overall campaigns, on actual historical events, began here.

So what made it a great game? Well, pretty much everything. Firstly, the level design. This is absolutely a corridor shooter (sometimes you are literally in corridors) but the levels that took place outdoors did not feel like corridors. Battling through hedgerows and bombed out buildings to locate a downed pilot’s logbook, or the awesome level where you are stalking toward the hydro-electric plant through snowy mountain passes, felt open and alive. This was as close to open-level design as the technology at the time would allow.

This open ‘feel’ was in large part due to the excellent sound design. This was DreamWorks, after all (this game came out not even a year after Saving Private Ryan). There is the magnificently ‘weighty’ feel of the M1 Garand banging away, the chatter of the German machine pistols, the thunderous roar of the mounted machine guns. But it was the ambient sound that elevated this game above other shooters at the time, like GoldenEye (which was a great game for sure). Here, the distant sound of artillery and distant pop-pop of small arms fire would ring out constantly, so as you played through the missions, you were always aware that something else was going on, somewhere else. This is something the entire series nailed from the get-go: the feeling that your role was only a small cog in a giant war machine.

The enemy AI was too, as good as it got in 1999. If they spotted you, they would drop and roll. If you surprised them, they would actively seek cover. They would continue to fire even when wounded, something that has become a staple of shooter AI mechanics.

And of course, Medal of Honor established the formula of the series, and something other shooters copied: the whole ‘find a location, attach a bomb’, or the ‘capture a machine gun nest and then defend against waves of scripted enemies’ – things that became overused as time went on. But there was genuine tension here. The feeling that something was at stake. The feeling that this was not ‘just a game’.

Medal of Honor is among my favourite games because this was the first game ever where I reached the end, and then turned around and started a new game right away. It was the first game I found myself still playing into the small hours, bleary-eyed and chanting ‘just one more mission’. And it was the game that cemented my status as a fan of the series. I have played, and loved, every single game in the Medal of Honor franchise. I am the only person I know who thought Warfighter was a great game (it was). And Allied Assault, which really did have open level design, and pushed the boundaries of PS2 technology to near breaking point so often you could actually hear the console straining. Not to mention the direct sequel to this one, Medal of Honor: Underground, which refined the mechanics, improved the sound even further, and to my knowledge is still the only first-person shooter to feature a female protagonist. 

I could go on, but I’ll just say this: it’s one of the great shames of my gaming life that this series came to an end, but I am glad I held on to my old PS2 so I can still wheel these games out from time to time and remind myself that Medal of Honor did World War II first, and did it better, than anything that came after.

Top Ten Games of All Time - 10: Centurion - Defender of Rome (1990)

Centurion was released way back in 1990 by Electronic Arts and was developed by Bits of Magic. It is a turn-based strategy game where you take control of a lowly centurion in the Roman Army and your task is to progress to Proconsul and conquer Europe, Western Asia, and North Africa. You begin in Italia with a single legion, and through strategy, battles, and even some diplomacy and political manoeuvring, you can eventually become Caesar and control the Roman Empire. 

The gameplay is simple: you basically begin on a map of the region, and point and click your legion into a neighbouring province. You are then taken to the ‘diplomacy’ screen, where you select some dialog options (basically, you can be nice, or just be a total dick) and the leader of the province decides whether to accept your diplomacy, or Go to War! It’s here you get a quick snapshot of whether the province’s army is large and brave, or small and weak, but there’s not much in the way of tactics, since the dialog options rarely end well regardless of what you choose. Most of the time you’ll be expanding the empire in much the same way the real Romans did – through conflict. 

This brings me to my favourite part of the game, the combat. You get an isometric view of a battlefield. Here, you select your formation and tactic, and then unleash the legion. Once unleashed, you can pause the game to make minor (and sometimes crucial) changes, ie stopping a cohort moving forward, ordering a retreat, and the like, but the fun is watching it play out. There’s little touches like whether your General is liked or disliked, and this will affect whether he can order troops in the field or not. It makes you look after your starting Generals, as their replacements are often useless, meaning you’re stuck with whatever strategy you first selected, and sometimes this results in complete annihilation.  

The simplicity of the gameplay is what drew me to it originally, but what kept me coming back was the ability to customise the difficulty settings. Even that was simple (it basically only affected whether your soldiers were Fierce, Good, Weak, or Panicky), but it made the victories hard-fought and made you strategize a little more (on the hardest setting if you did not have back-up legions ready to follow your initial push into a new province, your empire would be pretty short-lived). 

