INTRODUCTION: WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Electronic entertainment has been around long enough now for discernable “national” styles to have emerged. Experienced gamers, booting up a new title for the first time and without prior knowledge of its origins, can often tell by the time the opening cinematics have rolled by, whether the title was primarily developed in America, Germany, France, or one of the Asian countries. I’ve long felt that a very interesting thesis could be written about the psychic connection between, say, the first generation of Nintendo titles and the bizarre conventions of Japanese anime and comics (why all the characters must have thumb-tack noses, lipless mouths, and grotesque exothalmic eyeballs of the type more commonly found on giant squid than on human beings.)

The gaming industry in Korea, for example, has emerged with a distinct style all its own: There are graphic conventions: for example, scenic backgrounds are often filled with decorative (as opposed to obviously functional) bits of gleaming, chrome-plated machinery (pipes, valves, gauges, whose purpose is not immediately – or ever – apparent, but which seem to be intrinsic to the design of every room the characters move through; vehicles and aircraft whose rounded, aerodynamic gumdrop shapes are more suggestive of cover-art from a 1929 issue of Hugo Gernsback’s Air Wonder Stories than of anything you would find in the skies or on the roads of the real world. And then there’s the question of attitude…

The Koreans have focused, with considerable success in the Asian market if not yet in the markets of America and Europe, on a fairly narrow set of design-parameters. You won’t find many Korean designs that even bother to include a mode for solo-play against the AI. Only a hopeless wuss would even think of playing such a game. No, they’re into ruthless multi-player competition; their most successful games tend to become national obsessions, usurping the routine daily lives of tens of thousands of citizens. The rankings of successful players are followed as avidly as Scottish soccer hooligans keep tabs on their favorites in the World Cup competition. If you enter the arena of a Korean MMORPG, be prepared to expect no mercy, and to be scorned openly if you extend any. Rudeness, which is unthinkable in everyday social interaction, becomes a titillating virtue in anonymous on-line competition; the more vicious and clever the put-downs, the more the perpetrator is admired. A safety valve for repressed passions? A form of national psychosis? As I said earlier, many an interesting study remains to be written about this phenomenon.

But this is a game review, not a doctoral thesis. And Navy Field, which went public with open beta testing only last February, has already become a cult classic. It is by far the most successful, highest-profile title ever developed by SD EnterNET, a hitherto small and little-known Korean game company, and despite its manifold weirdnesses and hermetic difficulty, I have emerged from two solid months of exploratory game-play with a full-blown case of addiction. Don’t expect an unequivocal verdict, a clear-cut thumbs-up or thumbs-down, at the conclusion of this review. There were days when I became so aggravated by this game that I swore I would never fight another battle…and yet, the very next day, I was back at the helm of my newly remodeled destroyer, obsessively fighting furious pitiless engagements with opposing fleets, enduring one sinking after another so I could earn enough “credits” and “experience points” to purchase a new, more puissant vessel. My aversion to MMORPGS is by now something of an industry-wide joke, so if Trotter got hooked on this bizarre farrago of a game, you know it must offer a mighty compelling experience. But be warned: this game is not only as addictive as crack, it also forces gamers to deal with numerous truly strange eccentricities that they will simply have to come to terms with as the price of admission.

Let’s start with some of the basic terminology and its effect on the alpine learning-curve.

ALL YOUR SHIPYARD ARE BELONG TO US!

The first Weirdness, of course, is the title itself. What on God’s Green Earth is a “navy FIELD”? Do all the in-game ships roll around on giant wheels? No, actually, they maneuver on water (albeit very flat, motionless water), just as they’re supposed to. Nowhere on the game’s home site is the title explained, so the best guess I can make is that the title derives from an oddball Korean transliteration of “Navy Yard”.

As for the subtitle (“Resurrection of the Steel Fleet”), I haven’t a clue. Perhaps it refers to the fact that the game brings back to virtual life the great armadas of World War Two; or perhaps it alludes to the fact that no ship is permanently sunk – instead, it is quickly respawned in the player’s home base, where – if he has the credits – he can have it fully repaired with one mouse-click. In any case, it does no good to ask what these terms mean – presumably they make perfect sense in Korean, and if their surreality in English bothers you, that’s tough.

Other curious conventions abound. Load-outs of gun ammunition are called “binds”. Why? Again, the designers are defiantly mute. Presumably because shells come in pre-packaged lots (usually fifty rounds to a “bind”) and are therefore considered to be “bound together”. The plural of “bonuses” is always ‘boni” (kind of cute, actually). Every time you encounter a term that’s similarly out-of-focus or initially baffling, just accept it and go on playing. It’ll do no good to complain; you’ll either be ignored or given a snide cryptic reply that will leave you even more bewildered and feeling vaguely retarded for even asking.