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North Korea Angered Over Ghost Recon 2
Fennario writes "According to Stars and Stripes Pacific's translation of a North Korean government newspaper article, UbiSoft's forthcoming Ghost Recon 2 videogame, which envisions a near-future North Korea/China conflict with US involvement, has already attracted the reclusive country's attention. In a curt review, a North Korean government-run newspaper called the game proof of U.S. warmongering. 'Through propaganda, entertainment and movies,' read a recent online commentary in the Tongil Newspaper. Americans 'have shown everyone their hatred for us. This may be just a game to them now, but a war will not be a game for them later. In war, they will only face miserable defeat and gruesome deaths.' Given the steep learning curve of previous incarnations of Ghost Recon, it's conceivable many may face miserable defeat and gruesome deaths anyhow."
I guess game makers ran out of past wars on which to base games. Can you name one major war (or even a good-sized minor one) in the 20th century without a game based on it?
I know I've definately heard stories of China become upset over its portrayal in video games; I wonder why it is they haven't sounded off yet.
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Americans 'have shown everyone their hatred for us. This may be just a game to them now, but a war will not be a game for them later. In war, they will only face miserable defeat and gruesome deaths.'
They're on to something. Rockstar North was told by the supreme court to take out "Kill all the Hatians" from GTA-Vice City, and they did. Granted, things attached to Tom Clancy usually shine like diamonds, but with their ever-growing popularity, we should think about their global impact in the media, especially in crazy times like these. The world dosen't have the most favorable view of our country in the first place...Maybe we should take a hint, and not be a bunch of war-mongers.
Yadda yadda yadda yadda SHUTUP N. KOREA.
Video games don't dictate foreign policy, Kim Jong-il needs to put a sock in it.
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
Most of the wars in this list of 20th century wars don't have any videogames. Maybe I should send the link to some game-makers.
there just aren't enough people in the world that hate Americans.
I don't think so. I think this is more like North ;)
Korea saving face. Yes, we Americans
are shaking in our little booties.
besides, who esle is going to put up a good fight?
Panama?
Get Virtual.
From what I've heard in the past, it wouldn't surprise me one bit if Kim Jung-Il is an avid gamer.Yeah, he's kinda nutz too, but he actually does seem to pay attention to pop culture and such. Heck, he may be playing copy of Ghost Recon 2 right now. I'll bet he beats his homies all the time, or else!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
So I guess by the same rationale that because of Full Throttle all bikers are bad.
Day of the Tentacle: Weird green and purple blobs are evil and want to take over the world
Leisure Suit Larry: men only care about sex (ok, maybe they're right...)
Grand Theft Auto: It's totally ok to kill a hooker as long as no cop sees you do it.
Worms: Worms are bad creature and I should use wind direction and missle bomb loft to kill them in the most efficent manner.
UT: Other people are only good for cannon fodder
I could keep going...
hey NORTH KOREA, IT'S A FUCKING GAME. I highly doubt that every game that's ever been produced over seas portrays Americans in a good light, but do you see us complaining? Hell no, because we are too busy trying to get "kill all haitians" removed from our games (because haitians are a good and kind people who deserve no ill-respect).
I thought Tom Clancy's games were supposed to be realistic. Everyone knows in a war against North Koreans we will not put ground troops in the jungle, thats just plain suicide we learned that the hardway in Vietnam. Such a war will be fought with bombs. Hope the North Koreans understand that they will get their butts kicked.
For all of the dinosaurs running their backwards regime to roll over and die.
"U.S. warmongering"?
Is this North Korean gov't-run paper aware that UbiSoft is not an arm of the American gov't? I could see if America's Army had a similar storyline due to its US Army ties, but this is a Tom Clancy game.
Even if the paper is referring to US citizens instead of the US govt, this game isn't something that a large percentage of our general population will play. This game will be played by video game players who like war games. How much of our population is that? I imagine it's somewhere around 5% - 10% at most. Also, these games seem to me to have no bearing on players' opinions of real war situations. I imagine there will be some people who would be very upset about a US invasion of North Korea who would still enjoy this game, because they have the ability to separate reality from fantasy.
