{"id":6939,"date":"2022-06-05T17:26:46","date_gmt":"2022-06-06T00:26:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/?p=6939"},"modified":"2022-06-16T16:17:23","modified_gmt":"2022-06-16T23:17:23","slug":"iron-storm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/6939","title":{"rendered":"Iron Storm"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Still in the mood to get some twenty-year-old first-person shooters off the Stack, I pull up <em>Iron Storm<\/em> (Wanadoo, 2002). <span class=\"footnote_referrer\"><a role=\"button\" tabindex=\"0\" onclick=\"footnote_moveToReference_6939_1('footnote_plugin_reference_6939_1_1');\" onkeypress=\"footnote_moveToReference_6939_1('footnote_plugin_reference_6939_1_1');\" ><sup id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_6939_1_1\" class=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text\">1<\/sup><\/a><span id=\"footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_6939_1_1\" class=\"footnote_tooltip\">It is possible that my choice here was influenced by the title&#8217;s similarity to the name of the studio that developed the last game I blogged here.<\/span><\/span><script type=\"text\/javascript\"> jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_6939_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_6939_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top right', relative: true, offset: [10, 10], });<\/script> I picked this out of the bargain bin back in the day because the premise sounded interesting: it&#8217;s set in an alternate history where World War I dragged on for fifty years. &#8220;Alternate history sci-fi? That sounds cool!&#8221; I said, failing to realize how little it would mean in the context of a shooter, that the premise is just an excuse to play soldiers without an obligation to history. I had basically tricked myself into buying <em>Call of Duty<\/em> without even the pretense of realism. And then I found it excessively difficult to survive the very beginning &#8212; it throws you in at the deep end, asking you to pick off some snipers that you can&#8217;t even tell what direction they&#8217;re killing you from for the first half-dozen tries or so. So I shelved it, and am only getting back to it now. At some point I seem to have picked up the Steam version in a bundle, so I&#8217;m playing that instead of installing from disc.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not quite the FPS I remembered &#8212; it&#8217;s a hybrid that lets you switch freely between first-person and third-person perspective, and defaults to third-person. The designers probably expected that you&#8217;d stay in third-person most of the time, but I find myself preferring first, because there&#8217;s fewer things on the screen to keep track of that way: instead of your character and an aiming reticle, it&#8217;s just the reticle. As befits a game set in a war, there are NPCs on your side, creating some slight sense of comradery as you engage the enemy together, but you leave them behind before long: you&#8217;re a solitary commando on a special mission behind enemy lines. The environment is heavily based around trenches &#8212; trench networks that branch off to places irrelevant to your mission, that you can easily believe go on for miles and miles, surrounded by nothing but ash and ruins.<\/p>\n<p>Having played through the first level and some ways into the second (out of a mere 6, apparently), I&#8217;d say the overall feel is mainly characterized by tension. You can be killed so easily, and the enemies are prepared. They don&#8217;t have to run around dodging your attacks when they&#8217;re already in a secure machine gun nest with good cover. Sure, sometimes they do just mindlessly run into your fire anyway, but I&#8217;ve also had the experience of seeing a soldier escape around a bend and just wait there, aiming at where he knows I&#8217;ll be, because I need to keep going forward and all he needs to do is keep me from doing that. In an excellent bit of genre-appropriate interaction design, you can crouch and even crawl on your belly to take better advantage of cover. The ending of level 1 had me crawling around an open area, badly wounded, hearing the impact of bullets on earth around me, unable to return fire effectively because the sun was behind them.<\/p>\n<div class=\"speaker-mute footnotes_reference_container\"> <div class=\"footnote_container_prepare\"><p><span role=\"button\" tabindex=\"0\" class=\"footnote_reference_container_label pointer\" onclick=\"footnote_expand_collapse_reference_container_6939_1();\">&#x202F;<\/span><span role=\"button\" tabindex=\"0\" class=\"footnote_reference_container_collapse_button\" style=\"display: none;\" onclick=\"footnote_expand_collapse_reference_container_6939_1();\">[<a id=\"footnote_reference_container_collapse_button_6939_1\">+<\/a>]<\/span><\/p><\/div> <div id=\"footnote_references_container_6939_1\" style=\"\"><table class=\"footnotes_table footnote-reference-container\"><caption class=\"accessibility\">References<\/caption> <tbody> \r\n\r\n<tr class=\"footnotes_plugin_reference_row\"> <th scope=\"row\" class=\"footnote_plugin_index_combi pointer\"  onclick=\"footnote_moveToAnchor_6939_1('footnote_plugin_tooltip_6939_1_1');\"><a id=\"footnote_plugin_reference_6939_1_1\" class=\"footnote_backlink\"><span class=\"footnote_index_arrow\">&#8593;<\/span>1<\/a><\/th> <td class=\"footnote_plugin_text\">It is possible that my choice here was influenced by the title&#8217;s similarity to the name of the studio that developed the last game I blogged here.<\/td><\/tr>\r\n\r\n <\/tbody> <\/table> <\/div><\/div><script type=\"text\/javascript\"> function footnote_expand_reference_container_6939_1() { jQuery('#footnote_references_container_6939_1').show(); jQuery('#footnote_reference_container_collapse_button_6939_1').text('\u2212'); } function footnote_collapse_reference_container_6939_1() { jQuery('#footnote_references_container_6939_1').hide(); jQuery('#footnote_reference_container_collapse_button_6939_1').text('+'); } function footnote_expand_collapse_reference_container_6939_1() { if (jQuery('#footnote_references_container_6939_1').is(':hidden')) { footnote_expand_reference_container_6939_1(); } else { footnote_collapse_reference_container_6939_1(); } } function footnote_moveToReference_6939_1(p_str_TargetID) { footnote_expand_reference_container_6939_1(); var l_obj_Target = jQuery('#' + p_str_TargetID); if (l_obj_Target.length) { jQuery( 'html, body' ).delay( 0 ); jQuery('html, body').animate({ scrollTop: l_obj_Target.offset().top - window.innerHeight * 0.2 }, 380); } } function footnote_moveToAnchor_6939_1(p_str_TargetID) { footnote_expand_reference_container_6939_1(); var l_obj_Target = jQuery('#' + p_str_TargetID); if (l_obj_Target.length) { jQuery( 'html, body' ).delay( 0 ); jQuery('html, body').animate({ scrollTop: l_obj_Target.offset().top - window.innerHeight * 0.2 }, 380); } }<\/script>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Still in the mood to get some twenty-year-old first-person shooters off the Stack, I pull up Iron Storm (Wanadoo, 2002). 1It is possible that my choice here was influenced by the title&#8217;s similarity to the name of the studio that developed the last game I blogged here. I picked this out of the bargain bin [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[717],"class_list":["post-6939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-iron-storm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6939"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6939\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6969,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6939\/revisions\/6969"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}