I heard on a podcast a long time ago that the Army considered it one of their most successful recruiting tools. Not because it brought in more recruits, but because fewer recruits dropped out, apparently because playing the game led to fewer surprises after joining.
Til
AA2 and AA3 were legitimately great games.
Bush’s War on Peace was a wild time back in the early days.
It was actually pretty good. I remember having to pass an ingame training course to use the medic class. I still vaguely remember how to apply a tourniquet lol
It had a reporting system. If you reported someone for camping, the vote would be turned against you and if people agreed you were kicked. 😂
Greetings Starfighter. You have been recruited by the Star League to defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada…
It was a legitimately good completely free multiplayer FPS game. I was into it for a while ages ago, and it was quite fun.
I genuinely doubt it actually inspired a remotely meaningful number of people to actually join the army, though.
Didn’t expect so much hate for this game… In terms of simulations, in 2002, the original game was light years ahead of its time. They did a lot of things right that it took the more popular mil sims years to get correct. I’d go as far as to argue it is one of the most realistic squad-based tactical shooters of all time.
It being that realistic made it a terrible choice for me.
So I did all of the medical training that had on there, which I did learn stuff from but also found out that I should never actually work in the medical field.
But because it didn’t easily identify friend from foe, I kept killing my own team. Not on purpose I was just really bad at identifying friend from foe and if I saw it moved I killed it.
Otherwise it was a solid game. All the issues I had with it were with me.
I’ll suggest that there hasn’t been anything like it. I’ve tried a couple that were supposed to be more realistic mil-sim and not just FPS run-‘n-gun, but they don’t hold a candle to AA.
Had big vans parked on the UT Campus lawn paid for with Pentagon money, where you could play the game right next to a real live military recruiter.
I like to think about this while I’m looking at videos of Palestinian student protesters getting maced, tackled, and dragged away by campus security.
And it was a damn good game at the time. I remember getting a free cd from a recruitment center in a strip mall in town
I think I might actually still have it around somewhere. I think mine came in a magazine or something though. I remember never really getting to try it because my computer couldn’t run it that well.
The Air Force once injected an unsolved, 1000-year-old mathematical puzzle written in another language into the game Prometheus, and an unemployed college dropout genius who lived with his mom solved it, got recruited to participate in a highly classified mission to the planet P4X-351 where he, a crew of Air Force officers and personnel, and a few civilian scientists ended up being forced to evacuate due to an impending planet-wide explosion (as well as an aerial assault by a band of space pirates) by jumping through a stable wormhole whose terminus was aboard the starship Destiny - an abandoned scientific vessel launched one million years prior by a species known as The Ancients who had planned to use it to travel to the center of the known universe.
The special forces test was hard.
For the written test. there’s parts where you would be shown a helicopter for 100 milliseconds then have to remember the configuration, number of rotors, ordinance… Or you see a tank for a split second and have to correctly identify the barrel measurements and other little details.
The stealth mission was difficult too. I managed to be a medic and a ranger but not special forces.
The special forces test was nuts, was playing on a friend’s account at the time but it boiled down to just crawling through the lowest point along the entire path. Literally the entire mission you’re in a drainage or small creek just crawling and going stealth. I can’t remember if you eventually fight or do anything, I just remember the two hours of crawling on the ground to go undetected.
After I got the SF certification you could play this map called Hospital where you’re extracting a VIP while an insurgent team is trying to kill him. So much fucking fun. I loved this game. Yvan eht nioj
That’s when I stopped playing. I think I was an hour in before I got spotted and then wasn’t going to spend another 2 hours literally crawling.
