Don’t defeat the urge to play

DAY OF DEFEAT
Activision
www.activision.com

By Maj Marty McKone

Scenes from the game.

Scenes from the game.

Ever since Valve released their first person shoot-em-up, Half Life, a series of Half Life titles have been released and a serious Modder fraternity has sprung up.

These modders have used the Half Life graphics engine to create highly modified versions of Half Life covering periods from the Vikings through to futuristic space marine versus alien battles.

Recently one of these modified games has been picked up by Valve and enhanced for Retail release.
Day of Defeat initially starting as fairly clunky storm ashore at Normandy affair.

Over the years it has been improved upon until it reached its current highly polished format.

Day of Defeat is set in the heady days of the Normandy landings, with players being able to play as the US Infantry or Airborne, British Infantry and German Infantry.

The game is played in the normal Half Life 1st person view with movement and fire being controlled by a combination of mouse/joystick and keyboard strokes.

Players can lay, crouch, sprint, walk climb and crawl and need all these movement options to survive and navigate what usually becomes an extremely lethal environment.

Additional movement functions in Day of Defeat allow players to set up machine guns adding greatly to the accuracy of the weapon.

Players have at their disposal a range of period weapons which are faithfully reproduced.

The look, sound and characteristics of the weapons are well researched and lend a great feel to the game.
The audible twang of the discard of the Garand clip and the reload sequence for the .30cal are just two examples of the well modelled weapons.

Grenades and satchel charges help assaulting troops get through the maze of barbed wire, trenches and pillboxes that litter many of the battlefields.

Each mission usually has set objectives and requires players to capture checkpoints to achieve the mission’s goals.

One of the nice touches with Day of Defeat is that several missions are linked together, the latter only accessible after the successful completion of the first.

The main Normandy landing is a good example with the Allied player needing to capture the three machine gun nests before being given access to the second tier of defences, with the destruction of the German artillery installation the primary objective.

Day of Defeat can only be played in multiplayer mode.

This normally means that players are restricted to smaller skirmishes against a group of friends over a LAN or by joining on of the many games set up on the Internet, which can be easily accessed through the Day of Defeat console.

Another option is to down load Bots (computer controlled players) which populate the empty player positions and provide a useful enemy and friendly source of troops.

Day of Defeat has a range of command that the bots are responsive to, so players have some limited manipulation over the friendly bots.

The inclusion of Bots greatly enhances the smaller LAN games and stop them from being a one on one shoot out.

Day of Defeat is an excellent modification that has captured the feel and the intensity of the close fighting that characterised the clashes during this period of the war.

Console Corner XBox

Conflict Desert Storm II (Back to Baghdad)
Gotham Games
www.gothamgames.com

By CAPT Jason Logue

With Gulf War 2 sort of over, the entertainment industry is already grabbing on what detail they can find to begin concept work on the next range of movies, books and games to hit the shots ... nothing entertains like a good war story.

Conflict Desert Storm II Back to Baghdad is not however, as the misleading title may have indicated, about taking it to Saddam and his army in 2003. Instead a player leads a four-man special forces patrol during the ‘91 campaign.

Essentially It is a tweaked version of the parent title with all new missions and a few new tricks.

Off the top players get the choice of leading a 22SAS patrol or a 1SFOD patrol.

Really the only difference is the voices used to portray the patrol members as the missions, equipment and even their names stay the same.

Like the previous title, Conflict Desert Storm II Back to Baghdad, can be played as an individual or up to four players can each control a patrol member for some great team action.

Games grabs

We have a copy of Day of Defeat (PC) and Conflict Desert Storm II Back to Baghdad (XBox) up for grabs this edition. Entries should be e-mailed to ADFgamesmen@telstra.com with the name of the game you would like to win in the subject line. Please only one entry per person, subsequent entries will be discarded. Include your full name and mailing address in the e-mail or your entry won’t be accepted. Congratulations to our recent winners. SOFII: J Beeser, Sydney, D Spence, Sydney, P Spiranac, Brisbane. Medieval Total War: Viking Invasion P Phillipi Melbourne.

This team-based approach is how the game should be played because although the team members are reasonably capable when handled by the AI it is quite hard tomultitask within the patrol when time runs against you.

With four people each of the specialties, commander, heavy weapons, sniper and demolitions can be used to great effect – as an individual I found myself using the characters for certain tasks only preferring to stick with the demolitions expert for general play.

The controls are logical but are quite different to games of similar ilk so the training (which is unfortunately set in the USA) is very worthwhile.

The game also allows interaction with several vehicle types, predominantly hooning around shooting stuff up in a 110 ‘pinkie’. All up this is a great console game and it should also do quite well as a PC title.

My only concern is the amount of hits a soldier can take and the ability to constantly patch someone back to full health (despite just taking a T64 main armament round full in the face).

This is a gameplay issue as Conflict Desert Storm II Back to Baghdad requires a player to keep their whole patrol alive to advance to the next level – there’s no reo’s in the echelon.

Oh and you’ll be pleased to know I haven’t found Saddam yet either.