The Honor and Duty… of Fanboys.
[The serious downtime between articles has been a result of a very busy few months for me, particularly due to my new responsibilities volunteering at the RSPCA and, moreso, the death of a family member. I apologize for the delay since my last article post, but hope you all understand. -Fuzz]
I spend a decent amount of time on the internet nowadays, as most people do. I tend to spend most of that time participating in online gaming or gathering information. Information is power, and an endless diversity of information can be too much to pass up.
There are few things on the webbersphere that can get me truly frustrated; I even find humour in the trolls and various idiocies, but sometimes a point of view will escalate to a full-blown meme that everybody claims as their own. One that simply doesn’t deserve to be considered a valid basis for any opinion in the first place.
Everybody’s opinion is their own, and I can respect that. If all opinions were right there would be no debate or taste and, through that logic, little-to-no distinct creativity. Parrots who hear one argument and mimic it over and over again simply to defend something intangible though (Your validity as a gaming consumer, for example)? I wish every one of you would go headbutt a bullet.
There are two particular examples lately which simply demoralize anybody with any rationality. The first culprit isn’t really related to games, so I will skim over the details.
There was a flood in Australia around Christmas time, but it was far enough back that it’s no longer a very sensitive subject anymore, so people are trying to point fingers regarding who’s fault it was for the flood. Was it the fault of the officials who decided which areas would be settled in… on an island continent with a limited locational supply of water? No. Was it the people in charge of the dams? Maybe if they had whipped out some hoses and a few buckets and got to work on it themselves?
It was rain. Follow my lead here.
It rained a lot. There was water, then there was more water. When there was too much water, it went places. Places flooded.
I'm sure there's an inappropriate League joke in here somewhere.
This isn’t just my response to some internet parroting either; I heard debates about it on the radio and watched a few on television, and by ‘watched’ I mean ‘sternly frowned at for a while til something else was on’. I mean, I didn’t even suffer much from the flooding and I’m still pissed off about the debates; the water only reached high enough on my property to soak my lawn a bit. I came home after the evacuation and thought “Well, this is a bit anti-climactic.” then ended up with muddy water soaking into my socks. Travesty abounds! Uncomfortable squelching noises!
*Slaps dust off of hands* Subject dropped! Let’s move on and make this about gaming again.
There is another thing which has been giving me the Freddy Frowns; fanboys. In particular, Call of Duty fanboys. Yes, the Modern Warfare series is great. Yes, it bares some similarities to the timeline of the Medal of Honor franchise. No, Medal of Honor is not a slap-dash cash-in copy of Call of Duty.
For the past few years I can’t experience a conversation regarding different games in the ‘unnamed soldier’ niche without this coming up, but this broken-record is so dumbfounding-inaccurate that it’s just rather sad: “EA are such shameless bastards. Look at what they keep trying to do with Medal of Honor. They are trying to copy Modern Warfare”. No Nancy, they aren’t.
When Medal of Honor was announced the entire industry was intrigued. It was a game that was created by, and would also be directed by, the film director Steven Spielberg. At the time, a famous director getting involved in a video game release beyond a movie tie-in was just unheard of. The original game was released in 1999, then in 2002 Battlefield 1942 came out and was its damned schmexy self. It was a smooth and delicious palette cleanser for the market. You were thrown into an open world with a basic kit and told ‘Here are your orders. Now, go.’ It was probably the real protogame from which the sandbox gameplay style developed, and proved to consumers and developers everywhere that a large-scale multiplayer environment could exist, which was quite a big thing back then.
So everybody was kung-fu guerrilla fighting in Medal of Honor and turning tides in Battlefield 1942, then *pop*! Out of nowhere a year later in 2003, Call of Duty comes out and… wait, it’s actually a good game?
Yes, that was the exact response of the gamer everyman. We had our immersing survival wartime FPS in Medal of Honor and the completely nameless feel of Battlefield 1942. The common consensus was that Call of Duty was only being made to jump on the bandwagon, gripping strongly on the coat-tails of EA.
Epic Beard Man on a bad day.
It sounds really wierd doesn’t it? EA published two good games that everybody loved, and another company (at the time, Activision) saw some dollar signs and decided they could do things better? It’s funny how the circle comes around, isn’t it? So when Call of Duty came out and it wasn’t a completely crappy cash-in game, people were surprised. The game itself was a happy accident; it was another company’s attempt at doing a better job of providing a deep wartime experience, but it mainly came through thanks to a completely different company altogether.
Call of Duty was build upon ID Software’s Quake III Arena engine, which was a lead competitor in the multiplayer FPS core engine market that successfully rivalled the Unreal engine. This is important; modifying an engine with roots in deathmatch play to suit a wartime epic series ended up causing a strange effect: the multiplayer mode worked. It was crisp, clean and fun. It offered variety for map design, weapon implementation and graphical settings. To put it simply, people finished the single player campaign, got on multiplayer to give it a go, and were hooked.
