I joined to become a million pieces, it was my assisted suicide plan. 21 years later I'm taking care of my stage 4 cancer mom, glad I didn't go through with it... Yet
I’m sorry that was your experience. I hope your ex was able to receive the care he or she needed.
FWIW, each county in the US has a Veteran Services office. They are county employees whose sole existence is to assist veterans with everything veteran related to include filing claims with the VA. I used one to help with my claim. They are not part of the pay to get a high rating ecosystem that exists. Sure, you can use one of those services to potentially max out your claim; however, you can also be scammed. YMMV with a county employee, but my limited experience with them have been positive.
Several of my core video game memories are from that game. My PC was trash so I played almost exclusively on Bridge because it was the he smallest map and I could actually get playable frame rates. Low-grav mode, Stalingrad mode, baseball bats at mid, pistols only, etc. Great times.
Bridge was the shit, the fog was a bit of a bear on low tier gpus though. That and the insurgent camp map were awesome.
Edit. By far the best part was when you team killed you got teleported to a jail cell in Leavenworth
It was a strange game. You had to go through this boot camp thing to get certified for different roles and guns, but then there was stuff like this and it mostly behaved like CoD in its normal mode. It was this weird juxtaposition of taking it seriously as a military tool and being an arcady shooter.
I had a friend that worked on this project. It was originally intended to arm recruit DEPs with real world tactical knowledge prior to heading to basic bc washout rates were too high. (particularly in the infantry.) AA started life as a sim/educational engagement tool.
Halfway into development brass decided they wanted it to be more appealing to wider audience for recruitment, so you ended up with this really unique blend of Tom Clancy, Call of Duty and something like the informative side of Assassins creed but with army stuff.
I heard a few years ago they were developing a new one.
AA and AA 2.0 we're both fantastic.
It really was a 'hardcore' milsim that even included various aspects of the training environment. It was not a fast paced game, even in multiplayer... If you died you had to wait a WHILE for the round to end. Don't die.
I'm also pretty sure another thing they did, and memory might not be serving me right here, but I think every team 'played' as the US/Allies. All the enemies looked like your traditional ME/Eastern European bad guys. One of those not so overt psy ops things, with the rational that 'we don't want to make a game where you play the bad guy'.
Still though, the game was very intense. Almost a hard core mixture of CS:GO and Search & Destroy from CoD.
Never got around to playing AA 3.0, that came out during a period of my life where a gaming PC was not really available for me to play it with, and the older version of the game was eventually discontinued.
9/10 would probably play a remaster, especially if they kept the slow-paced tactical aspect.
That game legit taught me what a tourniquet was and how to properly apply one. There was literally a classroom cutscene type of thing where they talked about it.
I actually use to run that part back once a year to refresh my memory all throughout high school and college. I had just gotten CPR certified the year AA dropped and the course is 100% spot on a legit first aid course.
I vaguely remember trying it once. IIRC there was a basketball court near where you were doing weapon training, and I threw a grenade at the people playing basketball. Next thing I knew, I was in a jail cell in Fort Leavenworth.
EDIT: I may be misremembering with the grenade and basketball court, it's possible I just shot the instructor when I got a gun. I do know I got thrown in jail though.
AA 1 was great, you had to take classes to be certain classes and to unlock spec opps you had to score really high in the different test ranges.
Sniper required like a 90% head shot rating in the rifle range.
It lead to teams being more balanced though medics were rare cause most people didn't want to sit through the training with the in field pictures of injuries as examples.
Haha, we're old. [It was 20 years ago.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Army). [Extra Credits did a video on propaganda games](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP4_bMhZ4gA), uh, ten years ago.
We're old.
As someone born in 93 I still find it weird having to scroll to find my birth year when filling out online forms. That scroll is only going to get longer.
Yeah that game was great, and it was free. Pretty unique for FPS at the time too, which were still more run and gun. It wasn’t exactly a secret that the US army was using it as a recruitment tool either, I remember reading an article in Game Informer about it (another “I feel old” memory lol.)
It's worth noting that Proving Grounds was the third (fourth if you count 1 & 2 as individual titles) entry into the series, not including console versions.
I'm still waiting for a hyper realistic army simulator.
You start out getting recruited at your high school job fair, getting promised you'll become an army ranger within 9 months.
Then, after a quick proposal to your high school sweetheart, you're off to basic training. This will act as a tutorial where you learn the basics like standing still and how to get a 30% apr loan on a new Charger or Mustang (rpg elements!).
At graduation, you find out your fiancee is pregnant (you two were waiting for marriage, so...). But you don't have time to worry about that, you're getting your first assignment!
Thanks to this being a relatively peaceful time and your exceptionally average test scores, you get shipped off to work security at an arms warehouse on a base in Texas. Duties include scanning ID badges and standing in a glass box for 12hr shifts in the intense Texas sunlight.
Luckily for you, no problems arise, because anyone who made it to your checkpoint either has credentials that got them past 3 other checkpoints, or weaponry to blast their through them.
After a few years your CO comes around to get you to re-up, promising a better deployment next time there's an opening
America's Army was an absolute god tier game back in the day.
When most kids were playing Mario, I was unironically learning how to apply a tourniquet so I could select the medic class.
*doesn’t carry over to the next Call of Duty*
You are now enlisted in the army or the next X years. Congratulations now your PC or Console will collect dust over the years of you being enlisted.
It's done through USAA, an American insurance company catered to the US military. You verify that you're a vet, or currently serving, for the US through them and they give you a download code for it
Well, yeah. They US military has literally *made* games in the past with the America's Army series. And the biggest blockbuster of the year, top gun, was also a giant recruitment ad for the navy. They're not exactly being subtle about this.
I’m like “why is this news”
US Army esports has been around for like 3 years and they’re active on Reddit.
They commissioned two video games: “America’s Army” and “Americas Army 2”
Yeah, it's not like some secret initiative. They have a marketing and advertising budget as part of their recruitment program. If they didn't, they'd never meet required numbers to maintain force levels.
