Medal of Honor
(Electronic Arts for the PlayStation)
by Eric Johnson
Medal of Honor is a masterpiece, a genuinely unexpected treat we owe to Stephen Spielberg and his offhand decision to channel some of the military research compiled for Saving Private Ryan into an interactive computer game. The result is a tense, engrossing, historically and ballistically accurate first person World War II commando game destined for the top ten list of anyone interested in going out there and getting it.
Very few games are worth spending forty dollars on, and the overpopulated first person shooter genre already has quite a few superstars, so what makes this particular title worth getting? Well, I’ll tell you; as a bonafied history slut and video game enthusiast, I feel uniquely qualified to explain why this genuinely kick-ass game is one of the finest console titles released this past year.
The OSS (office of strategic services) was the CIA before the CIA existed, it was the foreign intelligence division of the US of A during that global conflict known as WWII. Specializing in espionage, sabotage, and stirring up basic unrest among the Axis powers throughout the war, they kept the French resistance supplied with weapons, and they were the reason NASA had so many German scientists working for them in the 1950s. Medal of Honor puts you in the place of a fictional OSS officer named Jimmy Patterson, and begins on June 5th, 1944 the night before the D-Day invasion.
As Lieutenant Patterson, you have 24 levels, subdivided into a series of eight clandestine missions to complete in the year between the invasion and the end of the war. The missions are firmly grounded in reality. You will be asked to destroy a V-2 rocket factory or sabotage a heavy water research facility in occupied Norway; you don’t get to kill Hitler or take on undead Nazi’s or anything like that. The mission objectives are fairly straight forward and run the gamut in terms of difficulty. You do get to kill a lot of Nazi’s, and oh boy are they smart; the AI in this game is praiseworthy, the opponents you face actually want to live. Unlike most first person games where the alien creatures charge blindly without regard for their own well-being, the Nazi’s in Medal of Honor will crouch, roll, hide, and gang up on you. They will throw back grenades and take blind shots with only their rifles exposed as they hide behind a stone wall.
The propaganda released with the title said that there were 22 intelligence profiles used for the various opponents, and I believe that. There are only 11 weapons available, including the standard issue semi-automatic M1 Garand, Spencer Sniper rifle, Tommy Gun, and the almighty Browning Automatic Rifle. Each weapon has a ballistically accurate set of drawbacks and must be juggled effectively for maximum effect; the automatics are terribly inaccurate while the precise M1 has a magazine with only eight shots. The controls are rather nice, but feature one huge drawback: if you move and fire you won’t hit shit. They are geared toward careful aiming. Aiming is important because your opponents take damage according to where on the body you hit them; shots to the head, chest, stomach, groin, and extremities have varying effects. A gutshot soldier will still fire at you if he can, and making sure each man is good and dead before you turn your back on him is very important. All these, seemingly unrelated elements have the most wonderful effect on gameplay, unlike most first person games, the need to take your time, listen for the enemy, and concentrate on making that vital one shot kill really slows down the action and increases the tension and excitement.
Anyone who has seen the harrowing battle sequences of Saving Private Ryan should appreciate the fact that the same team of military advisors went to work on this game and stuffed it full of loving details. Enemy soldiers scream at each other in real German, grenades kick up dirt and smoke, sometimes you will even walk into a bathroom while some poor bastard is relieving his bladder and has to zip up before taking a few shots at you with his grease gun. Even the propaganda that decorates the offices and barracks of enemy strongholds is accurate, corresponding to actual fascist propaganda. I was specifically impressed when infiltrating the heavy water plant in Norway; I was confronted by a highly pixilated image of Occupied Norwegian Dictator Vidkun Quisling; a fairly obscure piece of historical trivia, especially when few players would have known better. The background music is actually an hour long classical symphony of a quality more likely to be found in a major motion picture than the video game it was composed for.
On the down side, the graphics are not the best and occasional glitches populate the game, but the PlayStation is no longer state of the art and it warms the heart to see outstanding titles still being released for it. So far as competition, the only thing close is Goldeneye for the Nintendo 64, a truly excellent game in its own right, but a vastly different overall experience. Completed missions reward you with genuine newsreel footage and performance evaluations, maybe even a medal if you are truly exceptional.
Medal of Honor is a rare experience, firmly grounded in historical detail while complex and engaging enough to eclipse the vast majority of titles released this past year. In the future, I would love to see actual battles like the Normandy invasion recreated with first person perspective. Until a computer out there is capable of rendering 500,000 separate characters in a single area, realistic commando based games like this are going to be the closest visceral approximation to armed conflict most of us civilians are going to get to experience.
