April 6, 2011

Operation Armored Liberty

Way back when I beat A Link to the Past, my original fat grey DS, a gift from Trev, basically broke in half. I had gotten plenty of use out of it, and now with some money to burn, I decided to purchase a DSi to keep playing DS games. But what about GBA games? After all, I knew there were several Castlevania and Final Fantasy games I wanted to play on the GBA, but now had no system to play them on. I turned to eBay, and got myself a slick Game Boy Micro. I really like it- it's small enough to fit in my pocket easily, but powerful enough to play some great epic games- such as the recently beaten Final Fantasy V. But with my Micro game something terrible. A toss-in game that for some reason made my Micro cheaper than all other Micros on eBay. That game is Operation: Armored Liberty. It's an almost carbon copy of the SNES game Garry Kitchen's Super Battletank: War in the Gulf, which apparently was a pretty mediocre game when it was released nearly 20 years ago. Why it got a remake/port, I have no idea. The game puts you inside a tank with a first-person view, rolling around Iraq, avoiding mines and shooting at other tanks and helicopters. And that's it. You're put on a map, and you slowly roll from one target to another, shooting at it until it blows up and moving on. A lack of any variety whatsoever kills any fun you'll have with this game. The graphics are fine. The controls are actually pretty good. A fast-travel option thankfully cuts down the time it takes to get from one target to another. But it's just the same thing, over and over. You never fight more than one thing at a time, and at no point is anything resembling a "strategy" needed. I breezed through 10 levels and got the credits to roll within 2 hours. Now it's time to move on and forget that I wasted this beautiful afternoon playing a shitty video game.

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