Friday, July 2, 2004

I’m watching everyone’s bona fide summer blockbuster this afternoon, gentle reader, so I’ve got nothing but action on the mind. I’ve heard from various sources that the videogame, whose release just happened to coincide with the film release, rises above its cashcow roots and really hits the spot. Apparently many of us harbor a secret desire to swing through a virtual New York City, foiling sinister plots as we administer evenhanded justice with martial arts and webfluid aplenty, and the game designers seized this desire and pet it like a tarantula. If you’ve got some money to burn, I’d recommend grabbing one of the console versions from this merchant, since they munificently throw in a free t-shirt to prevent you from playing in the nude.

If you’re like me, however, you’ll have neither the television nor the Gamecube to feed the Spiderman merchandising frenzy. Instead, you’ll have an aging PC filled with ancient parts just barely able to play yesterday’s games. But play it shall, and three gems I’ve managed to run in the past few months are Bioware’s superlative Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Microsoft’s infamous Halo, and the fun but flawed Return to Castle Wolfenstein.

I’m a bit late stepping onto these three boats, which simply makes it more imperative that I refrain from masquerading as a reviewer. It’s enough to say that Knights really does deserve all of its acclaim, especially since the quality of the dialogue is more than commensurate with its quantity. Halo, on the other hand, forgoes such contrivances as “meaningful dialogue” and heaps gobs of eminently satisfying gunplay upon your person. The offline experience gets a bit repetitive, even tedious at times, but there’s nothing quite like having a dozen bloodthirsty creatures charge at you while your ammo display drops from sixty to screwed in ten seconds.

The game I’ve taken up with recently, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, is a study in big budget Nazi-bashing. Like Halo, the gunplay has a good feel to it; all the reloading and the sprinting for cover creates a fantastic rhythm. On the other hand, the kitsch factor soars off the scale more often than not, and the game proves surprisingly difficult at parts. You can find Wolfenstein for as little as $1.99, though, so that pretty much carpet bombs my complaints. And if you look at the game box, you’ll see it boasts “a full-blown Fatherland graphically realized to Germanic perfection.” Mein Gott, what the hell does that mean?