This week, the latest entry into the Wolfenstein series of video games is being released. You might think this would be a time of great excitement and anticipation at the Scaia house.
You might be a short-sighted oaf. Behold: the trailer for Wolfenstein: The New Order.
I’ve spent 20 years shooting Nazis in the face only to find out the Germans still won World War II!
Loyal Scaiaholics will recall that my first exposure to Wolfenstein occurred as a young boy in the early ’90s. At the time, I was just an impressionable child, learning how best to shoot Nazis in the face or devise a strategy should I ever find myself in a gunfight with a mechanical suit-clad Adolf Hitler.
These were practical life lessons, and I’m a better person for the experience.
More recently, my service to the Office of Secret Actions continued on my phone. This required an entirely different set of strategies, such as shooting Nazis while trying to look like you’re actually taking notes during a meeting at work.
I must have killed thousands of cartoon Germans over the past 20 years. It’s demoralizing to suggest they somehow regrouped to win the war.
I can’t even imagine the logistics of launching a counter-offensive, given how their streets and the corridors of all their castles are choked with corpses.
I’d even go back and shoot them all again if I thought that’d prevent this abomination from poisoning a new generation of American children. They’ll grow up to think that no matter how many SS officers you vaporize with a laser cannon, they’ll just show up again in 1966 as strong as ever!
Mein Leben! Those kids will be terrified to leave the house!
I’m not ready to dismiss Wolfenstein outright, though. The idea of advancing the series into a new era is exciting. The new game simply needs a patch that adds an explanatory scene at the beginning.
We’d learn that Hitler’s mechanical suit had some sort of device that allowed him to slip into a parallel universe and spawn millions of new Nazis. Frankly, I wouldn’t put it past him to employ sorcery in this quest.
It wouldn’t be unprecedented. Our protagonist, BJ Blazkowicz, has already shot his way through several other universes.
There’s the Spear of Destiny universe, the one with the zombies and even the weird one from the XBox game that came out in 2009 where you pop in and out of different universes. I didn’t completely understand that one, but it wasn’t hard to figure out the rules (“Continue shooting Nazis”).
If we establish a new universe, we can incorporate modern technology into the game and develop innovative and exciting ways of killing cartoon Germans. Until now, you could only dream of stealing a sports car and mowing through a crowd of Nazis for no reason, like in Grand Theft Auto.
In fact, people often ask me, “Do you beat hookers in Grand Theft Auto?”
My response is always the same, “Of course not, the hookers are providing a service. They’re innocent bystanders.”
But a Nazi hooker? Yes, it would be okay to hit her with a baseball bat.
An alternate universe helps us move the Wolfenstein story forward while also preserving the corpus of cartoon Nazi-killings we’ve worked so hard to forge over, lo, these last two decades. It’s time to do the right thing, MachineGames.