The really interesting thing about this is the insinuation that China would be NK's enemy, and that the US would be on the Chinese side in this conflict. It presumes a lot about China (eg: China really wants to thaw, to become a part of the capitalist world, despite what they say), and a lot about North Korea (the idea that an individual or faction in the military could actually take power from the all-powerful Kim Family Regime).
As a furriner living in South Korea, I'd be interested to see what part South Korea has in this game - that will be the true test of its importance as speculative analogy.
And apart from anything else, this game would pretty much be reason enough for me to buy a gaming rig and install windows on it... though I'd still need to use debian for everything else, natch.
L
I understand it's a Tom Clancy game. Even so, it was a French/French-Canadian publishing house that made it all work, so NK might as well call Quebec and France Warmongerers, too. Since they're obviously supporting the idea by having one company produce a game with anti-NK sentiments.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
Ubisoft, parent company of Red Storm, is a French company.
"U.S. warmongering"?
Is this North Korean go>v't-run paper aware that UbiSoft is not an arm of the American gov't?
If you ever have the chance to actually watch the NK news or read it's papers, EVERYTHING is further proof of the US's warmongering. If it rains next Tuesday, it's proof of the US's warmongering. If a French guy eats a taco while on vacation in Mexico, it's proof of the US's warmongering. If something sitting on some guy's desk is a particular shade of red... well, you get the idea.
It's actually quite entertaining to read.
Are you trying to say that we didn't do bombing runs during the Vietnam war? We did tons of them. What everyone *in the military* knows is that you can't win a war by bombing the hell out of it (WWII in Japan notwithstanding).
Does anyone hear that? The world's smallest violin? ... No?
Huh. Maybe it's because they don't allow that kind of music in North Korea, since it would speak against the glory of the supreme leader.
Maybe we should play the world's smallest violin for the world's smallest violin.
"In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, 'Make us your slaves, but feed us.'" -Dostoevsky
Perhaps he would prefer videogames that are cell-shaded?
Lasers Controlled Games!
I guess we'd better all get a copy of it before they are forced to recall the game and publish a new version.
From Pandemic's Site:
Mercenaries is a revolutionary 3rd person action-shooter game set in the near future and inspired by real world events. On the eve of a historic reunification of North and South Korea, a ruthless general stages a military coup to take control of North Korea and threatens the world with nuclear war. As one of the top operatives for a private mercenaries company called Executive Operations, you have been called in to help collect bounties on the general's top military and scientific advisors.
http://www.lucasarts.com/games/mercenaries/
"You should never have your best trousers on when you turn out to fight for freedom and truth."
-Henrik Ib
that Ubisoft has announced Chessmaster® 10th Edition and we all know how evil Chess is.
...it's best work coming from a French company like Ubisoft!
Like all good dictators, they don't want the people to get it. People who live under oppression with spoon fed government media long enough tend to be disbeleive that it's any better anywhere else. The NK government knows full well that Ghost Recon isn't a government project (at least SOMEbody in there has to have enough brains to know that and delude the people who matter), but the people aren't likely to be intimately aware of the inner working of capitalist systems.
The US posuturing over Iraq and Afghanistan may convince 90% of the world that they're warmongers, but remember that North Korea has been promising the world bitter defeat and sea of flames and all that shit for better than fifty years, now, so they have to really raise the bar on warmongering by grasping onto every violent video game, every explosion in every action movie, every killer robot on TV, and every dead cat in a car commercial as proof of the sheer scale of foreign warmongering, lest they themselves become warmongers.
Look at the stuff that THEIR GOVERNMENT creates!
http://www.epicentregallery.com/DPRK_posters.html
------ hi mom
... feel the anger of the US as we unleash our weapons against their puny forces. Every day. When I play the game.
