Showing posts with label CoD: VietNam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CoD: VietNam. Show all posts

13 January 2010

Call of Duty and Gaming Links, 13 January 2010


My XIM360 sensitivity settings...

    From lotus13 of 2Old2Play: Inside an Infinity Ward developer's meeting:

IW Dev #1: OK, team, we're almost done with the game, but how can we extend the life if it so we don't have to create any DLC, or develop a new one?

IW Dev #2: We could just 'port the maps from the last one over as a DLC pack!

IW Dev#1: We're already on that one, but I like the way you think.

IW Dev#3: How about creating a secret time-travel level that takes them back to the WaW maps?

IW Dev#1: No, that would require programmer time and we're all heading out for vacation. Plus, it would create an implicit acknowledgment that Treyarch did OK, and we'd lose a shit ton of geek cred.

IW Dev#4: Oh! Oh! I know! Let's just mod the skins and a couple of weapons and make a caveman mode with sticks and rocks and stuff!

IW Dev#1: Security! Get this jackass outta here.

[IW DEV#1, QUIETLY TO HIS ASSISTANT]: *Actually, get a team on that right away, but make sure my name is on it*

IW Dev#1: Come on, people, we need answers here! The beach ain't gettin' any warmer!

IW Dev#2: Man, if only there was some way to make people just play through the same shit over and over again.

IW Dev#1: Wait, what did you say?

IW Dev#2: I said it would be nice if we could just get them to replay the same thing again and again, without us actually having to do anything.

IW Dev#1: You are a fucking genius. But we'll have to find some way to make them actually want to do it.

IW Dev#3: Hey, my kid got this G.I. Joe last Christmas that had a bunch of unit insignia stickers. We could just let them start a sticker collection.

IW Dev#1: Perfect. Frank, scan that shit in and let's get out of here. I have an appointment for a colonic before I leave and I don't want to be late.

[FADE OUT]

    Cool, huh? One VietNam flick I didn't mention in the past 2 blogs because I haven't seen it in this century: Hamburger Hill. It's been more than 10 years since I saw it, and I don't remember a blessed thing about it, other than Courtney Vance is in it. I have the DVD somewhere. Once I see it again, I'll revisit the CoD: VietNam/movies topic.
    While Reibo rested from his labors, I managed to hook up with Matt64 for a couple of hours of Modern Warfare 2. It was my first time roaming with my Joker961 gamertag on an Xbox 360 memory unit. I played on my old 27 inch Samsung 1080i (I usually game on a Samsung 24 inch 1080p). As the girls will tell you, three extra inches make all the difference. I really liked the bigger FOV better. Plus, the ergonomics of my own computer desk are much better than the gaming cubbyhole in Reibo's man-cave.
    It was Matt64 and me with 4 randoms. Everyone else was apparently doing something else.  We played 11 matches of hardcore TDM, pretty much losing every other match, even tho we were rarely negative. Almost all the losses seemed to be caused by somone on our team going majorly negative (and, luckily, it was hardly ever us).
    We started out auspiciously on Wasteland as Spetznaz (we seemed to be spawning as the opposing forces all night), where I went 9/2 thanks to the SCAR-H equipped with thermal. We were in a lobby with some (apparently) Arabic-speaking players. They all quit after they got fragged a few times. They didn't seem to have a bad connection. One of their party got split up on our team, but he seemed to be playing fair, which was a nice change of pace.

    Matt64 had a scorching game on Highrise, mowing Rangers down with his trusty RPD and going 22/11. My own highlight came on Skidrow, where 3 Rangers ate my predator around the corner from their spawn area, which we'd taken over. It was pretty super-delicious to have one of my team-mates go, "Hey was that a triple-kill?" :D Sadly, all good times must end. On the last game, I went 2/5 and we got outrageously spanked as the OpFor on Afghan. I rage-quit after that match. We finished with with 6 wins, 4 losses, and 1 suspicious draw on Terminal where a team-mate might have been sand-bagging to help his buddies.

    On to the links:
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PS.
Posted by Joker961 at 07:28 0 comments
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12 January 2010

Call of Duty and Gaming Links, 12 January 2010

Never get out of the fucking boat.
   
