"This week Vice President Joe Biden spoke at a senior center in Iowa.
Which explains why the seniors were like, 'Is this Hell?'" –Jimmy Fallon
Poor Joe Biden. Personally, I think our VP is a rather nice fella. Unfortunately, he just isn't the sharpest tool in the shed. We knew this long before he was ever VP - I mean, he was caught plagiarizing time and again. Then there are all those wonderful gaffes caught on film:
And liberals like to make fun of Palin. Wow.
Well, ol' Joe did it again with this incredibly racist statement a few days ago:
Remember when Bill Clinton complained that Team Obama "played the race card" on him? Well, it looks like they were planning on going back to that well in their desperation to talk about anything but Obama's abysmal record. Unfortunately for them, this time they went too far and needed to put Joe back in the attic.
Now, what has this got to do with EA and it's Battlefield series? Well, today I read an interesting story that the next installment of EA's famed Battlefield series, Battlefield 4, is not going to be moving on from the modern era:
Given Battlefield 4's quick turnaround after 3, it's probably
unsurprising to hear that the game won't be straying too far from its
predecessor. Developer DICE isn't planning on following the footsteps of
Treyarch's Black Ops 2 by going into the future. Instead, the game will be set in the "modern day as it is."
Speaking
at GDC Europe, DICE general manager Karl Magnus Troedsson talked about
how "we feel this is a place we can be and continue with the series.
Battlefield 4 can live in this space and be very successful."
When I read that, I had a flashback to then senator Joe Biden's idiotic plan to divide Iraq up into three provinces, something that any mildly experienced 4X gamer would instantly realize would guarantee nothing but an on-going civil war. I can't help but to feel that EA is doing something just as idiotic here.
One of the great critique's against Activision's 800lb Call of Duty gorilla is that it never innovates enough, that with each iteration of the Call of Duty franchise, Infinity Ward & Treyarch just "copy and paste" the last CoD into the new one. Now it would appear EA is doing the same with Battlefield.
I hate to think how the Battlefield crowd is going to react to this. I mean, even after Treyarch recently unveiled Black Ops 2 - a title that besides taking the franchise into a delicious cyberpunkian near-future, will also be completely changing its class system, altering how killstreaks work (now score streaks), adding new MP game modes, adding a branching SP campaign, and building in e-sports accoutrements - the Battlefield fanbois who stalk every CoD posting on the internet because, apparently, they have nothing better to do (I guess talking about BF3 is better than playing it), remarked "nothing to see here, more of the same." Bad news fellas: it now looks like Battlefield is stuck in neutral, while CoD is marching on.
I really don't know what EA is thinking! BF3 was a deserved hit; now is not the time to rest on your laurels, and certainly not the time to adopt the worst habits of Activision. Rather, now is the time to keep things fresh and interesting for your fans by adding to the BF franchise and not just making "more of the same". I was positive, for example, that EA/DICE was going to bring the Battlefield series back to World War II. I mean, CoD fans have been clamoring for a remake of World at War for years, and seeing how Tripwire's Red Orchestra 2 was a disappointing flop, there is a real opportunity here for the Battlefield series to dominate a whole new historical era (I'm rather sick of WWII myself, but imagining the battlefields of WWII set in DICE's gloriously destructible, combined arms environment even gives me goosebumps). But no.
Guess I shouldn't be surprised seeing how EA has been slowly trying to morph BF3 into MW3. I mean, first they add smaller maps to BF3 for some CoD-esque CQ battles, and then EA announces the unabashed CoD clone that will be October's Medal of Honor: Warfighter. Would it be wrong to conclude that EA has begun to raise the white flag?
Guess we'll see, but for now I am not optimistic about the direction EA is taking their shooter magnum opus. Before long, it might be CoD fans that start poking fun at the moribund clone that is the Battlefield franchise.
[It was inevitable. Whenever I write about the glorious decade that was the 1980s, my mind inevitably turns to the culmination of the Cold War that occurred in the final years of that golden age (one I consider to be the last gasp of traditional America). Fortunately for the world, that culmination was non-violent even if it could have easily been otherwise . Of course, as an avid Cold War wargamer, it is the now speculative violent end that continues to intrigue me. Eh, what can I do? After all, it was the Cold-War-Turned-Hot wargames of the 1980s that formed me into the gamer I am today. With that in mind, here is an AAR of a patrol by the submarine USS Jack in the opening days of World War 3, circa 1984. It is based on a session with Killfish Games' Cold Waters , their modern re-imagining of the Microprose sub sim classic, Red Storm Rising .]
Is it too early to start queuing up some entertainment for Halloween? Just a bit. Regardless, I find myself doing just that. Part of the reason is that summer for my region never really arrived. Instead of the requisite heat and humidity, we were treated to largely cool, dry days. Really, it has felt like little more than an extended late spring or early autumn. As a result I have found myself yearning to get autumn underway as there isn't any point of continuing this useless summer. This is why I have been looking forward to Halloween: it is THE holiday of autumn! But in addition to that, two games have recently awakened in me a love for the horror of "urban fantasy": Shadowrun Returns , and The Secret World . As I detailed here , those two games have hit a home run with me, and made me reconsider the whole horror genre - a genre I never particularly cared for seeing the low budget "torture porn" tripe coming out of Hollywood these days. And t
Chapter 2: The Soviet Right Hook As we detailed in the previous chapter ( "Red July" ), STAVKA had conceived of the assault on the Fulda Gap not as their central effort but as a grand diversion to draw NATO forces away from other sectors of the West German front. As expected, NATO, long expecting Fulda to be central to a Warsaw Pact onslaught, took the bait and committed the bulk of its ground forces to holding off the fierce Soviet offensive. STAVKA waited three full days to ensure that NATO forces were fully engaged before committing their strategic reserve to opening a new front to the north of Fulda. Known as "Operation Gold Pluto," this daring Soviet plan would put NATO in a perilous position. Final unit dispositions of Operation Gold Pluto with operational overlay (courtesy 8th Guards Army Archives , Volgograd, 1985) Historical Redux If this sounds a bit familiar, it should: Operation Gold Pluto was based on the plan used by Germany during
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