Burke's Joystick

One of my favorite go-to gaming genres is the first person shooter.  I think the reason why I so enjoy this format is because it is low effort gaming in the extreme.  What I mean by that is that unlike other genres that often require greater mental effort on the part of the player to effectively participate in the gameplay, such as strategy games or role playing games, shooters are more about muscle reflex ("twitch") than they are about deep thinking.  I mean, you don't have to be a genius to figure out how to place a crosshair on a target and pull the trigger.  Now, that is not to say that there is no mental effort required; that would not be true.   As I have pointed out before , most shooters are realistically brutal in their presentations of real world warfare. The player who willy-nilly jumps onto the modern virtual battlefield without using any brain cells will soon find himself to be the first causality on that same field of battle.  Shooters ...

It is one of those things where one game leads to another, which leads to another....  In this case the instigator was Red Orchestra 2 .  As I detailed here , I've been having a blast with the Rising Storm expansion.  Well, after playing on a bunch of servers that also hosted the core Ost Front content, I started to notice that maps which favored armored warfare were coming up quite infrequently in the rotation.  Truth be told this is no big loss as I hate how RO2 restricts armored vehicles to players who choose the role of crewman/tank commander.  As someone who prefers to play infantry, I rarely get a chance to hop in a tank because of this restriction - how I wish Tripwire would ditch this limited class thing and embrace the more open system used by Dice's Battlefield 3 !  Regardless, even though I do prefer gritty infantry combat, I did become wistful for the chance to slug it out in some armor. So I started looking for a replacement and remember...

This is going to be one of those oh-so-rare posts about a World War II game.  Why so rare?  Because World War II bores the heck out of me! You just can't get away from it:  World War II movies, TV shows, books, magazines...the world remains awash in this epic conflict!  I guess that is to be expected seeing how it was a world war that affected millions of souls around the globe, and defined much of the 20th Century's political history. Regardless, the dosage makes the poison, and I have to conclude that the non-stop saturation of all things World War II has fatally poisoned my interest over the years. Gaming, of course, has over-indulged with WWII like every other medium, so I haven't even been able to find refuge here.  To make matters worse, unlike, say, television or cinema that has attempted to portray this world war in different ways over the years, gaming has largely been stuck in neutral with various games constantly revisiting the same territory ...

"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...