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"The New Bandwagon"

Vietnam seems to be the new bandwagon for developers who make action orientated games.

So far there has been Platoon, from what I read a sub-standard RTS set in Nam, Vietcong, a great looking FPS which I've been looking forward to for some time, Men of Valour: Vietnam which also looks promising thanks to it being made by the same people behind MOH: AA, and now Line of Sight: Vietnam, a sequel of sorts to that not particularly groundbreaking Deadly Dozen game.

So it appears developers are now abandoning the battlefields of World War 2 for the more open jungles of Nam. Sure it may not be a bad thing, if these games manage to be pretty good, but I doubt all of them will, it just appears to me that when it comes to thinking up of new settings to place a game, developers are a little unoriginal.

Vietnam seems to be the new bandwagon for developers who make action orientated games.

So far there has been Platoon, from what I read a sub-standard RTS set in Nam, Vietcong, a great looking FPS which I've been looking forward to for some time, Men of Valour: Vietnam which also looks promising thanks to it being made by the same people behind MOH: AA, and now Line of Sight: Vietnam, a sequel of sorts to that not particularly groundbreaking Deadly Dozen game.

So it appears developers are now abandoning the battlefields of World War 2 for the more open jungles of Nam. Sure it may not be a bad thing, if these games manage to be pretty good, but I doubt all of them will, it just appears to me that when it comes to thinking up of new settings to place a game, developers are a little unoriginal.

Yo, PC Gamer made that point as well. Not a bad thing though, I love the terrain of Vietnam.

Soon someone will try to make a spate of games in the middle east. Then they will be branded racist and removed from the shelves...

Little Hobbo wrote:
> Yo, PC Gamer made that point as well. Not a bad thing though, I love
> the terrain of Vietnam.

I agree, the environments of these games are like nothing I've seen before, but I fear the actual game-play won't fare as good.

I dunno. Just imagine sniping from behind dense jungle foliage. Or infiltrating and area using the undergrowth as camoflauge. Or even defending against such an attack. I think this opens the way for some fantastic combat.

works in theory, and certainly in multiplayer at least.

But get the AI not to see you because you've got a leaf next to you the same colour as your camoflauged face. It's probably an AI nightmare.

Yerrrss. The AI would be a huge problem. But as you say, Multi-player would be fantastic.

The trouble I can see is this; there isn't enough inspiration to draw from the real world conflict of Vietnam for these games to be truly different from each other.

As apposed to the WW2 setting where there was years of conflict to get ideas from for the games missions, I don't think the same will apply for the jungles of Nam. I can see a barrage of jungle set shoot em ups with the same mission structure as one another, with nothing wholly original to make buying them all worth it.

Still, the environments will be top notch, and I can't wait to get my hands on Vietcong in a few months time, but as for the rest of the Vietnam set games, I'll have to wait and see if they provide anything that hasn't already been done.

Ah, but you have the added element of US troops barging into small Viet villages and shooting hapless children in the head.

Or won't they port that particular cultural contribution into the 'Nam games?

They are really losing ideas...