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.
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