...)
Ummm. Right. (Anyone up for a little dose of paranoia?
I still can't comprehend the reasoning that would let a belligerent dictator in North Korea say straight-forwardly and without repercussion that he is in fact developing nuclear weapons and will use them against the USA; whereas, in Iraq, a dictator who we originally propped up, who claimed to not be developing nuclear weapons, had his country invaded. I would have been fully for a war against North Korea. (Not now, not with Bush in office.)
So, what you're saying is that if you're going to be a warmonger, you'd just better follow through on it?
To them their statements may seem like a show of bravado, but it's really just trolling.
I wonder if Kim Jong Il is a regular troll here on Slashdot.
In other news, Satan has filed an official complaint against ID Ssoftware for the unfair and unlicensed portrayal of his dark minions in the DOOM series. ID Software released a brief statement, saying "IDDQD, motherfucker!"
I read the headline and though "oh wow, they are upset it's going to be 3rd person too". My bad...
bitch!
(It probably would have been completely ignored by Americans if it hadn't been for the fact that Prince Andrew served during the war.
For some reason, many Americans seem to have as much of a fascination with the British Royal Family as the British do.)
As far as 20th century wars not made into games, I was thinking that many civil wars, such as the ones in China or Cambodia, or the many African civil wars, have probably not been made into games.
Some wars in which the USA was involved that may not have been made into games include the illegal US invasion of Panama, the illegal US invasion of Grenada, the failed US invasion of Iran to rescue the hostages, the illegal arming of the Contras in Nicaragua, the illegal bombing of Libya, the illegal blockade of Cuba during the Cuban missile "crisis", the illegal and failed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, the illegal repression of Phillipines during the US occupation there after the Spanish-American War, etc.
Some conflicts that were not wars, per se, that may not have been made into games include various clashes between local governments and civil rights workers during the civil rights movements of the 1960s, the incident at Wounded Knee, the Waco Massacre, the terrorist attack now known as "9/11", the various slaughters of innocent Americans, Columbians, etc., that is a result of the stupid War on Drugs, Ali vs Frasier, the retaking of Attica, the Kent State "Massacre", the police riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention, the LA riots, the riots that occurred after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, clashes between unions and police in the early part of the century, the destruction of the American Veterans' encampment by Douglas McArthur, the ugliness resulting from Prohibition, the Oklahoma City bombing, and, of course, Hillary vs Monica.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
"Illegal" bombing of Libya? "Illegal" blockade of Cuba? Dude... WTF are you smoking? Next thing, you are going to say the illegal occupation of Germany in the late 1940s.
Also, Wounded Knee was the 19th century, not the 20th.
What the NKs seem to miss is that the US is going more and more toward electronic warfare only. We're also raising an entire generation on halo and half-life and UT and ghost recon. Meanwhile, in NK, they are raising them on crap. Who's gonna own who in 2010?
Not to try to get into a political discussion/argument about Vietnam, but the reason we [as a country and a military] got our butts handed to us, is because we didn't use the full force of our military, for fear that China or Russia would ally with North Vietnam and bring nukes into the equation.
Despite the fact that the US military was hampered the US military was not handed it's butt. The Vietnam War was lost politically not militarily. Look at the Tet Offensive for example. North Vietnam committed the Viet Cong to conventional warfare in an attempt to spark a popular uprising. The Viet Cong was annihilated. The civilian population rejected the call for uprising. Hue failed. Khe San failed. In the Paris Peace Accord (1973) North Vietnam agreed to South Vietnam's right to existed and agreed not to send troops into the South's territory. The US went home. When the North violated the treaty and invaded the South (1975) the US failed to intervene and assist South Vietnam's military due to political reasons. President Ford was in a weak position due to his pardon of Nixon and elections were coming. There was little sympathy in Congress. We abandoned our ally. Ironically the North's 1975 invasion was quite conventional in nature and highly vulnerable to US aerial attacks. We could have provided enough air support to the South so that the South's military could have repulsed this particular attack. What would happen in later years is anyone's guess.
