Violence on a budget: Wii hints at shoot-’em-up future with new download - Military Video Games, computer games, games, gaming - Navy Times

Violence on a budget: Wii hints at shoot-’em-up future with new download

The Nintendo Wii finally has a proper, violence-oriented first-person shooter, complete with gunfire, blood and bad guys yelling in Arabic.

In fact, “Heavy Fire: Special Operations” could be the best video game value you’ve ever gotten for $5. Still, as welcome as that is, five bucks can buy you only so much fun.

“Heavy Fire,” a new download available through the Wii’s online store, puts you among an Army Special Forces team taking on generic bad guys somewhere in the Middle East.

You roll into town on the machine gun atop a Humvee and blast away at terrorists who pop up from roofs, slide around corners or run into the open, all with guns blazing.

Then you’re on foot, advancing through the same universal Middle Eastern village that we can all draw from memory: Dusty streets, treacherous rooftops, piles of baskets, wrecked cars just aching to explode, and so on.

What tangle of geopolitical intrigue has brought you to this kill zone? What crime did these masked, shouting gunmen perpetrate against you or the U.S? What amount of force is appropriate for you and your comrades to use against them? Who cares? Kill ’em all!

“Heavy Fire” is a refreshing break from bloated, overwrought first-person shooters — no 10-minute cut scenes, no Russian-accented villains prattling about vengeance, no buddy-movie nonsense. It’s just you pointing your Wii controller at the TV and blasting away. You can add a second player to double the carnage.

It’s an encouraging development for the Wii, which has suffered from a stunted range of kiddie games since it exploded onto the scene only a few years ago. Today, Wii consoles are stacked in piles by the checkout counters at Target, but back in the bad old days — by which I mean 2007 — I was meeting strangers at 3 a.m. in parking garages trying to get one.

The novelty of its stand-up-and-wave-your-arms game play held strong for a while, but then, once you’d mastered all the tennis and table tennis and pingpong games, you started to yearn for Nintendo to take you to another level.

(I’m going to pretend the Wii balance board and its fitness games never existed. Video games as exercise? Heresy!)

“Heavy Fire” could be viewed as a toe in the water for Nintendo to see how meat-and-potatoes gun violence plays among its less hard-core audience. Earlier, full-scale attempts either have been disastrous — judges should sentence criminals to play 2006’s “Splinter Cell: Double Agent” as punishment — or jokey, as in duck-hunt games or this year’s vanilla “Attack of the Movies 3-D.”

The wrinkle here is that a cheap, no-frills title such as “Heavy Fire” probably won’t generate the same kind of following as a “Splinter Cell,” and it suffers from its own structural and formula problems.

In “Heavy Fire,” you can’t move or dodge as the bad guys shoot at you — just like bowling, you knock down all the pins, the game moves you to different vantage points, and then it sets them up again. All well and good, but “Fallout 3” this ain’t, and if you’re not in the mood for mindless action, this isn’t for you.

Sometimes, however, you just want to check your brain at the door and blast away.

Buy? Skip?

• Our verdict: Buy.