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Konami Announces a Game Based On a 2004 Battle In Fallujah
The LA Times reports that Konami has announced Six Days in Fallujah, a video game due out next year that is based on an actual battle fought in Iraq in 2004. Quoting:
"The idea for the game ... came from US Marines who returned from the battle with video, photos and diaries of their experiences. Instead of dialing up Steven Spielberg to make a movie version of their stories, they turned to Atomic Games, a company in Raleigh, NC, that makes combat simulation software for the military. ... 'The soldiers wanted to tell their stories through a game because that's what they grew up playing,' said John Choon, senior brand manager for the game at Konami... More than a dozen Marines are featured in documentary-style video interviews that are interspersed with the game's action. The Marines reappear in the game itself, doing pretty much what they did during the war. One tells the story of how he furiously wrote a letter to his wife and begged a chaplain to give it to her if he died. Another, Eddie Garcia, talks about how his right leg was shredded in a mortar attack, and how he suffered survivor's guilt after he was taken out of combat."
Do you get extra points for incinerating women and children with white phosphorus?
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
I've spoken to some people that were at Fallujah. I guess everyone sees it differently, but they saw it as a massacre. Over 1300 "insurgents" dead, less than 100 Americans.
They told me stories of teams of people that would go into apartment buildings and shoot every single thing in it. These people were all "insurgents". Entire families of insurgents.
I'm sure I'll get modded down for this, but screw it. What if someone made a game glorifying Rhwanda? Cambodia? I realize its not the same thing, but there are certain "battles" that shouldn't be immortalized as heroic actions.
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Something wrong with that? Way I see it, they're upholding the finest traditions that made the free world what it is today.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The right won't play because they don't want to glamorize American soldiers getting shot at.
Everyone else won't play because it's tasteless.
I think its good that Americans who fought Fallujah get to tell their story. We've had plenty of insurgent friendly lefties tell theirs for long enough, indeed, some are posting here. The fact of the matter is that Fallujah was the one place where insurgents tried to make a pitched battle rather than hit and run as normal. Urban fighting ensued, and the insurgents ultimately lost.
This is my sig.
If Fallujah is ok we should have a gas chamber game. You go around in a big truck and kill thousands of jews
Oh give me a fucking break.
I'm normally ok with this sort of thing but this is up there on the offensive scale
The only thing that's offensive is some jackass invoking the memory of genocide to describe a battle where less than 2,000 people died.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Honestly though this is sick. It was a wholesale slaughter of people. Burning corpses hanging in chunks from buildings. People having their flesh burned to the bone while they are alive. I'm normally ok with this sort of thing but this is up there on the offensive scale. Not going to leave out the fact that the US violated weapons treaties are we?
What the fuck do you think war is dude? A bunch of people running around like in Unreal Tournament or HALO with fake manly voices going "Roger Roger" and shooting all the time?
Phosphorus bombs are not a violation of any weapons treaty. And besides, we had no treaty with the insurgency, so screw them.
This is my sig.
As a former member of the military, and someone who spent time in the Gulf, I can tell you that NOTHING is as cut and dry as civilians try to make it. When you're a twenty year old stuck half way around the world in a dessert city and people are literally trying to kill you everyday with road side bombs, sniper attacks, and suicide bombs as they HIDE AMONGST the innocent public, it is very easy to cross the line and hurt/kill the wrong people. It's also just as easy to get a limited viewpoint of what happened and say things like, "The military is bad", or "Fallejuh was a massacre", or "What happened there is sick". No, it wasn't bad, a massacre, or sick...It was war. Label the politicians with those monikers, not the war itself. Along those lines, I think that if this game accurately depicts both the good and bad sides of war, the internal struggle of the soldiers as they tell their stories and follow orders they might not like, the reactions of ALL the towns people, favorable and unfavorable...Well, dammit, I think that would be a great game and one that US Citizens might actually be better off having played it.
You seem to be under the delusion that wars are meant to be fair. That, somehow, an equal number of people should be killed on both sides and that's the good way to do a war.
That is stupidest thing imaginable.
The fact is, we spend 500B a year on the military so that when we do fight people, it is a massacre. We do not want our guys to die. We want their guys to die.
