"MEIN LEBEN!!!"
Oct. 6th, 2009 09:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynOr, welcome to the latest installment of Camwyn Stinks At Videogames. Today's entry: Wolfenstein.
The Wolfenstein franchise holds a special blood-soaked place in my heart. See, way back when I was a wee freshling at Case Western Reserve University, yours truly had a really nice computer, at least by the standards of every computer I'd owned before. Said computer was a 386SX with something like four megs of RAM and a whopping 20 meg hard drive. It was a lovely device, truly it was, and it made me very happy with what I was doing at the time. And then one day a friend of mine came along and said there was this video game and I should totally load it onto my computer and try it, even though my primary games up to that point had been things like Dune and Civilization. The game was a pirated copy of Wolfenstein 3D, and it was the very first first-person shooter I had ever encountered in my life. I'd played shooty games before that, but they'd been things like Omega Race or Gorf... say, does anyone mind if I drop the italics? What's the formatting requirement for video game names? ... anyway, the only first person type games I'd played before that had been driving games. Wolfenstein 3D was the first time I was asked to put myself into the blood-soaked shoes of the guy with the gun. Or, since I was just starting the game, the guy with the tiny stabby knife. It took me a while to get used to it, and I was never great at it; my hand-eye coordination wasn't fantastic, and there was the part where, well, 386SX. Poor dear computer (I've forgotten its name) wasn't exactly the fastest chip in the shed. Still, there was a certain joy to be had in running around like a maniac shooting anything that moved, mostly because anything that moved that wasn't me was Very Bad People and would reward me with ammo and screaming in German. And then there would be the Pile O' Corpses, but since this was an early 90s game, all the corpses would be represented by a single graphic for each type, so there'd be fourteen of the same dead guy all seen from the same angle. No matter where you looked, the dead guys' feet would all be pointed at you, which for some reason I found amusing.
I bring this last bit up because it was part of the limitations of the graphics engines of the time, and the graphics engines of the time plus my video card were part of why I left the FPS genre for years after Wolfenstein 3D. See, the castle through which BJ Blazkowicz battled had secret panels and hidden rooms that you had to open and raid in order to get 100% completion, and the easiest way to find them if you were me was to run along the wall with the 'push it now, dangit!' button held down. It worked, but it meant you were treated to closeups of 1990s repeating textures at close range, flickering past at high speed. It's a wonder I didn't have a Pokemon seizure or something. As it stood, I realized after playing for long stretches of time that the graphics made me motion sick, and eventually with some reluctance put the game aside. Killing Nazis and wondering just how snarlingly feral a guy who could down an entire turkey in less than five seconds (health boosts, gotta love 'em) would be by the time he slaughtered every single other person in the castle was entertaining, but I didn't really want to spend half an hour after every game trying not to be ill. It wasn't just Wolfenstein, either. I played Doom, somewhat, but while I was reasonably good at Wolfenstein I wasn't much good at Doom at all- and the graphics issues persisted there. So I put it all aside and didn't come back to FPS until Half-Life, at which point all was forgiven- but you know that story.
All of that is basically TL;DR for 'Played Wolfenstein 3D, loved it, got ill from the graphics, never did get to kill Chaingun Mecha Hitler, sob sob'. Beyond the next cut lies the actual first bit of gameage.
I picked up the new Wolfenstein game- that's its only name, Wolfenstein, not Castle Wolfenstein or Return to Castle Wolfenstein or Wolfenstein THE NEXT GENERATION or anything- last week at Gamestop. The cover was a metallic-looking skull, glowing green, in an SS hat and with a RAR I AM FIERCE expression insofar as, y'know, human bones can make expressions. I'd read a review of the game before, and it said stuff about bla bla occult bla bla fancy guns bla bla solid game but no surprises and nothing really knew to the genre etc. Whatever. Reviews like that are for people who play a lot more than I do and who need Something New and Terribly Stimulating to get them happy. Me? I've got a game with a glowing green skeleton in an SS hat. Bad people're about to go down. It's kind of hard to ask for more than that.