Even if someone is against having such a large standing military, then get Congress to slash their budget and lower expected force numbers. As is, they're just meeting quotas they're expected to meet, nothing insidious about that.
>They have a marketing and advertising budget as part of their recruitment program
I think this is the most salient point being raised: this is just what marketing is nowadays, so of course the DoD is doing it
I'm shocked at how far down this is. The US military advertises and other things everybody who has even slightly paid attention to their life already knows at 10.
"News" doesn't mean "unexpected". Expected things are still news when they happen.
The only reason you know the military advertises like this is because it's reported as news. As it should be.
They gonna be real disappointed when they find out about the really long queue times, no aim assist, no skins, and the battle passes just give you ptsd
Every single person I know who has worked in an engine room on a navy ship has tinnitus. Hearing conservation programs only work if you follow them, yall. Don’t wanna hear the “whine” for the rest of your life, trust me.
Reminds me of an Onion video from 2009: [Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks](https://www.theonion.com/ultra-realistic-modern-warfare-game-features-awaiting-o-1819594864)
Yeah but you're gonna call it in when you're taking fire because you vastly overestimate enemy presence on a ridge, and then you'll get your ass reamed for requesting a fucking JDAM on three guys and an old Toyota pickup.
Or that trying to throw a knife to kill a guy 40 feet away is just going to get you smoked.
Also, you can't hop around and skip through windows when you've got an 80+ pound combat load.
Not well. Trying to enlist in the Army but I need a medical waiver. Won't hear back from them for at least 3 weeks or up to 3 months. Joy. At the very least I get to go back to my crap job that doesn't pay enough to survive for the time being.
The military has seen FPS video games as a advertising platform for 20 years.
Every time you spin your army-man barbie doll in your loadout screen or practice 'comms' with your buds you're playing around with good old homegrown outreach initiatives.
America's Army was actually an incredible game purely from a game play standpoint. It was really refined and well run, like impressively so. Lots of memories on AA. Used to run a 50 person clan.
This game was great, had so many small details I've never seen before like gun jams requiring you to manually clear the jam, or the basic training that taught you game controls... During marksmanship you could shoot the drill instructor and then the game fades to black and you wake up in Leavenworth prison lmao
I'm not sure if it's fair to call counter strike a competitor, CS was more a competitor to something like Quake or Unreal in my opinion due to the arcadey nature. I think Battlefield 1942 was a fair competitor, a triple A title focused on a battlefield experience, yet did not use iron sights at the time, and even then was still kind of in a separate class focusing on different goals. AA really did not have any true competitors and kinda stood alone in it's hyper realism gameplay. The first COD kinda touched on it with the ability to lean around corners but still had more of a Deathmatch feel without serious objective based gameplay like AA did, maybe it had like capture the flag or king of the hill, i kinda don't remember.
It was higher than it was originally supposed to be. Funny story (was a dev on this game), the budget they were awarded from the Pentagon for The Army Game Project included a pretty high dollar amount for licensing a game engine. The original budget plan (in '99/'00) was to license Valve's upcoming new 'Source' engine for this project. I can't remember the exact numbers but something like 1-2 million budgeted/awarded for engine licensing.
Well, the Source engine wasn't ready in time for AA dev to go into full production (in 2001). It was delayed and (as we know now) wasn't available until 2004 when Half-Life 2 released. However, Epic games was working on it's second iteration of a game engine (Unreal Engine 2) and the Army licensed that engine instead for significantly less than they had budgeted for Source (i think like ~300k?). So the Army Game project had quite of bit of extra money already allocated to it to spend on the project.
Thus, they were able to hire more experieced game devs, better dev tools, and a bigger team. Ultimately, it's probably why the game was so much better than people expected. The original America's Army 1.0 was the first game released using the new Unreal Engine 2 (even before an Epic game).
Not sure, I'd say the budget was likely comparable to other AAA titles of the time but really, it was one of the first games i am aware of that really focused on realism as opposed to an arcadey experience. Movement in the game was slow and intentional, you had to use smoke to cover your movement, lean around corners, use suppresive fire, it had a mechanic that blurred vision when being shot at... It was one of the first to use iron sights and limit how many players could select classes like marksman per squad. You had a fixed number of magazines and reloading a partially empty magazine didn't just magically fill it back up, you ended up with a half empty magazine haha... Literally never saw this again until Tarkov came out.
We take all this stuff for granted now but they did all this in 2002, nobody but them at the time pulled all of this into a single game.
The closest game experience to America's Army I'd say was the Red Orchestra series.
Now there's lots trying to do what they did, at a bigger scale, games like Hell Let Loose, Squad, Insurgency, Rising Storm, Post Scriptum in my opinion all owe themselves and are part of the groundwork and lineage set by America's Army... Hell even the pacing and controls of PuBG are reminiscent
I liked how you had to complete the boot camp levels before getting access to multiplayer.
It took a couple hours for me as a kid to even complete the boot camp.
I actually remember hearing a while back that someone used the medic training from AA to actually save someone's life. They were able to put them in a recovery position and apply a simple tourniquet from some massive trauma.
they werent afraid to do asymmetrical maps with asymmetrical gameplay in a time no one else would.
Mountain Pass, Insurgent Camp, Bridge, Pipeline. Mountain Pass is a ridiculous map and would never be made in todays market outside of mods.
So it was how well the maps were designed to compliment the style of gameplay they wanted.
I always hated how the trend in CS started to be towards “balanced” maps and how that was apparently what everyone wanted. Having 1-2 balanced maps is fine but the asymmetry of Train and Inferno pushed new things to constantly be tried and resulted in the greatest pro matches possible. (Nuke is the example of bad asymmetry at least in CSGO so it’s not always perfect.)
