Is a hopeless first person shooter video game written by Jim Ramm of the US white supremacist group "National Socialist Movement." In it, you play some sort of skinhead and you shoot at racial stereotypes.

This, and "ZOG's Nightmare II" - there's two of them but they're all the same - are from the same brainiacs who came up with "Ethnic Cleansing", by the way. I should explain that in the alternate bizarro universe inhabited by the US far right, "Zog" stands for Zionist Occupation Government and refers to their idea that everyone who opposes them is a shill for the evil Jewish world conspiracy.

And it sucks on every conceivable level.

I discovered this a while back and played it. While I could have bought it from Resistance Records' website (they being the record label who distribute it), I instead logged onto BitTorrent and pirated it because there was no way I was putting my money into the hands of a bunch of racist white trash. I then played it and decided to write about it here so you don't have to.

Let's leave aside the horrible racism of this game and focus on whether it's fun, specifically, if it wasn't horribly racist, would someone want to play it? No, is the answer. It's built using an engine called "FPS Creator" which is a freeware number. Some brief digging into this particular product reveals that it seems to have roughly the capabilities of the Unreal engine, so the game should look fairly nice, right?

Well, no. It may have an engine that's on par with Unreal, but the level design is right out of the Wolfenstein 3D era. Every level seems to be rooms and corridors that are all exactly rectangular and clearly made up of squares. While some levels do have uppy-downy bits, this is rare. Furthermore, all the lighting is at 100% in the whole of the game. The more ambitious areas are still foulsome looking. In one outdoor area there are cars and if you, the PC, stand atop one of them you're taller than the houses - which actually have flat rooves and there's inexplicable black blobs where the texture ends. Furthermore, other levels smack of complete failure to care. One level is entirely made of black walls, ceilings, floors covered in thousands of miniature Stars of David, and on which all the enemies are re-textured likewise. Severe eye pain results.

Shall I tell you all about the racist bits now?

Well, the enemies include black gang bangers, who go "kill whitey" when they see you, corrupt cops (because they've got yellow "Jude" stars on them, natch), IDF soldiers (who go "oy vey" in a ridiculous voice when they see you), Mexicans, homosexuals (conveniently identifiable by their pink triangles and "fag" written on their foreheads), and zombies (the fluff tells me that they're the result of a Zoggy experiment to reanimate the corpses of fallen members of the master race, which is basically an excuse for "we just didn't care.") Every wall throughout the game, pretty much, contains pictures of Adolf Hitler and WWII-era Nazi propaganda posters and putting a bullet through der Fuehrer's forehead is infinitely more fun than shooting any of the enemies, which simply glide towards you firing indiscriminately, probably because they couldn't be arsed to program in any real AI. So they made it artificially difficult by giving everyone huge amounts of hit points.

Then there's the bits such as cans of "Zyklon B" in the super secret NS headquarters, which can't be that secret because it's got ginormous swastikas on the outside. While all this is going on the soundtrack is a bumper bag of Rock Against Communism including Skrewdriver, No Remorse, Brutal Attack, and suchlike. One of these songs is a parody of "Hey Jude" called "Hey Jew" which is like something Eric Cartman from South Park would have written and is even in a voice approximating his. Conveniently, all these bands are on Resistance Records. In fact, the whole game is like something Cartman would have written. I actually considered the possibility it may have been troll but noticed that the authors are actually neo-Nazis and as such, depressingly, it's real.

There is an upside though. The fact that the games are so shite means that it fails utterly as propaganda. Think about well known propaganda films and songs from the past. The idea is that you get the audience rooting for the side that exhorts your political ideology and/or terrified of the side that exhorts the other guy's ideology. This requires some skill. "Triumph of the Will" manages it and is even ripped off today in modern, non-Nazi, non-propaganda films. So does "Birth of a Nation", and the Disney cartoon "Education for Death". If I were an impressionable teenager seeing those things for the first time I would probably have been converted. However if someone gave me ZOG's Nightmare I would have firstly gone, "what the fuck is this shit?" then buggered off back to Halo or Call of Duty or World of WarCrack and considered the people responsible a bunch of clowns.

So now you know. And knowing is half the battle. As for me, I am going to delete this heap of tosh from my laptop and in the 1.5 GB hard drive space formerly occupied by it I am now going to download a huge consignment of interracial gay porno.


(IRON NODER 2011, 17/30)