The game starts with a rather nice cinematic on board a Nazi vessel five miles off the coast of England, and this is where we meet our hero, William "B.J." Blazkowicz. I have to wonder what the hell prompted him to start using those initials instead of his name, considering; maybe there was another William Blazcowicz in the Office of Secret Activities? Who knows... anyway, ol' Beej has crept onto the ship and presumably killed the general on board, given that when we meet him he's wearing the general's clothes and quietly waiting for his opportunity to start Nazi punchin'. And he is good at the Nazi punchin' and the throwin' of bad people over the rail and the use of metal doors as shields against bullets. In fact, he positively seems to be enjoying himself, an impression that stayed with me for the whole game. This is the first time I've played an FPS where I felt that the guy I was playing was having fun. Gordon Freeman was running screaming for his life, and I never felt any kind of personality at all when I was playing Bioshock (mind you, Jack had a good reason for that), and the Master Chief was just doing his job... but ol' Beej? I could just about hear him grinning and saying "I love being a spy!"
At any rate he winds up cornered against a railing by about twelve or so Nazis including a very grumpy officer, and something in his coat starts glowing blue. The officer demands he bring the glowing thing out, and my first impression was that it was half of the Orb of Aldur, because glowing blue + round + it looked like it was semispherical... well yeah. Given that the next thing the Nazis did was open fire on Beej, and the glowing thing put up an energy shield and bounced the bullets off? Definitely did not change that impression. The part where the Nazis suddenly had a NO SKIN FOR YOU!! moment, followed by the blasting of everything else from their bones? Seriously, Beej, lemme see your right hand, i need to check for the mark of Riva...
After that the scene goes to the Office of Secret Activities in London, and we get briefed on Beej's mission. The Nazis are doing weird things and digging for archaeological stuff in a German city called Isenstadt. Beej should totally go there, meet up with the Resistance, and make the Nazis stop. There's more details than that but basically? "Go to Isenstadt. Meet the Resistance. If it's wearing a swastika, kill it, and if it's glowing or otherwise being weird, either take it, break it, or blow it up." Really, pretty simple.
So then the gameplay starts. The initial mission is the basic skills one, and it's a fairly nice tutorial without ramming its tutoriality down your throat. You arrive on a train, hiding in a boxcar, and your contact meets you. He speaks excellent English. Everyone does. It's all German-accented, but it's a reasonably well done accent, and there's none of the random mingling of words that you get with some depictions of fictional Germans (no offense, Kurt Wagner, but I'm lookin' at you). I assumed Beej speaks/understands German fluently, dubbed what I was hearing 'Englisch', and moved on from there. My contact showed me to a tunnel that I had to run through and promptly got himself cornered by the world's least observant Nazis- "THERE WAS AN AMERICAN ON THAT TRAIN! DID YOU SEE HIM????" "I don't know what you're talking about." "FAN OUT AND LOOK FOR HIM!!", etc. I didn't hang around long, I just ran.
(Oh, side note. In Wolfenstein 3D, Beej was blond, or at least had light brown hair. This is not that BJ Blazkowicz. This one has black hair, blue eyes, and a seven-o-clock shadow. In the cut scenes he looks rather like a cross between Kurt Russell and Eli Roth. I can live with this.)
Eventually I found my way to the Resistance meetup point, where I was greeted by one of the locals who gave me a situation report and pointed me at a table full of weapons. You do not start this game with a stabbity knife, oh no. You start this game with a fully automatic submachine gun and three grenades. I like this prospect. Okay, yeah, it's still the least impressive weapon in the game but it's nice not to have to shiv a guy for his pistol in the hopes of using the pistol to shoot another guy for a better gun. Lord knows the MP40 was plenty good at drilling the Nazis who wandered by in the next room- although to my surprise they took multiple hits, staggered, and then shot back. I sort of expected them to drop after the first three or four. Oh well, not a problem, I'll shoot them again.