Ultimately the War failed but that was due to politics. North Vietnam's victories against the US were on the TV set, not the field of battle.
... Ubisoft is a French company.
what the rest of the world seems to forget is that we have freedom for media, and government policy doesn't dictate what tv shows/books/movies/games can be about. if north korea is mistaking a freaking video game for an actual threat, then they should be afraid of game developers, not our government or armed forces.
Attacking North Korea would have some pretty catastrophic results. They've got one of the largest standing armies on the face of the planet, and a good deal of long range missles. Last I heard, they were believed to posses the capability to lob a warhead into California. (!!!) And that's not to mention the fact that N. Korean would probably burn its effort attacking our allies in Asia, rather than the continental US.
The resulting shitstorm would basically obliterate South Korea and Japan. Regardless of of your opinion on Iraq, war with North Korea would be a Very Bad Thing. Not to be taken unless we have absolutely no other choice.
Yay for burning karma.
--LordPixie
I thought UBI was a canadian company...
This malignant slander and hate speech against green tentacles has gone way, way WAY too far! It's time that we, as a community, draw a line in the sand and say; "This far, but not further! Don't slander the green tentacles!"
What's next, hate rallies against Monkeys?!
Hell, we've been killing Nazis for ages (Wolfenstein, etc) LONG before we were killing over races in video games, and you don't hear the Germans complain.
Jesus Saves! And takes half damage (shouldn't the Son of God have improved evasion?)
Ubisoft is a french company, right?
Fighting ignorance with ignorance.
Congratulations, North Korea. You've finally worked out that America is a warmongering nation with an extensive corporate propaganda system operating through movies, news media and even video games.
This is not news. Many of us noticed this years ago. And picking a French-made video game as an example just makes the whole thing seem ludicrous to the US citizens who could stop the whole process if they really wanted to.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
i just blew all my points, but this is the best slashdot comment of the day
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
You're exactly right. I'm stunned that someone would make environmental comparisons between Vietnam and Korea. Good God, you'd think that someone interested in making the kind of statement grandparent did would at least GLANCE at a damn map...Even a winter episode of M*A*S*H would get the point across.
So when exactly did the Vietnamese 'defeat the Americans,' forcing them to retreat and shame them? In the Vietnam I know of, the Americans failed not because of superior enemy forces, but because the war was being fought by politicians instead of generals, and the troops had minimal support at home. Consider what happened at the Tet Offensive : the United States forces utterly destroyed the NVA, with about 35 NVA deaths for every one American killed. That's hardly a shameful defeat - but the media kept saying how bad things were going and it was the lack of public support that caused the Americans to eventually withdraw - not the NVA. No army can win a war if that war is fought according to the dictates of politicsal expediency instead of military necessity.
My blog
On a side note, most gamers will be angered by it too.
In a classic case of dumbing down for consoles, they're replacing the incredibly innovative gameplay features of the original with a more SOCOM style feel for the sequel.
The original was brilliant in its use of the whole unit. You could toggle between troops, setting up truly complex strategies. No longer did you have to deal with AI companions who'd never display human level intelligence - you could simply swap to them, position them, use them for their unique abilities, then swap back to someone else.
My epiphany moment in the game came a few missions in when I carefully set a sniper up on one side of a small depression, overlooking an enemy emplacement, two other guys were on the opposite side supplying crossing fire, the others had a machine gun and an anti tank weapon ready. A quick swap to the anti tank weapon had him stand, fire, quickly swap out and lie back down. Getting the enemies' attention, they all opened up on me, only to be cut down by the well placed covering fire that was waiting to be fired upon before returning fire. Now tell me how to do that in any AI based game where it's not just a forced part of the script.
It's that genius that they're removing from Ghost Recon II to make it more console friendly. Once again, a great game dies in order to get more console sales.