There’s also a system of taxation which much be carefully managed (in addition to staging games in the various conquered provinces, thankfully these ones are off-screen) in order to keep the people of your empire happy. Tax them too hard in order to build your legions too quickly, and they will not hesitate to throw off the yoke and take up arms against you. This was also great on harder difficulties as you simply cannot afford to be putting down rebellions all over the place while trying to expand the empire. At one point my little Roman Paradise was on the verge of complete collapse, and I had to spend turn after turn on ‘Bread and Circuses’ instead of my actual duties, just to ensure my new empire did not completely fall apart. Something the real Roman Empire knew all too well!

Centurion was obviously a predecessor of more widely known war strategy games like Age of Empires, and in them you can see clear influences that began here. 

It loses some points for replay value only because of the dreaded gladiatorial fights. This was a gameplay feature I hated, even as a kid. It was designed to offer some variety to the gameplay, but soon becomes nothing more than a giant pain in the ass. Basically, you get on-screen prompts that the people of Rome are bored, so you need to build the Coliseum and stage gladiator fights. These are little more than key-spamming a single sword animation until your opponent’s health bar depletes. It’s maddeningly repetitive and happens far too often, and there’s no way to avoid it – if you ignore the prompts, the people in your home province rebel and you’re forced to put down the rebellion.

It earns points because it does what all great games should do – it stimulates the imagination. Granted, as a kid I took this too far and used the game as a basis to write an 80-page ‘alternative history of the Roman Empire’ based on my conquests. Yes, I really am that geeky.

All in all, it was a great game and I found myself enjoying it just as much again recently as I did when I first played it all those years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion:_Defender_of_Rome 

PREY Game Review - A Constant State of Anxiety

Arkane Studios’ 2017 sci-fi shooter, Prey was one of those games I almost missed entirely. I was never a fan of Arkane’s previous claim to fame, Dishonored, and it was really only out of sheer boredom I decided to pick up Prey one lazy afternoon and see what all the fuss was about.

In a nutshell, Prey is awesome. I love it. I really have only one or two complaints, which in the interest of a balanced review I will mention, but honestly, the game is practically flawless.

Prey is a survival horror game in a science fiction setting, with elements of a first-person shooter. Each area of the derelict space station where it takes place is essentially a game level, and each enemy type has certain strengths and weaknesses. If you take your time, learn the levels, learn the enemies, and apply a little strategy to your gameplay, Prey will really reward you with an exciting, and at times excruciatingly tense experience. It is loads of fun.

Lurking in the shadows...

One thing Prey does really well – it keeps you in an almost constant state of anxiety. The damaged space station creaks and bangs. Every shadow may conceal an enemy. You almost never know what to expect around any given corner or through any doorway. Speaking of doorways – some of the electric doors are malfunctioning, so they open and close randomly. You find yourself constantly looking over your shoulder. And one of the enemy alien types – the Mimic – can disguise itself as literally anything. You will find yourself blowing away coffee mugs and frantically whacking chairs with a wrench, because they just might be a mimic lying in wait. And the enemies respawn in a really cool way – you can never wander around confident that you have cleared an area. Prey doesn’t work that way. Just because you have cleared one area of the map doesn’t mean there won’t be mimics or more dangerous enemies lurking there the next time you have to travel through that area. And Prey makes damn sure you have to do this – often you will find objectives force you to go back through an area you’ve previously ‘cleared’. I don’t think any other game has had me on the edge of my seat the way this one did, from start to finish. 

Story

You are Morgan Yu (you can be either M or F), stranded on a derelict space station called Talos I, suffering selective amnesia and with nothing but a wrench to defend yourself against the mysterious Typhon, a race of intelligent, hostile aliens with all kinds of gnarly abilities like shapeshifting and mind-control.

The game takes place in an alternate reality where President John F Kennedy was not assassinated in 1963 and America never went to war in Vietnam, so the space race ramped up instead, leading to rapid space exploration that then led to mankind encountering the Typhon – an entire ecosystem of bizarre, morphing aliens who we only discovered were incredibly hostile after it was too late.

Researchers from the TranStar Corporation discovered they could harness the aliens’ special abilities in devices called Neuromods, and quickly became mega successful hawking the neuromods to rich people on Earth. 

Of course, things went catastrophically wrong one idle Tuesday, and that brings us to Prey.