Two things I discovered in this part of the game, one good, one bad. The good part is that depending on where/how you shot them, the enemies crumple up and die with reasonably appropriate animations- tumbling to the side if you mostly took out their leg, doubling over if you hit them in the torso, their hats or helmets flying several feet straight upwards if you managed to explode their heads, etc. The bad part is that my compatriots in the Resistance were all wearing greys and browns, and the low level Nazis were all wearing grays and browns, and I couldn't always tell them apart if there wasn't a visible arm band. It took me a while to get used to that. Fortunately there's no friendly fire, so I didn't accidentally explode the wrong head, but still.
We then entered a running battle through the Isenstadt train station. My enemies were very good at taking cover and firing from cover. However, they- and my allies- all broadcast their moves to a degree Sailor Moon would find excessive:
"I need suppressing fire!"
"Cover me, I'm reloading!"
"Don't let them flank you!"
"Suppress! Suppress!"
"He's reloading! Get him now!"
"I'm pinned down! I need suppressing fire!"
I think if I never hear the words 'suppressing fire' again I will be a very happy person. Fortunately, I was able to explode a few heads by firing at the only parts of my enemies to be visible over the tops of the sandbags they hid behind, and I had my grenades... those are fun in this game. They're long-handled 'potato masher' types, and they take several seconds to detonate, so if the Nazis threw one at me and I was close enough I got a message indicating a new option.... Given the nature of ethnic jokes and the fact that BJ is of Polish descent, I found it deeply satisfying to very literally pull the pin and throw it back.
Okay, no pin to pull, but you get the idea.
Somewhere along the way I got hold of a rifle from a dead guy. That's the way of things, I suppose, but I found it kind of weird that I had been briefed back when I met my contact and told that there was a black market in town where I could buy... upgrades. You can't buy weapons in this game. You can only upgrade what you've already got. I'm not sure what the black market is doing with the actual guns they must surely have in stock given the number of mods you can buy. Possibly building very peculiar treehouses out of them. I don't know. AT ANY RATE the rifle turned out to be an excellent gun, because I got to zoom in very close with it. The fact that holding the gun relatively still tightened my targeting reticle (which got bigger whenever I shot, reflecting my gun's recoil) stacked with that, and I was able to plug a couple of Nazis for single-shot kills from quite a long way away. Also a couple of red barrels. They explode. Of course they explode, they are red barrels and this is a video game. Why would they not explode?
We wound up reaching a machine gun nest. I'm not sure why the Nazis felt the need to put one in the train station. Possibly to mess up the Resistance. It didn't really matter, though. We took it away from them, and by 'took it away' I mean two grenades of mine, one grenade of theirs thrown back at them, several rifle plugs and liberal use of the MP40. I was then informed that one of the other Resistance guys was going to set an explosive on a nearby train to clear our path and could I please defend them all by using the mounted, emplaced gun? Great, thanks...
I don't think Beej was laughing or anything while he manned that gun, but the phrase 'hose them down' came to mind given how many bullets that thing put out and how much brass it was kicking onto the ground. I also realized two things. One, Beej is tall enough that every so often when he's using a gun like that, he has to give off shooting and crouch. There are no health power-ups in this game. If you get hurt badly the edges of your screen get all bloody. You then have to hide in cover until the blood goes away, and then you're good again. The other thing that I realized is that Beej has a pretty clean vocabulary. The worst word I could hear him using over the course of the entire game was 'bastards', and that only once or twice. In my head he has a tendency to address any Nazi he's attacking as 'Fritz'. "You're going down, Fritz!" "You missed, Fritz!" "Called shot to the groin, Fritz!" - okay, that last part only happened when he had the rifle and could zoom in on his enemies, not the machine gun, but still. I like to think he did a lot of grinning while he filled the air with metal, and not a lot of talking.
Eventually the demo guy was done and the train exploded and we all ran through to continue our mission. More shooty! Yay! More boom! Yay! More- wait, I have to set the explosive now? I didn't pick up anything that looked like- oh, okay, I didn't have to pick up an object to be able to set a demolition charge. Just run up to the door, hold the Y button down until the progress bar filled up, then run away to get out of the blast radius. 'm good with that. Unfortunately one of the other fighters wasn't quite so good at it, and he got wounded. The rest of the group said they'd take care of him but I should go on, which was fine with me. I continued, rounded a corner, started up the stairs, opened fire on two oncoming Nazis, and that was the point at which gravity turned off.
