Really Advanced Warfighting?

Well, it is possble, as Calvin once said to Hobbes, to "live and don't learn".

I went to stay with my brother in London for a coulpe of beer -fuelled days. He lives in Streatham, where he owns a rather nice, spacious flat with a nice spacious living room and in the nice spacious living room there stands a nice, spacious telly. Its a Sony Bravia and it is a beautiful thing. Thankfully, he also owns a 360, so it was nice to have a bit of a gaming fix while away.

My brother doesn't play much and a few weeks ago he bought a copy of the first Advanced Warfighter at a knock down price. He hasn't really got into it since he is a little bit intimidated by the controls and hasn't got past the tutorial yet. This was impressed on me more powerfully when I picked up a control one morning, thinking it would be nice to stroll through a couple of the early levels and enjoy killing with impunity and ease. I ahve played most of the levels and over that time I became - for me - quite proficient at soldiering, in my cautious, creeping way.....

I was in for a bit of a shock. I was shit at this. Even the tutorial was a challenge of sorts. It felt like a completely new game. One that I had never played before and one that made me feel like I had ten fingers on each hand. I kept going into zoom mode when I wanted to crouch, I kept trying to reload when I wanted to grab a grenade, and worst of all, I kept going the wrong way.......

I realised the problem. I had been playing Rainbow Vegas rather than Recon for a while and Vegas was a simple game. It had simple, exciting maps, straightforward, visceral gunplay and that brill cover system. Ghost Recon seemed like floating in a blank ether by comparison.....intimidating spaces, complicated or unintuitive controls and somehow more complex missions, but that might just be the sense of disorientation you get from the maps....

Going back to it after a long break makes me think that to the average Joe, videogaming must seem like an intimidating, complex world of joysticks, coloured buttons that have strange symbols on them and combinations that scare them to death.

That’s why I think that gaming will never become truly mainstream. Its too hard and too weird for normal people!

At least the Wii is having a go and I must admit, I have had my neighbours and my wife playing Wii Sports and loving it. They didn’t think of it as a videogame, but just as a game – something fun and social. That said, they would never in a million years pick up and play Twilight Princess…