You will be happy to learn, as was I, that version 3.0.7 of America's Army has corrected the annoying problem of weapons suddenly disappearing. In addition, grenades will now display properly, and the problem of killing oneself with a grenade has been fixed. They've even addressed the issue of player name-length!
Not that things are perfect, as one "Phoenix" posted on the AA3 blog: "Now just fix the part where I empty an entire clip into someone only to have him turn around and shoot once and kill me, and walk away without a scratch.."
I know that would seriously upset my day.
What is this all about? Well, I must confess I came late to the subject, myself. "AA3" is, of course, the third (major) version of America's Army, a video game that is so good that it is used by the U.S. Army as a training exercise. One commentator said that, if you give the Army combat simulation training to an 18 year-old, he already knows most of it.
Video games make killing fun! And why shouldn't the ordinary foot-soldier enjoy the same convenience of killing by remote control that the pilots of drone aircraft get, sipping their coffee in Texas while destroying bad guys (and the occasional village) in Pakistan? what's the qualitative difference between killing on-screen and killing on-scene?
"Well, things aren't quite so antiseptic on a real battlefield," one reviewer cautioned. "And sometimes, in actual combat, you have to go tell your buddy's wife that his brains are scattered over some mountainside and he won't be coming home."
Bummer. Where's the reset button?
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