Gameplay

I think Prey is a little misunderstood. The criticism levelled at it is stuff I’ve heard before about another wildly misunderstood game, Ubisoft Montreal’s 2008 shooter Far Cry 2, and that is the combat is too hard, the enemies respawn ridiculously fast, stealth is broken, etc. 

Much like Far Cry 2 did, Prey rewards you for playing the game well, and punishes you severely for, well, playing like a dick. And at first, that is exactly what I did. Even though I did not preorder the game I received the preorder bonus with it – a levelled up shotgun. So of course, I immediately started blasting enemies to kingdom come with it, because hey, that’s what I thought I was supposed to be doing. I very quickly ran out of shells and was reduced to bashing alien heads in with a wrench. After having my ass handed to me mercilessly over and over again I quit and started a new game and decided to really learn the game and play it properly. And man, what a difference that made.

Danger lurks behind every door

Prey rewards patience, and research. Research? I hear you say. You can’t be serious! 

But let me explain, and dispel some of that negative criticism I have seen.

Prey is really not a first-person shooter, it can just seem like one. Being a survival game, resources are scarce, so you have to conserve ammo and use it wisely, and use your surroundings, whatever you have available. The game drip-feeds information to you about the enemies you encounter, so you can slowly start to discover their weaknesses and use those against them. 

Know your enemy...

The game is semi-open world. It takes place on a space station and each area of the station is in fact a ‘level’. If you barge into an area and start blasting away with the shotgun, you will be very quickly overwhelmed and the game’s enemies are some of the least forgiving I have ever encountered in any game. They will absolutely destroy you if you let them. If, on the other hand, you enter a new level quietly, use your ‘scope’ to spot enemies before they spot you, learn their movements, know their weaknesses, and then sneak in and unleash holy hell upon them, you will quickly dominate them, clear the area, loot the crap out of it, and walk out feeling like a total badass. 

Don’t get me wrong, if you want to use a melee combat playstyle and go gung-ho on the enemies, you can indeed do that. It’s just not nearly as fun. Seriously, there is nothing more satisfying in Prey than laying a trap, luring an enemy into it, and then springing out from behind a corner and finishing them off with a shotgun blast to the face.

That brings me to this, stealth is far from broken in Prey. It just doesn’t work the same as other games. As I mentioned, Arkane previously developed the Dishonored series. Stealth in Prey works a little like the stealth mechanic in Dishonored. That is, you really need to be stealthy, not just toggle the crouch button. If there are shadows, you need to use them. If there are obstacles to hide behind, get behind them. Move slowly. And I mean s-l-o-w-l-y.

The skill tree in Prey is handled by way of the aforementioned neuromods, funky little devices that implant skills directly into the brain via the eyeball (yeah…ouch), but the skills are basically the usual: you can buff your physical strength, your mental acuity, your weapons, etc. Eventually you can access the Typhon neuromods that let you explore cooler abilities like being able to shapeshift into random objects, fire EMP pulses at electromagnetic enemies, or zap-transport yourself short distances to get out of tight spots. It’s all very cool and I don’t want to spoil it – the abilities are best explored and developed for whatever playstyle you want. 

The skill tree

Complaints department, take a number

So, there are a couple of minor things that detracted from my Prey experience, but really they are just that – minor. One is the NPC dialogue. Occasionally, the NPCs will chatter incessantly in your ear right in the middle of combat. There’s no way to skip any of it either, which made my second playthrough a bit laborious since I had heard all the conversations before. And the game doesn’t seem to realise one character hasn’t finished talking before another starts in, at one point in the game I had two NPCs talking over one another, and in an effort to get away from them so I could hear myself think, I accidentally wandered too close to another NPC who started yammering away at me to activate another quest, so I had three people yabbering at me, yet I couldn’t hear any of them properly. The game saves all the conversations in a menu so you can access them later, so I don’t understand why there was no option to skip the dialogue.

Some of the NPCs will go to great lengths to talk to you

The only other things are even more minor. Prey does a great job, for the most part, of giving you numerous ways to solve any problem – locked door? There’s usually an Aliens-style ventilation duct to crawl through. Too many strong enemies in one room? You can usually find an alternate route and sneak past them. But there are several times the game forces you to do this silly mini-game where you have to hack terminals. You have to bounce a little ball through an obstacle course and land it in a hole at the end. It was like a bizarre combination of mini-golf and that old board game, Operation (you get zapped if the ball hits the red walls). I found it distracting and really frustrating. 

