Return to Castle Wolfenstein
It's taken 6 long months, but I have finally beaten Return to Castle Wolfenstein. It was the first real game that I got for my new computer, and I loved every little bit of it. For the first two months, I religiously played it every day, sometimes until 2 or 3 am. I love WWII simulation games because not only do you get to immerse yourself in the past, but you also get a brief history lesson about the weapons, vehicles, locations, and military plans during WWII. You also get the added bonus of hearing very funny German accents say, "Did you hear zumsing?" or "Vut vas dat?"
When I first got into computer games, I was playing on a DOS based computer that only had 5MB of space. The best game that I had was either the Commander Keen series or Wolfenstein. Wolfenstein was the hardest game I had, and certainly the funniest, with all of it's insults when I decided to quit. When I heard about this game, it was a must have. So I began to play.
Two months into my fight against Hitler and his disciples, I was annoyed that my enemies had shifted from endless hordes of Nazi soldiers, to demons awakening in underground tombs. Apparently Hitler wanted to resurrect the dead, and create Super Soldiers from body parts. I did some research and found that there was some truth to this, but not much. I found myself underground in a mine, searching for the main dig site, trying to prevent the resurrection of the most feared, German soldier. I was stuck in this one damn section of the mine, and no matter what I did, I found myself unable to get any farther in the game. This is about the time when I finished downloading GTA3, and I decided to give Wolfy some rest and turn my destructive efforts elsewhere. GTA3 was completed, and soon after I bought the Half Life: Platinum Pack. This occupied me for quite a while. Next it was Star Wars: Jedi Academy, and GTA Vice City. This lasted me until a few weeks ago. Stupid Lance not calling my cell phone. I decided to go back and finish Wolfenstein, because then I could start "Iron Storm," which I bought at Staples for 4 bucks, without any guilt. Today I finished Wolfy, and my disappointment continued right to the very end. The cut-scenes in this game were terrible. The dialogue was painful, mostly because it was completely unnecessary. With mission debriefing before every mission, there was no need to hear some old windbag. The characters in the game lacked detail, but thankfully the environment had some detail. My favourite part of the game, came when I was sneaking through a German village.
As I passed through a pub, I heard many Germans singing the Nazi anthem, and started searching the pub to find them. I finally discovered a small radio in the corner that was broadcasting this music. I destroyed it with a few shots, and all of a sudden, from outside, I heard, "Who turned off zat vunderful music?" The German village also contained one house, which was guarded by two soldiers. I took out the guards with a sniper rifle from a distance, then snuck upstairs to make sure I hadn't missed any ammo. As I approached a semi-open door, I peered in and saw a Commander yelling into the next room, "I vill be vith you shortly, my dear." I decided to leave the guy alone and tip-toed to the next room, where I found a woman decked out in every piece of lingerie. She ended up giving me some gold in exchange for her life, not that I would hurt her since she's a civilian, and proceeded into the previous room to kill the Commander. It was an objective. He was on the Board of Directives for Hitler's Resurrection project.
Aside from those two moments, the game was just like any other WWII simulation, except, they decided to throw some demons into this one. The game was fairly simple and I was able to defeat the boss on my second try. It didnt take much, just one of those "You run in a circle around him and shoot, and he just stands there grinning moronily." If you like to shoot things, then you'll love this game. If you're a big World War simulation fan, steer clear. The demons, and ghosts will not challenge you. They'll just piss you off.
