"What the hell is this crap?" you ask? If you've spent ten minutes around me in IRC or on the forums or in the comments, you probably know that I'm a financially strapped bastard who has yet to purchase a beloved Xbox 360. As such, I am left all by my lonesome, puttering around the remnants of old-school Xbox Live, playing 5-year-old games until the demons scratching away at the shell of my bitter, decrepit soul cease their howling. So, here's my plan:

1. Borrow, rent, or buy old games.
2. Play old games that no one plays anymore.
3. Review old games that no one plays anymore.
4. Post those reviews on Destructoid Community Blogs.
5. ???
6. Profit!

Makes sense, amirite? First on the agenda, one of the 9,563 games released in the past 10 years that involved killing Nazis, Medal of Honor: Frontline. Frontline was the fourth in the unnecessarily-epic series, and probably one of the best-received of the lot. It reintroduced us to the painfully-American-sounding Jimmy Patterson, a character who debuted in the original MoH game and excels at killing evil German men. As Jimmy, you're a swastika-stomping G.I. Joe who probably drinks hard whiskey and smokes cigars and loves America and apple pie and the missionary position. Jimmy is America's bitch and is given impossible mission after impossible mission where he is expected to slaughter a seemingly endless stream of Nazis and blow up radios and pick up documents and steal men's clothes. If this were me, I'd have told Uncle Sam to blow it out his ass and skipped off to Canada.



But Jimmy's a noble little bullet sponge and he rhymes the rhyme well, provided you, the player, are not a circus chimp with Down's Syndrome. The game is challenging in places, but we're not talking about a brilliant piece of strategic gaming here. Each level is, essentially, get from Point A to Point B, pick something up, blow something up, and get to this location. Oh, and don't get killed by Nazis. I played the game on Easy, because I wasn't about to waste hours of my day trying to kill that Nazi guy whose name reminds me of Strom Thurmond... Ah, yes, Sturmgeist. Thank you, Wikipedia . Also, I played the final levels in God Mode, because I wanted to live out my childhood fantasy of going Terminator on a group of Nazis. So, well, I guess this isn't the most accurate or realistic game review you'll ever read, but I don't really think either of us care.

Personally, I thought this game was decent enough that it didn't make me immediately want to run out and study up on Mein Kampf. It's fun to run through some reasonably well-designed WWII scenarios as a Nazi-killing machine, and the one or two sequences where you're in disguise helped spice things up a bit. Still, the whole game appears to've been rendered in greys and browns. Even though it's not to the extent of every single FPS released nowadays, there's an underlying bleakness to the game that wore away at me over the course of my playing. Now, you'll probably say that, well, it's a World War II video game and World War II was no Sunday walk in the park, but this isn't World War II, it's a video game that's based on World War II and I don't like my video games depressing the fuck out of me, so bugger off. So it's a little dismal, but maybe that's my depression talking. The graphics, however, are pretty decent for the time it was made, so it at least looks pretty good while it's making me slit my wrists.



The game starts out during the world's most famous beach party, the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, like a good World War II game should. The level is decent, even if the beaches do look a little devoid of soldiers. Let's just assume that most of our boys landed just down the beach, shall we? From here, Jimmy goes U-boat hunting, sneaks through German mansions, plays Nazi dress-up, and rides through a mine in a minecart in one of the must unashamedly unrealistic sequences in video game history. One day, I'm going to walk up to a World War II veteran and ask him about the time he rode in the back of a mine cart and blew up dozens of Nazis who just so happened to be standing in front of highly explosive barrels of flammable material. When he's done ramming his cane up my bleeding arsehole, I'll be sure to blog his answer. The game ends with you single-handedly fighting through the entire population of the German military in order to kill Baron Sturmgeist and steal his magical flying unicorn of death... Okay, it's a prototype plane. The unicorn just sounded better. The ending is fairly anti-climactic, but I guess that's war for you.

Apparently, the PS2 version of this game is about as gimped as a Joystiq writer in a coolness contest (oh, snap!), shockingly lacking any form of multiplayer mode at all. The Gamecube port had multiplayer, but the Xbox version went one step further and enabled online multiplayer, so you could fight Nazis who would realistically yell racial slurs at you while you shoot at them. Of course, if you try to play the five-year-old Frontline on Xbox Live now, you will probably be met with an empty game lobby which, while less entertaining, will also save you from having to listen to xXuRgayXdickXx from Texas calling you a "nagger Jew." I didn't play on any of the multiplayer maps because I have no friends, so I'm going to completely ignore it. No one cares. The selection of weapons is pretty basic and not particularly exceptional, but they get the job done quite well during the campaign. As such, I can't imagine multiplayer being all that much fun.

I honestly don't see any point in my picking this game up again, despite its being pretty decent. It was an entertaining enough time playing through the game, and I did play a few choice levels through a second time, but the game doesn't really stay fresh, especially since there have been 78,253 sequels released since 2002. Still, it's definitely worth at least one or two play-throughs, if you find yourself tired of BioShock after your 18th run or you're sick of the COD4 beta or you won't be playing Halo 3 online, or you won't be buying any new games at all, this year. So, yeah, you'll never play this. Fine.