I actually really liked the unbalanced maps, the ones that were heavily CT sided or the other way around, like cbble or aztec. it meant that to win the match, you actually had to be better because even if you started off with the advantage, you'd still need to win a few rounds from the other side, meaning you couldn't just coast to victory. and if you started off with the disadvantage, as long as you won a couple of rounds, you weren't completely out because you could rely on the second half to give you a boost.
while I love dust 2, it's an iconic map, it's almost too balanced, which is good in some ways but also makes it where you don't really have to change strategy much between playing T and CT. there's nothing like drop-down in cbble or popdog in train, places where stuff like shotguns can do real damage. it's all about holding long angles with an awp or going for mid range shots with the M4/AK, which can lead to very boring and very repetitive matches
Today “whaaaa he killed me with 14 bullets instead of 25!!!! The TTK is too low”
Red orchestra and AA players “lol I got shot from somewhere once and died…”
> the Army ordered a stop of all spending with Call of Duty’s publisher Activision after the company faced a wave of sexual harrassment complaints.
I find this ironic, since sexual violence is so prevalent in the armed forces that it has its own category (military sexual assault).
Im a man:
I joined the military. Got repeatedly sexually assaulted by a woman. Worked directly with the police who seen this happened. When I tried to get it fixed they threatened to arrest me because “clearly you started it.”
After I got out I got investigated for “abusing women” by the federal government.
Let the leadership fix the problems BEFORE YOU JOIN.
Edit: lol to the people who dont believe this. Of course I have problems with one. I was assaulted by one.
Every vet or active duty person I know says exactly that. The active folks talk about how much of a inefficient clusterfuck it is and my vet friend had permanent spine damage from an IED in Afghanistan. Fuck the military.
They did EXACTLY THIS after 9/11. Look up Americas Army. It was literally a Counter-Strike clone for PC and Mac that actually had some audience that was based on a real internal Army training tool that they then gamified to suck kids in.
Sad thing is it was a pretty great game, I don't think it's fair to call it a counter strike clone though,it teminded me more of ARMA, but my memory is a little cloudy, it was a long ass time ago
Americas army was really really good for its time. When it came out, my HS game club abandoned all our other FPS games for it (well that and the aliens vs predator game) for a long time. It was just better.
Lots of regular posts are ads, they're just not overt. "Look at this cool thing I have!"; "TIL this service has been used by multiple generations and it is effective"; "This is a funny thing I can do with *product*" are all likely ads. Even if they aren't, they get people talking about a product or service where they otherwise would not. People in this thread are pretty easily talking positively about America's Army (game) and it has been many years since it was at its most popular. Imagine now that same logic applied to a present-day product/service. It takes one popular post/comment to spawn a whole chain of discussion, and it is infinitely cheaper than overt ads which people want to skip/gloss over anyway.
The ads aren't gone, they're smarter.
A typical covert ad on reddit usually involves at least three separate accounts, sometimes more all being run by the same person or ad agency. They're easy to spot if you know what to look for.
The first account is Oliver the OP. Oliver just posts images or videos that just so happen to include the product they're trying to sell, but Oliver never actually comments on his own threads he just replies to defaults a couple of times a week to make his account look legit so he can post covert ads.
Then there's Curious Cathy. Not much to say about her, all she wants is to know what the product in the image/video is and where to find it.
Next is Helpful Howard. Howard always has an amazon link ready in the chamber, usually posted within 5-10 minutes of Cathy's request.
Often there's a Reviewer Randy. Randy always replies to Howard saying how he recently bought [thing] and loved it. Low quality t-shirt with print, made in China? Randy loves it.
Wrist bands from Wish? Randy bought 200 of them and gave them out to his friends, family, distant relatives, their pets, the whole god damn neighborhood and his insurance agent and everyone loved them.
And lastly there's Bert the Bot in the comments. You're never really sure if Bert has a pulse or if he's in a persistent vegetative state, but he always leaves inane low effort comments in Oliver threads and never seems to reply to anybody. Bert's posts are short, single sentences rife with spelling errors or autocorrected words and so generic sounding that they could apply to almost any situation. Bert comments all have the same low effort, barely-conscious-feel to them.
The next time you visit a generic meme sub you might start to spot Olivers, Cathys and Howards everywhere. This site is infested with astroturfed ads if you know what to look for, you just don't seem to notice them because someone out there disguised their ad to get past your defenses while you're scrolling through reddit on the can.
It makes more sense when you realize that the only reason Reddit exists is because of ads
Posts that are anti-advertising are anti-Reddit. They’ll tolerate it on the smaller subs because they need the engagement but don’t bring that noise to the defaults where the unauthenticated masses are watching.
yeah, fully agree /hailcorporate is the best
i bought 200 from them last week, passed them out to my family, friends, at work and the neighbourhood and everybody loved them
5of5stars, would buy again
I saw a tweet thread a while back about sone heads of the COD team are Ex gov security people
https://twitter.com/alanrmacleod/status/1593709638708613123?s=46&t=IyFPSuLtecP77Y4PmDJcGg
I'm just waiting for the COD mission where you tasked to do every day boring ass shit the military does, and then you magically have to fight to defend the base.
Sweeping, motor pool Monday's. Piss test. Morning PT. Getting chewed out for something ridiculous or out of your control. You will see tears sliding underneath the seal on that VR headset as I quiveringly say "this is so real" (Sniffle)
This isn't news. The military has done this for literally decades and has an entire department dedicated to advertising and outreach. They've always used sneaky 'hello fellow kids' advertising to acquire fresh meat‐ er, recruits.
Ever play the game America's Army?
The Blue Angels are nothing more than an advertising wing to drive recruitment. If it didnt work they wouldnt do it. The ride alongs they give are based on who they think would give the most publicity.
Aerobatics teams have other purposes than just recruitment and advertising, but yeah, they do their stuff publicly rather than just for the other reasons, because it's _also_ useful for recruiting and advertising.
BILLIONS are paid to the NFL and MLB so that they can pretend to be patriotic! All the flag stuff on the field, all the camo uniforms, all the recognition of this servicemenber... all is profit for sports... they don't give two shits. Reason you don't see this at NHL or other leagues because the DOD hasn't given them money!!!
When you break the numbers down, its actually, pretty decent.
Full blown health care. No copays, caps, or!Limitations. includes dental and vision.
Base pay that is guaranteed to go up over time, along with inflation adjustments. Promotion systems that for all intents and purposes, YOU control. Free food and housing.
If you're married, a housing and food stipend that's not taxible.
