WiC: Soviet Assault On The Senses

Video by Alec Meer Co-founder

Published on May 31, 2008

You know what's funny? Being IP-blocked from accessing your own website.
You know what's not funny? Being IP-blocked from accessing your own website. Also, Garfield.

Anyway, I return from 24 hours of infuriating blacklisting to find Kieron's done a splendid job of managing the place while Jim and I have been offline and Walker's been away snuggling with Gabe Newell, so why bother posting? Oh, alright. Here's an enjoyably epic new video for Soviet Assault, the upcoming World in Conflict expansion. I've not played WiC for a while, but this has convinced me to dig it out again. Shamelessly ripping off Gillen's video-autopsy shtick, I've stuck some blow-by-blow commentary beneath the cut. Yes, Saturday is RPS is Hungover So Fobs You Off With Trailers day.

10s – Wobbly VHS effect on the logo, a canny nod to WiC’s 80s setting and curiously evocative of a thousand terrible teen horror movies
15s – Massive Entertainment really is a very good name for a developer. But only if they are indeed massively entertaining. They should have renamed themselves to Adequate Entertainment for Ground Control 2.
20s – The Thing, as soundtracked by outtakes from Donnie Darko.
50s- It’s like Lost! But with less preening former models and Party of Five stars!
1m – Reflective snow remains a cheap but effective trick to make games pretty. I wholeheartedly endorse it.
1m05s – parachuting men as maudlin beauty sky-ballet. Nice.
1m16s –Bugger me, that /cannot/ be in-game graphics, surely?
1m20s – Excellent synchronisation of the music with the puff of snow-cloud from the rear of the tank tracks. All piano ballads would be improved by the addition of tanks, I suspect.
1m35 – Notice the lyrics – “death to my hometown”, as gigantic Russian army silently sieges sleepy, snow-bound village.
1m50 – At last, sound effects slowly fade in alongside the music for the climactic assault – war is noisy and brutal, not the elegiac, noble thing the video’s fooled us into thinking it was so far.
2m – Ah, WiC ‘splodes. There’s still nothing quite like ‘em.
2m15s – God, look at that. If you don’t want to play this game right now, you’re broken in the head.
2m30s – Death, so much beautiful, glorious death.
2m50 – Well, that was all remarkably stylish and spectacular. It’s told me absolutely bloody nothing about how Soviet Assault differs to WiC, however. To Wikipedia I go!
5m - Just rewatched it muted and with The Ting Ting's Great DJ playing in the background instead. Worked incredibly well, especially because the carpet-bombing scene matched up near-perfectly with THE DRUMS THE DRUMS THE DRUMS THE DRUMS.