Lastly, the inventory management is clunky. I only mention it because at no point in the game does the inventory become a non-issue, you constantly have to prioritise and juggle, especially on the harder difficulties.

The inventory management is a bit clunky

But, while these things are a little irritating, none of them are game-breaking. 

Conclusion 

Prey is a really apt title. The game has a great way of, even after 30 hours when you have numerous skills and buffed weapons, making you feel like you are not the hunter, but the hunted. Creeping around the creaky space station, heart pounding, down to my last ammo clip, happening across a vitally needed medkit only to have the damn thing turn out to be a mimic and lurch up off the table and attack me, face-hugger style, just never got old for me. 

Actual gameplay, not a cutscene. Prey is a beautiful game.

The game has a really punishing learning curve, especially if you’re not used to this kind of game (I was not), but the payoff is an intriguing story, great combat, beautiful art design, a cool retro sci-fi soundtrack, and a campaign that is just the right length, short enough to be instantly replayable, long enough that if one playthrough is all you want, you’ll more than have got your money’s worth by the time the credits roll.

Prey is highly recommended.

Proxy War and How the Big Kids on the Playground Are Now Preparing for World War Three

The following article is me in a sense simplifying very complex political, religious, economic and military situations in various countries. There are any number of other reasons and causes for the situations I describe. But what is history and the lessons we learn from it but that very thing: simplifying complex problems and examining them so that, one hopes, we avoid the same circumstances in future? That has been the hope of historians since the learning of history passed from oral to written.

I had been asked to share my thoughts on the most recent events in Syria. I refer of course to the chemical weapons attacks that ‘prompted’ the US airstrikes on a Syrian airbase controlled by President Assad. I put the word prompted in inverted commas for a reason: I don’t believe that is what prompted it at all. That is to say, the US waited for something they could label as a ‘cause’ of their aggression, but that aggression had been planned for a while.

To explain this, bear with me as we travel back in time a little.

One of the most terrifying weapons invented in the twentieth century, besides chemical warfare and nuclear weapons, was a singular and utterly appalling notion: War by Proxy. Proxy war is the idea that larger, more powerful nations can engage in warfare without actually firing those nukes at each other.

Like bullies in a schoolyard, using War by Proxy the big Western powers can pit smaller nations against each other, engaging in war without actually having to declare it. And so those other nations suffer the consequences.

Modern proxy war began in the ashes of Berlin in 1945. The guise of US and Russian soldiers united in a brave march on the Reichstag to finally free the German people from a dictator was a front for the real intent. Basically, German scientists were a smart bunch of guys who had perfected one technology and were well on their way to figuring out another one. The first: rocket propulsion. The second: nuclear energy harnessed and used as a weapon. The US and Russia knew this because they had been listening in on German radio transmissions for years. And boy did they want to get their hands on all of it.

Sorry folks, much as Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks would have you believe the Band of Brothers invaded Western Europe out of some altruistic notion of freeing Europe from the oppressive clutches of a murderous Nationalistic regime (and to be fair, that’s what the troops believed they were there to do, and in many ways, did) the reason the Normandy invasion was planned and executed was not to crush Germany, the Russians had already well and truly done that on the Eastern Front, but it was to ‘free’ Western Europe and to gain a foothold there, because if they didn’t, the Soviets sure as hell would have. And the whole European peninsula would have become a Red Iron stronghold with its guns firmly aimed at the United States. If you were running things, if that was the lay of the board on some massive game of Risk, would you let that happen? Of course not.

Now, disturbingly, ask yourself this: if dropping a nuclear weapon on Japan was about ending the war, as the United States insisted (and still insists) it was, why drop two? Why obliterate Nagasaki as well as Hiroshima? Did they actually think Japan would watch Hiroshima go up in smoke and then sit back and cross their arms and say, ‘well, let’s not surrender just yet, let’s see what else they have in store for us!’

No. It was a test of two different types of nuclear bombs. And, perhaps more importantly for the US government, it was a statement, to the Soviet Union and everyone else, of what they were prepared to do. It was the US government’s way of telling any potential enemies: We Won, So Don’t Fuck With Us.

And no further proof is needed than simply looking at what came after the fall of Berlin – decades of hostility and barely-contained nuclear warfare between the US and the Soviet Union.

And the first of all the proxy wars to come: Korea.