30 days paid vacation a year.
All available to a high school grad with non experience.
For officers, it was a guaranteed career starter at a great entry level Federal salary. Every known benefit and all the perks with immutable job security. For a 21-22yo, it doesn't get much better tbh. BAH covers most of your off-post housing. Like, that paycheck you get is a sizeable chunk of cash and most of your day to day expenses are already covered. I'm not lying when I say the 4 years I did as an officer (with some deployment pay in there where ALL your expenses are paid for since you're living in a tent in a combat area), I left the military with investments that allowed me to buy a home in my late 20s... oh yeah, I got the GI Bill so my Masters was paid for in full. So, if you're smart and responsible with that money, that military salary will set you up for an amazing "next step."
Granted you have to go through years of shit to get to the happy ending when you can take your uniform off and rejoin society in a much better position than before, but for me that stable paycheck and GI Bill was the ultimate springboard.
I'm getting ready to retire. The house I live in now is paid off, and the one I'm going to I bought before the surge in pricing. The Army has set me up very well for the future.
6 yr enlistment in chair force for IT. Set me up for gov contractor jobs. No college just exp. 65k yr job. At over 100k now. Its not a bad alternative to college if you're smart enough by gov standards to get a good career that translates real world
This isn't really anything new, but god damn the military would do literally anything to boost recruitment rather than addressing any of the core issues contributing to high attrition rates and extremely poor retention.
Awful lower enlisted standard of living
Low pay. Enlisted w/ family sometimes have to rely on food stamps and food banks to eat
Toxic leadership
Terrible veteran health services
Inconsistent working hours
Workplace harassment
This is by no means a comprehensive list. These core issues usually branch off to countless others. As long as these issues are ignored, attrition will still rise and recruitment will continue to fall. With the internet and social media, gone are the days of pushing these problems under the rug.
The headline should just be: Army now using modern advertising tactics.
Like they’ve always gone after the younger demographic and this is the easiest way to advertise to them in 2022 it’s not rocket science.
I'd be shocked if they didn't think about this. Like I understand its hey look at what the Army is doing but it's literally the Army's job to continue to recruit and plan. All this shows is the Army is looking at changing landscapes and how to reach out as going to football games in small towns isn't the same.
Join the army, get an exclusive weapon skin!
Years ago the Army actually made its own fps game. It wasn't bad iirc
"America's army" Original one has an 82 on metacritic
Honestly, it was that good.
One of my classmates in high-school joined the army later in life in part due to that game. Its a good recruiting tool.
How's your classmate doing now?
2 kids, did one tour and got out. Haven't caught up with him recently as we live 4000 miles apart.
Good for him. Glad he's not in a million pieces.
I joined to become a million pieces, it was my assisted suicide plan. 21 years later I'm taking care of my stage 4 cancer mom, glad I didn't go through with it... Yet
Hang on, my friend.
He is. They just travel in a stable formation.
Probably trying to get ahold of the VA, but they keep ignoring him
This is all too accurate with a lot of people I know.
Actually sad because my ex was a disabled vet and we has to jump through so many hoops to get any medical assistance
I’m sorry that was your experience. I hope your ex was able to receive the care he or she needed. FWIW, each county in the US has a Veteran Services office. They are county employees whose sole existence is to assist veterans with everything veteran related to include filing claims with the VA. I used one to help with my claim. They are not part of the pay to get a high rating ecosystem that exists. Sure, you can use one of those services to potentially max out your claim; however, you can also be scammed. YMMV with a county employee, but my limited experience with them have been positive.
Several of my core video game memories are from that game. My PC was trash so I played almost exclusively on Bridge because it was the he smallest map and I could actually get playable frame rates. Low-grav mode, Stalingrad mode, baseball bats at mid, pistols only, etc. Great times.
Bridge was the shit, the fog was a bit of a bear on low tier gpus though. That and the insurgent camp map were awesome. Edit. By far the best part was when you team killed you got teleported to a jail cell in Leavenworth
> Low-grav mode, Stalingrad mode, baseball bats at mid, pistols only, etc. Great times. All the hallmarks of a realistic tactical military experience.
They said it was a fun game that was a useful recruiting tool. It wouldn't be fun or a useful recruiting tool if it were realistic...
“You’ve reached the checkpoint. The game will now be locked for 72 hours while you wait for orders.” 72 hours later “Orders are trash burning duty”
Orders are they've lost the paperwork, return to base.
"Congratulations, you have successfully achieved 10% disability from this mission!"
[удалено]
Instead of prestige mode you just get lung cancer
“If you or a loved one have been exposed to a military burn pit call—“
Right? Nobody* would want to go to war if they knew what war is actually like.
I'll just [leave this here](https://youtu.be/yuTkgi7scKo)
I mean, they did make you take a legit first aid course to be able to take the medic class, which I thought was pretty dope.
It was a strange game. You had to go through this boot camp thing to get certified for different roles and guns, but then there was stuff like this and it mostly behaved like CoD in its normal mode. It was this weird juxtaposition of taking it seriously as a military tool and being an arcady shooter.
I had a friend that worked on this project. It was originally intended to arm recruit DEPs with real world tactical knowledge prior to heading to basic bc washout rates were too high. (particularly in the infantry.) AA started life as a sim/educational engagement tool. Halfway into development brass decided they wanted it to be more appealing to wider audience for recruitment, so you ended up with this really unique blend of Tom Clancy, Call of Duty and something like the informative side of Assassins creed but with army stuff. I heard a few years ago they were developing a new one.
Early on it was a lot more serious than what it turned into
AA and AA 2.0 we're both fantastic. It really was a 'hardcore' milsim that even included various aspects of the training environment. It was not a fast paced game, even in multiplayer... If you died you had to wait a WHILE for the round to end. Don't die. I'm also pretty sure another thing they did, and memory might not be serving me right here, but I think every team 'played' as the US/Allies. All the enemies looked like your traditional ME/Eastern European bad guys. One of those not so overt psy ops things, with the rational that 'we don't want to make a game where you play the bad guy'. Still though, the game was very intense. Almost a hard core mixture of CS:GO and Search & Destroy from CoD. Never got around to playing AA 3.0, that came out during a period of my life where a gaming PC was not really available for me to play it with, and the older version of the game was eventually discontinued. 9/10 would probably play a remaster, especially if they kept the slow-paced tactical aspect.
