WWII Games Redux

I feel so strongly about this I needed to make another seperate post. I was unable to bring myself to add to the current one, because I thought, nay feared that you would miss what I was saying. First and foremost, let me give you my review of Sniper Elite, I like to call it "in a nuthshell":

5 minutes of fun, 3 days of boring. This game has already been made. It was called Max Payne 2. Slow motion bullet times? Frantically shooting enemies with machine guns? If you added some comic book references and a noir narration/spooky voice-over from a music video, then you'd have the same game. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I liked the whole Max Payne series, I liked it so much I played it to the point of driving other people crazy, because they KNEW I was playing it (see: d4v). And, that is in fact, the problem. I played it to death long before SE came out.

-end of review-

Not the end of my rant however. As with my request to end the spewing geyser of WWII games, we also need to stop rehashing game play. It ties into everything I was freaking out about with the Nintendo "incident". People demand innovation in the game industry, but they demand it from, and within, areas that aren't truly innovative. A new controller? A different visual style to deliver the same scene? These are Red's baby, they don't actually have anything new or exciting about them. The last truly innovative game I played was the original splinter cell. In the era of constant FPS beign churned out, to see a game where shooting was never as important as hiding, where darkness was as powerful a weapon as your knife, and where the AI could not only be misdirected, but entirely fooled into doing things that were stupid and counter-productive, Splinter Cell was a whole new level of play. Some of it had been tapped by the new Metal Gear series, but sadly Metal Gear adhered too closely to its roots, to truly soar. Don't get me wrong, I played Metal Gear Solid with near feverish zeal, but it was a shiner version of the original, and had its moments of truly poor design. The only real downfall of Splinter Cell, as with any game to date, has been the lack replayability after you've mastered the powers of deception necessary to defeat any of the levels.

wait a minute....I just thought of something. Something important. I lied to you, there was one other game, I played AFTER Splinter Cell, that was totally different from anything I'd played before, and captured my focus with equal zeal.

Freelancer

That game was sick. The environments were beautiful, the story was intriguing, the weapons scaled up awesomely, the content and playability were HUGE. It took almost 2 years of playing that game to finally exhaust its potential, and I'm still tempted to play again. I'm surprised actually that no one came out with another. Especially since the multiplayer aspect of the game was so basic. It didn't have any kind of Co-op or PvP beyond the simple act of blowing one another up or doing the standard missions together. They could have made a MMORPG out of that game, I would play it, i'd play it right now. I'd never stop playing it.

Anyways, since the original Medal of Honor came out, there have been 12 other games released on the MoH and CoD branding that were all variations on WWII events. I think we've pretty much covered the genre, and even invented many tales that probably had no basis in actual operations within the European Theater. Either way, I'd prefer to see some other subjects broached, and some other game styles tapped. Even invented.

I haven't seen any civil war games or Boxer rebellion titles...