The Korean War was a war between Communism and the West; it was the sabre-rattling of two world powers testing the waters, ie, what would a conflict look like between us? Well, it looked pretty devastating, but not as devastating as it might have been. It was a war by proxy, a test-conflict. It ended in a stalemate that the Korean people have been paying the price for ever since.

Proxy war was brought to its most brutal incarnation in the war that came next: Vietnam. This was again a war between the Communist (and Russian-financed and equipped) North Vietnam and the pro-American South Vietnam. Again, two massive powers duking it out in a tiny scrap of land in South East Asia rather than firing nuclear weapons at each other.

But there was a spanner in the works in Vietnam that no one saw coming (well, the Vietnamese did, but very few history books acknowledge it): first and foremost, the Vietnamese people themselves, who were far more resilient than anyone predicted or could have possibly even understood, and a little-known revolutionary named Ho Chi Minh and a fanatical and brave group of people who called themselves the Viet Cong.

The US fucked up in Vietnam. That’s now freely acknowledged, even by them. But they learned from it, and proxy warfare took a turn from ideology to oil.

Let’s jump ahead in time and to another continent entirely: South America. Let’s wonder for a moment why there are more than seventy US military bases of various sizes in South America. Let’s wonder with even wider gaping mouths why Venezuela is the only country in South America that is both a) a democracy, and b) been declared a threat to US national security. Why Venezuela? Why not any of the numerous dictators in other nations on that continent? It’s because Venezuela has the largest oil reserves, by far, of any nation on that continent. And why did the US government help to depose a democracy in Venezuela and a leader who was, according to many people there, the best thing that ever happened to that country, economically, politically, and socially? Hugo Chavez had the temerity to put his people’s and his country’s wealth first. Yes, the companies there sold the vast majority of it to the United States. But the US would rather not pay for oil from oil-rich nations. It works out far better for them if they can work to overthrow whatever despot is in charge and then just sweep in and take it. War, paradoxically, is far cheaper than peace in the long run.

We must understand US oil interests are best served by having unstable political situations in the nations where they exist. It’s that damn frustratingly simple. They could not give a flying fuck about the people in those nations. The people come and go, and die. The oil is forever. Unstable political climates and ongoing warfare justify their reasons for going into certain countries, and staying there.

Think of conflicts anywhere else in the world, and specifically in countries that have little or no oil reserves. Where is the US while innocent people in these nations are being butchered by violent dictatorships and their private armies? Answer: as far away as humanly possible. They stay away because far from what they would love people to believe, they really do not care about innocent people being slaughtered by anyone or in any numbers, as long as it’s not American people or American soldiers doing the dying. 

And that is, of course, how we get to the Middle East.

Let’s start with the Russians, because we’ll certainly return to them. The Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979. This was, ground down into simple terms, to gain a foothold in a region they knew the US was salivating over.

The most absurd of all the wars the US has now waged in the Middle East is undoubtedly Iraq. There was literally no military or political reason to do it. But there was the fact that Iraq sits atop some of the richest oil reserves anywhere in the world.

The US administration under George W Bush created a plan, called various things under Bush's administration and the subsequent Obama one, things as vague as 'The New Middle East', or as sledgehammer-subtle as the 'Five Point Plan for American Political and Economic Control of the Middle Eastern Oilfields'. It was the brainchild of a lunatic running the Pentagon back then, Donald Rumsfeld. Basically, it involved invading and conquering (or otherwise gaining control over) five countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. Rumsfeld and the rest of those crazies really were deluded enough about American military might to think that the first two of these countries would collapse and be able to be placed under US-installed dictators quickly and easily.

If Afghanistan failed to wake them up to the notion that taking over the Middle East would not be easy, or quick, Iraq sure as hell did. And as the American flag-draped coffins started rolling home into airfields on US soil, they quickly woke up to the fact that American people were still as decidedly against US military intervention in foreign conflicts as they were back in 1972, even conflicts ‘caused’ by suicidal religious fanatics slamming passenger jets into skyscrapers in Manhattan. (As an aside, those said fanatics had nothing to do with the Taliban in Afghanistan and even less to do with Saddam Hussein, but that’s another story)

If it’s not already clear by what I’ve been saying, the US needs conflict in the Middle East. The worst thing that could happen (for them) is for everyone there to shake hands and sit down to afternoon tea and forgive all the evil and set about to get along famously. If there is no conflict there, then they cannot continue to justify their presence there, to their own people and to the rest of the world. They continue to push this idiotic notion that the place is better off now that they have intervened and ousted monsters like Saddam Hussein and whoever the hell else they peg as a bad guy. Iraq was far from a perfect place under Hussein, but more people have died there since the US invasion in 2003 than ever before in that country’s modern history (ie since it stopped being part of Persia and became Iraq). The US took away the one guy who had enough sway in that country to keep true monsters like ISIS from stepping in and shooting up the place. I know which of the two evils I would prefer if I was living there.