   Like Apocalypse Now, Platoon is obviously going to be an powerful influence on any game based on VietNam. I have a bit of personal history with Platoon, too. Director Oliver Stone was an infantryman in the 25th Division in '67, and the film is based on his view of the VietNam conflict. When Platoon was released in December of 1986, I was an infantryman in the 25th Division, too. The film was still in general release some months later when I became the training NCO of my company (RATELO for the company CO in the field and training NCO back in the barracks). I arranged for my entire company to go to a private screening of Platoon as a training event. The general topic was the Geneva Convention, war crimes and military discipline. I got a roll of tickets the size of a movie reel. I arranged military bus transportation down to the theater in Waikiki, and the whole 120-man company convoyed to see Platoon. 
    My First Sergeant, Edward Naylor, (himself a VietNam veteran in the 173rd Airborne), God bless him, didn't think much of Stone's movie. A lot of it was overblown, he said. But the attention to small details really, really affected him. The depiction of the insanity of jungle combat left him shaking and sweaty. I had only ever seen him like that one other time: When we did our joint training exercise with the Thai army during Operation Cobra Gold '86. We bivouaced in huts like those used in VietNam; the weather, of course, was identical. We even had the same uniforms. For Cobra Gold, we were issued VietNam era OD BDUs with the slanted tunic pockets and boonie hats. 1SG Naylor got a bit shaky when we were out in the middle of the Thai jungle, a million miles from anything except snakes. He was always composed and in control.  But you could tell he was remembering some bad stuff. I don't think anyone was happy to be out in the middle of nowhere with nothing but bayonets and blanks. (You know how the jungle sounds at night? Ever see a Tarzan movie? Just like that. No shit.)

    Platoon will likely provide some great imagery for Treyarch to cook up uniform details, weaponry, and so forth. The scenes with the NVA making a fast movement to contact were brilliantly directed and edited. The long shots following the grunts and the NVA running through the jungle must have been hell to shoot, but they look amazing. The terrain was real jungle, and, watching the movie, I sometimes thought I recognized locations. When the grunts have to climb up a terraced stream, it looked just like one of the obstacles we had to traverse in Thailand. One of the guys from 2Old2Play mentioned that a jungle game might be a bit too monotonous. There's something to that. (I know that after 30 days in the jungle I wanted to never seen the color green again.) But there were vehicles and tanks used during VietNam, as we saw in Full Metal Jacket. The PBR sequence in Apocalypse Now had some exciting moments. Some combat could be set in urban settings; and there could be some interesting behind-the-lines stuff cooked up to keep things from getting too boring. Surely, they could throw some really great Navy SEAL action in there, too. (Where's Dick Marcinko when you need him, huh?

    I really loved the CAR-15 carbines SGT Elias and Barnes used. At least, they were accurate to the period, more or less. Evidently, Stone allowed folks to personalize their kit, and some non-accurate weaponry snuck in. SGT Barnes (played by Tom Berenger) has an 80's era push dagger from Cold Steel. SGT Elias (played by Willem Dafoe), meanwhile, has a Cold Steel Tanto-bladed knife which was probably not available during the VietNam era. (I carried a Gerber Mark II with an non-serrated blade and a camouflage enamel job on the handle and a camouflage nylon scabbard. I had a length of 550 cord as a lanyard on the pommel looped through an equipment ring on the shoulder pad of my web gear, right where the bandage pack was.) But I digress... :)

    On to the links:
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PS.
Posted by Joker961 at 09:23
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11 January 2010

