Kotaku: War Games

The U.S. Army Pulls the Trigger on Realistic Video Game Controllers

Evan Narcisse — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 18:00:00 EST

It's not news that you can get a plastic gun to play a video game where you get to shoot other human beings. It is news that you can get gun controllers that exist with the blessing of the U.S. Army. More »

The UK’s Ministry of Defense Wants Simulators As Good as Battlefield 3 or Modern Warfare 3

Evan Narcisse — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 14:00:00 EST

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It's no secret that today's soldiers train on all manner of video game-style simulators. In the United Kingdom's Ministry of Defense, British servicemen use Virtual Battlepace 2 as part of their regimen. VBS2 is a product of Bohemia Interactive, who also made the first Operation Flashpoint game and now produce the ultra-realistic ArmA shooter sims for the consumer market. (The U.S. Secret Service use VBS2, too.) However, unlike the OpFlash games, VBS2 hasn't gotten an update since 2007. In the dog years of video game engine iteration, that's a loooong time. With recruits already having experienced the better graphics and gameplay of Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3, British military are finding that VBS2's hoary old experience no longer holds new trainees' attention. Bored soldiers-in-training probably aren't what you want to be sending all over the world. More »

I'm Impressed By How Much This Tabletop Game Looks Like Video Game War

Brian Crecente — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 11:00:00 EDT

I haven't played a tabletop game since my near-obsession with Warhammer back in my college days. More »

Are Drones So Easy to Fly That Even a Journalist Can Do It?

Brian Crecente — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 10:40:00 EDT

There's been much talk lately about the Predator Drone and how using it to take out enemies from a distance is like playing a video game. More »

The King Of Kong Director Is Launching A WarGames Reboot

Michael McWhertor — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 18:20:06 EDT

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Global Thermonuclear War is coming back to the big screen courtesy of the man who brought a battle between two Donkey Kong high score warriors to film. Seth Gordon, director of 2007's The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is re-directing WarGames. More »

Infamous Real-Life Mercenaries to Star in Blackwater, the Video Game

Owen Good — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 17:00:00 EDT

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Blackwater Worldwide, the real-life mercenary team linked to the killing of civilians and noncombatants in Iraq during U.S. operations there, will be the subject of a Kinect-supported video game coming to the Xbox 360 later this year. More »

Watch Gamers Kill Osama in Recreation of SEALs Assault on Compound

Brian Crecente — Sat, 07 May 2011 07:30:00 EDT

Gamers can play through the final, fatal moments of Osama Bin Laden's last stand in Abbottabad, Pakistan in the latest, last episode of video war game Kuma War II. More »

The War Game Where Nobody Gets Shot

Luke Plunkett — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 07:30:00 EDT

If I told you a game cast you in the role of a US soldier in Iraq, would you simply assume you'd be spending your time shooting? You probably would. Which is why I like this game. More »

These Video Game Movies Don't Actually Suck

Brian Ashcraft — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 09:00:00 EDT

By "video game movie", I do not mean movies that were adapted from video games. Oh, no. More »

Medal Of Honor Developer: "Afghanistan Sort Of Chose Us"

Stephen Totilo — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 12:00:00 EDT

This fall, one of the biggest war video game franchises will be set in a current war, the conflict in Afghanistan. Why? Not politics, a developer told Kotaku. Not current events. More »

Unmanned Aircraft System Hovers Over America's Army

Andrew Freedman — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:00:00 EDT

America's Army 3 is bringing Northrop Grumman Corporation's MQ-8B Fire Scout Vertical Unmanned Aircraft System to the digital battlefield, allowing players to experience some of the military's newest technology. More »

The Air Force Has Video Games Too

Mike Fahey — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:20:00 EDT

Just like the Army, the U.S. Air Force uses games to help potential recruits connect with their organization. Just not quite as well. More »

A Sampling of Soldiers' Reaction to 'Fallujah'

Owen Good — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 17:00:00 EDT

By the title alone, you knew Six Days in Fallujah, Konami's planned "documentary-style" combat game about Iraq, would create an uproar. Unlike historical or generic conflict, this covers recent and real, about a polarizing war. More »

UK Soldiers to Train on Game That Stinks ... Literally

Maggie Greene — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 12:30:00 EST

