“Unparalleled financial opportunity” – Mercenaries

[For this guest post, I am welcoming back Iain Farrell, who previously wrote about Sonic 3. You can find Iain on twitter as @iainfarrell.]

**Mercenaries** (Pandemic/LucasArts, PS2, 2005)

Two things spring to mind when I think of Mercenaries from 2005. The first is that more games should start with a PowerPoint presentation and a pitch to board level executives. The second is that it’s hard to go back to a time before control standards were established. For example, every console first person shooter before Halo is a nightmare.

I’m getting ahead of myself.

Mercenaries came to the original Xbox and PlayStation 2 in 2005. What’s most impressive is that a £3 copy purchased on eBay arrived, was popped into an Xbox Series X in 2021 and JUST WORKED! This is a sidebar to this reminiscence on the game but it’s pretty blinking marvellous. This is the Xbox platform super power and if anything can/should be copied by every other platform then this should be . The more games can be made to do this over time on more platforms the better. It would be a huge deal for preservation and respecting people’s commitment and collections. I popped the disc in, the Xbox worked it out, downloaded the updated 4K version and away we went. It supports widescreen and HDR and looks about as good as any 16-year-old game can. Grab a used copy or digital download. It’s tremendous.

The game is, like many games from the time, a bit of an unusual artefact and is all at once brilliant and frustrating. Brilliant because at the core it is a massive open world filled with objectives and missions that see you blowing up all manner of vehicles, meeting different factions and getting stuck into a web of interconnected groups and agendas. The experience is filled with touches that attempt to make the game feel grounded in the real world. You receive mission information and updates via email, you look at this on a special PDA, ask your parents what smart phones were before smart phones, and as mentioned, the game opens with a presentation to business executives.

The acting that supports the great-for-2005 visuals is brilliant. I loved meeting the characters who although a little two dimensional, are performed with gusto. That’s not faint praise. I really enjoyed hanging out with the characters. It’s a game made in a simpler time in a lot of ways and it wears its casual approach to international conflict with ease. A game made now on this topic would likely thread the needle in a more nuanced way but this game exists in a time when callbacks to action adventure would be movies like The Rock and Indiana Jones.

Viewed through the lens of the time, this spiralling world of missions and explosive toys holds up very well and is well worth picking up, however it’s not without its frustrations if you’re coming to it having never played it before. I repeatedly found things like the buttons used to control vehicles frustrating. Get past the fact that you use Y to get into a vehicle, and then press A to accelerate or X to brake/ reverse. This is weird feeling these days. All I wanted to do was reach for the triggers every time. I also kept trying to look down sights when shooting and instead would toss out a grenade. It’s something you get used to but it took me a good long time to get my head around it, especially when in between playing I would go and play modern shooters with friends and then come back. There’s a case to be made here for updates and remasters to consider their target platforms as much as their platforms of origin when doing any work like this. This was the fascinating topic of conversation on a recent episode of Triple Click from Maximum Fun which started to delve into the differences between remakes, remasters and the like. I’d highly recommend a listen. If you’re reading this I know you’re into that sort of thing.

So we’ve established that establishing absolutes is hard and that going back 15 years, even in the most comfortable modern way possible, still comes with drawbacks. But it’s worth doing. The game is still great fun, a sandbox of destructive possibilities and a refreshingly light adventure. As the winter nights draw in it’s a great way to spend a few evenings.