Homefront, the FPS THQ released earlier this year amidst an aggressive marketing campaign, saw a unified Korean army invade the United States. It did good things: I liked the consistency of the domestic suburban U.S setting, there were some impressively spectacular set-pieces and, er, it was reasonably fun in places. It also did bad things, not least in going to great lengths to create a serious political framework for its implausible story before spoiling it all by casting the Koreans as monstrous one-dimensional ogres. In case your motivation for killing these insane subhumans was unclear, throughout Homefront you had to defend a family from being ambushed (complete with crying baby!) and return to what was once a peaceful communal garden to find everyone slaughtered. Who's going to grow the vegetables now?! It's so sad. But best of all though was the moment at the end of chapter two when you stumble upon a mass grave of American innocents, and can only watch on helplessly as those evil Koreans shovel in more dead. There're so many they have to use a mechanical truck to get them all! The level ends with perhaps the greatest button prompt in first-person shooter history, when unable to run from an imminent enemy helicopter, the on-screen instruction 'Square - Jump In Mass Grave' appears.
Homefront is basically the videogaming equivalent of those American hard-bodied films from the 1980s - they masqueraded as action cinema but were pieces of Republican/Reagenite propaganda from the 1980s, the likes of Red Dawn (whose director John Milius also wrote Homefront) and Delta Force helping promote American might and coming across a tad fascistic. But anyway, here's the footage of Homefront's mass grave mission*.
Jump In Mass Grave, amazing.
* Taken from the PC version.
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