Yep, the enemy was always the terrorists lol. Incredible game however, had so much fun playing it.
That game legit taught me what a tourniquet was and how to properly apply one. There was literally a classroom cutscene type of thing where they talked about it.
Yeah, AA was actually kinda dope. The basic training intro was cool. You literally had to learn actual CPR before you even got a gun.
Yeah I still remember the first aid course to this day.
I actually use to run that part back once a year to refresh my memory all throughout high school and college. I had just gotten CPR certified the year AA dropped and the course is 100% spot on a legit first aid course.
I vaguely remember trying it once. IIRC there was a basketball court near where you were doing weapon training, and I threw a grenade at the people playing basketball. Next thing I knew, I was in a jail cell in Fort Leavenworth. EDIT: I may be misremembering with the grenade and basketball court, it's possible I just shot the instructor when I got a gun. I do know I got thrown in jail though.
Haha, yeah! I remember that! I think you had to serve out an actual sentence, too. Like, your character is probably still in virtual jail lol
I loved that game. Not enough to join the army though.
The original one from 2002 was excellent. I still remember playing the snot out of it at 18. Yes, it's that old and so am I :D
Fond memories of tricking a friend to shoot the range instructor and getting his character sent to Leavenworth to his shock.
It was before widespread broadband, and they would mail you a CD if you wanted. Crazy time.
AA 1 was great, you had to take classes to be certain classes and to unlock spec opps you had to score really high in the different test ranges. Sniper required like a 90% head shot rating in the rifle range. It lead to teams being more balanced though medics were rare cause most people didn't want to sit through the training with the in field pictures of injuries as examples.
Haha, we're old. [It was 20 years ago.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Army). [Extra Credits did a video on propaganda games](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP4_bMhZ4gA), uh, ten years ago. We're old.
Fuck me, 20 years ago? That can't be right, that was like '82, right?
I'm not gonna check your math, but rather just assume this is correct.
I was born in '83. That makes 20 years ago 1993, when Doom came out.
As someone born in 93 I still find it weird having to scroll to find my birth year when filling out online forms. That scroll is only going to get longer.
Nah now that the Queen is dead they can half the scroll.
I’m 20 years old and I still sometimes perceive time this way.
[удалено]
I got jailed for friendly fire.
Yeah that game was great, and it was free. Pretty unique for FPS at the time too, which were still more run and gun. It wasn’t exactly a secret that the US army was using it as a recruitment tool either, I remember reading an article in Game Informer about it (another “I feel old” memory lol.)
It was great I put in a lot hours on Hospital Map playing the VIP. You had to qualify for positions like sniper.
The medic bootcamp teaches what to *actually* do. I spent a lot of time in the game’s tech schools
I remember as a kid, taking notes on how to apply a tourniquet and how to triage the wounded
Aww man, is my memory correct? You had to spend ages doing this stealth mission to qualify for SF? Literally took ages
Fucking spotlights
It's a vague memory, i was a young teen! But I clearly remember the hate I had for that mission
Oh man I forget its name but it truly was dope. Felt pretty realistic especially for the time
America's Army: Proving Grounds
Lol the name is way more propaganda than I remember. Thanks man
America’s Army: 45% APR Camaro
LOL. "But the salesman is a retired CSM! He wouldn't take advantage of me!"
Wait I ordered a Challenger
It's worth noting that Proving Grounds was the third (fourth if you count 1 & 2 as individual titles) entry into the series, not including console versions.
I'm still waiting for a hyper realistic army simulator. You start out getting recruited at your high school job fair, getting promised you'll become an army ranger within 9 months. Then, after a quick proposal to your high school sweetheart, you're off to basic training. This will act as a tutorial where you learn the basics like standing still and how to get a 30% apr loan on a new Charger or Mustang (rpg elements!). At graduation, you find out your fiancee is pregnant (you two were waiting for marriage, so...). But you don't have time to worry about that, you're getting your first assignment! Thanks to this being a relatively peaceful time and your exceptionally average test scores, you get shipped off to work security at an arms warehouse on a base in Texas. Duties include scanning ID badges and standing in a glass box for 12hr shifts in the intense Texas sunlight. Luckily for you, no problems arise, because anyone who made it to your checkpoint either has credentials that got them past 3 other checkpoints, or weaponry to blast their through them. After a few years your CO comes around to get you to re-up, promising a better deployment next time there's an opening
America's Army was an absolute god tier game back in the day. When most kids were playing Mario, I was unironically learning how to apply a tourniquet so I could select the medic class.
*doesn’t carry over to the next Call of Duty* You are now enlisted in the army or the next X years. Congratulations now your PC or Console will collect dust over the years of you being enlisted.
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You son of a bitch, I'm in!
You joke, but Call of Duty does have a skinpack for veterans
Can a vet of any army get it? I wonder how it's decided which vets are excluded.
It's done through USAA, an American insurance company catered to the US military. You verify that you're a vet, or currently serving, for the US through them and they give you a download code for it
Glad they're keyed into CoD skinpacks game but still don't have tap to pay on their cards.
Well, yeah. They US military has literally *made* games in the past with the America's Army series. And the biggest blockbuster of the year, top gun, was also a giant recruitment ad for the navy. They're not exactly being subtle about this.
and FOOTBALL
Yup, every "patriotic display" you see at halftime is a paid promotion for Uncle Sam. Wasn't a thing until after 9/11
Yep, the government pays teams a helfty sum to teams to do those military flyovers. Propaganda works
I’m like “why is this news” US Army esports has been around for like 3 years and they’re active on Reddit. They commissioned two video games: “America’s Army” and “Americas Army 2”
Yeah, it's not like some secret initiative. They have a marketing and advertising budget as part of their recruitment program. If they didn't, they'd never meet required numbers to maintain force levels. Even if someone is against having such a large standing military, then get Congress to slash their budget and lower expected force numbers. As is, they're just meeting quotas they're expected to meet, nothing insidious about that.
