Mercs Just Wanna Have Fun

Time for a videogame entry. I've been playing two videogames lately, World of Warcraft and Mercenaries. World of Warcraft can wait for another entry, because I'm sure I'll be playing it for a while. Mercenaries is just plain fun, which is surprising to me, because its a lot like Grand Theft Auto. As I've written before, Grand Theft Auto is a 'kitchen sink' type of game, like the Sims (though diehard Sims players would be horrified at the comparison). You have an environment and a plethora of options for your playable character, and the player makes his decisions and watches the fun. Whereas the Sims is enjoyably inventive and endlessly amusing, though, Grand Theft Auto becomes less and less impressive the more you play it. At first its like, 'I can drive! I can shoot! I can steal!' Then it becomes more apparent that its a mediocre driving game welded to a suub-par shooter connected to a shoddy control/aiming system. In a way, its impressive that it can do all these things at all, but in another way, its less than the sum of its parts. Mercenaries, on the other hand, which could be described as 'Grand Theft Auto in a War Zone' , is far superior. The driving parts are solid, the combat is fun in and of itself, and the destruction is so darned FUN that it puts the game that inspired it into the shade. Here's the deal: some crazed psycho has taken over North Korea and is threatening to nuke Japan, so the US, China, and South Korea invade. In the ensuing mess, you operate as a free agent, doing tasks for each of the invading armies (and also the Russian mafia), playing each of them against the other as you attempt to find the evil North Korean bad dudes. Okay, so its not Kafka. What it is, though, is fun. It enables you to apprach so many missions from different angles in the sandbox it provides that it becomes more than the sum of its parts. Here's an example. The South Koreans wanted me to capture/kill a North Korean nuclear scientist who was hiding in a far-flung village. I tracked him to a particular building and my first approach was through the front door. Unfortunately, the scientist had 20 bad guys guarding him, and they shot me up within an inch of my life. My next apprach was sneakier. I stole a nearby helicopter and landed it on the roof of the building, and started blasting my way into the scientists lair from the top down. this didn't work either, as the scientist had laid a booby trap in the penthouse. For my 3rd attempt I abandoned all finesse and planted C4 around the building. When I hit the switch the entire building exploded, vaporizing the scientist. Now, I lost half of my reward for killing the target, but man, it sure was a pretty explosion. The entire game is like that. You can play it as creatively as you like, and the game won't break. Plus, the explosions rock. After a hard day at the office, that sounds like the perfect game.

Now, Mercenaries isn't an 'important' game like The Sims or World of Warcraft or Half Life 2. It doesn't appeal to non-gamers and it doesn't really innovate -it just perfects the innovations of those games that have come before it. But its not trying to reinvent the wheel. It's just trying to have some fun. And at that it succeeds perfectly.