I played through Medal of Honor: Airborne (MoH:A) earlier this year and all I can say is, "what a colossal disappointment." I fondly remember flipping open my German ID to the low resolution guards in the origi
nal Medal of Honor on the Playstation, just to have them turn their backs so I could put a bullet in them from my silenced pistol, completely undetected. Medal of Honor was one of the first great "console" shoooters; It was released in late 1999 which was a year after Half-Life, but the same year as a terrible port of Quake 2. The problem with porting many PC games is that the PS1 just wasn't that powerful and if you bought Quake 2 on the Playstation, chances are that you are still waiting for the game to load. But these were different days when consoles could only dream of the fps power and popularity that they had on their PC brethren. MoH was a giant leap forward for shooters on the consoles partially because it was a console game and not a PC port. They also just revolutionized the control scheme, using the left analog stick to move forward, backward, and strafe left and right, while the analog stick was used to move the camera (aim) (<-body / head ->). Medal of Honor had it all: Memorable 
environments, great mission structure, good shooting, and even a little local multiplayer. Yes, MoH was riding the big wave, and they rode that big wave into a dozen or so sequels and spin offs. Medal of Honor Allied Assault (PC) and Fronline (PS2, GC, and Xbox) were the apex of the franchise. Storming the beaches or Normandy had never been so real, so intense, and so much fun as they were in MoH. If the franchise had stopped there, it could have died instantly and painlessly, but instead, the franchise had its legs shot off in "Rising Sun." The resilient publisher then grabbed its legless comrade and tried to drag him to safety, but they found themselves in a minefield in Pacific Assault. Once clear of the minefield, they came under heavy mortar attack in Heroes. Legless, bones broken, bruised and unable to move by itself, Medal of Honor was sent into combat again with Airborne and was abruptly shot in the face.It is this shot to the face that I would like to discuss a little further.
I purchased Airborne for 5.00 on a Steam holiday sale and got around to playing it several months after that. The game has an odd leveling mechanic that makes your shots wildly inaccurate at
the outset of the game and just mildly inaccurate by the time you finish. The game is boring, but that's okay because if I hadn't played on Hard difficulty and died an unbelievable amount of times I could easily have walked my way through this disappointment in about two and a half hours, which makes a the single player in a Call of Duty game seem like the Lord of the Rings trilogy in comparison. The short time was not without its high points, but the high points were not great atmosphere or music, no, it was the most crazy ass broken physics I have ever seen in a game. I shot a guy in the leg with a pistol once and he flew 3 and a quarter miles up in the air as if he had sat on an atom bomb strapped to a rocket. When I thought of the idea for this post I decided that I would try to record how busted this game really was. I played for a little over a half hour and while I didn't record my pistol sending a Nazi to the moon, I did get enough broken physics to feel okay about quickly uninstalling the game. The video shows Nazi after Nazi falling in unnatural falls of bullet riddled death, but it is the last Nazi officer (on the left hand side towards the end of the video) that gets stuck on the environment and shakes uncontrollably and then when shot, gets his arm stuck on some crates just to have his arm extend to 6 feet before giving one last unnatural body jolt before the physics engine leaves his body to rest. This is my first foray into video editing and man does it show. I will have something of better quality and without a watermark on it soon, but this video does what it needs to.EA tried to give enough time for wounds to heal and for people to forget about the atrocities that had happened to the franchise, releasing a reboot of sorts, but from all accounts (I haven't played it and 60.00 is just too steep of an entrance into a ride that I only want to take to verify how bad it is.) Medal of Honor was DOA, killed in action long ago in WWII. So here's to you Medal of Honor. Your 21 gun salute is in order because no matter what anyone says, you should always remember that you were important once.
