TECH

Medal Of Honor: Infiltrator
(GameBoy Advance)
EA Games

I’m going to discuss three video games that changed the world. And no, I’m not talking Tetris, Pac Man Space Invaders or Pong. While those games were great in their own way, they didn’t revolutionize game play as we know it.

The first game to change the world was Leather Goddesses of Phobos, a DOS game with no graphics. Like many of today’s role-playing games, you were asked what you wanted to do next, and your answer could have been anything from "turn left" to "fuck that alien with my well-lubed ray-gun." Of course, sometimes the game didn’t understand what you were saying, but, surprisingly, most of the time it did. I remember playing the masterpiece on my monochrome 20-meg-hard-drive IBM AT/XT. I also remember getting a sore right wrist way too much.

Second was Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. This graphics-driven video game also let you type in answers or directions. For example, while pissing in the men’s room, you could type "look in toilet," where you could find a wedding ring. Or was that the sink? Anyway, by the end of the game you were in a hot tub on the roof of some swanky hotel with a chick named Eve.

Then there was Wolfenstein 3D. The first FPS (at least the first to catch on). First Person Shooter. Developed by id Software, who later designed Doom and Quake. In this masterpiece, all you did was run around a Nazi castle and shoot Germans and their nasty Dobermans. Eventually, if you killed enough Nazis, and progressed far enough through the maze-like castle, you got to go up against Adolf Hitler. But not before shooting some Nazi butchers.

Which brings us to Medal of Honor: Infiltrator. The first couple of Medal of Honor games first appeared on the original PlayStation. Much like Wolfenstein, it was a first-person shooter in which you ran around Europe killing Nazis. There is nothing as exhilarating as lining up your sniper rifle with a Nazi’s blonde-haired, blue-eyed head and pulling the trigger. Well, except for schtupping an underage chick at a Motley Crue and Ratt concert. But I won’t go there. Not today, anyway.

Just released for the GameBoy Advance is Medal of Honor: Infiltrator. While it does have some FPS elements, like left-to-right scrolls–much like the old Punisher GameBoy cartridge, most of the action is viewed from overhead and feels like really old school fare such as Contra, or the GameBoy version of Metal Gear Solid.

As with all other Medal of Honor titles, you get to kill plenty of nazis in Medal of Honor: Infiltrator. But you also get to do lots of stealth stuff, and yell stuff like, "Oh! Germans!" The game, while not at all groundbreaking, is tons of fun, and has great graphics and sound. Most importantly, it will bring you back to a time when the wonders of video games were new. That alone is worth the price of admission.

–George Tabb