Homefront Sells an Estimated One Million, Quality Unrelated
Goddamn it, videogames.
Homefront has apparently sold a million copies. That’s the estimation of real sales, and that’s based on 2.4 million copies shipped. This is according to a THQ press release mind you, so goodness only knows how accurate that is. It’s also #1 in the UK sales chart, and a few other things that sound juicy to investors.
Since its release, the game has received largely luke-warm reviews. Does that surprise you? Well, you should have seen this coming. Nearly a year ago, using journalism that took me less than 30 seconds, I looked up the developer KAOS studios. The same KAOS studios who brought us blandness in a box and named it Frontlines: Fuel of War. Unsurprisingly, their first game received tepid reviews, and Homefront still managed to get a lower score than that.
Despite this, the gaming press hyped the bitch out of this game.
I don’t like to rely on Metacritic averages to judge the quality of something as complex as a videogame, but we’re talking about a war game; one of the most travelled paths in the medium. We should be able to recognise the signs of a mediocre game before getting mixed up in the hype, ultimately disappointing everyone when it doesn’t meet our heightened expectations.
But hey; at least we have Shadow Harvest: Phantom Ops to look forward to. And Nuclear Dawn. And Modern Warfare 3. And Socom 4. And Battlefield 3. I could do this for a while. There are a lot of war games.
But Homefront has something unique; it shows the US as the poor victim! There’s a major lack of US propaganda in the games medium. I think it’s a valuable lesson to teach that, when the US invades, it’s justified in doing so, but also that when the US gets invaded, it’s the invaders that are the bad guys.
Also, Homefront offers another innovation in that it lets you fight in your average US street. This gives players a deeper connection to the game, as it reflects their daily life more. While many other games allow you to fight in the streets, those streets always belong to some other country. And as we all know, Muslims and communists and Nazis and Asians aren’t people and their countries are just full of uncultured barbarians. The US is helping them by taking over their countries so that they can fix them by introducing capitalism, consumerism and the true Christianity. So no one cares about being able to fight on “their” streets unless they’re a true United States American. And besides, their armed forces are always evil, so why would they want to fight for their country? Only gooks, japs, niggers, mudslimes and Nazis want that.
It’s time to take of that red star blindfold and see the real world, non-Americans.
I witnessed this phenomena firsthand. An acheivment whore friend of mine, who rates Halo 2 as his favorite game, brought up the topic of Homefront. I explained that I had seen multiple videos that demonstrate it is heavily scripted, adding essentially nothing new gameplay-wise to the genre other than it’s atmosphere, which was over the top and ridiculous in its mass grave/evil koreans themes.
Then the commercial came on. It showed guns, explosions, and jam-on-screen action. He said, “I don’t know dude, it looks pretty cool.”
Where I work, we have a promotion on for homefront, extra credit when traded against crysis. We have more preowned back than we got in.