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Yes, they're still being massacred by bloodthirsty gamers every day, in every continent. Yes, they're still being shot in the head. I have my own theory: V2's x-ray is a small step towards a little sympathy for the video game Nazi. Perhaps the group unanimously agreed, nodding and murmuring emphatically, that what they wanted above all else was to see a German soldier literally die inside. Perhaps the makers of V2 held a focus group. Perhaps they figured we've become inured to the thrill of watching a man get shot without an x-ray. What made them think we would want to see an x-ray of a Nazi as he dies? Hard to say. And then, when it reaches its man, you watch in graphic x-ray as it finds its mark, penetrates flesh and bone, and emerges again from your target's body trailing blood and guts. Snipe an enemy from far enough away and the game lurches into cinematic slow-motion as you follow the flight of the bullet over rooftops and courtyards. Of course, every one-man mission through Germany needs its own unique selling point, and in V2 that selling point is clearly the kill-cam. You play as American agent Karl Fairburne, out to kill or capture Germany's finest rocket scientists (the only Nazis ever deemed worth keeping alive being the ones who can help us kill other Nazis faster and more efficiently). So it is with Sniper Elite V2 (PC/PS3/Xbox 360), a reboot of 2005's Sniper Elite, which mixes third-person stealth gaming with sophisticated, hold-your-breath, account-for-the-wind-and-pick-your-moment sniping. Meaning every year, without fail, there are half a dozen new games offering a good old-fashioned romp through war-time Germany with nothing but a rifle and a cheeky grin. They die because gamers want to kill them, because there's no enemy as satisfying as an unthinking embodiment of pure, picture-book evil. Sometimes at night I can still see hear them squealing.
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I have killed them when they rose from the grave as zombies in Call of Duty: World at War, and in Hogs of War when they were cartoon pigs soaring over me with jet packs. I have killed them without a second thought first in two dimensions in Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, then in three in the Medal of Honor games and Battlefield 1942. It's just what a boy with a games console did when I were a lad. Every teenage boy of the last two decades has his 100 Nazi scalps. A thousand unmarked digital graves litter every square inch of the beaches of Omaha and the train yards, docks and barracks of a hundred occupied territories. The ghosts of the virtual dead are packed so tight in the stone hallways of Castle Wolfenstein that it looks like Pac-Man level infinity. You could lay the bodies head-to-toe in a line from here to the sun and back. In fact, I would venture to guess more video game Nazis have died in the past 30 years than there are humans who have ever lived. The video game Nazi will be remembered only as an end-of-level statistic. Eventually – provided the player sticks with him – the commando will emerge victorious and alive. When Patterson dies, he returns, regenerated, to a checkpoint just a few minutes earlier, rearmed and ready to begin his assault afresh. And in part because he knows that, unlike the gruesome demises of his foes, his own death is a temporary setback. The unit cost of the rifle is around 8 900. He scoffs, in part, because – as the game's hero – he's better, smarter and stronger than the entire military might of the Third Reich. However due to its size the Barrett M82 is usually carried in special case. Let us call him, for argument's sake, Jimmy Patterson. Most often his angel of death is a lone American commando, a man trained since birth for this battle and this battle alone, a man who scoffs at the odds stacked against him. Or is stabbed or strangled or blown up and scattered to the wind like straw. He fizzes into being, examines his uniform, wonders perhaps why he is holding a rifle and what exactly he is fighting for and, within seconds, takes a bullet in the head. He is born into this world only to be killed moments later, a newborn convert of a hateful ideology. Complete a level with 100% accuracy, using only riflesĪn easy achievement to miss, but also an easy one to unlock once you've completed the game on your chosen difficulty, To gain this ahievement select Prolog and cadet difficulty.Take a moment to pity the video-game Nazi, for his life is nasty, brutish and short.