Day of Defeat is thoroughly Teutonic

As I'm living the high life of £100 a fortnight I decided on some retail therapy - in particular, Valve's Day of Defeat: Source, released after CounterStrike: Source in 2005. At $9.95, I thought, how could I go wrong?

As a fore-warning, I apologise to anyone who doesn't know about games. If you know about Germans though, I guess it's still quasi-readable.

Never did I realise that a good 95% of players of this World War II epic between the US Army and the Wehrmacht would be German. Ironic, no?

Well if you take a quick look at the games banned in Germany, they reveal something interesting.

1/ Wolfenstein 3D. The one where you shoot the hell out of Nazis in a spooky pre-Doom environment. They don't like swastikas in Germany these days, so this level design was interesting to their powers that be in 1994:

2/ Mortyr. Crap game, nice visuals, but first and foremost a crap game. Oh, and you're a Nazi on the verge of armageddon in an alternate future where the Nazis won the war. Common theme perhaps?

3/ Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines. Guess which enemies they were?

4/ My personal favourite, winning an IGN Award for most unnecessary game ever made: KZ Manager. I thought this was a football sim at first, but the graphics tell of a different role for the casual gamer.

I just want to know what was running through the minds of the programmers when they made that one, even if one is nicknamed Prince Porn. I just imagine a blackboard with the phrase "management sim + Zyklon B + Jews = $$$!".


Anyway, Day of Defeat. Even though it's not banned (although there aren't any swastikas to my knowledge, so that's probably why), it's a bit unbearable at times. I have both Team Fortress 2 and CS, and you can guarantee that you'll hear an English voice or see usernames you can understand. But this? Gah. It's excruciating. Not because they're German, even. Well yeah, partially because they're German.

You know how they say Germans have no sense of humour? Well, it's true according to online gaming. Many admins on servers use the Mani Admin Plug-in to keep an eye on things; sadly this allows them to use their own music, sound effects and graphics. I'm not even kidding when I say that most servers use the same download set. Typing a certain word allows the sound effect to play on EVERYONE'S computer. Then, of course, the Germans repeat some of them through their microphone. Great.

Here is a list of things that I want banned from Day of Defeat immediately:
1/ The Nelson Muntz laugh. For Christ's sake. When was that actually funny? Certainly not when one user plays it every time he gets a kill.
2/ A camp German saying "lol". Without any hint of irony.
3/ Upon a player's suicide, a Quake III Arena "HOLY SHIT!" sound effect. Given friendly fire is always on, and people have no clue with grenade distribution, this is pretty common.
4/ In the same voice, "DOMINATING!", the once-classic CounterStrike: Source staple, is now played if someone gets three kills in a row. Wow. You don't even have to work hard if you have any spare grenades or you're a machine gunner.
5/ The entire Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme tune (luckily, not the extended version) if you type "fresh" into the console. Jesus.

I'll probably think of more as soon as I stop ranting but quite frankly I don't want to add any more - I like the game, and I don't want to cry myself to sleep over the mental anguish I've already suffered after hearing Will Smith telling the cabbie that he was home and that he'd smell him later while I get shot in the head, point blank, by a Wehrmacht Support soldier.

Aside from that it's not a bad game, but with TF2 and (as a now-neglected back-up) CS on my Steam list, I can't see me playing it much after the initial obsession wears off. Like CS, it suffers from uber-gamers who know every spot, vantage point and trap. You barely walk around a corner to see your brains land on the camera. At least with CS, I knew them myself, but I couldn't imagine starting to play it now.

I ought to get back on my Wii. It's been packed away since I came back from Hull three weeks ago. Maybe when Mario Kart Wii and Super Smash Bros. Brawl come out, and/or I find some friends, it may return to the TV screen.


Links of note:
Failed Spin-offs: video games (by me). I wrote it a while ago for The Bollocks but kind of feels right for the topic.
Minesweeper: The Movie - pure genius.