Seriously. There was a boom! and suddenly every loose object in the room started floating, including the two Nazis, who immediately started screaming "VOT ZE HELL IZ ZIS?". It wasn't strictly zero gee, because I was able to shoot them in midair without being propelled backwards by my own recoil, but still. I landed shortly thereafter and kept running, and then there was another BOOM! and gravity went away again.
Ever seen a Nazi spinning in circles up by the ceiling, screaming "GET ME DOWN FROM HERE!" and firing his gun into the wall because he can't actually aim at anything or direct himself downwards? Yeah, like that. Once I realized I could get back to the ground and then have gravity for me while they continued to float impotently, I got out the rifle and started target practice. I didn't get all the floaters before gravity came back, but I pegged enough of them to make my life a lot easier when the rest came back to the ground.
Unfortunately, I then had to cross rubble and fire and smoke, and I had trouble seeing who was shooting at me and where they were shooting from. I died a couple of times there and had to restart from my last checkpoint. There's no savegames in this, just checkpoints that you pass. Annoying, but oh well... anyway, Beej eventually took to chucking grenades in the general direction of anyone yelling. Inefficient tactic, but hey, it shut them up pretty good. Beej had to kill the last couple with standard gunfire, and he made it out of the train station alive and into a cutscene.
Other than the zero gravity incident there wasn't much weird to report on that mission. It was still fun, though. Good start to the whole thing. I found out, however, that I'd missed out on the grand Wolfenstein tradition of Collecting Things. Every level in the game has 'gold' and 'intelligence' items hidden all over it. The gold is for purchasing upgrades at the black market. The intelligence fills you in on little details of the gameworld- it's all IC- and also unlocks other upgrades for you to buy. Later there are also hidden tomes of power that you need if you're going to upgrade your juju, but Beej hasn't got juju when he starts the game. Just good ol' American know how and good ol' German firepower.
I'll go into his next mission later. This seems like a good place to stop for the moment.
The Wolfenstein franchise holds a special blood-soaked place in my heart. See, way back when I was a wee freshling at Case Western Reserve University, yours truly had a really nice computer, at least by the standards of every computer I'd owned before. Said computer was a 386SX with something like four megs of RAM and a whopping 20 meg hard drive. It was a lovely device, truly it was, and it made me very happy with what I was doing at the time. And then one day a friend of mine came along and said there was this video game and I should totally load it onto my computer and try it, even though my primary games up to that point had been things like Dune and Civilization. The game was a pirated copy of Wolfenstein 3D, and it was the very first first-person shooter I had ever encountered in my life. I'd played shooty games before that, but they'd been things like Omega Race or Gorf... say, does anyone mind if I drop the italics? What's the formatting requirement for video game names? ... anyway, the only first person type games I'd played before that had been driving games. Wolfenstein 3D was the first time I was asked to put myself into the blood-soaked shoes of the guy with the gun. Or, since I was just starting the game, the guy with the tiny stabby knife. It took me a while to get used to it, and I was never great at it; my hand-eye coordination wasn't fantastic, and there was the part where, well, 386SX. Poor dear computer (I've forgotten its name) wasn't exactly the fastest chip in the shed. Still, there was a certain joy to be had in running around like a maniac shooting anything that moved, mostly because anything that moved that wasn't me was Very Bad People and would reward me with ammo and screaming in German. And then there would be the Pile O' Corpses, but since this was an early 90s game, all the corpses would be represented by a single graphic for each type, so there'd be fourteen of the same dead guy all seen from the same angle. No matter where you looked, the dead guys' feet would all be pointed at you, which for some reason I found amusing.
