183 Games About WWII
Published by wes213 on Friday, August 14, 2009
You and i both know there are a lot of world war 2 games out there and until now how many for sure was just a guessing game, here we have a new report by 1up that will fill in any and all missing info about the war game that have come out since the dawn of consoles.
1UP reports: "Another WWII shooter" has long since passed beyond the point of being mere cliché; to becoming something almost entirely meaningless -- so common there's little point in even pointing it out. The sun came up in the East today, the ocean is kind of wet, and we stormed the beach at Normandy for the five hundredth time this week. It's not until we remember, based on the minimal attention we paid in history class, that there were a crapload of other wars fought over the last century or so that it starts to feel a little odd that the second World War gets such disproportionate representation in gaming. In fact, performing a casual census of game releases since 1980 and checking them against 20th century American conflicts is more than a little startling:
The obvious question is, "Why?" Part of the answer lies in the dates the games were released, which reveals a huge spike in WWII titles around the late '90s. While games were always heavily weighted toward WWII before that point, over two-thirds of the titles on the list were released after 1998, and almost all of them have been first-person shooters. It's true that more games of all kinds were being published by then than in the industry's younger days, but the number of titles set in other wars actually decreases at that point. Perhaps more tellingly, a large percentage of the games on the list represent only a few franchises:
But none of this actually explains why. The obvious answer would seem to be, "Because they're popular." As long as a certain kind of game sells well, it'll be followed by sequels and imitators, and WWII shooters sell very, very well. But why would they be so much more popular than shooters set in, say, World War I or Vietnam?
At least some of that has to be a practical consideration. No war has actually been much fun for the people involved, but there are certain elements that make for a fun game. In the case of the first World War, gamers probably wouldn't have a particularly good time spending hours sitting in a ditch waiting for either someone to take off their head the instant they look up, or for their entire team to be wiped out by poison gas. Think of it as a version of Team Fortress in which Sniper is the only class and everyone randomly dies for no reason occasionally. In fact, nearly every WWI game ever made has been either a strategy game or a flight sim. Nobody actually seems to have much interest in dying in a trench.
In the case of Vietnam, the difference is probably mostly psychological. First, it probably helps that WWII is a war that we "won." Second, though history is a bit more complicated than we'd like to think, it's very easy to believe that WWII may have been an example of the mythical "just war." There were good guys and bad guys. Nazis, in fact, rank above robots and zombies on the list of evil things we can guiltlessly cap in the head. Meanwhile, conflicts like Vietnam, where you don't really know exactly what you're trying to accomplish or even who the bad guys actually are until they start shooting at you, don't make for a very satisfying experience, at least in the context of a shooter. Nobody wants to play a game where you don't know who to shoot, other than "everyone, including the women and children," and winning means coming home despised, unemployable, and possibly maimed.
Most any other war has some combination of the above problems, coupled with the fact that WWII looms so large in both history and collective memory that it's sometimes hard to remember that any other wars happened.
News-Source:
1up.com
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