Enemy Territory - The First Encounter

Soldier Films

To the contrary of the rest of the household (my wife that is) I have grown a passion for soldier wars. My first soldier film was Saving Private Ryan, a film which I saw alone and left me squirming in the seat for the first 15 minutes. I had been wanting to watch a soldier film ever since but, with my wife not sharing my same tastes, I could'nt get myself to watch any. I had made an exception with The Pianist, which I saw on my own but there were quit a number that I wanted to see.

Black Hawk Down

One of these was Black Hawk Down which also starred the not-so-notorious-then Orlando Bloom. I started playing the game and got myself well immersed into the story. Just before I reached the mission ' Irene' , I managed to rent the DVD and watched the video. Tremendous. Then I played the game and, whist loading, I was reading veterans' stories about their experience in that tragedy in Somalia.

Black Hawk Down was the first game I completed ever since DooM.

American Cousin Visiting.

A few weeks later I was visited by my American second cousins - the younger of which was an avid player of Enemy Territory. He told me about it and I downloaded it. But when I tried it, I must have loaded quite a drab level since I remember being in a really graphic-less environment in which I thought ET was just an outline environment (no textures) and I quickly uninstalled it.

Call of Duty

Then I went on to play Call of Duty. The change in graphics from Black Hawk Down was tremendous and I felt I had done the right thing of playing BHK before CoD or I would not have enjoyed it so much.

Call of Duty pitted me back in the Second World War and I really enjoyed the fact that you played it from different parts - Allies and Russians. Again, I finished the game - I actually shot at the guys coming up with the Russian Red Flag on top of Berlin at the end. Luckily I missed.

After playing Call of Duty, I managed to watch Enemy at the Gates, another tremendous film which to me highlighted a yet unknown frontline of WWII - Russia. The role of the sniper also attracted me - something which left repercussions in my first online encounters on Enemy Territory... the subject of my next Weblog