next-gen.biz — Out of all the period games that could be made, a lopsided majority end up being about World War II. In the 2006 calendar year alone, a whopping 23 World War II-themed games (including special editions) were released at an average of two titles per month. Unthinkable? There's a reason.
Jun 13, 2007 View in Crawl 4
gwjcJun 13, 2007
True dat; the Crimean War would also be good.
salinemistJun 14, 2007
@veritateHave you read the Geneva Convention? Unless your country is a signatory and you're fighting in uniform it doesn't apply. Al-Qaeda/Mahdi Army/Muslim terrorists et al have brutally murdered every Westerner they've ever captured, we are far away from sinking to their level.
herald42Jun 14, 2007
@jamessavik"There was no moral ambiguity in WWII."There was some in the beginning, especially contemporaneously to the unrestricted submarine warfare you mentioned. Without declaring war, we and the British tried to strongarm Japan by blockading their trade routes, threatening to sink their civilian ships, engaging in a trade embargo in an effort to economically starve Japan's war in China, and sending the Flying Tigers over to China to bomb them, in addition to sending weapons to England on civilian convoys and using civilian convoys to call in torpedo bombers to sink subs when they emerged to ask for surrender (incidentally, that's what the Germans were fairly certain the SS Athenia was doing when they sunk it, but happened to be wrong). While we were not committing atrocities per se, FDR was engaging in some shady tactics akin to the German unrestricted submarine warfare by dodging the isolationists in Congress until he could provoke something that could get all of America wanting to go to war -- Pearl Harbor. Once we got in the war, the atrocities on the enemy's side were revealed, but we didn't get into the war by simply waiting around to get attacked -- Japan wouldn't have touched Pearl Harbor at least as soon as they did; they were busy with their own wars in China and Southeast Asia. I do have to give FDR credit -- he was a political genius, especially when it came to PR.
babywookieJun 14, 2007
Stalin's USSR was a monstrous regime, especially to its own people, but its policies and actions were still not nearly as genocidal and deranged as those of the Nazis. At least, not on the same grand scale. By the way, the Nazi Germany was defeated by the Soviet Union, no questions about it. 85% of all German losses were suffered on the Eastern Front. By the time the Allies invaded Normandy, the Germans could no longer afford to put up a decent fight.
flakmonkeyJun 15, 2007
Korea was a win. The goal from the beginning was to leave Korea the way we came, a divided peninsula. The only person who wanted to go further was MacArthur.
eanbowmanJun 15, 2007
The US actually "won" this war.They invested a lot after Pearl Harbor (about f**king time!) and did something positive for the world. Thus the era of world-policing began! yay!This is the core reason WW2 games are hot and probably always will be in the North American media. It's a "tale of glory". It's something to be proud of for the US citizens of the world. Since the US forges so much of new media at this time, it's no wonder their greatest triumphs become their greatest media.Simply put... DUH! :P
sjzeroJun 30, 2007
War isn't fun. War games aren't like real war. Whether you're talking about World War 1 or World War 2, or Napoleon invading Russia, none of it is fun. Some great aces got less than a dozen kills in the air, and some pilots ran patrols and would never see an enemy, for example. Think about that: What game would let you fight an entire war where you shoot down less than a dozen aircraft, and in most missions never see combat?! Real ground combat is similar: No game will have you playing guard duty for 4 years at some strategically important power plant that never gets attacked, they make you the guy on Omaha beach on D-Day. The first thing you need to realize when playing any war game is it's not designed to be realistic, it's designed to be fun. That's why even when you're playing a general, you get unit-level control in RTSes (Who wants to sign a bunch of papers authorizing routine unit transfers and such?). That's why even when you've been shot dozens of times, you can just pick up a med kit and you're ready to go again(Who wants to win a level then have their character die of gangrene in his wounds? Who would like playing a game where an enemy sniper from a mile away wipes out your platoon and no matter how good you are you'll never figure out where he's shooting from or have a chance to fire back). It's all meant for fun game play, and it's not at all realistic. Because of that, you can "action movie"-ise the game play, so you don't have to be the general signing papers you don't care about or the poor shlub in the phalanx. You get to be the roman soldier carrying seven different types of weapons, who doesn't have to work that hard with his unit, even though Romans succeeded because of the superior organization in their units.Basically, you don't need to think about the fun or lack of fun in a war to determine if you can make a fun game out of it. You basically make a fun game, and give it a story and theme so the player can pretend he's there. It's not much different than when you were a kid playing cowboys and Indians. Even then, you could use BB guns and sharp stones and really make the game realistic(in terms of the combat -- you could bring genocide into the equation if you wanted to as well, but it's a game and genocide is a downer), but it's not meant to be realistic, it's meant to be fun. Your other reasons are the good ones. It's a marketing thing. You might be able to sell a civil war game in the US, and a Napoleonic game in France, but a WWII game you can sell EVERYWHERE, and it's got the recognition, and it's got the morality.
sjzeroJun 30, 2007
You've got a point there. My grandfather told me that the people in the war, they were just like him, and there wasn't this vicious hatred of enemy soldiers, they were just people out there to do a job.
sjzeroJun 30, 2007
Hey, who says you need to be a bigot to see the value in a game like that? Honestly, I can't even identify a Jew (The only ones I know of are the ones like Jon Stewart who go out and tell you), let alone despise them, but the thought of having a game where you're the evil bastard running a murder factory would, if nothing else, be interesting because from an artistic point of view, it could force the player to examine his response to evil. Since we're talking about something that IS terrible, the game could keep reminding that what the player is participating in is truly terrible and reprehensible and has no redeeming qualities (Possibly juxtaposed beside other aspects of the game, such as feedback from superiors, which would present your evil in a positive light), eventually pushing the player to either allow the evil and allow himself or herself to become a cog in the machine of evil, or pushing the player to stop playing, despite the fact that it's a fun game, because he doesn't want to play a part in the evil that is the game.The big thing would be framing the game so it was obvious that what you were doing is evil, and having things where you end up having to deal with individual prisoners with personalities so you're forced to face the people you'll be sending to their deaths.
sjzeroJun 30, 2007
Why blame Saving Private Ryan? The Americans have considered themselves the heroes of the German front for as long as I can remember. Sure, Russia lost 10 million soldiers, half a million just invading Berlin, and historians agree that if Hitler hadn't broken the peace with Russia the war would likely have gone differently, but the Americans don't like that most of their heroics were on the Japanese front. I mean, considering that the Chinese aren't exactly on good terms with the west, it's pretty obvious why Americans pretend they had a bigger role in protecting Europe than they did