US military shooters have no valid historical targets aside from Nazis. So if they make a new one they either have to cycle through the many undeserving targets of US empire or completely give up on making USBurgermericans the heroes (they do the first one).
this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2026
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Yeah, but recently - perhaps due to global markets, perhaps it's a vague take on capitalism - it seems like a lot of games favour the backdrop of a mass mercenary war with a vague global assimilation of 'good guys' vs bad greedy corrupt mercenaries.
R6, BF6, latest Black Ops - it actually makes me miss the old explicitly partisan games - because at least then in multiplayer I could play as the 'bad guys' (anti-imperialists). Now I just have to play as some NATO-coded PMC.
at least then in multiplayer I could play as the 'bad guys' (anti-imperialists)
The original Modern Warfare, playing as Spetsnaz and being greeted on the victory screen by the anthem of the USSR 
Even as a kid without any context at all, hearing that theme definitely planted a seed at the back of my mind that these guys were cool.
Early call of duty where you can spend unlimited time sniping Nazis in Leningrad.
I like ARMA Reforger for that reason, in the vanilla game you can play exclusively as the Soviet Army and one of the most popular mods WCS (Worst Case Scenario) adds NATO and Russia and modern equipment. Some servers also allow you to be Iraqi insurgents. It is hella janky and bugged though.
It also works as a great filter because all the terrible players never play the soviets because they "want to play the good guys" so you're usually on the winning side.
Yeah I almost feel bad sometimes, NATO gets steamrolled almost everytime it seems like ahah. They just want to be cool "operators" and take out the bad guys, meanwhile the Russian team actually runs supplies and works together.
Oh interesting. I admit I haven't really paid attention for like 4 years. They actually pivoted?
Yeah. It's sort of because a lot of these games got infected by the Hero-Shooter virus. Most of these games don't let you play as some ground soldier anymore - it's always some dweeb called McKai or Zeb who's cracking jokes and being epic on the battlefield, and who has 25 different themed skins. Casual military franchises now dont really stick to the simulation aspects of the old ones, or pretend to be adult games. They're out and out for kids.
Just do a Halo and have the enemies be space muslims 
Never played the campaigns. Theyre just islamophobia?
Many took the central premise of the very US-coded humans fighting against religious, fanatic genocidal aliens that way, especially after Halo 2 introduced the religious leaders of the Covenant called the Prophets, the leader of them being the Prophet of Truth. Also, the Arbiter, an elite warrior working for the Prophets was called Dervish during development. Halo 3 introduced a mechanic where cornered enemies would try to suicide bomb you. Also its revealed that the Prophets' religion is false and the humans are secretly the gods they worship and they're trying to cover up that fact by killing them
For context, Halo 1 came out in 2001 but Halo 2 came out in 2004 and the aftermath of 9/11 and War on Terror was in full effect. Halo being islamophobic is a common sentiment on Hexbear and while I think it's a bit overblown you've got to understand how it looked at the time
Space islamophobia 
Basically what the reply above said. Still recommend giving the original trilogy a shot though, they're fun.
Always has been
I mean yeah, obviously, but it feels so weird seeing no one care a single inch about this from what I've see, it feels somehow worse than it already was.
Well it's the DPRK, so "progressive" liberals are roughly as bloodthirsty as the hawks in terms of their sentiments but differ only in strategic approach. It's not a "gauche" kind of warmongering the way that slaughtering brown people in whatever non-specific desert country for oil is.
Yeah, ever since getting deprogrammed on the DPRK I have been going insane every time I have to see a liberal's take on it, it's just unfiltered racism through and through, the only thing comparable I see is the way Europeans treat and talk about Roma people.
Does anyone remember the Mercenaries games? The first one was about blowing up North Korea, the second one about blowing up Venezuela. I'm sure they would've done Iran in the third game had the studio survived that long
Yeah that one was insane, and with no pretense either - the Venezuela one was literally about taking their oil iirc
Awesome games though lol I liked them when I was a kid
Just Cause perfected that sort of thing really - Just Cause 2 was basically blow up North Korea.
At least Just Cause 2 had the decency to make up a pretend island with a pretend bad guy on it so you're not being conditioned as strongly to think it's okay to kill anyone in any real country
And as far as I remember there are some based characters in that game who have absolute contempt for the main character and will gladly send him into absurd situations because he's a shitty US goon and if he dies good and if he takes out some fascist goons with him all the better
Also the later titles did somewhat move away from that. In 4 the main enemy was an US mercenary group IIRC. And at the end of that game it did sort of imply you would be attacking some sort of US agency in the next title (which was canceled, rip).
Yeah, I haven't seen a single article talking about how absolutely fucked it is
Homefront: The Revolution at least had the courtesy to be ugly, janky and overall off-putting
The real goal of gamergate was a wild success, get the chuds screaming about wokeness so loudly that everyone else is too distracted by the culture war to have any real discussion about politics in video games
If i ever get the chance to make a video game, I will make those chuds pay
With money for the game, yes, but also assaulting them with radical left-wing messages
All the marketing for the game should appeal to chuds, then do a bait and switch half way through and basically berate the losers for thinking they were the good guys
Yeah extremely on point. There's is basically no meaningful discussion about videogames as a whole and every time it is tried it is decried as completely wrong and useless. This is a medium that have incredible potential for actual political discussion and education, but gamergate basically buried it all before it was even born.
There was a good game somewhere in Homefront: The Revolution.
By that, I mean the hidden copy of Timesplitters 2.
I couldn't even get to that point
The game was so bad
Not worth it, even for my beloved TimeSplitters
Every day I grow more and more glad that I stopped playing new Call of Duty after Black Ops II.
Well, I played COD4 back in the day and thought it was stinky doodoo 
It wasn't because I was particularly politically aware though, I just thought military shooters were lame
disappointed that they didn’t call it Modern War4
Modern 4fare
4Modern 4Fare
Where you earn Modern 4skins for your guns?
The first game was full of anti-soviet propaganda (human wave stuff, though it's probably because of enemy at the gates being popular around then), CoD 2 was surprisingly decent on that front (the potato thing is just funny tbh), World at War was good, even though they tried to paint shooting nazi prisoners as bad. All the others are just pure ass when it comes to the imperialist propaganda though.
Never played the first 2 games, I started on World at War but at the time I didn't knew english at all. The only ones I played were WaW, MW1 (Remaster), MW2, MW3, Black Ops 2/3/4 and some Warzone. Only by BO3 did I know enough english to actually be able to understand the story, and that one is a stinker that is just a cheap copy of the movie Source Code. Even then, on Black Ops 2 I had the feeling that it could maybe be bullshit too, tho I was too impressed by the game to care that much at the time.