Anyone else find it ironic that a communist nation with state controlled media is accusing another country of using propaganda to control their people?
Regan deliberately placed US warships off the coast of Libya (imagine how the US government would have reacted if the Libyan navy had placed warships off the coast of the USA), and when the Libyan air force flew some planes too close to the ships, he used that as an excuse to bomb Libya.
It was revenge for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland, which the Libyan government supposedly aided and/or abetted.Yes.
The US government took it upon itself to prevent ships from moving between two sovereign nations.
Imagine how the US government would have reacted if the Soviet Union had blockaded Germany or the UK (or Turkey!) to prevent the US from installing its nuclear missiles there.Germany declared war on the US.
It lost.
I don't remember the exact terms of surrender, but it probably included the right of the Allies to occupy the country for a time.I was referring to the incident that occurred in the late 1960s or early 1970s.
That is why I called it an "incident", and not a "massacre", which is what happened in 1890.
Also, I don't understand why my post was moderated as "flamebait".
The GP wanted to know about 20th century wars that were not made into games.
I listed some wars, plus some other conflicts.
What's so flamebaity about that?
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Most of these invasions were not declared acts of war. We went to those countries for a purpose and left. If we wanted to declare war we could have just took over those countries and set up our own global drug trade. And just so I'm clear on this... these invasions were illegal how???
What's so flamebaity about that?
Did you dare to suggest anything that might call America into question as a Shining Beacon of Light for The Free World?
Perhaps you suggested something that America did was in any way done for underhanded less-than-ideal purposes that differed from the propaganda put forth by the ruling American government?
You've got to learn -any criticism of America will most likely earn you flamebait points. Especially if the story comes and goes before the right-wing lobby's bedtime.
But I empathise with you - just remember to stay out of discussions like these in the future - you won't convince anyone of anything, it's pointless, and it costs karma...
Make jokes about death people, 11-S and 11-M, its a very bad idea. Please refrain to do so.
-Woof woof woof!
Unless sanctioned by the U.N., invading another country without declaring war on it first (or without an invitation from said country, or unless said country attacks us first) is illegal, i.e., contrary to international law.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Not like Ubisoft is some huge American company last I heard home base was in Europe somewhere. Boy North Korean Intelligence is good.
Sigh... I wish I still had the time and the bandwidth for 1st person shooters. :-( Anyway, what does IDDQD mean? A google search just brought up nonsense.
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
Yes but the 2 examples listed in the post above mine were not illegal. The Libya ordeal was a result of a bombing and according to reports the ships were in international waters and they were threatned by planes. The Cuban missile crisis was definitely a hostile act by the Soviet Union. We have spy plane photos of the missile they were pointing at the United States. I'm sure the Soviet Union wouldn't have minded if we had parked the whole navy fleet right off their coast.
They eventually agreed to pay relatives of the victims so that the problem would go away, but they never admitted to having anything to do with the bombing itself.
The "evidence" pointing to Libyan government involvement was as flimsy as the recent "evidence" pointing to WMDs in Iraq.Then the most that they should have done was shot the planes down (after attempts to warn the planes off first), then lodged a protest at the UN.
Note that Libya and the US disagreed what constituted "international waters".
While the US claimed that they were in international waters, Libya claimed that the US fleet was in Libyan waters.
The US Coast Guard routinely boards vessels that are as far off the US coast as the US fleet was off the Libyan coast.
The only reason that the US fleet was there was to deliberately provoke Libya; there was no other tactical or strategic reason for the fleet to be where it was.The actions by the Soviet Union were a response to the placing of nuclear missles in Turkey by the US.
The crisis was resolved when Kennedy agreed to remove the missles from Turkey if the USSR would remove its missles from Cuba, and that is what, in fact, happened.
(I am not being an apologist for the USSR, here.
I think that authoritarian communism sucks, and I am glad that the Soviet Union is no more.
However, the Cold War was not all black-and-white.
There was good and bad on both sides.)
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana