‘America’s Army’ video game cancelled
p2pnet news view | Games:- The ‘America’s Army’ video game recruiting tool is cancelled, said the New York Times earlier in the month, going on:
“The popular recruiting game is being beaten into a digital plowshare.
” ‘We’re training the next generation of diplomats now,’ said a developer of the renamed ‘America’s Diplomat’.”
Unfortunately, the story came in the brilliant NYT spoof which included other scenarios, such as, “The Times acknowledges that accepting money from the very corporations whose activities we are responsible for reporting on — running ads from Exxon-Mobil while reporting on climate change, for example, or from weapons manufacturers while reporting on the Iraq War — represents an obvious conflict of interest.”
But back to ‘America’s Army,’ the cold reality is: the cancellation is about as likely as the RIAA telling the truth and in fact, the US army thinks so much of the game it’s spending another $50 milllion on what it euphemistically calls ‘combat training games’.
‘Project Executive Office — Simulation Training and Instrumentation’ has a nice ring to it, does it not, and lieutenant colonel Gary Stephens, product manager for air and ground tactical trainers, says the $50 million has been approved for a “games for training” program starting in 2010, states the Stars and Stripes, going on »»»
“The Army takes this seriously,” Stephens said of PEO-STRI and its Army gaming unit, which will handle military video game requirements. “We own gaming for the Army — from requirements through procurement,” he said.
Game development has become a multibillion-dollar industry in recent years, with large game studios employing thousands of developers and sales that compete with Hollywood’s blockbusters.
“We want to take advantage of that, but we don’t have the intent to become a competitor with the commercial gaming industry,” Stephens said. “We don’t have the intent or capability to be a commercial game house.”
Instead, the US Army gaming unit will, “watch trends in the industry and identify technology that can be used for military training”.
Not only but also, it has an, “undisclosed additional budget to purchase a state-of-the-art commercial video game system that will be fielded for training in February,” says the story.
Did you enjoy this story, or find it interesting/useful? Help keep the posts coming by donating. No amount is too small. Cheers! And thanks.
Stars and Stripes – Not playing around: Army to invest $50M in combat training games, November 23, 2008
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.
November 25th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Wouldn’t this be what all those Medal of Honor, and Tom Clancy games are for?
Sure they might make this fun to play, but I’m hard pressed to see how this would actually convince people over the age of 12 to actually join. Let alone even go outside.
Hell, about a quarter of the games out now are either homages or tributes to the guys in uniform. Those haven’t phased my lazy gamer friends that way one bit.
November 25th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
If you like war FPS’ and dont have the money to drop, or you dont want to fund these kind of interests. Their is a game built on the open source engine of HalfLife2 called ‘Insurgency’. The game is regularly updated new maps etc. The community is quite large already theres at least 100 servers worth of people to join up and get your game on. All you need is counter-strike source which you can buy at any dept store or online for 10$. The game Insurgency itself is FREE of charge and is in the final release candidate stages. Valve is currently hosting game updates and the game itself as of recently.
check it out: http://www.insmod.net not a troll just some good advice for players of americas army this game is just as good; if not better.
November 25th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
another point to add to my above comment
The first release and most the releases were distributed using bit torrent.
November 26th, 2008 at 6:36 am
thanx for link since america’s army is crap