Medal of Honor (PC)

The final 'M' game I'm playing this year is Medal of Honor, not to be confused with Medal of Honor, despite the fact that it's by the same people and has the exact same damn name. Actually you should get the games confused, teach EA a lesson.

Medal of Honor 2010 seems to have acquired a bit of a bad reputation, possibly because it dropped the franchise's World War 2 setting after 11 years of gunning down Nazis to follow the Call of Duty series and become yet another charmless grey Modern Warfare clone. Or maybe it's just crap. Either way it probably isn't an ideal candidate for my site, but I've seen it get so much hate over the last few years that I'm curious to see what exactly it's done to piss so many people off.

I'll only be playing the single player campaign I'm afraid, though I'm sure multiplayer also features gruff soldiers pulling off headshots with scoped M4A1 Carbines.

(Click the pics for double the resolution.)

Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (PC)

Fans of murky faded screenshots rejoice, as today I'm taking a quick look at a classic World War 2 first person shooter (again).

Medal of Honor: Allied Assault is the third game in the franchise after PlayStation exclusives Medal of Honor and Medal of Honor: Underground. Weirdly though, this never got a console release; instead the Xbox, PS2 and Game Cube got their own game a few months later called Medal of Honor: Frontline which was never released on PC. Maybe they just wanted to make sure each system got a game tailored to the machine's strengths, or maybe it was a deliberate scheme to confuse and annoy me, I don't know.

But what I do know is that 22 of Allied Assault's developers (including the lead designers) went on to form a new company called Infinity Ward after this and spent the next seven years building up a rival WW2 FPS franchise of their own that went on to achieve a certain measure of success. So I suppose you could say that this is Call of Duty 0.

(Click the pics to view in x-treme 1280x1024 resolution. I'm sorry folks, I've got a retro monitor so all I can get are retro screenshots.)

Medal of Honor (PSX) - Guest Post

"Are you ready to rise above and beyond the call of duty?"

I see what you did there! Except this came out before Call of Duty! Argh, I don't know what's real any more!

Hey, click on the images to view them not as evil JPGs!