World War One in Pixels

World War One was a terrible time in history, today is one of the many days to remember what the soldiers who did in that and other wars did for us. While everyone remembers 11/11/1918 here in 2015 let's take a look at when video games adapted the terrible conflict!

Flight Simulators, for whatever reason, are very popular nowadays! I remember discovering the flight simulator in Google Earth and flying all over the world! World War One was represented by this genre/ subgenre in the game Wings: Over Flanders Fields. Flanders Field of course being famous through the war time poem and the field coomonly associated with the growing of the poppies! Making a game of the war in the air during World War One was a popular choice looking at the huge amount of titles that are all about the planes! Wing 2: Aces High, or Blazing Skies in Europe, you control a British Warplane bombing strategic areas for Kaiser Wilhelm II in France, should you die you'll be given a cemetery scene which lets you know that the game takes place in 1917. Even the most famous plane, possibly, in the First World War is given a series of arcade games: the Red Baron! The Red Baron is notorious in history if not simply due to the mystery surrounding its final mission and in 1980 Atari made it into an arcade machine! Way back when we first talked about Polybius I mentioned the 1981 arcade title Battlezone (for those of you who've read the first post on the site this is not the same game that we find Dopefish), Red Baron holds many similarities with this game! It's first person view with the same gameplay mechanics!

Want more of a man vs man vibe? Look no further than 2012's Toy Soldiers. This game technically isn't a man vs man but more of a plastic toy soldier vs plastic toy soldier as you choose between two rival armies and battle to the death! The characters in the game are designed as World War One soldiers, however, the places you fight in certainly weren't in the First World War! One such setting is a child's bedroom and another being a library! Taking a bit more of a realistic adaption we find the iOS game Trenches. It's more realistic that Toy Soldiers but not quite capturing the horror of the war as this game is a Tower Defense title. The game encompasses the entirety of the First World War as you try to send your forces into enemy territory. You can play as either the Commander of the British Expeditionary Forces or a Commander on the German side! So far this is the first game we've covered that let's you play as either side. The game even takes a leaf out of Call of Duty's book and lets the player endure hoards of Zombies!

World War One games can, as we've seen, take a wierd turn, but there's more where that came from! Peanut's Snoopy has a series of games where he takes to the skies during the Great War and fights the German forces and even Cthulhu sinks his claws into the bloody conflict in Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land! But the conflict has been taken seriously in many games too, look at 2008's World War One. This game may take the war at face value but it was plagued by bugs and glitches but it did feature a huge map of Europe to fight your way through! Verdun became fully released on Steam earlier this year which historically represents the infamous Battle of Verdun in 1916, the game features period clothing, weapons and equipment!

The modding community also seem to have a respect for the First World War by putting the Great War into other huge titles. Battlefield 1942 received a mod in 2011 called Battlefield 1918, as you could guess this mod sets the game during the First World War and features settings in Western Europe, Africa, Asia and more! The FPS titan Company of Heroes got the Great War 1918 mod too in 2014! The video game industry seem to sprinkle the serious iterations of the bloody conflict in between the weirder versions, however, the war is never really too sugar coated. Take Toy Soldiers, you might be controlling toys but you're still fighting a war! Snoopy may be flying on his dog house but he could easily be shot from the sky just as, in the game, you destroy German planes!

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