If you don't want massacres, then don't fight the USA. That the USA can massacre its opponents is a GOOD thing, as it brings more American soldiers home alive.
Now, if you don't want this, then don't send soldiers off to war, but that's a different debate. Once they are there, you want Americans to be able to kill enemies like a Power'd up dude in a video game.
This is my sig.
This would make a lot of sense for training Marines, but why a mass market game? They say they want to tell their stories, but that's what memoirs are for. Looks to me like they are out to make a buck.
They want to reach people like them: people who are growing up playing video games. Sure, a memoir would get the story out there, but few potential marines (a demographic which overlaps heavily with video-game-playing teenagers) are going to pick it up. The point isn't just to be heard, the point is to be heard by the people to whom it matters.
hundreds of games exist whee you murder people for fun and profit. you even kill prostitutes o take their money in GTA.
now, finally, actual soldiers want to make their own game, and slashdotters think it is 'sick'.
what is truly sick is the utter disconnection of slashdotters with reality. the site is replete with stories on 'cool new weapons', the video game reviews and mentions are legion, star wars is almost a religion.... the political and history and philosophy discussions are strictly on a high school level.... this article is a perfect example of that.
people who sit around pretending to be soldiers for hours a month, are 'discomforted' by the real stories of actual soldiers. they find it 'sick' and 'disturbing' that actual soldiers want to tell a story.....
but if anyone protests against video game violence, they are instantly shouted down as 'prudes' or 'against freedom of speech' by the slashdot legions.
it is no wonder the the USA makes bad decisions, its own people are apparently repulsed by reality, and prefer to live in a fantasy world.
Only if you don't understand the difference between insurgents and "insurgents". For all you know from those figures it could be 5 enemy, 100 of your guys and 1295 innocent bystanders. Although I grant that in that case you would have made enemies of quite a few of those innocent bystanders as they saw you massacre their loved ones.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
If Fallujah is ok we should have a gas chamber game. You go around in a big truck and kill thousands of jews...
Please do not downplay the sevarity of the holocaust to such extremes. Millions of jews were killed and you are doing history and society a great disservice in attempting to compare it to something as relatively tame as Fallujah.
"linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
So genocide is about numbers, not actions?
Genocide is defined as the systematic extermination of an entire national, racial, political, or ethnic group. Do you really think that's what our forces were doing in Fallujah? If you do you are a moron. If you don't then you ought to be calling out morons like the GP who make dumbass comparisons with the Holocaust to stir up emotion.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
"If you don't want massacres, then don't fight the USA."
Ummm...they didn't "fight us", we invaded them, based on our president's dislike of their ruler and a bunch of trumped up "evidence".
Yes, they fought back, but think of what would happen if some foreign power invaded us. Certainly, there would be some who would choose to fight back.
Guerilla war is like that...the innocent die along with the insurgents, who shelter among them.
But, let's remember who started it, and not place *all* of the blame on the opponent.
They developed Close Combat, which was an innovative game in the war genre. This suggests to me that the game won't treat the subject like an arcade shooter or a Michael Bay movie. So that's good, at least. I don't see how this production is different from, say, the tv miniseries Generation Kill, which was based on a book about the invasion. When you watch (or read) that, you see a lot of conflicting viewpoints about the war, even among the military personnel themselves. If this game preserves that feature, it can only be good. That is, unless you're a war cheerleader who doesn't want anyone saying anything about the inherent evils of war.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
I don't really advocate the deliberate killing of civilians.
I mean, if the USA wanted to, we could have just pulled the troops into a ring around Fallujah or any other Iraqi town and firebombed it. We could have issued the Iraqi equivalent of Commisar orders like the Nazis did - and incidentally, were followed by the Wermacht, and have shot any tribal leader or Islamic cleric on site. We could have had reprisal hangings in villages.
But, the USA didn't do -any- of that.
If anything, the soldier in Iraq has been -more- fair with his opponents than ever before.
I mean, we hung the Nazi's at Nuremburg for waging war on civilians, when our own strategic bombing strategy was in fact to kill as many German civilians as possible to bring about a quicker end to the war. There was no military need to firebomb major German cities. Yet, the truth is, in the scale of the war, American firebombing was actually far less terrible than what the Germans did to everyone else, so the USA came off as far more humane.
