War… War never changes…

That’s how it is in the real world, but it does change quite a bit in video games. Throughout the brief yet colorful history of interactive media, the theme of a bloody drag-out real-life war hits the spot like no other, letting you terminate foes with an array of armaments that you may find in the real world. There are various genres that capitalize on the theme of realistic human conflict, but the first person shooter is always the staple.

Perhaps the primary appeal of such games is the fact that people can relate to them by just reading several Wikipedia entries on whatever happened in the past. Soon enough, you’ll find yourself immersed in all things military. As we look closely at the history of these war games, we see that there have been many games that take real life wars as its main component, and publishers have spent millions of dollars to market them as the ultimate military experience.

Medal of Honor was pretty good for its time, offering interesting storylines that showed World War II at its best or worst. Audiences related to the single-player since they’re based on historical events, and they were portrayed in a cinematic way. Players took to it quite well, especially since the guns were made pretty well to begin with. The Thompson sounded almost like it was shooting rapid-fire hammers, while the MP40 had a sharper bang due to its smaller caliber, just like in real life. Everything just seemed to feel right with this series, so Electronic Arts enjoyed a good measure of success while it was still good.

But as with all things EA, that series took a bit of a nosedive later on with the coming of a new kid on the war gaming block. MOH was dethroned as the go-to game franchise for world war action when Call of Duty arrived in the scene. However, the WW2 theme was getting too old all on its own with so many games released with the same premise of fighting Hitler. Between MOH and COD, there are also many other games that have tackled either World War II or the Vietnam War, spawning lots of mediocre titles with questionable quality. This was where Activision and Infinity Ward stepped up their game with what’s now considered a contemporary classic — Modern Warfare.

There have been games before that took from the concept of a realistic modern military game, but they were mostly too complicated or too heavy on the system. Also, their single-player campaigns tend to be a bit bland since the life of a soldier isn’t exactly a box of chocolates to begin with. But what Modern Warfare offered was a simplistic military shooter with the hard-hitting international terrorists versus do-gooders with guns story, so it clicked with different types of gamers. This began the craze for games with conflicts in the same present day setting. All that is left to be done was exploration and execution.

There are some games that seemed intent on predicting the future. Homefront is a good example with the premise of North Korea having conquered its neighboring countries to form a Greater Korean Republic, which is then intent on conquering the United States of America. Crysis is another game that has a more futuristic theme and not as realistic, but is still set in the real world and has North Koreans as adversaries. There’s also games like Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising where China becomes a gigantic bully that seizes oil from everyone else. Ghost Recon is a series based from the Tom Clancy books that tells of a special group of soldiers who are sent to destroy enemies from the inside. There are a lot of these games that keep coming into the market, each with its own interesting premise.

Other genres are not exempt from this phenomenon, like strategy and flight simulators. Company of Heroes is a very good example of a game based on World War II, having squad-based units that you can move tactically to take objectives and hit the enemy with a combination of brute force and strategic cunning. Before that, there was Close Combat, which is an old series from Microsoft Games that had infantry, armor, and aerial battles across a map from a top-down perspective. Games from SSI like People’s General may not be memorable for mainstream gamers, but war-gamers should be somehow familiar with its hexagonal tiles and use of various units that included prototype tanks and aircraft to conquer cities one by one.

Flight simulators have been prominent for a long time, although they’ve been mostly played by hardcore enthusiasts who don’t mind the complicated controls and difficult gameplay. These games focused on various air forces from different countries, each with their own array of aircraft with their own strengths and weaknesses. You can play them with joysticks and get a good feel of flying fighter planes in your own computer. For those who aren’t as hardcore, there are still arcade flight sims like Ace Combat and HAWX that let you do the same thing, but without the need for understanding what the hell must be done to land a plane. All you have to do in such games was to turn and shoot.

Such games will never disappear from the shelves, it seems. The human fascination for war serves as both a reminder of how violent these conflicts can be, as well as a channel for games that continue to captivate our imagination, no matter how much we’ve seen them before. Also, they’re quite fun, so we can reload and shoot our M4′s and AK-47′s with all the excitement that they can bring.