Homefront

If you were to ask me what my favorite game was, it would be a toss-up between Fallout 2 and…something Bioware made, probably. The thing about the Fallout franchise is that there’s so much there: the backstory is rich and the wasteland, richer with details of how our country suffered its apocalyptic death.

THQ has released two trailers for their upcoming game, ‘Homefront,’ a game that’s being written by John Milius of Apocalypse Now and Red Dawn fame. One of them explains the premise: an alternative timeline where N. and S. Korea and Japan are joined, and they launch an EMP laser at America. Now, the likelihood of whether or not something like this could actually happen is…questionable. Still, the trailer establishes context in a way that reminds me of Fallout: sure, what they’re depicting probably could never happen, but there’s still that tiiiiiiiiiiiiny tiny sliver of a chance that it could. And if you suspend your disbelief a little bit, the premise and how close to home it hits is fantastic.

The timing for this is interesting. After the Vietnam war, there was an effeminized America that saw the need for movies like Rambo to reaffirm its masculinity. Now we’re in a war again and I’d say that the morality, as a country, is at an all time low. We’re not sure if what we’re doing is right, we’re not all that sure of our position in the world stage, there is plenty of internal turmoil, and there are other Superpowers which are rising. Will Homefront address these concerns, or will it speak to them in the same way Rambo did, reaffirming America’s wounded wings? Though we’ve seen plenty of games before that have the premise of a destroyed America, Homefront is being created during the conditions which I just described. That being said, it’ll be interesting to see how these current concerns and conditions influence the plot in Homefront: it’s a very political game, and I’m interested on whether or not it attempts to make a statement regarding its subject.

Anyway, here’s the contextual trailer:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjtpQ5Y0eco]

Notice how we even see an angry Tea-Partier, oil prices which are almost in the 20 bucks a gallon range…and is Hillary Clinton president or something? Geez, everything goes to shit in America when that lady takes the helm, I tell ya.
And the less interesting trailer with the shooty-shooty bits, also, a thing called goliath:

Click on past the jump to see the second trailer

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phqzhXf82OU]

So you’ll be fighting on American soil–in front of Home Depots and inside of someone’s white-picket fenced backyard. It’ll be interesting to see what sort of social commentary arises from these locations experiencing the horrors of war. Hell, it’ll be interesting to see if the Resistance even wins in this game, that is, if ‘winning’ is even a possibility–that alone will speak volumes toward what sort of message this game has in regards to our internal morale. Then again, if things were to be resolved in this one game, there wouldn’t be a threequel which games these days are so enamoured with!