I bring this last bit up because it was part of the limitations of the graphics engines of the time, and the graphics engines of the time plus my video card were part of why I left the FPS genre for years after Wolfenstein 3D. See, the castle through which BJ Blazkowicz battled had secret panels and hidden rooms that you had to open and raid in order to get 100% completion, and the easiest way to find them if you were me was to run along the wall with the 'push it now, dangit!' button held down. It worked, but it meant you were treated to closeups of 1990s repeating textures at close range, flickering past at high speed. It's a wonder I didn't have a Pokemon seizure or something. As it stood, I realized after playing for long stretches of time that the graphics made me motion sick, and eventually with some reluctance put the game aside. Killing Nazis and wondering just how snarlingly feral a guy who could down an entire turkey in less than five seconds (health boosts, gotta love 'em) would be by the time he slaughtered every single other person in the castle was entertaining, but I didn't really want to spend half an hour after every game trying not to be ill. It wasn't just Wolfenstein, either. I played Doom, somewhat, but while I was reasonably good at Wolfenstein I wasn't much good at Doom at all- and the graphics issues persisted there. So I put it all aside and didn't come back to FPS until Half-Life, at which point all was forgiven- but you know that story.
All of that is basically TL;DR for 'Played Wolfenstein 3D, loved it, got ill from the graphics, never did get to kill Chaingun Mecha Hitler, sob sob'. Beyond the next cut lies the actual first bit of gameage.
I picked up the new Wolfenstein game- that's its only name, Wolfenstein, not Castle Wolfenstein or Return to Castle Wolfenstein or Wolfenstein THE NEXT GENERATION or anything- last week at Gamestop. The cover was a metallic-looking skull, glowing green, in an SS hat and with a RAR I AM FIERCE expression insofar as, y'know, human bones can make expressions. I'd read a review of the game before, and it said stuff about bla bla occult bla bla fancy guns bla bla solid game but no surprises and nothing really knew to the genre etc. Whatever. Reviews like that are for people who play a lot more than I do and who need Something New and Terribly Stimulating to get them happy. Me? I've got a game with a glowing green skeleton in an SS hat. Bad people're about to go down. It's kind of hard to ask for more than that.
The game starts with a rather nice cinematic on board a Nazi vessel five miles off the coast of England, and this is where we meet our hero, William "B.J." Blazkowicz. I have to wonder what the hell prompted him to start using those initials instead of his name, considering; maybe there was another William Blazcowicz in the Office of Secret Activities? Who knows... anyway, ol' Beej has crept onto the ship and presumably killed the general on board, given that when we meet him he's wearing the general's clothes and quietly waiting for his opportunity to start Nazi punchin'. And he is good at the Nazi punchin' and the throwin' of bad people over the rail and the use of metal doors as shields against bullets. In fact, he positively seems to be enjoying himself, an impression that stayed with me for the whole game. This is the first time I've played an FPS where I felt that the guy I was playing was having fun. Gordon Freeman was running screaming for his life, and I never felt any kind of personality at all when I was playing Bioshock (mind you, Jack had a good reason for that), and the Master Chief was just doing his job... but ol' Beej? I could just about hear him grinning and saying "I love being a spy!"
At any rate he winds up cornered against a railing by about twelve or so Nazis including a very grumpy officer, and something in his coat starts glowing blue. The officer demands he bring the glowing thing out, and my first impression was that it was half of the Orb of Aldur, because glowing blue + round + it looked like it was semispherical... well yeah. Given that the next thing the Nazis did was open fire on Beej, and the glowing thing put up an energy shield and bounced the bullets off? Definitely did not change that impression. The part where the Nazis suddenly had a NO SKIN FOR YOU!! moment, followed by the blasting of everything else from their bones? Seriously, Beej, lemme see your right hand, i need to check for the mark of Riva...
After that the scene goes to the Office of Secret Activities in London, and we get briefed on Beej's mission. The Nazis are doing weird things and digging for archaeological stuff in a German city called Isenstadt. Beej should totally go there, meet up with the Resistance, and make the Nazis stop. There's more details than that but basically? "Go to Isenstadt. Meet the Resistance. If it's wearing a swastika, kill it, and if it's glowing or otherwise being weird, either take it, break it, or blow it up." Really, pretty simple.
