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Real War is developed by Rival Interactive and devoted to modeling modern warfare. Or rather, the weird imaginary world that the American Military seems to live in. Real War's main selling point is that its a commercial version of a package actually used to train US armed forces: you are the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). This isn't the first time I've heard a game invoke genuine military pedigrees, and it certainly won't be the last. The demo, at least, seemed to have missed a few things: Wreckage, dead bodies, prisoners of war, palls of smoke, collateral damage, accidents (in the Gulf War, more Yanks were killed by silly accidents than by the Iraqis), pollution (who needs chemical weapons when you use DU ammunition?) civilians (say - where are all those civilians? The Real War demo seems to exist on a battlefield with no humans in it), ruined cities and ruined families, hunger and starvation, disease, overcrowded camps with no sanitation, UN humanitarian aid, roving media personalities, struggling NGO's, breakdown of services and chronic shortages, power blackouts, orphans, land mines (everywhere - not just in small, visible lumps), limbless children, mass graves, black markets, snipers, riots, economic blockades, State bankruptcy and general anarchy, looting, pillaging, rape, murder, drugs, prostitution, poor weather, mud, destroyed farms, disaster induced famine, check points, barbed wire, ethnic cleansing, arson, food queues, and, more often than not, the whole sordid enterprise ending in disaster. Usually for the country that's found itself hosting the main event... Count up the number of wars that have taken place in just the last ten years, and ask yourself how many of them weren't ghastly nightmares. Most of the participants weren't conveniently colour coded and most of the conflicts were ongoing skirmishes, massacres, skulduggery and chaotic sieges that mostly involved militias, hapless civilians and largely anonymous fighters. In many cases a lot of the combatants were neighbours killing each other. Most RTS games - and a lot of modern televised news coverage for that matter - simply adds up all the juicy toys and their hit points in a vacuum and proudly declare that this is fundamentally all there is to a conflict. [Note: the 2003 Iraq war should hopefully kill off a lot of these misconceptions] Either that, or all you ever hear is nothing but the soldiers tough times on the front - somehow everyone else in the country who's entire existence has been turned upside and all but changed/destroyed forever barely gets a look in. Occasionally, the locals will even be put down as selfish bastards who just don't understand what a great thing it is we (i.e. the West: NATO and particularly the US) do for them obliterating their country and swapping one set of atrocities for the complete destruction of the entire country's infrastructure, services and landscape. As far as they are concerned there's very little difference. If the modern disasters we see on television are anything to go by, I think we can safely say that many of these factors are usually missed by the JCS. Someone else's problem! Usually the UN's. But I am being a wee bit unfair. This feels like the original JCS game was probably designed to simply train young commanders how to co-ordinate all their different hardware - not model an actual conflict. Real War isn't much more than a rather ordinary "typical" RTS with a few extra command features and units derived from a non-fantasy source. While many games make a point of being pure fantasy, this one seems to crow about its authentic military roots and its apparent realism - and it's strictly on this basis that it earns my scorn. Seriously, Real War isn't any more realistic about its subject than Action Man. :P Besides, I'm only giving this entry some undue attention purely due to a weird coincidence: I received e-mail from the publisher (my first from any publisher) Simon & Schuster Interactive, requesting whether I would "talk to the people" about the virtues of their fine product, Real War. I was wondering how to politely decline them because RTSC isn't a commercial web site, and I wasn't about to do a John Laws for a game I had a pretty low opinion of, anyway. I couldn't really think of anything at the time, so I turned on the television. It was midnight, Australian time, September 11. At the precise moment I tuned in, there was a dissolving building, a vast cloud of glittering glass, and pyroclastic flows of dust sweeping through the canyons of a New York in full stampede. Well. Where does one start? You could rant and rave volumes - and many people have. The chooks sure came home to roost that day. Real War came to New York one morning. The scale of the disaster was staggering, but ultimately not that much different from what goes on in many long suffering countries once you take relative scales into consideration. Real War becomes extremely ironic in light of things like the so-called War on Terror, but as a bit of contemporary culture it illustrates perfectly the "us and them" fortress mentality and that perverse unilateralism pervading large chunks of US thinking these days, especially by the Bush Administration and especially in the months afterwards where no one it seemed was allowed to criticise Administration thinking and perspective - not even Americans. An extraordinary state of affairs, especially when you consider the democratic traditions of the United States. It smacked of an gold opportunity for a power grab, offset by sheer bloody minded incompetence. But at the rate things are going, I suspect Dubyaism will cause more havoc and damage to the Stars and Stripes than a hemisphere full of Al Qaeda's could ever hope to achieve. Its sort of all summed up by this little line from
the Real War web site: "EMPLOY ANTIPERSONNEL MEASURES: from mines
to nuclear missiles to biochemical weapons." Fan-tas-tic! Take
out those nasty terrorists with WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION! Yep -
I think maybe Shrub Jnr. and his cronies really do use Real War to
train on.
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Last modified Sun, Aug 8 2004 by Lindsay Fleay
