Don't Go, Daddy: Medal Of Honour Trailer

There's a rather touching new trailer for EA's CoD-spoiling reinvention of Medal Of Honour. (And yes, RPS continues to pioneer in ignoring how games are spelt in favour of inserting rogue 'u's.) There's mere seconds of what might be in-game footage, but building up to it is a well performed, smartly filmed sequence in which we see one of the game's soldiers effectively humanised.

This taps into something for me - a reason why I still feel so much affection for the first Call Of Duty game. Obviously there's a lot of possibly unnecessary controversy over the use of historical war in the background of games. (Few complain if it's a pre-20th century war, of course - deader humans are less important.) But a healthy degree of respect goes a long way. Call Of Duty took the slightly more flippant Medal Of Honour series into much more moving territory, the deaths feeling meaningful, the conflict horrendous, the fall of the enemies a tragedy alongside the victory. I'd love to see a new MoH taking a similar tack - although clearly without preaching. The trailer implies the human side of things, albeit in not altogether the most sophisticated way. It's obviously little more than the scene where the neatly-haired young gentleman promises his wife and daughter that he'll be back from the war in no time, and they'll all go to the seaside that very day, before walking out the front door and getting a rocket in his head. But still, I think it's done well, and that's what counts.

The game's due to be with us on 12th October this year, which is a very specific date this far ahead.