The Mouth: Medal Of Honor – No More ‘Realistic’ Shooters, Please

There’s this big argument going on at the moment – even as I speak, at the desk behind me, in fact – about what’s respectful, what’s not respectful, what’s gone too far and what’s palatable in our videogames. The new Medal Of Honor is, of course, causing lots of wrung palms as everybody jumps on their high horses and bemoans the game’s setting in actual, real Afghanistan.

The same people who criticise that approach then mock other games that set their contemporary warfare in some kind of faceless, made-up suggestion of the same place, without actually naming it. They mock, but they find it more acceptable, and continue to trudge on shooting boring, faceless enemies with boring, faceless guns from behind a boring, faceless face.

Perhaps people feel safer embracing their dull desire to play soldier if they don’t feel so directly attached to the carnage they’re playing out, but whatever, I have another solution to this rolling, trolling utterly dull argument: hang it all, stop playing Contemporary War 5, and let’s just start using our imaginations again.

It sometimes astounds me that, in the days before we even had proper graphics, there were wonderful feats of creativity spilling out of the minds of the first bedroom developers. Geoff Crammond’s Sentinel in 1986 used basic vector graphics to construct a world just as loaded with fear, dread and kneejerk hair trigger gameplay as any modern FPS. The fact it was set in an utterly ambiguous world in which you played a bodiless entity trying to construct a tower before a gigantic rotating eye saw you just made the whole thing more memorable, more chilling and, let’s face it, just more videogamey.

Nobody’s doing things like that any more. It’s like as soon as computers could generate enough graphics to approximately simulate real life, that quest for ‘reality’ became the obsession, the stopping point, the zenith.

Let’s roll out a Modern Warfare (or, in Treyarch’s case, Relatively Modern Warfare – shoehorning unlikely ‘modern’ tech into its Cold War-set Black Ops) every year. Let’s roll out sniping games that feel a bit like Modern Warfare that aren’t as good, but feed that listless, conditioned appetite, and climb the charts regardless. Let’s make each new tie-in to this core concept closer and closer to a naked reality of real men on real battlefields really killing each other.

Namco Bandai’s Enslaved is currently in the office being reviewed by various magazine staff. It takes post-apocalyptica but makes it verdant and pretty, and it’s based on a fanciful Chinese myth about a monkey, a wizard and a pig making a fantastical journey. It’s a game filled with experiences and nuances that couldn’t happen in real life, and you can bet your bottom dollar it’ll sell about 10,000 copies as a consequence.

I know for a fact nothing’s ever going to change that, and I won’t even start to rant and rave (more than I already have) about the majority of gamesplayers’ continued obsessions with how many M16 rounds they can empty into each other.

But if you do just one thing out of the ordinary today, maybe hit XBLA and have a round of Peggle or something. You might just find your fervered bloodlust tempered for a few precious seconds. Give it a go.