The PC gaming business is an interesting case of innovation and stagnation.
On one hand, it destroys consoles in terms of new content, you'll often play a
mod for a game longer than the retail game, and there are interesting homebrew
titles being released.
On the other hand, the big boys tend to play a game of catch up with each
other. The result is many games being released with the same theme, in a
surprisingly short amount of time. With the success and influence that
Battlefield 1942 and now Vietnam have shown in the marketplace many of us were
bracing ourselves for the flood of online war-based games.
NovaLogic fires a round in this fight with Joint Operations: Typhoon
Rising. With World War 2 everywhere online and Vietnam spoken for they put
this game in the next logical place. I mean, c'mon, we were all wondering
who was going to grab Indonesia as the next setting in an online FPS, right?
The story doesn't really matter, the game doesn't try to strive for the same
sense of place and setting as Battlefield: Vietnam so all we need to know is
that we're in a jungle setting. So let's go to Indonesia and see what NovaLogic brought to the table.
Packaging and a surprise
I remember back in they day when PC games came with intricately shaped
boxes with cloth maps, huge books, quick key charts, it was great. Sadly now
we get tiny, Wal-Mart safe cardboard boxes and a printable .pdf more often
than not. It's depressing how bad its gotten — I found myself getting really excited when I saw that Joint Ops comes with a keyboard overlay.
Props to them for giving us something. The manual itself is also well laid
out and gives more information than most these days.