Well, militaries across the world may soon have a new war game to their arsenal, and it could have a trickle down effect to retail games — British researchers have come up with a game system that incorporates a 'smell box,' in an attempt to see if they can make training stick better. In what sounds like an unpleasant experience, various smells are triggered as users 'take an authentic walk' around hostile areas. If it's determined this is making training more useful, it could be rolled out next year and be used in training actual soldiers: More »

WarGames: A Retrospective

Owen Good — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 13:00:00 EDT

Wired has put together a retrospective on the silver anniversary of WarGames, which if it isn't the first movie premised on PC gaming, is certainly the most notable. The film came out in 1983, the summer of Return of the Jedi. And as I recall it at the time, WarGames was well overshadowed in hype even next to movies like Krull (and Scarface, or Flashdance, but my parents probably weren't gonna let me see those.) But it came away with three Academy Award nominations and taught my generation some powerful lessons: No one can win a nuclear war, and you can get free calls from a payphone using a soda can tab. More »

PS3's Cell Processor Powers World's Fastest Supercomputer

Mike Fahey — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 12:40:00 EDT

The United States' nuclear stockpile in Los Alamos will soon be monitored by a powerful computer made out of parts you might have in your living room - the PlayStation 3's Cell processor. Nicknamed the Roadrunner, the IBM-built supercomputer is comprised completely of off-the-shelf components, including nearly 7,000 dual-core AMD Opteron processors and almost 13,000 Cell processors. The machine can process more than one thousand trillion calculations per second, making it twice as fast as the world's current fastest computer, IBM's Blue Gene. More »

Major General Hammond Invokes Pac-Man

Mike Fahey — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 12:20:14 EDT

U.S. Major General Jeffery Hammond, delivering a press briefing on the progress of the 4th Infantry's efforts in Iraq, revealed the inspiration behind their current strategy for dealing with Al Qaeda operatives and Shiite extremists.

"I believe they have been degraded, we continue to PacMan, like the video game, away at their efforts, at their different levels," Major General Hammond said.

While it's nice to see a video game reference made by high-ranking military officers, I have to wonder exactly what this means. I get this bizarre mental image of an overhead view of the streets of Baghdad, fruit carts spilling into the streets and the military struggling to pick up the produce for extra points. Are we the ghosts, or are we Pac-Man himself? Are power pellets sanctioned under the Geneva Conventions? With so many questions, one thing remains quite clear - we need to air drop Billy Mitchell into the war zone immediately, hot sauce and all. More »

Panzer Tactics DS Explained

Mike Fahey — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 13:30:58 EDT

One of the things that has always turned me off from straight-up war games has been the overall dry presentation. I mean, you've got a hex grid, some cutout tanks, and there you go. While I think Panzer Tactics, Conspiracy Entertainment's WWII strategy game for the Nintendo DS could very well usher in a new era of DS war gaming, this instructional video - the first in a series - does little to get me to want to play the game. I think it's the narrator, who is about as gripping as a ~~air waitress~~ stewardess reciting the airplane safety instructions. More »

Gamers: 1, Soldiers: 0 (For Now)

Maggie Greene — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 14:30:24 EDT

Militaries using games as training tools is nothing new; but here comes one account of a group of five gamers taking on five soldiers from the Netherlands in 'Virtual Battlefield System 2,' and scoring a resounding win (the author points out that the gamers were way ahead the soldiers in terms of familiarity with the software, which helped). It's entertaining, but also contains some musings on the future of such war games and gamers and the military. If you can forgive the typos, it's an interesting little piece on current applications and perhaps where this might lead: More »

Civilization Used For Iraq War Comic

Brian Ashcraft — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 17:22:40 EDT

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You might remember those military and civilian units from Civilization 3. Alex Dragulescu has taken them and created an experimental graphic novel called What I Did Last Summer. Using software that harvested text from web blogs, the comic recounts cached versions of actual American army blogs. The result is a profound mash-up of images and words. More »

Video Games Tackle Saddam Hussein

lsmith — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 10:40:03 EDT

Over at 1UP.com has a story about Kuma Reality Games and their free, slightly strange Saddam Hussein game. The game places players in the middle of Iraqi history in positions with the ability to stop the horrors of Hussein (in some cases) before they start. It's part video game, part history lesson - but at least it's free. More »