![]() Win win, right? We can clear the way and not worry about having to fight our way through. Luckily, as game logic would have it, there is a way to clear the way, by dropping white phosphorus on the enemies in the way. I got to a section of the game where the way is blocked by what is shown to us as enemy soldiers, far too many to deal with. So, picture the scene: it’s mid afternoon, the boy was having a nice snooze, the wife was having a lie down, and so I decided to play a little bit of a video game, in this case Spec Ops: The Line. Well, I say I did, obviously my wife did, but when this game came out he would have been around one year and the apple of his daddy’s eye. And acts don’t come much more heinous than one that is carried in Spec Ops: The Line. These sources focus on how war affects the participants, and how people who commit heinous acts are haunted by their actions, and the way that the brain tries to cope with them. The inspiration for the game is the book The Heart of Darkness (by Joseph Conrad, interestingly) and the film adaptation of it, Apocalypse Now. What the developers have tried to do – I think anyway – is try to make us see that even in a game context, the decisions that we make can have real weight. This is where the beauty of The Line’s narrative comes out. That is something of a shame, as the psychological aspects of the storyline were very well executed and quite disturbing. However, it appears that the games have never exactly set the world alight, and despite the almost cult following that the game has picked up in the intervening years, it was classed as a commercial failure the death knell for the franchise. What I didn’t realise, until when doing some background research, is that Spec Ops is actually a fairly old franchise, with Spec Ops: The Line being the tenth game in the series. Of course, given that our character had a previous relationship with Konrad, we are chosen to lead a three man squad to attempt to find him and discover what happened. ![]() ![]() The caravan never arrived, all contact was lost, until a looped radio signal was finally detected from Konrad – the caravan had failed and the death toll had been “too many”. The story is that our character, Captain Martin Walker, has been sent to lead an elite team of special forces soldiers into Dubai to find a certain Colonel John Konrad, who was attempting to lead a caravan out of the destroyed city.
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