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Medal Of Honor - Rising Sun Readied For Japan
Thanks to GameSpot for its coverage regarding EA's imminent launch of Medal Of Honor - Rising Sun for PS2 and GameCube in Japan, and the correspondent's observation that the game's "portrayal of [the] Pacific campaign, where Japan suffered losses, [is] politely overlooked, but not by all." A review in Japanese publication Softbank Games is referenced, which reads: "This game is set in the Pacific, where deadly combat between the Japanese Imperial Army and the American Army unfolds", and GameSpot's correspondent finds "no indication that the reviewer finds anything unusual about playing as a U.S. soldier trying to defeat the WWII-era Japanese army." Other Japanese gamers surveyed had other opinions, with one suggesting that "...this is a game in which you play as a foreign soldier and try to kill troops from your own country. I bet that you couldn't even sell a game like this overseas."
Or Return to Castle Wolfenstein where you can play as German vs US forces, or Battlefield 1942 again where you can play as a Japanese attacking US forces, yeah, those kind of games don't sell at all.
Gamespy stats seems to indicate other though. By the way, the second most popular mod for Half-Life is a WW2 mod where you can play as Germans.
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
This shit got modded interesting? We're talking about a war filled with atrocities on BOTH sides of the conflict, we're talking about buried caches of chemical warheads still being found in China, we're talking about thousands of Korean, Chinese and Dutch women forced into prostitution for the sake of a war, and you're freaking telling me that people should win a war because of a VIDEO GAME?
Perhaps you would like Japan to start a war with the US and win so that they can portray Japanese soldiers brutalising American women? Would you like to play a game like this, Doug?
I'm fully prepared to get modded as troll or flamebait for this post. After all, people who would mod the parent post as "interesting" would definitely have a problem with my statements!
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
He was just stating the simple truth that it's the winners who write the history books.
Ho-ho-ho. When there's talk of the war, some assclown always pulls this out.
Sure, I crack up when I hear Groundskeeper Willie call them "cheese eating surrender monkeys", but honestly, the entire French people have been forever condemned due to their government during WW2. That's pretty fucking stupid. Especially when the French anti-war stance in the lead up to to the Iraq "war" was the correct one as far as the majority of the planet was concerned.
This French bashing is lame, and shows you to be an uneducated, ignorant oaf, and a very bad troll.
Go off and get killed for your country if you feel so strongly about their stance you stupid cunt.
Does nobody remember how well Capcom's (a Japanese company, for cryin' out loud) classic shooters 1942 and 1943 did in Japan?
I have no qualms playing as terrorists in Counterstrike. In fact I actually prefer it (mostly due to this bogus war on imaginary terrorists threats around the world
+1, True. Sigh.
But in WW2 games, no, I agree with you. It's tough to get any enjoyment playing murdering bastards.
I dunno. I guess that on a leadership level, perhaps the Germans were nastier (at an individual level, as nicely illustrated in Saving Private Ryan, everybody was busy playing hardball). The US imprisoned mass numbers of Japanese US citizens...but they didn't kill them. The Nazis imprisoned, and toward the end of the war, began mass exeuctions of Jews.
However, nobody's hands were exactly clean in WWII, either. The Japanese did some awful things to territories they conqered. The Allies (I believe it was Britain and the United States) were the ones to begin strategic mass killing of civilians on the opposing side by carpet-bombing nonmilitary, purely civilian areas. The United States developed the atomic bomb and dropped it on two cities, obliterating everyone. There's a pretty reasonable argument that these bombs were dropped more to benefit post-war negotiations than to win the war -- Japanese politicians were trying to figure out a graceful exit strategy, and Russia was considering entering the fight.
That being said, I don't see any problem in playing a video game as either side -- I prefer playing the Germans to the Allied forces in Close Combat because of the different play style. It's a video game, and people shouldn't lose sight of that. In various games, I've played a mad leader starting atomic wars, a demon, a vampire, a human-slaughtering horde of aliens, and an undead voodoo warrior. In the majority of video game plots, there is no (or very little) regard for human life. Characters get killed, generally in unpleasant ways. The thing is that people should simply keep sight of the fact that you are *playing a video game*. You should be able to watch Das Boot or play the DM in Dungeon Siege without problems -- you're changing the positions of some polygons and manipulating a bit of memory. Folks would do well not to lose sight of that.
