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America's Army on Linux

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the free-combat-simulators dept.

jojor writes "It seems that icculus.org has gotten America's Army to run under Linux, as this screenshot will attest. America's Army is UT based and free (as in beer). More games for Linux, yippeh!" Awesome. I consider America's Army to be one of the best things my government has funded within recent history.

4 of 459 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why? by drunkmonk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Yes, but the overall recruiting budget for the United States military is huge, and the total development costs for the game were a rather small part of it. Think about how many man hours it saves if even 0.1% of the people who play it come to the recruiter instead of making the recruiter come to them.

  2. Re:Argh! by FeloniousPunk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The military has a recruitment mission and for this mission it gets millions and millions of dollars. Have you any clue on how much advertising costs? So now the Army decided to spend of those millions on a game as a recruiting tool instead of lame Army of One and Be All You Can Be commercials. Pretty smart move, I think. It's not like that money was in a pot that was otherwise going to fund school lunches or something like that.

    --
    I know this because Tyler knows this.
  3. Re:Recruiting by wakebrdr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why not spend more money on preventing war instead of fighting war?

    This may come as a suprise to you, but there are people in the world who want to kill you and me just out of spite. We who sit around on Saturday mornings sipping tasty caffienated beverages sometimes have a hard time relating to those in the 3rd world raised in highly religious environments where they are taught that all their problems are because of us, and the only way to fix it is with an AK or a suicide bomb.

    When you try to act on this problem, you end up making the productive members of society give away huge amounts of their earnings because the only way to *prevent war* on a planet with limited resources and swelling population is to redistribute wealth. "From each according to his ability; to each according to his need." This leads to socialism or communism. People are not naturally inclined to work for the service of others. It is not natural for people to sacrifice the fruits of their labor for some larger social goal. Surely you learned something from the collapse of the Soviet Union, yes?

    So sorry, but the old saying rings true: The best way to keep the peace is to prepare for war.

    --
    Slashdot: Liberal News for Nerds. Liberal Stuff that Matters.
  4. AA is worth it just to watch censors squirm... by Nice2Cats · · Score: 4, Interesting
    ...in places like Germany, where they have banned games such as "Quake 2" for for violence, and forced "Tomb Raider" to have blue-blooded animals, and changed the translation in "Command and Conquor" so that the soldiers are all robots. But they haven't touched AA yet -- image the diplomatic fun if Germany banned a game that the U.S. government produced.

    Ah, censorship. It will make you look like an Dummkopf every time...