If you don't want people to die the solution is to not get into a war in the first place
Bingo.
This is my sig.
Until "it" can be "proven" otherwise, those "figures" are only cause for "thinking", without "evidence" to back "them" up.
I think the men and women that go overseas are some of the bravest and most honorable people around, and that while a few may be gung-ho and shoot everything in sight, most do their best to keep civilian casualties to a minimum.
At least, I don't recall reading of any pits with thousands of bodies in them, or our GIs beheading "insurgents" on live television for everyone to watch. Instead, I read of our GIs helping rebuild hospitals and helping to rebuild the infrastructure that was destroyed during the initial fighting.
Go ahead and live in your dream world where you read only about our guys being the bad guys, and those who think nothing of purposefully attacking civilians with suicide bombers are just victims.
And I'll live in mine.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Some people believe that mass murder of innocents is still evil, even if you aren't as successful at it as some have been.
Instead, I read of our GIs helping rebuild hospitals and helping to rebuild the infrastructure that was destroyed during the initial fighting.
Of course, you read about this in your own press.
As an Airman on active duty who has been to Iraq I want to thank many of you from the bottom of my heart. You clearly believe that every last service member is a blood crazed, baby killing monster. You think that we wake up every morning Hell-bent on going out and killing as many civilians as we can. We don't even shoot at insurgents. If given the choice between taking out someone shooting an AK-74 at us or hitting their granny, we're taking the old lady out. Give me a fucking break!
Thank you for honoring (not at all) the sacrifice of over 5000 men and women. Thank God I know there are many out there who truly do appreciate what we do and what we sacrifice for you all to pretend to know what happened in Fallujah. Were you there? No... well then you have no fucking right to say how it was a massacre of epic proportions, pure genocide, or the next holocaust. I have so much respect for those who do go into combat and risk their lives daily. I could never do what the soldiers and Marines do daily over there. I am so thankful for them because I don't have to. And guess what, because of them you don't either.
I have been coming to Slashdot for years now because I enjoy a level of intelligence that isn't found on many other websites on the Internet. Clearly that intelligence has fled from this particular discussion. Mod me troll because that's 100% what it is. But I couldn't sit back and watch as every service member serving and who has served was demonized by people who don't even truly know what they are talking about.
"Armed forces abroad are of little value unless there is prudent counsel at home" - Cicero
As was said it is our own press that release things.
But again the problem is the soldiers. They are 18 year old kids, most of them from low poverty (generalizing but that seems to be the prevalent stat) areas, given assault rifles, essentially turned into police in an occupied country with probably no training what so ever. God, you see kids online power tripping when they can beat most of the people in a video game, how do you think they act when they hold ALL the power in their interactions with the population?
On top of this, they get picked of slowly one by one by god knows who, they have no targets in front of their face to take their anger out on, and hell, they are probably bored most of the time.
Don't expect to see press footage of the iraq cops full of holes cause they didn't put their guns down fast enough, or the family who's car got chewed up by 20 marines at a check point cause he drove up too fast and one guy panicked and shot, so then everybody shot, or catching a guy with an ied and the 5 minutes 'with the boys' he got. They won't let press near those things, and why would they?
You put a bunch of young kids with guns, in a f'ed up situation, where they are already alienated with the population, whom you cant tell whos going to shake your hand or try to drive a car bomb into your check point, or tell them they cant shoot at their enemies who've been putting bullets down range on you from tress...hell yeah bad shit will happen.
Spend 5 minutes talking to a marine and he'll probably have 10 to 15 stories of crazy shit like that happening. But hey, for every f'ed up situation happening in iraq, I bet you'd be surprised about the shit going down in your neighbors basement.
Congratulations, you just defined war:
appear to be intended - (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
Short of genocide, that's what war is. It's to get the opposition - largely composed by the civilian population of an area - to surrender, or provoke a surrender. To break the war machine.
This is the danger we put ourselves in by catering to the whims of self-important lawyers. They pass laws and regulations which make even commonsense things "wrong" and "illegal".
Trying to put warfare within the context of war is a loser's game. IE, if you do so, you will lose. Sorting out the right and wrong is for the victor to do, not something which should be done strategically.
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