LogFAQs > #949849048

#44 - SOCOM II: U.S. Navy SEALs (PS2, 2003)


SOCOM dominated my high school years. Whereas a lot of these games Ive covered before, like Mario Party 2 and Timesplitters 2, were fun games that were played in certain situations to fill time, SOCOM II was a game that we would get out of school, run straight home, and boot up to play all evening. And this lasted for well over a year. In my Monster Hunter 3 write-up, I felt like that was probably the game Ive played the most of any game. Upon writing this paragraph, I realize that cant be true. SOCOM II has to hold that honor.

SOCOM was a third-person shooter series that was one of the first to fully embrace online as its main functionality. It was more tactical than a lot of the other shooters on the market. I believe team matches with SEALs vs terrorists were the only option; no solo deathmatch queues or anything. There were a few different game modes: deathmatch, prisoner rescue, demolition, fairly routine game modes. Each round was typically very quick. A few shots would kill you, and explosives were one-hit kills. When you died, you were out for the remainder of the round. Youd run forward to the midpoint of the map, everyone would toss some grenades at typical chokepoints, and then the stragglers afterward would run around until they found each other. The first team to completely die off would lose, or the first to complete all their objectives would win. If the timer ran out, whoever had more left alive would win. Every match was a best of 11; first to 6 wins took the match.

There were some really weird nuances to this, though. For instance, the prisoner rescuing teams goal was to bring three captured prisoners to the extraction zone. But two of them would be enough. If either team killed one of them, it would count as that prisoner being rescued if you were defending, or dying if you were rescuing. This led to some crazy fun standoffs where either team would start using the prisoners as meat shields, because even if the terrorists killed one, it would count them as being rescued. They also had health bars, so a common tactic as a terrorist was to go in and shoot the prisoners a few times so theyd have one hit left to death, and try to goad the SEALs into killing them. On top of that, the SEALs only needed to rescue two of them to win. But saving the second one wouldnt end the match; the third one would still be out there. If it was in the level, the SEALs would typically try to find them and kill them so they would win. A little bit too realistic of a game there, Zipper Interactive.

Anyway, we had three systems and three TVs hooked up in my room so we could all get on and play together in-person. We all joined clans and had clan wars. Youd hop into a lobby and find another clan looking for a team match with the same number of people you had online and play a best of 3 game against them, where each team would pick a map they were good at, and then the potential tiebreaker map would be one of the few true 50/50 maps to decide it.

I remember one time we had a 6v6 clan war. We were down 1-0 in the first match, going into round 2. Everyone ran forward and tossed grenades and a whopping 15 seconds after the round started, I brought up the scoreboard screen to see how it was going and my entire team was dead except me, and they had killed no one. I decided to just run around until I found someone so they could kill me and get it over with. But I came up behind someone, so I picked him off with my silenced weapon and turned and ran off somewhere else. This happened 5 more times, as I methodically picked off their entire team en route to a 6v1 comeback. My clanmates were screaming as their voices came back on as it ended, and we rode that momentum to a 6-1 rout of the match.

One of my friends was playing at home one day and was doing his own clan war. We had been part of that clan before and left, while he had stayed behind. We found their lobby, by complete chance. This being the case, we knew the password the clan used for its wars, and we noticed it was an uneven game, and that the clan leader wasnt in there. We thought fast and made a new account that looked just like his name but one letter off and hopped in there. They were all like oh thank god youre back, were barely holding on here. We then proceeded to teamkill everyone for two rounds before getting kicked out of the room. The next day at school, we went up to him and went I hear your clan leader had a rough clan war yesterday. He was so pissed at us that he didnt talk to us through the entire next week.

SOCOM is not a series that would survive today. It was pretty primitive and a product of its time. SOCOM 4 came out on PS3 and was absolutely terrible, and it hasnt seen the light of day since. But those PS2 days were some of my most cherished gaming moments of my entire life.

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Xbox GT/PSN name/Nintendo ID: TatteredUniform
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