How I explained the FPS genre to my Dad

My dad sent me a short email that he had seen the latest Medal of Honor trailer on TV. Knowing that I spend way too much time playing video games he asked me what my opinion of it was.

I don't think he was suspecting this:

Right now there's two game companies that are competing in the same genre; modern warfare FPS (First Person Shooters). Activision has the best seller with their "Call of Duty" series. As of June the most recent game in the series has sold 20 million copies worldwide. EA (Electronic Arts) has a series called Battlefield, which used to be more popular, but now doesn't sell as well as Call of Duty. The most recent game in that series sold 5 million copies worldwide as of March. So, Electronics Arts is trying to compete with Activision by making a game that has more of the same features as Call of Duty. That's where Medal of Honor comes in.

Medal of Honor used to be a popular series, but hasn't had a good seller for maybe 5 years. EA is using the Medal of Honor name brand to create this new game, in order to directly compete with Call of Duty. Call of Duty is more of a game you can just pick up and play, the analogy is that it is an "Arcade Shooter". Battlefield tends to be more realistic, and is focused on team play and strategy and takes longer to really get into the game.

So, basically EA is making Medal of Honor an "Arcade Shooter" to directly compete with Call of Duty. I tend to like team based strategy games, so I like the Battlefield series better.

The next Call of Duty game is coming out a month after Medal of Honor. The next Battlefield game is actually set in Vietnam and will come out this winter.

Here's the trailers for each of the games:

Battlefield: Vietnam: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ro6FVcxiKI8&feature=related

Call of Duty: Black Ops: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtRnpC7ddv8

Medal of Honor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwhqUkMzbeA

You can see that Battlefield has a different atmosphere than the other two games which look more like action movies.

There's also some controversy over the Medal of Honor game because it features Taliban insurgents. Which, being a multi-player game with two teams, players can choose, or be randomly assigned, to play as Taliban against US soldiers. They recently changed the game to say "Opposing Force" instead of "Taliban" because EA was going to lose support from the real U.S. Army which had granted them hands on access to make the game as accurate as possible. You can read more here: http://kotaku.com/5653177/modern-games-struggle-with-modern-warfare

DSRJR

P.S. I got kind of carried away, but I have been working on improving my programming skills, so I needed a break.