The Saga Begins

So everybody in the whole wide world (all three of them) have been telling me that I should start a blog. I've always avoided the whole "blog" scene because, frankly, it always sounded so blasé`. But I've got a lot of work to avoid doing today, so I've finally decided to give it the benefit of the doubt, and assume that phonetic similarities aside, maybe it won't suck.

After about 8 failed attempts at correctly typing out my email, password, and that crazy word art thing they do to prove I'm not a robot (which seems very unfair to robots) I finally got to step 2 of the process, at which point I learned that some girl out in Texas had already taken the URL that I slaved for three whole minutes to come up with. What's more, this proactive idea thief perpetrated her preemptive plagiarism more than a year ago, and in that time has not made a single post.

OK, so I got through all that, and now here I am. Boo-yah. Time to do me some blogging.

If you’re reading this, I think it’s a given that you already know me, so I won’t bother introducing myself. Instead, I think I’m going to kick things off with something that will, in all likelihood, become a regular purpose on this forum. A video game review. Video games are something I’ve always enjoyed, so it’s easy to write about. So for you’re reading pleasure, I’m going to discuss a recent fascination of mine, Tom Clancy’s HAWX.

HAWX stands for High Altitude Warfare eXperimental Squadron. My best guess at the reason for that is that Tom Clancy does drugs, or at least was very drunk when he named decided on the name for this project. Now Ace Combat notwithstanding, flight sims are one genre of game that never seem to get a lot of love. How realizing the fantasy of blowing things up with a $5 million dollar flying car could be anything but lucrative evades me, airplane games just seem to rarely sell well, and the only really popular one out there has been Ace Combat, so I’ll be largely comparing it to that.

The storyline is your typical Tom Clancy near-futuristic cloak and dagger military conspiracy extrrrrrrrrrravaganza, in which your squadron, the titular HAWX, are disbanded within the first 10 minutes of the game, and so you flip Uncle Sam the finger, quit, and go work for a new security firm that’s only just opened its doors. Naturally, this prodigious startup company can pay you three times what you were getting when working for the wealthiest nation on earth, and your country does not seem to voice any objection to its best pilots quitting to join somebody else’s army. The end result of all this exposition is that you, Nameless Pilot, get to fly big metal willy-extinctions all over the globe, and blow the crap out their inhabitants. Good times are had by all, and don’t worry about the inherent horror of all that mass murder- it turns out that blowing up the world is the only way to save it.  

One particularly cool feature of this game is that all of its maps are constructed directly from real-life satellite images, so when you fly through Tokyo, LA, Chicago, Afghanistan, or any of the other game’s 20 exotic locales, you are blowing shit up in a photorealistic, 100% accurate picture of the real thing; every rock, building, mountain, tree, bridge, street, etc are exactly where they are meant to be. It’s pretty cool, really. Also, you get to choose from 50 real-life planes to fly.

Now for the feature that gets its very own paragraph. See, your planes all come outfitted with a safety lock that prevents you from turning or breaking too hard and stalling your plane. This makes it literally impossible to stall, but it also limits your movements somewhat. That’s fine, because you can still turn much faster than anybody traveling at Mach 2 has any business turning, but if it’s not enough, you can turn those safeties off. Mr. Clancy’s amazing aptitude for appellation rears its head again, as he has brilliantly dubbed this mechanic: “OFF mode.” If you engage OFF mode, in addition to being instantly fortified with deet and mosquito free, your camera cleverly shifts to about three or four miles outside of your cockpit, at an angle scientifically designed to leave you with no clue which direction your plane is pointing. At first, OFF mode feels like you’re driving a retorted circus bear wearing rocket skates. Your moves are ridiculously fast and could most definitely be called a spectacle, but you don’t really have a lot of control over where you’re going and you’re probably going to die. Once you get the hang of it, it feels… well, I can only describe it as if you’re riding a retarded circus bear wearing rocket skates, but you’ve somehow gotten good at doing so. It looks amazing, and if you can get used to it you’ll be able to pull a 180 turn in midair on a dime to line up a missile lock with the enemy plane that 2 seconds ago was right on your tail.

It’s amazing how well-done all of these things are, which makes it all the more sad when you realize that the game gave you all these awesome planes to fly and cities to fly them in, but they forgot to include a lot of stuff for you to actually do. For all the things that happen in the game’s story, you’ll find that the whole thing ends abruptly after a very short amount of time playing it. I finished it off in three short evenings, but if I was really bored I could have probably done it in a day. And after that, it’s over, and there’s not much joy to be had in replay. At this point, if you’re a fan of online gaming, it’s the multiplayer mode to the rescue with a really fun deathmatch mode. For the first time in the history of ever, I actually forked over the $40 for a year’s subscription to Xbox Live, if only so I could play this game online. Otherwise, I can only recommend it for a rental.