There are certain games that make me feel a bit queasy. It’s not due to huge amounts of blood and gore. It’s not because of sickeningly cute protagonists in J-RPGs. It’s not even the result of awful movie tie-ins.

It’s the games that glorify the military.

Case in point - Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2, the 360 version. Okay, so it’s a title based on the ideas of Tom “Every-day-is-Defcon-1″ Clancy, but even so I don’t recall the original Ghost Recon being this…patriotic.

It felt like I was playing a recruitment ad: “We have the most advanced-est technologies so we can totally PWN TEH FREEDOM’S ENEMIES! You, too, can be a bad-ass Captain that gets to shoot at stuff and blow shit up! Merely four of you salty motherfuckers can take on battalions of the enemy! You can undertake secret missions to fuck shit up in the name of ‘pre-emptive action’, and when we get made you can just get rid of the evidence by blowing that up too! OOORAH”

Then there’s the not-so-leather-lunged General who barks orders at you in the way one of those tiny dogs you see in handbags would bark at you. “JUST GET IT DONE MITCHEL, DO IT FOR YOUR COUNTRY.”

And the kicker for me? When you get shot and “incapacitated”, you never die on the spot in some foreign land; instead you have the President on your cross-com telling you to hang on because a Medivac will come and whisk you away.

It’s a bit much for me to stomach, having the whole experience of war glorified. Who knows, maybe I’m just reading too much into it.

(Stay tuned for my next post on how Red Faction: Guerrilla is actually an “alternative-warfare” training program. )