So then the gameplay starts. The initial mission is the basic skills one, and it's a fairly nice tutorial without ramming its tutoriality down your throat. You arrive on a train, hiding in a boxcar, and your contact meets you. He speaks excellent English. Everyone does. It's all German-accented, but it's a reasonably well done accent, and there's none of the random mingling of words that you get with some depictions of fictional Germans (no offense, Kurt Wagner, but I'm lookin' at you). I assumed Beej speaks/understands German fluently, dubbed what I was hearing 'Englisch', and moved on from there. My contact showed me to a tunnel that I had to run through and promptly got himself cornered by the world's least observant Nazis- "THERE WAS AN AMERICAN ON THAT TRAIN! DID YOU SEE HIM????" "I don't know what you're talking about." "FAN OUT AND LOOK FOR HIM!!", etc. I didn't hang around long, I just ran.
(Oh, side note. In Wolfenstein 3D, Beej was blond, or at least had light brown hair. This is not that BJ Blazkowicz. This one has black hair, blue eyes, and a seven-o-clock shadow. In the cut scenes he looks rather like a cross between Kurt Russell and Eli Roth. I can live with this.)
Eventually I found my way to the Resistance meetup point, where I was greeted by one of the locals who gave me a situation report and pointed me at a table full of weapons. You do not start this game with a stabbity knife, oh no. You start this game with a fully automatic submachine gun and three grenades. I like this prospect. Okay, yeah, it's still the least impressive weapon in the game but it's nice not to have to shiv a guy for his pistol in the hopes of using the pistol to shoot another guy for a better gun. Lord knows the MP40 was plenty good at drilling the Nazis who wandered by in the next room- although to my surprise they took multiple hits, staggered, and then shot back. I sort of expected them to drop after the first three or four. Oh well, not a problem, I'll shoot them again.
Two things I discovered in this part of the game, one good, one bad. The good part is that depending on where/how you shot them, the enemies crumple up and die with reasonably appropriate animations- tumbling to the side if you mostly took out their leg, doubling over if you hit them in the torso, their hats or helmets flying several feet straight upwards if you managed to explode their heads, etc. The bad part is that my compatriots in the Resistance were all wearing greys and browns, and the low level Nazis were all wearing grays and browns, and I couldn't always tell them apart if there wasn't a visible arm band. It took me a while to get used to that. Fortunately there's no friendly fire, so I didn't accidentally explode the wrong head, but still.
We then entered a running battle through the Isenstadt train station. My enemies were very good at taking cover and firing from cover. However, they- and my allies- all broadcast their moves to a degree Sailor Moon would find excessive:
"I need suppressing fire!"
"Cover me, I'm reloading!"
"Don't let them flank you!"
"Suppress! Suppress!"
"He's reloading! Get him now!"
"I'm pinned down! I need suppressing fire!"
I think if I never hear the words 'suppressing fire' again I will be a very happy person. Fortunately, I was able to explode a few heads by firing at the only parts of my enemies to be visible over the tops of the sandbags they hid behind, and I had my grenades... those are fun in this game. They're long-handled 'potato masher' types, and they take several seconds to detonate, so if the Nazis threw one at me and I was close enough I got a message indicating a new option.... Given the nature of ethnic jokes and the fact that BJ is of Polish descent, I found it deeply satisfying to very literally pull the pin and throw it back.
Okay, no pin to pull, but you get the idea.
Somewhere along the way I got hold of a rifle from a dead guy. That's the way of things, I suppose, but I found it kind of weird that I had been briefed back when I met my contact and told that there was a black market in town where I could buy... upgrades. You can't buy weapons in this game. You can only upgrade what you've already got. I'm not sure what the black market is doing with the actual guns they must surely have in stock given the number of mods you can buy. Possibly building very peculiar treehouses out of them. I don't know. AT ANY RATE the rifle turned out to be an excellent gun, because I got to zoom in very close with it. The fact that holding the gun relatively still tightened my targeting reticle (which got bigger whenever I shot, reflecting my gun's recoil) stacked with that, and I was able to plug a couple of Nazis for single-shot kills from quite a long way away. Also a couple of red barrels. They explode. Of course they explode, they are red barrels and this is a video game. Why would they not explode?