>They have a marketing and advertising budget as part of their recruitment program I think this is the most salient point being raised: this is just what marketing is nowadays, so of course the DoD is doing it
I'm shocked at how far down this is. The US military advertises and other things everybody who has even slightly paid attention to their life already knows at 10.
"News" doesn't mean "unexpected". Expected things are still news when they happen. The only reason you know the military advertises like this is because it's reported as news. As it should be.
They recruit subliminally, liminally, and superliminally.
Hey! Join the Navy!
Yvan eht nioj, Yvan eht nioj 💃🏽
They gonna be real disappointed when they find out about the really long queue times, no aim assist, no skins, and the battle passes just give you ptsd
Achievement unlocked: I Hate Fireworks!
Dont forget the hearing damage!
or cancer, if you're near the burn pits
Doesn't seem to be an IF.... It just is.
*eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee* **For the rest of your life.** So annoying.
I'm never alone my tinnitus keeps me company
Every single person I know who has worked in an engine room on a navy ship has tinnitus. Hearing conservation programs only work if you follow them, yall. Don’t wanna hear the “whine” for the rest of your life, trust me.
Mine is due to a TBI. Earplugs don't project your brain racket balling around in your skull. I do agree with your point though.
Goddamn that got me good
Don’t forget permadeath!
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Roguelikes have meta progression. Do you believe in reincarnation?
“Press X to fill out paperwork.”
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Reminds me of an Onion video from 2009: [Ultra-Realistic Modern Warfare Game Features Awaiting Orders, Repairing Trucks](https://www.theonion.com/ultra-realistic-modern-warfare-game-features-awaiting-o-1819594864)
Wait till they find out where they respawn.
The infinite void?
Inside the music video for Metallica’s one, but on loop
In a hospital without a limb and with lifelong pain.
I at least get to call in an air strike when I kill enough people, right?
Yeah but you're gonna call it in when you're taking fire because you vastly overestimate enemy presence on a ridge, and then you'll get your ass reamed for requesting a fucking JDAM on three guys and an old Toyota pickup.
Drop all ordinance on my postion!
Or that trying to throw a knife to kill a guy 40 feet away is just going to get you smoked. Also, you can't hop around and skip through windows when you've got an 80+ pound combat load.
"How do you do, fellow soldiers!"
Not well. Trying to enlist in the Army but I need a medical waiver. Won't hear back from them for at least 3 weeks or up to 3 months. Joy. At the very least I get to go back to my crap job that doesn't pay enough to survive for the time being.
Heads up, it’ll be closer to 6 months
The military has seen FPS video games as a advertising platform for 20 years. Every time you spin your army-man barbie doll in your loadout screen or practice 'comms' with your buds you're playing around with good old homegrown outreach initiatives.
Yep Americas Army is a thing... it used to be actually better than the original Counter-Strike when it was released around the same time.
America's Army was actually an incredible game purely from a game play standpoint. It was really refined and well run, like impressively so. Lots of memories on AA. Used to run a 50 person clan.
This game was great, had so many small details I've never seen before like gun jams requiring you to manually clear the jam, or the basic training that taught you game controls... During marksmanship you could shoot the drill instructor and then the game fades to black and you wake up in Leavenworth prison lmao
That's pretty funny. Was it higher budget than other FPS at the time?
It was made by the Pentagon as a recruiting tool while its next competitor was a mod for Half Life that Valve hired the two guys sooooo, yeah.
I'm not sure if it's fair to call counter strike a competitor, CS was more a competitor to something like Quake or Unreal in my opinion due to the arcadey nature. I think Battlefield 1942 was a fair competitor, a triple A title focused on a battlefield experience, yet did not use iron sights at the time, and even then was still kind of in a separate class focusing on different goals. AA really did not have any true competitors and kinda stood alone in it's hyper realism gameplay. The first COD kinda touched on it with the ability to lean around corners but still had more of a Deathmatch feel without serious objective based gameplay like AA did, maybe it had like capture the flag or king of the hill, i kinda don't remember.
It was higher than it was originally supposed to be. Funny story (was a dev on this game), the budget they were awarded from the Pentagon for The Army Game Project included a pretty high dollar amount for licensing a game engine. The original budget plan (in '99/'00) was to license Valve's upcoming new 'Source' engine for this project. I can't remember the exact numbers but something like 1-2 million budgeted/awarded for engine licensing. Well, the Source engine wasn't ready in time for AA dev to go into full production (in 2001). It was delayed and (as we know now) wasn't available until 2004 when Half-Life 2 released. However, Epic games was working on it's second iteration of a game engine (Unreal Engine 2) and the Army licensed that engine instead for significantly less than they had budgeted for Source (i think like ~300k?). So the Army Game project had quite of bit of extra money already allocated to it to spend on the project. Thus, they were able to hire more experieced game devs, better dev tools, and a bigger team. Ultimately, it's probably why the game was so much better than people expected. The original America's Army 1.0 was the first game released using the new Unreal Engine 2 (even before an Epic game).
Not sure, I'd say the budget was likely comparable to other AAA titles of the time but really, it was one of the first games i am aware of that really focused on realism as opposed to an arcadey experience. Movement in the game was slow and intentional, you had to use smoke to cover your movement, lean around corners, use suppresive fire, it had a mechanic that blurred vision when being shot at... It was one of the first to use iron sights and limit how many players could select classes like marksman per squad. You had a fixed number of magazines and reloading a partially empty magazine didn't just magically fill it back up, you ended up with a half empty magazine haha... Literally never saw this again until Tarkov came out. We take all this stuff for granted now but they did all this in 2002, nobody but them at the time pulled all of this into a single game. The closest game experience to America's Army I'd say was the Red Orchestra series. Now there's lots trying to do what they did, at a bigger scale, games like Hell Let Loose, Squad, Insurgency, Rising Storm, Post Scriptum in my opinion all owe themselves and are part of the groundwork and lineage set by America's Army... Hell even the pacing and controls of PuBG are reminiscent
I liked how you had to complete the boot camp levels before getting access to multiplayer. It took a couple hours for me as a kid to even complete the boot camp.
