Sam Parker PC Editor	Most Wanted: Deus Ex: Invisible War (PC, Xbox), Republic: The Revolution (PC)

War Games

There's serious stuff taking place on the stage of world affairs. At some point, current events are more than just fodder for debate or something to watch on CNN. There's no predicting the particulars of what significant events will entail, but if war's involved you can be sure that at some point, those events will make it into a game. Armed conflict is the central focus of many games, particularly the strategy and action games I play quite often. I don't think of myself as a warlike person, but there's no denying there's some impact to getting wrapped up in games, books, and movies that focus on battles real or imagined.

You can learn a lot from games, everything from history to team tactics.

A game like Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield wouldn't be the same if it didn't put an immensely varied arsenal at your fingertips, and there's something undeniably cool about being able to try out all of those automatic weapons that are otherwise out of the reach of ordinary citizens. In a video interview we recently put up, one of the game's designers noted that gun enthusiasts constitute a significant portion of the game's hard-core fan base. And another movie provides a peek at how a sound team took all the assault rifles and SMGs and other class-3 weapons featured in the game out to fire them on a range to record the audio. The crisp sound effects for the guns sound even better in the game, to the point where hearing a close-quarters shoot-out is at once mesmerizing and terrifying. That's quite appropriate--the deep report of a terrorist's AK-47 should have you scared, especially in a game where a single hit is often fatal.

Simulations have given me the chance to try out the planes my granddad flew.

Simulations and strategy games often put the focus on the heavy hardware, armor units and fighter planes. There's a definite appeal in commanding units of times past and future. Look at the historical detail that goes into representing WWII units in tactical war games. And in the heyday of combat flight sims, there were plenty that were based on planes that were still in the concept stage or that weren't even produced. Sid Meier's F-19 that came out in 1988 was based on early data on the tactical stealth fighter, and subsequent games featured various competing designs for what became the F-22.

Would you rather have MiGs or stealth bombers on your side in Generals?

As successful and influential as the movies Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down were, movies and books that deal with war aren't nearly as common as games that focus on the subject. It wasn't that long ago that the association of violence and gaming was the subject of heated debate. Most of us can probably agree that it's silly to assume that playing games makes any normal individual more inclined to commit acts of personal violence. But a more subtle point could be legitimate. An astonishingly high percentage of games deal directly with the means and the methods of armed conflict, and such games can have an impact on our attitudes. This doesn't have to mean anything, but it is something I've been thinking about as I hear echoes of the front page news as I play through the stack of recently released games on my desk.