So, let’s turn now to Syria. The US administration does not give a shit about innocent Syrians dying, at Assad’s hand or anyone else’s. They needed an excuse to begin the military intervention there, and they got it. And predictably as a sunset, Russia has stepped in to oppose it. Syria is another proxy war; it’s just one that has been adapted to the technological age. Russia needs Assad there, the US need him gone. He may or may not have used chemical warfare; the US would have found a reason to start to blow his forces away one way or another.

The conflict in the Middle East is now about what it has always been about: oil. If the US manages to truly gain control over Middle Eastern oil they will be in a better position to fight the actual war that the world seems destined to march blindly towards. The real war. No more of this proxy shit. The actual conflict between Russia and China, and the United States and the rest of the West. China cementing a military stronghold in the South China Sea is not something they are doing for fun. The US (more and more actively) opposing it is proof it’s something we in this region should be far more worried about than we currently are. And the fact there are now more NATO and Russian forces amassed along the Russian/Eastern European border than at any other time in history (it makes World War II look small) should be cause for a long pause as well.

The previous two instances where the world has been plunged into global conflict have begun in similar ways – a whole lot of posturing before a flashpoint ignites the whole damn thing. I look around the world today and I see the tinderbox filled to overflow. The spark will come in the Middle East.

Source: the picture I have used above was originally published on the blog (which is a good read, please check it out): https://scrutinisedminds.com/2017/01/03/the-proxy-war-on-syria-afterword-the-roadmap-to-peace/ 

First impressions - Ghost Recon: Wildlands

Nothin' says badass like a good bandanna

First impressions just a few hours in to Ghost Recon: Wildlands, are that this game is going to take a very long time to complete. Ubisoft are right up there with Bethesda in terms of the beauty of their open world designs, and if their previous outings in the sandbox shooter genre are anything to go by, the gameplay in this one should be right up there with the best Far Cry or Skyrim has ever offered.

Yeah boys, I could retire here.
You know, if it wasn't for the bloodthirsty drug lords.

Those who have listened to me rabbit on about games here on my blog (and those less fortunate souls who have listened to me in person, sorry guys) will have no doubt heard me profess my undying love for Ubisoft Montreal’s 2008 first person sandbox shooter, Far Cry 2. I’ll say it again just in case. I love Far Cry 2. Love it. If I had a son I don’t know if I’d love him this much (okay, maaaybe that’s a stretch).

I played Far Cry 2 on repeat for over 12 months. No other game, just Far Cry 2. I finished it on every difficulty setting and tried every single remotely possible strategic approach I could think of, and then I did it all again. Even close to a decade later I think Far Cry 2 still ranks among the best games of all time, for reasons not least of which is because it was way ahead of its time. There are games far more recent with enemy AI that does not even come close to matching the brutal, punishing efficiency of Far Cry 2's Central African militia.

Far Cry 3 and 4 took the franchise into more RPG territory, introducing skill trees and collectibles, and this was fine. They were fantastic games and Far Cry 4's improvements were full proof that Ubi listens to fans and responds. Far Cry 4 improved everything that worked in Far Cry 3, and ditched everything that didn’t, and even included some great call-backs to Far Cry 2 that Far Cry 2 die hards like me really appreciated.

The other thing Ubi does that keeps me coming back for more: they do not punish single players. That, for me, is massive. I’m a solo gamer. Always will be. I don’t do online multiplayer and I don’t do co-op play. I am not a team player. I’m a lone wolf. I hate the frenetic pace of multiplayer and I don’t like adapting my game play style to suit others in co-op. I just don’t find it enjoyable. One of the reasons I game is to escape from people, so playing with other people is of no interest to me.

The other reason is, I play open world, strategic games at a very slow pace. We are talking ridiculously, agonisingly slow. I once spent over two hours scouting an enemy outpost in Far Cry 4 before I even commenced the assault.