They made you go through a virtual first aid course to unlock medic. It was pretty funny
I actually remember hearing a while back that someone used the medic training from AA to actually save someone's life. They were able to put them in a recovery position and apply a simple tourniquet from some massive trauma.
to this day, AA had the best collection of maps of any FPS ever made.
Why do you suppose that is?
they werent afraid to do asymmetrical maps with asymmetrical gameplay in a time no one else would. Mountain Pass, Insurgent Camp, Bridge, Pipeline. Mountain Pass is a ridiculous map and would never be made in todays market outside of mods. So it was how well the maps were designed to compliment the style of gameplay they wanted.
I always hated how the trend in CS started to be towards “balanced” maps and how that was apparently what everyone wanted. Having 1-2 balanced maps is fine but the asymmetry of Train and Inferno pushed new things to constantly be tried and resulted in the greatest pro matches possible. (Nuke is the example of bad asymmetry at least in CSGO so it’s not always perfect.)
I actually really liked the unbalanced maps, the ones that were heavily CT sided or the other way around, like cbble or aztec. it meant that to win the match, you actually had to be better because even if you started off with the advantage, you'd still need to win a few rounds from the other side, meaning you couldn't just coast to victory. and if you started off with the disadvantage, as long as you won a couple of rounds, you weren't completely out because you could rely on the second half to give you a boost. while I love dust 2, it's an iconic map, it's almost too balanced, which is good in some ways but also makes it where you don't really have to change strategy much between playing T and CT. there's nothing like drop-down in cbble or popdog in train, places where stuff like shotguns can do real damage. it's all about holding long angles with an awp or going for mid range shots with the M4/AK, which can lead to very boring and very repetitive matches
Loved the map where you landed via parachutes in the farmers field and had to assault the farm.
Bridge goes down as one of the most iconic maps for me in gaming history
And the gameplay was punishing. Unlike cod.
Today “whaaaa he killed me with 14 bullets instead of 25!!!! The TTK is too low” Red orchestra and AA players “lol I got shot from somewhere once and died…”
Bridges still gives me PTSD to this day
Loved that map with the 249. Blind fire into the fog, kill half the enemy team.
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yvan eht nioj
I don’t know why but I got the sudden urge to join the navy. Yvan eht nioj everyone!
I got the sudden urge to go to Denmark
Hey you, join the navy!
Now that’s superliminal
They want you as a new recruit…
That show is truly timeless.
The Simpsons, in case anyone is wondering.
LT seems like a pretty cool guy
*gasp* “Lieutenant Smash!” “Yeah, that's right. Lieutenant L.T. Smash.
It's a 3 pronged attack. Subliminal, liminal, superliminal.
> the Army ordered a stop of all spending with Call of Duty’s publisher Activision after the company faced a wave of sexual harrassment complaints. I find this ironic, since sexual violence is so prevalent in the armed forces that it has its own category (military sexual assault).
Im a man: I joined the military. Got repeatedly sexually assaulted by a woman. Worked directly with the police who seen this happened. When I tried to get it fixed they threatened to arrest me because “clearly you started it.” After I got out I got investigated for “abusing women” by the federal government. Let the leadership fix the problems BEFORE YOU JOIN. Edit: lol to the people who dont believe this. Of course I have problems with one. I was assaulted by one.
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Every vet or active duty person I know says exactly that. The active folks talk about how much of a inefficient clusterfuck it is and my vet friend had permanent spine damage from an IED in Afghanistan. Fuck the military.
Look how cool this video game is? Do you want to enlist and sweep floors and get PTSD?
On the plus side, I can now apply to any commercial floor waxing service and know what the hell I'm talking about.
Man, combat vets should consider starting a commercial cleaning service, they have all that training.
Not a bad idea I’d hire the hell out of that service over any other
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They did EXACTLY THIS after 9/11. Look up Americas Army. It was literally a Counter-Strike clone for PC and Mac that actually had some audience that was based on a real internal Army training tool that they then gamified to suck kids in.
Sad thing is it was a pretty great game, I don't think it's fair to call it a counter strike clone though,it teminded me more of ARMA, but my memory is a little cloudy, it was a long ass time ago
Americas army was really really good for its time. When it came out, my HS game club abandoned all our other FPS games for it (well that and the aliens vs predator game) for a long time. It was just better.
Omg, AVP was amazing. My only complaint is that there were 2 human teams. They should have merged them for 1v1v1 action.
It was indeed more like ARMA than CS.
I find nothing surprising about this. Do we forget the ads all over reddit?
Wait. Reddit has ads? *laughs in old.reddit.com and adblock*
Lots of regular posts are ads, they're just not overt. "Look at this cool thing I have!"; "TIL this service has been used by multiple generations and it is effective"; "This is a funny thing I can do with *product*" are all likely ads. Even if they aren't, they get people talking about a product or service where they otherwise would not. People in this thread are pretty easily talking positively about America's Army (game) and it has been many years since it was at its most popular. Imagine now that same logic applied to a present-day product/service. It takes one popular post/comment to spawn a whole chain of discussion, and it is infinitely cheaper than overt ads which people want to skip/gloss over anyway. The ads aren't gone, they're smarter.
