History and videogames have been intertwined since at least the early ‘80s, but at best it’s been a shaky relationship. Until fairly recently, concepts like “realism” and “accuracy” weren’t often a consideration, and they tended to be thrown out the window if a cool explosion or giant monster was judged more beneficial to gameplay. As technology has progressed, however, more of these games have been trying hard to be tr🎐u💟e to their historical roots – and, predictably, a lot of them don’t do so well.
For the sake of conciseness, we’re not going to pick on games that take creative license to the point of being obviously inaccurate or fantastical – so Genji: Days of the Blade’s giant crabs and demon-powered villains are out, as are clear﷽ alternate histor💞ies, like those in Resistance: Fall of Man, Turning Point: Fall of Liberty and any game that guessed at the future (i.e. Street Fighter 2010) and got it wrong.
Above: Anything this stupid gets a pass, just because no reasonable person actually thinks giant enemy crabs roamed historical Japanese battlefields
6. Medal of Honor: Underground
Medal of Honor is another series that generally tries to re-create history, insofar as the technical limitations of game consoles ꦗwill allow. Unfortunately, it doesn't always get it right – and it seems its efforts were kind of doomed from the start, because as early as the second game, it was already going off the rails.
In Underground, players take on the role of Manon Batiste, a female French Resistance fighter recruited as a commando by the US Office of Strategic Services. There’s a real-world analogue for her, one Helene Deschamps Adams, although her work for the OSS seems to have involved posing as a secretary for the Vichy puppet government, and scouting behind enemy lines. But hey, we’re not going to complain about a woman gunning down scores of Nazi troops, even if it’s stretching the truth. Hey, it could have happened, right?
Above: That Big Joe crossbow, meanwhile, is actually a real thing
What we are going to complain about is the game’s fourth mission, Dark Camelot, in which Manon sneaks into Wewelsburg Castle to find a dark secret. Wewelsburg, incidentally, is better known as the headquarters of the SS and the inspiration for Castle Wolfenstein, so the idea of sending a lone female commando into such an obvious viper’s nest is a little insane. But it gets more insane when the game – which has been relatively faithful to history up to this point – pits you against Heinrich Himmler’s SS “knights,” who attack with frigging swords, while wearing bullet-resistant medieval armor.
Above: One of these things is not like the other...
For the record, real bullets will go right the hell through medieval suits of armor, and they’ll go through them even harder when they’re fired from a 1940s-era submachine gun. That’s why nobody actually wears medieval armor into combat anymore. For a game so focused on realism (inasmuch as it was achievable on t♔he PSOne), battling literal Nazi knights was a weird turn of events, even for a level set in what’s arguably 🍨the global center of cultish Nazi weirdness.
Above: And this would be the center of that center