Call of Duty and Gaming Links, 11 January 2010

    Since we blogged about CoD: VietNam yesterday, let's continue the discussion and move on to possible movie inspirations. Apocalypse Now is a given. Whatever filmgoers thought of Coppola's murky ending to the movie, it had a lot of visuals and bits of dialogue that stick in your head for life. Some of the characters are iconic. Surely, Robert Duvall's LTC Kilgore has been ripped off riffed on in a million military movies. I like the smell of homage in the morning... It smells like... plagiarism. It's extra points for Apocalypse Now since it gave R. Lee Ermey his first movie role in a bit part as a helicopter pilot. 
    1987's Full Metal Jacket, surely, is going to be a influence. (I saw that while I was in the Army, and it eventually inspired my Joker online persona 11 years later.) And, of course, that movie brought the always STRAC R. Lee Ermey to stardom. Someone at Treyarch has to be busy trying to cook up "war faces" for the player characters right now. (R. Lee Ermey was originally only a consultant for recruit training and the USMC on Full Metal Jacket, but a videotaped demo of 15 minutes of uninterrupted drill instructor swearing won him the part of the Drill Instructor who drives Vincent D'Onofrio's Pvt. Gomer Pyle insane.) 
    R. Lee Ermey also figures prominently in another epic (well, half-epic) VietNam film: The Boys in Company C. That's a movie that was well on the way to becoming a great VietNam flick before went South in its second half. I totally forgave the film its hackneyed retread of WWII flick ethnically mixed platoons and the cliched plot turns for two things: The performances of R. Lee Ermey and Stan Shaw. R. Lee Ermey was literally living the part since he had been a real-life drill instructor using his own know-how from tours in VietNam to train Parris Island Marine recruits. His little off-camera bits during the haircut scenes are priceless, but his earnestness and intensity during the pivotal confrontation scene with Stan Shaw are unforgettable. Stan Shaw, as the ass-kicking Tyrone Washington, forever won my heart in the combat scene where he stood up, smoking RPG launcher on his shoulder, after rocketing a VC sniper to Commie smithereens and shouted: "Yeah, I did it. And I hope I got your mama, too!" Badass doesn't come any bigger or badder than that. The whole movie went to cinema hell with a soccer game plot twist, but, to this day, when I frag somebody real bad, I repeat that line.
    The Boys in Company C segues right into a little known but cool VietNam film: Go Tell the Spartans. Craig Wasson, who played the hippie-dude in The Boys in Company C, plays the green Cpl Courcey in Spartans. The movie takes place during the early years of the war, and it has some truly great performances from Wasson, Burt Lancaster, and even Evan Kim. In the next blog entry, we'll chat about Platoon, which will likely be a major inspiration for CoD: VietNam.

    On to the links:
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    Non-Gaming Links:
PS.
Posted by Joker961 at 05:39 0 comments
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10 January 2010

Call of Duty and Gaming Links, 10 January 2010


He'll be back.

    I've been giving this CoD: VietNam thing some thought. A Call of Duty game for that conflict does make sense. After all, Call of Duty is a franchise that has traditionally dealt with conflicts where the end result is a known quantity. The only difference is that the end is one where we (meaning the "Good Guys") come out on the losing side. Weapon-wise, a VietNam era CoD is pure win. That conflict was fought with an amazing mix of weapons. There'll still be AKs; there'll be Dragunovs; there'll be M14s. The famed "White Feather", Carlos Hathcock, had his Winchester Model 70, so maybe we'll get that to play with. They can toss in the XM177 to take the spot of the M4A1. (And, in fact, my own M16 while in the Army, was an arsenal-refurbished XM177E. The lower receiver was Colt-stamped as one of the experimental full-auto carbines that eventually became the ubiquitous M4A1. And, yes, she jammed like a motherf*cker.) M203s will be in there, too, to placate the tubers. But there'll also be a cool mix of WWII era weapons which were used by both US and regional troops. Treyarch can mix and match WWII and modern era weapons to get the VietNam conflict armory fleshed out in no time. There were still Garands around during the early 60s; the "Ruff Puffs" had them instead of M16s. M1 carbines (including full auto variants) were used. I remember reading some first person accounts in Soldier of Fiction of guys hauling the Thompson around, too, as well as some arcane foreign SMGs like the Swedish K. The VietCong were copiously supplied with arms by the SovBloc like the PPSh-41 and Moisin-Nagant sniper rifles, too. It might be actually easy for Treyarch to cook up a VietNam title. They've got mappers who have already made a lot of jungle-type maps. They can probably reskin the Japanese models to make them resemble NVA soldiers. After all, the NVA wore those same spiffy Pith helments. Hey, maybe they can coach the same voice actors in Vietnamese!
    If nothing else, Call of Duty: VietNam will mean I'll finally get a full-auto M16 like the "Jammin' Jenny" that was so dear to my heart when I was a ground-pounder in the mid-80s. On to the links:
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PS.
Posted by Joker961 at 06:05 0 comments
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