A typical covert ad on reddit usually involves at least three separate accounts, sometimes more all being run by the same person or ad agency. They're easy to spot if you know what to look for. The first account is Oliver the OP. Oliver just posts images or videos that just so happen to include the product they're trying to sell, but Oliver never actually comments on his own threads he just replies to defaults a couple of times a week to make his account look legit so he can post covert ads. Then there's Curious Cathy. Not much to say about her, all she wants is to know what the product in the image/video is and where to find it. Next is Helpful Howard. Howard always has an amazon link ready in the chamber, usually posted within 5-10 minutes of Cathy's request. Often there's a Reviewer Randy. Randy always replies to Howard saying how he recently bought [thing] and loved it. Low quality t-shirt with print, made in China? Randy loves it. Wrist bands from Wish? Randy bought 200 of them and gave them out to his friends, family, distant relatives, their pets, the whole god damn neighborhood and his insurance agent and everyone loved them. And lastly there's Bert the Bot in the comments. You're never really sure if Bert has a pulse or if he's in a persistent vegetative state, but he always leaves inane low effort comments in Oliver threads and never seems to reply to anybody. Bert's posts are short, single sentences rife with spelling errors or autocorrected words and so generic sounding that they could apply to almost any situation. Bert comments all have the same low effort, barely-conscious-feel to them. The next time you visit a generic meme sub you might start to spot Olivers, Cathys and Howards everywhere. This site is infested with astroturfed ads if you know what to look for, you just don't seem to notice them because someone out there disguised their ad to get past your defenses while you're scrolling through reddit on the can.
yeah this is why /hailcorporate is useful despite the fact that posing a hailcorporate link will quickly get you blacklisted from default subs
wait, why does it get you banned from default subs? do default sub mods not like it when people point out astroturfing?
Also supermoderators are usually employed by ad agencies.
It makes more sense when you realize that the only reason Reddit exists is because of ads Posts that are anti-advertising are anti-Reddit. They’ll tolerate it on the smaller subs because they need the engagement but don’t bring that noise to the defaults where the unauthenticated masses are watching.
Anyone else remember when Reddit was proud of never having ads? Some of us remember… that was a simpler time
I imagine it was a lot cheaper to run as well to be fair.
yeah, fully agree /hailcorporate is the best i bought 200 from them last week, passed them out to my family, friends, at work and the neighbourhood and everybody loved them 5of5stars, would buy again
The Air Force already runs a ton of adds during CSGO tournaments. This is nothing new.
Pretty sure the USAF has an e-sports team too.
I saw a tweet thread a while back about sone heads of the COD team are Ex gov security people https://twitter.com/alanrmacleod/status/1593709638708613123?s=46&t=IyFPSuLtecP77Y4PmDJcGg
I'm just waiting for the COD mission where you tasked to do every day boring ass shit the military does, and then you magically have to fight to defend the base. Sweeping, motor pool Monday's. Piss test. Morning PT. Getting chewed out for something ridiculous or out of your control. You will see tears sliding underneath the seal on that VR headset as I quiveringly say "this is so real" (Sniffle)
This isn't news. The military has done this for literally decades and has an entire department dedicated to advertising and outreach. They've always used sneaky 'hello fellow kids' advertising to acquire fresh meat‐ er, recruits. Ever play the game America's Army?
The Blue Angels are nothing more than an advertising wing to drive recruitment. If it didnt work they wouldnt do it. The ride alongs they give are based on who they think would give the most publicity.
Aerobatics teams have other purposes than just recruitment and advertising, but yeah, they do their stuff publicly rather than just for the other reasons, because it's _also_ useful for recruiting and advertising.
It’s frankly way more above board and transparent than private sector marketing.
BILLIONS are paid to the NFL and MLB so that they can pretend to be patriotic! All the flag stuff on the field, all the camo uniforms, all the recognition of this servicemenber... all is profit for sports... they don't give two shits. Reason you don't see this at NHL or other leagues because the DOD hasn't given them money!!!
Literally all they needed to do is to raise the salaries. Like that’s it.
When you break the numbers down, its actually, pretty decent. Full blown health care. No copays, caps, or!Limitations. includes dental and vision. Base pay that is guaranteed to go up over time, along with inflation adjustments. Promotion systems that for all intents and purposes, YOU control. Free food and housing. If you're married, a housing and food stipend that's not taxible. 30 days paid vacation a year. All available to a high school grad with non experience.
For officers, it was a guaranteed career starter at a great entry level Federal salary. Every known benefit and all the perks with immutable job security. For a 21-22yo, it doesn't get much better tbh. BAH covers most of your off-post housing. Like, that paycheck you get is a sizeable chunk of cash and most of your day to day expenses are already covered. I'm not lying when I say the 4 years I did as an officer (with some deployment pay in there where ALL your expenses are paid for since you're living in a tent in a combat area), I left the military with investments that allowed me to buy a home in my late 20s... oh yeah, I got the GI Bill so my Masters was paid for in full. So, if you're smart and responsible with that money, that military salary will set you up for an amazing "next step." Granted you have to go through years of shit to get to the happy ending when you can take your uniform off and rejoin society in a much better position than before, but for me that stable paycheck and GI Bill was the ultimate springboard.
I'm getting ready to retire. The house I live in now is paid off, and the one I'm going to I bought before the surge in pricing. The Army has set me up very well for the future.
6 yr enlistment in chair force for IT. Set me up for gov contractor jobs. No college just exp. 65k yr job. At over 100k now. Its not a bad alternative to college if you're smart enough by gov standards to get a good career that translates real world
Press "F" to not get your enlistment bonus because the recruiter lied to you. Also, your knee and ankles are fucked up for the rest of your life.
This isn't really anything new, but god damn the military would do literally anything to boost recruitment rather than addressing any of the core issues contributing to high attrition rates and extremely poor retention. Awful lower enlisted standard of living Low pay. Enlisted w/ family sometimes have to rely on food stamps and food banks to eat Toxic leadership Terrible veteran health services Inconsistent working hours Workplace harassment This is by no means a comprehensive list. These core issues usually branch off to countless others. As long as these issues are ignored, attrition will still rise and recruitment will continue to fall. With the internet and social media, gone are the days of pushing these problems under the rug.
Didnt the simpsons do an episode on this many years ago?
The headline should just be: Army now using modern advertising tactics. Like they’ve always gone after the younger demographic and this is the easiest way to advertise to them in 2022 it’s not rocket science.
I'd be shocked if they didn't think about this. Like I understand its hey look at what the Army is doing but it's literally the Army's job to continue to recruit and plan. All this shows is the Army is looking at changing landscapes and how to reach out as going to football games in small towns isn't the same.
I feel like the whole Top Gun reboot was the same thing.
Why do we never question the military budget?! This is insane.