World War II Video Games

Okay, so in the video game industry, there is a huge amount of titles that aim at depicting the action and heroism of soldiers in World War II. For the sake of this post, towards the end I'm going to only focus on the main WWII games.

First off, I don' t think that video games that seek to emulate real wars and situations are disrespectful. If they are taken wrong then they can be, because they make light of a situatin in which thousands of people lost lives, but in general I don't think that is a real problem. If you play a World War II game just to have fun instead of intending on being wrapped up in the story and drama of the war, then you may just be missing the point. I think that these games should be made to tell real and accurate stories, not just to run and gun through a historically based mission.

Now, I'm going to look at a few series of WWII games and say my thoughst about each.

Medal of Honor
As I have said, I don't think that World War II games are bad or wrong. The one thing that I have a problem with in the Medal of Honor series, is that they glorify things and tone things down. There isn't any blood flying everywhere, there aren't swear words being spewed out of every mouth, and it just doesn't do any justice to what real veterans really experienced. To be honest, the MoH games are engrossing and epic experiences, but they still aren't my favorite.

Call of Duty
The Call of Duty games suffer from the exact same thing as the MoH games. They glorify everything, making it seem much more heroic then it really was. Sure, the soldiers helped to define history as we know it, but really a lot of them were just trying to stay alive, they weren't doing certain actions with the whole situation of the war in mind. Then, they tone everything down, with no or very little blood. I'm not saying that you need to make everything bloody and gory to the endth degree, but at least make it accurate to some degree.

Brothers in Arms
This is my favorite series of WWII games. It is brutally and horribly accurate in its depiction of combat situations and the real drama between soldiers and enemies. I think that this is the series that does the best job in depicting what it was like to fight in World War II, and I hope that Gearbox Studios, the series' developer, keeps on doing this kind of job, giving gamers and people everywhere who couldn't have experienced WWII to at least get a little taste of what it must have been like.

Also, for those of you interested in World War II, there is a documentary called The War that looks very interesting that is set to air on PBS on the 23rd.