[quote=""'[R-MOD"]Jigsaw;1374158']I completely disagree here, the Vietnam conflict is far from saturated with games, in fact here is a list of Vietnam era games released since 1981:
Vietnam War Era games
High quality, prestigious games? Not so much. In fact the most recent game that I would call high profile was Battlefield Vietnam, and that was originally released
six years ago... Ask yourself, how many of those games have you actually played? My guess is very very few, I can't even remember the last time I gunned my way through a dense swamp with a Huey flying overhead. By way of comparison, here is a similar list of WW2 era games:
World War II games
With this evidence in mind I don't see how you can argue a case for over-saturation in this medium, in films certainly there are numerous examples, but games?
No.
Sure there may be a time to look at other smaller scale conflicts within the whole but the base should be the Vietnam conflict itself. Yes there are both CoD 7 and BC2:Vietnam coming but don't let them cloud your vision of what is a particularly under-explored conflict in video games.[/quote]
This is one of the points I have tried making in the past too. While there have been some Vietnam-era games, many were low quality or focused more on the storyline of a movie than the actual war or realistic events. The same can be said about the majority of Vietnam-era films out there, usually involving some bullshit plot instead of going after real or "realistic" events. Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, etc are some examples of a decent film written about total ****. The solid films are those such as BAT 21, Rescue Dawn, and I'll even say We Were Soldiers.
Then look at the market of WWII games. It's been flooded so much that even a damn good WWII game is likely to see little interest simply because it's been overdone. It's like steak and lobster: Some of the best food, but if you eat it 3 times a day, 7 days a week, for 10 years straight...after a while that steak and lobster is going to taste like shit.
I've seen some good WWII games, but I've seen 10 times more crappy ones. Same with movies, I've seen (and even helped write) some great stuff, and I've seen some really awful films that would make a maggot gag.
[quote="Bellator""]That's a pretty impressive list of vietnam war games (sure, its not as obsessively depitected as WW2 ... although, there are few quality WW2 games that depict the warfare accurately).
But my point was not strictly limited to games, but to medias overall. Yes, there is an over-saturiation, at least for me, for the specific type of Vietnam war depiction (the drama of unshowered American soldiers in the bush and their fights and distress). Its been rehashed in popular culture too many times. Video games are an art among many, so my point does include them as well.
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You mean the part of the war that took place when most people actually knew we had soldiers over there, when the war was actually in the news instead of page 12 of the paper? If you look at the beginning of the war, there is not a whole lot that would make for interesting games or movies. Even today a lot of the missions that took place are still classified because most of the early war operations were SpecOps, Black Ops, "Agency" missions, or advisor duties.
What you see in previous games and film is not 100% accurate, but it's usually not that far from the truth either. The majority of your soldiers were not volunteers, they were poorly trained in the first place and our entire military overall was lacking sufficient knowledge/tactics of jungle warfare. Of course you'll see some fictional events and drama in the movies, THEY'RE MOVIES. But a good amount of what they show in the movies and games is close to fact.
Besides, if you were buying a video game or movie about the Vietnam War, which would you want: 1) Pvt. Gimper sitting in the chow hall eating pork & beans while smoking a Marlboro, way behind the lines with not a drop of action for hundreds of miles... or 2) Cpl. Gungho with an M60 in his arms, belt of ammo draped over his shoulder, shouting profanities at his fellow soldiers while dodging bullets from the NVA/VC, with some CCR music in the background?
People don't buy games or movies to just sit their watching some guy with his thumb up his ***, they watch or play something to be excited, for entertainment.
Here's another good example of why you see what you see. I'm sure most of you have seen at least one episode of "Cops". When was the last time you saw an episode showing an officer writing parking tickets, filling out an accident report back at the department, or eating lunch at Subway?
Personally, I love the whole Vietnam-era setting. I honestly wish I had been born a generation earlier so I could have taken part in that conflict. I love the jungle, I feel comfortable there. And the type of combat was hardcore, what every true Infantryman lives for. That really was a "Get Some" war, and it's much harder to find that kind of action now. Vietnam-era war games really open up a can of whoop-*** on some great opportunities. I think PR:Vietnam is going to be a great mod when it's done.
