I wonder how many of you can claim to have played a game featuring heavy Nazi imagery, banned by the German authorities, IN Germany.
Wolfenstein
Activision
PlayStation 3
Hayden Meikle
3 stars (out of 5)
In late 1993, I was in Germany - a wonderful country full of wonderful people - for a two-month exchange, when I found myself huddled over a personal computer, probably a 486, in the home of a bloke I shall call Rudi.
The game was Wolfenstein 3D, which I had played before.
In rather hushed tones, my Deutsch friends informed me the game, involving an American soldier attempting to break out of the stronghold that gave the game its name, was banned - verboten - in their country.
Apart from a few swigs of some particularly violent firewater at a Christmas dinner, playing a banned video game was about as wild as I got on that trip.
Germans, from what I encountered, were simpy keen to forget Hitler, Nazism and the unsavoury events of 1939-45.
But teenagers are teenagers.
Rudi and his mates, like me, appreciated Wolfenstein for the ground-breaking first-person shooter it was, and big deal if there were swastikas everywhere.
The game returns in an update that adds a little bit of science-fiction to the idea of a lone American soldier single-handedly taking on the Third Reich.
You again play as BJ Blaskowicz, the one-man causer of carnage.
It's 1943, in a fictional town called Isenstadt, and the SS has developed an evil plan - well, it's hardly a group that would plan a blossom festival - to harness an occult force known as the Black Sun.
This kind of stuff loses me a little.
Nazi-fighting, that's simple.
Shifting to another dimension to embrace something called The Veil, as the main character does in the updated Wolfenstein, seems needlessly complicated.
Anyway, BJ gets to do things like walk through strange doors and slow down time when he is under the "Veil".
There's a lot of investigating to do, though this is presented in a mainly linear fashion, and a lot of dark forces to defeat.
Since the original Wolfenstein, of course, first-person shooters have become a staple of gaming, and series like Halo, Call of Duty and Resistance have sold millions and millions of copies.
Giving a shoot-the-Nazis FPS a supernatural twist is fine, but Wolfenstein would have to offer something else to bump the other well-established games from their perch.
The gameplay is simple and fun, the weapons are perfectly interesting and the action can be intense, but most of this we have seen before.
Still, I wonder if, somewhere in Germany, teenagers are huddling in a dark room playing an illegal game.