Remember the original Brothers Grimm fairytales. Before they were prettied up for a more modern audience, they were quite gory. Cinderella's stepsisters, for instance, deliberately and on the spot cut away large pieces of their feet to shove their feet into slippers...and when (the spirit of) Cinderella's dead mother notices the blood pouring from the shoes, she rips the stepsisters' eyeballs out. Somehow, parents didn't have a problem telling their kids all this (until recently). Today's society is not more violent that it once was. Our sensibilities have just been tightened a bit.
May we never see th
Forgot to include the USSR with the US and UK, did ya? Exactly how many people did Stalin kill?
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
The level of racism that's come up because of this discussion is, to say the least, mildly disturbing. The story is about Japanese gamers and their take on this FPS. So what if Japanese people don't want to play it, it's their preogative.
./ seem to forget how badly Americans have treated and do treat Native Americans and Africans, how the Brits treat former subjects from the Indian subcontient.
Did the Japanese do awful things during the war? Of course; I'm from Bangladesh and my grandparents ran on foot from from Burma back to Bangladesh, leaving most of their wealth over there. My girlfriend is Okinawan and her grandparents had to hide in caves during the Battle of Okinawa. She's a part of the Japanese education system and she knows went on during the war, more than most American kids know about anything their beacon of democracy has done (Hello, Iranian Revolution? Wheeling and dealing in South America? Killing civilizans in Iraq and Afghanistan? Atomic weapons in Japan?). But American and the west have done PLENTY of horrible things in Asia (and there's a line of thought that Japanese involvement in WWII is a direct response to brutal Western colonialism in the East).
History is written by the winners; no one's saying "Damn, we don't get to burn May Lai to the ground and rape Vietnamese women in games from that war." But that stuff happened (American vets would be as mad as Japanese people would be). If you want to talk about white washing, let's go play some America's Army or some other piece of crap where the brave American solider protects us from those dirty brown people.
I'm not some anime fanboy saying Japan is the perfect society; it's not and the Japanese government should apologize for war time atrocities, and the government should do more for the desdendants of Korean laborers. But a lot of bigoted people here on
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
One of my favorite books of all times was Forgotten Soldier. It is about a guy in the German army during WWII. Yeah, he is the 'bad guy', but the truth is, he isn't. He was some stupid young kid who went off to war and any sort of political ideology he might have had was crushed under first wave of Russian soldiers.
I would absolutely kill to play a German soldier on the eastern front in a video game. Hell, I would love to play a Japanese soldier. It is a game, and if the game does well, in the end you will feel sympathy for the 'villains'. No game is going to make anyone regret that Germany and Japan lost during World War II, but they can instill that it wasn't the hordes of Nazis and brutal suicidal Japanese verse the virtuous allies.
If someone wanted to make a powerful video game, they would make a game from the axis perspective. They would start out with a bunch of your buddies all under the age of 19. You would go through some training together, get the usual propaganda stuffed into your head, then hit a real battle field and forget it all. You would huddle with your buddies in a fox hole and fight your way forward, then back in retreat, with long time companions who have saved your life countless times dying one by one. That is the reality of war. Celebrate the ideological victory and that horrific atrocities were ended, but don't forget that the enemy was human and that those humans felt the entire range of emotions that we do. The overall war was a just victory, but there were a million small tragedies on both sides to get there.
Japanese of today dont even relate to the murderous imperial japanese army. I cant imagine any Japanese thinking "oh my god, im killing my own people". If a Japanese DID feel that way I would be suspicious, but could only see that happening if they were actually supporters of the imperial army.
Its like in Germany, Return to Wolfenstein is real popular (even though its banned, everyone bought their copys over the nearest border).
Germans dont think of themselves as Nazis playing Americans killing their own side!
They seem to just play it from the point of view of either side. Not really relating to any side in particular. I would be worried if they did!