I really dig games that give me the option to do this, and I want to wring every moment of enjoyment from them. I don't care how long it takes me to complete open world games. Recommended time to complete Fallout 4, for example, was about 35-40 hours. I spent over 200 hours completing that one. I like games that reward patience.

So that, I guess, brings me to Ghost Recon: Wildlands.

Drugs are bad, folks.

I almost skipped this one. I’ve never been into the Tom Clancy games. I don’t like tactical shooters and I don’t like third-person shooters, so there was nothing drawing me to those games. 

It was only that I read that Wildlands was a sandbox, and saw the screenshots of the switch-to-first-person-view shooting, that made me even look twice at purchasing this game.

And whoah boy I’m glad I did.

I only had to complete one mission (the introduction interrogate/extract) to know that this is a game I’m going to wring out and then some.

Let’s walk through it – firstly, the game suggested I take a vehicle from the first safehouse to the location of the start of the mission. I decided to ignore this and walk. The game let me do this, and what’s more, I was rewarded for it. Halfway to the location my character and his squad happened across a random trio of cartel thugs harassing a homeowner. Perfect chance to scout the location, line up a ‘sync shot’ with my buddy, eliminate the hostiles, move on. Perfect chance to test the controls, shooting mechanics, squad commands, etc. I would have completely missed this had I jumped in a Jeep and high tailed it to the location. Love it.

A little while later I found myself perched on a hill staring down at a small farmhouse populated by bad guys and the target I had to extract. Scanning the entire area I decided the best approach would be from the west. Across a road and through a field was the only elevated position I could see so I figured that would be the high ground for scouting out the attack.

Totally immersed in this game world, I waited until dusk, then slowly led my team into position. By nightfall we were perched on the high ground and I took up the binoculars and commenced scoping the location.

What became immediately apparent was the lack of any predictable patterns or patrol routes of these enemy AI. They were all over the place. One guy seemed to hang out on a corner smoking. Okay, I figured I had him locked, move on to the next guy and track his movements. To my amazement the smoking guy, after about ten minutes, moved off and started loading packages into a flatbed truck. He never again took up position in the corner smoking. I knew then this was a game that was going to test my tried-and-true habits honed over three Far Cry games – establish patterns, quietly eliminate the isolated bad guys and move in from there.

In this encounter, I was forced to take opportunistic shots to eliminate two of the cartel thugs when they wandered away from sight of the rest of the group, because I knew I might not get the opportunity again. Brilliant.

And when I took a risky shot to drop a third guy, another guy noticed, and then it was on. I was forced to abandon the slow-and-steady approach altogether and hope for the best. What happened here was the dynamic game world had set events in motion that conspired with and against me: though a light rain had begun to fall, masking my already suppressed shots, I had spent so long observing the enemy position that I was in danger of losing the cover of night. So, I hurried my shot, and blew my cover. The game reacted to my actions. I love any game that does that, and this one seems to do it well.

To my delight I was lining up a shot on a bad guy and heard the thok-thok of my squad mate’s silenced weapon and the guy dropped in front of me. Ordering the squad weapons free in this game is no idle threat. What’s more, the enemies didn’t immediately make a beeline for my team. One guy headed right toward us, the others tried some kind of flanking move, taking cover as they went. There was the perfect amount of confused reactivity – they knew roughly where my team and I were, but because we didn’t break cover, they were not able to immediately pinpoint our exact location, so instead, they quickly moved toward where they thought we were. The AI in this game, both enemy and team, is spot on.

So anyway, a few minutes and a really, really, excessively strange helicopter ride (and hilariously botched landing) later, and my ‘mark’ was stashed in a CIA safe house and my squad and I were on our merry way.

But seriously, what is with the helicopter controls? I doubt I’m going to get used to that in a hurry.

All said and done the entire first mission took me about three hours. I’ve completed lesser games in less time, and this one had only just begun.

Putting the game away to get some much-needed rest I found myself thinking about it, recalling my encounter and mulling over what I might have done differently and what I’ll do different next time. It was a welcome return to the sort of soul-searching and poring over minutiae I experienced after my first few hours with Far Cry 2. And not since Far Cry 2 have I felt as lethal as I do in this game, perched on a hill, methodically scoping out an enemy outpost, watching thugs go about their business quietly oblivious to the fact my lone predator has them in his sights.

These chumps are walking around thinking they’re alive. And now I have a sniper rifle.