We wound up reaching a machine gun nest. I'm not sure why the Nazis felt the need to put one in the train station. Possibly to mess up the Resistance. It didn't really matter, though. We took it away from them, and by 'took it away' I mean two grenades of mine, one grenade of theirs thrown back at them, several rifle plugs and liberal use of the MP40. I was then informed that one of the other Resistance guys was going to set an explosive on a nearby train to clear our path and could I please defend them all by using the mounted, emplaced gun? Great, thanks...
I don't think Beej was laughing or anything while he manned that gun, but the phrase 'hose them down' came to mind given how many bullets that thing put out and how much brass it was kicking onto the ground. I also realized two things. One, Beej is tall enough that every so often when he's using a gun like that, he has to give off shooting and crouch. There are no health power-ups in this game. If you get hurt badly the edges of your screen get all bloody. You then have to hide in cover until the blood goes away, and then you're good again. The other thing that I realized is that Beej has a pretty clean vocabulary. The worst word I could hear him using over the course of the entire game was 'bastards', and that only once or twice. In my head he has a tendency to address any Nazi he's attacking as 'Fritz'. "You're going down, Fritz!" "You missed, Fritz!" "Called shot to the groin, Fritz!" - okay, that last part only happened when he had the rifle and could zoom in on his enemies, not the machine gun, but still. I like to think he did a lot of grinning while he filled the air with metal, and not a lot of talking.
Eventually the demo guy was done and the train exploded and we all ran through to continue our mission. More shooty! Yay! More boom! Yay! More- wait, I have to set the explosive now? I didn't pick up anything that looked like- oh, okay, I didn't have to pick up an object to be able to set a demolition charge. Just run up to the door, hold the Y button down until the progress bar filled up, then run away to get out of the blast radius. 'm good with that. Unfortunately one of the other fighters wasn't quite so good at it, and he got wounded. The rest of the group said they'd take care of him but I should go on, which was fine with me. I continued, rounded a corner, started up the stairs, opened fire on two oncoming Nazis, and that was the point at which gravity turned off.
Seriously. There was a boom! and suddenly every loose object in the room started floating, including the two Nazis, who immediately started screaming "VOT ZE HELL IZ ZIS?". It wasn't strictly zero gee, because I was able to shoot them in midair without being propelled backwards by my own recoil, but still. I landed shortly thereafter and kept running, and then there was another BOOM! and gravity went away again.
Ever seen a Nazi spinning in circles up by the ceiling, screaming "GET ME DOWN FROM HERE!" and firing his gun into the wall because he can't actually aim at anything or direct himself downwards? Yeah, like that. Once I realized I could get back to the ground and then have gravity for me while they continued to float impotently, I got out the rifle and started target practice. I didn't get all the floaters before gravity came back, but I pegged enough of them to make my life a lot easier when the rest came back to the ground.
Unfortunately, I then had to cross rubble and fire and smoke, and I had trouble seeing who was shooting at me and where they were shooting from. I died a couple of times there and had to restart from my last checkpoint. There's no savegames in this, just checkpoints that you pass. Annoying, but oh well... anyway, Beej eventually took to chucking grenades in the general direction of anyone yelling. Inefficient tactic, but hey, it shut them up pretty good. Beej had to kill the last couple with standard gunfire, and he made it out of the train station alive and into a cutscene.
Other than the zero gravity incident there wasn't much weird to report on that mission. It was still fun, though. Good start to the whole thing. I found out, however, that I'd missed out on the grand Wolfenstein tradition of Collecting Things. Every level in the game has 'gold' and 'intelligence' items hidden all over it. The gold is for purchasing upgrades at the black market. The intelligence fills you in on little details of the gameworld- it's all IC- and also unlocks other upgrades for you to buy. Later there are also hidden tomes of power that you need if you're going to upgrade your juju, but Beej hasn't got juju when he starts the game. Just good ol' American know how and good ol' German firepower.
I'll go into his next mission later. This seems like a good place to stop for the moment.
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