Suddenly Call of Duty had their own fanbase, which they continued to cater for with each release in the franchise; while they strive to continue with their vision of making a better wartime experience for the player, they understood why they were successful and made an effort to maintain the clean multiplayer experience.
The Medal of Honor franchise has still been steadily releasing new games in its series to this day, and has taken its step into different wartime events, mostly due to having specifically built game releases around World War II campaigns for a while and needing new content. The series has still been primarily focused on the giving a truly heroic feel, where you step into the shoes of a soldier of the time to follow his misadventures and do your part for the greater good…
…but you know what, fanboys? You probably don’t know half of the history behind these two games, if any of it at all. All you do is spout of your comments in an attempt to put Call of Duty on some kind of pedestal and proclaim that somehow Medal of Honor is trying to take the podium. The games may have had similar roots (which, funnily enough, came from the opposite of what you believe) but they have evolved into two completely different experiences.
Call of Duty wants you to have fun, Medal of Honor wants you to feel proud.
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Fuzz Goes off in a Tangent:
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This type of pointless, stubborn fanboy behaviour is not limited to internet randoms or certain genres; it could just as easily be regurgitated by somebody you know about a game from a genre you wouldn’t expect. Allow me to portray one of my regular experiences with it first-hand.
I’m a big fan of all genres, but I’ve always had a soft spot for RTS games. I own and play the whole Command & Conquer franchise, the Dawn of War games, Blizzard’s productions, the Supreme Commander series, and many more different releases. Well, except Command & Conquer 4. I bought and played some of that, then almost facepalmed myself into a coma.
Some days I just really feel like playing a particular game, so I will get on my Ventrilo server and or take a trip to a local gamer’s hangout (like a LAN centre or hobby shop) to chat to people. There will be people talking about messing around on MMOs, playing FPS, RPGs; you name it. Unfortunately, many of these gamers have their foundation built from Blizzard games.
This poses to be quite the dilemma. Here’s a sample Ventrilo conversation that covers about 3/4 of the conversations I have when trying to drum up an RTS game.
“Hey, anybody wanna play some RTS?”
“Starcraft 2?”
“No thanks. I’d like to play some Dawn of War/SupCom/Red Alert 3/etc right now.”
“[Insert fanboy lingo here that dismisses the ENTIRE RTS GENRE unless it is made by Blizzard]“
No, I’m not joking. One of the biggest hurdles to make it over when playing a game with friends comes forward in the RTS field. Blizzard fanboys are like rabid bears, with Blizzard games being their caves which they shelter within to protect them from having a bad experience. Don’t step into their cave and confuse them with things such as ‘new concepts’ or ‘interesting gameplay mechanics’ or they might attack you with their fragile viewpoints and maul of inconsistencies.
“Starcraft 2 is the best RTS available. Nothing competes with it. There’s no reason to play anything else.”
“Comparing SupCom to Starcraft is a mute and pointless argument. They only share genre; they are completely different. They are fun for unique reasons.”
“I don’t care.”
Eventually it spirals downwards with me being accused of being the real fanboy of whatever RTS game I want to play at the time, despite playing all of them. Starcraft 2 is a good game, and most of Blizzard’s steps into the RTS genre share that trait, but for Pete’s sake people, play a different bloody RTS game you insecure twats.
So Blizzard fanboys, let’s put this into perspective:
By your logic, I shouldn’t have played and enjoyed Borderlands because I like FPS games made by Valve, or should never have played any of the Donkey Kong Country series because I should only have experienced platform games made by Shiny. Sure, Shiny only released 3 platform games in the last 15 years, but that wouldn’t stop you, would it? I mean, Blizzard has only released the RTS games Starcraft, Warcraft III and Starcraft 2 in the last 15 years, right? Though to throw your mind for a loop, I might not have ever played Earthworm Jim or Wild 9 if I was going by your logic, because I would still be playing Sonic the Hedgehog games.
Why should we even limit that logic to games? It’s so diverse!
You remember when you had some of your grandma’s jam on toast as a kid? Well, why aren’t you eating that every day for breakfast? Hell, don’t even worry that your roommates are sitting across the table enjoying crisp and spongy waffles. Is your toaster broken? Don’t risk it; stay away from that cereal in the cupboard and wait for lunch. You never know; the cereal might not be satisfying. Never mind that your friend Bob went out to the Diner with you and ordered some bacon on eggs. You’ve got jam on toast, right? You know that jam on toast is good, because it’s never let you down. You don’t need their fancy bacon, convenient cereal or sweet-smelling waffles.
In conclusion: Buy Borderlands. It’s cheap now and, after still playing it on-and-off for so long, I can safely say it’s worth the money. Plus, it gives them more incentive to go all-in for the production of Borderlands 2. Good stuff.
