[lbo-talk] Call of Duty's Battle of Stalingrad video game

[Chris Doss]

While we're at it, can somebody tell me why my laptop crashes when I try to run Half Life Episode 2? I'm thinking my driver (Radeon Xpress 200M) is out of date, but when I try to upgrade it via Steam it tells me my computer (Samsung BTW) has incompatible hardware. (?) The computer crashes and restarts at the very beginning of To the White Forest when the portal storm goes off -- I suppose my computer can't run the graphics. I've tried turning the resolution way down but it doesn't seem to help.

Christopher E. Doss
Moscow, Russian Federation

--- On Sun, 1/4/09, Philip Pilkington <pilkingtonphil at gmail.com> wrote:


> From: Philip Pilkington <pilkingtonphil at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Call of Duty's Battle of Stalingrad video game
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Sunday, January 4, 2009, 1:55 PM
> On Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 5:24 PM, B.
> <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> > I know there are some hardcore video gamers on the
> list. Apparently the PS3
> > has a new Call of Duty out ("World at War")
> that lets you fight the Battle
> > of Stalingrad? Anyone tried it?
> >
> > I played a previous Call of Duty game on my
> cousin's PS3 and couldn't stand
> > how chaotic it seemed. Squad-level, first person POV
> mano y mano fighting
> > that just seemed impossibly frenetic and aggravating.
> >
> > -B.
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
> 
> 
> I've played it on the XBox and I was fairly impressed.
> It is a little
> chaotic but I think that's kind of the point. It tries
> to realistically
> reproduce the conditions of fighting in WW2 and, while
> I'm obviously not
> speaking from personal experience, I think they do a pretty
> good job.
> 
> One thing that really struck me is how bleak the game is.
> War isn't made out
> to be fun or glorious or anything of the sort. For example
> there's much
> emphasis placed on the hatred directed against the
> invaders. At one point
> you have to option of allowing your fellow soldiers to burn
> surrendered Nazi
> soldiers to death with Molotov Cocktails while laughing at
> their screams and
> pleas for mercy; the effect of which is actually quite
> chilling. It seems to
> me that often when popular films try to portray the
> brutalities of WW2 they
> either come across as hopelessly melodramatic, dishonest
> and... well... shit
> (I'm thinking Spielberg here) or they succeed in making
> a point in an
> extremely cryptic manner (I'm thinking the subtle
> treatment of PTSD in "A
> Matter of Life and Death"); video games, on the other
> hand, seem to have a
> bit of an edge here. Now all we need are more games set in
> the trenches of
> WW1...
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