These enemies can move off-screen and strafe around the tank, leading to difficulties. Helicopters, minefields and other tanks wait to block your moves. However dangerous enemies lurk all over the battlefield. Mission objectives.can be anything from eliminating the enemies to destroying the enemy fuel dump to taking out an enemy camp. Players are stuck straight in the tank and sent off to the battlefield in order to accomplish the mission they are assigned to. Oh wait, there was those movies The Hurt Locker and Green Zone.Battletank is an advanced tank simulator where players take control of a tank from its driver's seat. Trivialising war via crude reductionism = OKĮmpathic storytelling via realism = Not OK Under the radar.Īlright people, I think I’ve got a handle on it now: Apparently reducing the entire war to a flat, sandy carpet dotted with poorly drawn and re-drawn tank sprites, is NOT offensive. Try playing Space Harrier from inside a mailbox and you’ll have an idea of how this game plays. Which brings me back to Garry Kitchen’s Super Battletank: War in the Gulf, set in the first Gulf War, released just ONE YEAR out from the conclusion of said war. This was nearly five years after the Second Battle of Fallujah had ended. The words “too soon” were thrown around a lot. Konami are proud too, and show it off to the gaming press, only to be railed on by war veterans and soldier’s families (“how DARE you document true war in a toy?!”), and just one week later, Konami pulls the plug. All is well and the Marines involved are proud to have their story shared with the world through a new, exciting medium. So the game picks up steam as the first first person shooter based on honest-to-God experiences in war, and Konami picks it up for publishing. The team interview over 70 people – Marines, Iraqi civilians, ENEMY INSURGENTS, war historians, and senior military officials – just to get it right. When they returned from Fallujah, said Marines asked them to create a videogame based on their experiences there. Atomic Games were developing training tools for the US Marine Corps, but the Marines they consulted with were sent to Iraq a few months into development. Videogame approximations of recent, real-life wars are only offensive if they’re accurately and thoughtfully portrayed. This is the lesson I have learned from Garry Kitchen’s Super Battletank: War in the Gulf:
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