Game Review: Take Kerry's Swift Boat for a Nonpolitical Spin [and get a Silver Star]

SENATOR JOHN KERRY'S Vietnam War record has been a focus of the presidential campaign for weeks. For a New York company that produces reality-based video games, that makes the topic ripe for a jump from politics to pixels.

The company, Kuma Reality Games, which specializes in recreating military encounters, is making one of Mr. Kerry's Swift boat missions the situation for a game. It says that the game is intended to entertain and to inform, and that it is nonpartisan.

Armed with a computer keyboard, players are invited to enter an interactive simulation of Viet Cong ambushes on a small tributary of the Bay Hap River in the Mekong Delta.

The company says the details - complete with the fire of automatic weapons and the exploding of rocket-propelled grenades - are based on the Navy's records of an encounter on Feb. 28, 1969, for which a young Lieutenant Kerry was awarded the Silver Star. The game, scheduled to go online late this month, is primarily designed to be played from a digital Lieutenant Kerry's point of view, its creators say.

"Our goal is not to give you a jungle setting where you can tear around, but to show you - at least give you a general sense of what happened," Kuma's chief executive, Keith Halper, said of the Kerry mission, one in a series of game missions called Freedom's Heroes.

Players must accomplish various goals in the game, ensuring that even with improvisation, gameplay will stick fairly closely to the battle's official chronology, he said.

In that chronology, Lieutenant Kerry's flotilla of three Swift boats was ambushed while making a sweep of the area. The boats turn and head directly into the attack. Troops leave the boats and battle enemy fighters on the shore.

Similarly, Lieutenant Kerry orders his boat and another upstream into another ambush. The boats speed into the ambush, according to the game brief. Lieutenant Kerry leaps from his boat and chases a Viet Cong fighter, killing him and finding a B-40 launcher nearby.

Mr. Halper said he had long thought that revisiting Mr. Kerry's Vietnam War experience would be a logical effort for the company, which will offer 21 other military missions, many set in Afghanistan and Iraq, by the time the Kerry game is available. (One of the games portrays the capture of Saddam Hussein.)

It was after he watched Senator Kerry speak before the Democratic National Convention in Boston in July, Mr. Halper said, that he decided that it was "obvious and timely" for the company to do a Kerry Vietnam game.

But not long after that, a group of Vietnam veterans bought television time in an attempt to discredit Mr. Kerry's war record. Sarah Anderson, Kuma's vice president for marketing and sales, said the company would take into account the dissenting views, especially those by a Republican-linked advocacy group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, by noting them in background notes, a video report and links to news articles, broadcasts and related Web sites.

"We will present the controversy and different perspectives on it in the video news show that will accompany the mission," she added. "We will allow the user to play the game to determine for themselves what they think happened."

Kuma games are sold online (kumagames.com) through a $10 monthly subscription, which gives players access to the Kuma mission library and three new missions or episodes each month. The games require computers that have high-speed Internet connections, Microsoft Windows 98 or later and at least a 64-megabyte graphics card. Unlike typical video games that, like movies, take years to make, Kuma games are created more like episodic television shows: very quickly, Mr. Halper said. To help accomplish this, he said, his teams create and reuse digital models of places and figures that are in the news in anticipation of coming missions.

Mr. Halper said Kuma had created a digital model of Osama bin Laden, possibly for a mission ending in his capture or death. "We're waiting," he said.

And Republicans may soon have their turn to be at the center of the company's video game exploits. Mr. Halper said possible missions in the Freedom's Heroes series include the World War II heroics of former Senator Bob Dole and Senator John McCain's Vietnam combat and capture.

REPLAY - Its maker says a new game is based on the Navy's records of an encounter on Feb. 28, 1969,
for which Senator John Kerry was awarded the Silver Star.

[Ed. Note: You can't make this stuff up. It's the gift that keeps on giving.]

See also NAVY SECRETARY RECEIVES ADDITIONAL QUESTIONS OVER KERRY’S SILVER STAR:
Supplemental Filing By Watchdog Details Serious Problems With Kerry’s Records --
Possible Attempt to “Paper Over” Unauthorized Silver Star
(Source: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1210852/posts)

And in a staggering display of historical realism, the game automatically ends after your player's health drops to 97%. The average player can usually finish the game in under 4 minutes.

And in a staggering display of historical realism, the game automatically ends after your player's health drops to 97%.

Is each Purple Heart received worth 1 health point? Get 3 and the game ends.

Is each Purple Heart received worth 1 health point? Get 3 and the game ends.

Yes! The player can earn a Purple Heart each time their health drops by 1%. This makes playing the game especially hazardous, as players can get hit by mortal shrapnel/burning rice/flying dogs, or even pick up splinters from the boat's deck.

The first 1,000 people to purchase this game will also get a copy of McHale's Navy, Season 1 on DVD.

Figures. Kerry looks more lifelike as a collection of polygons.

Like many popular "flight school" games, this one comes with a "film room" feature that allows you to replay completed missions and watch the action from multiple angles. With this game, however, your player can actually "enter" the mission footage as it's played back and edit/add/create new scenes of your character interacting with the footage if you wish. The improved mission film is automatically saved as part of your "saved game" files every time you leave the film room.

Even though the game hasn't been released yet, a downloadable user-created add-on level is already generating quite an advance buzz...

Water Taxi Attack on Boston Harbor

Thanks for your great graphics (courtesy, Bootyist Monk)! I hadn't seen his August 2 post on FR, but the timing of this Times article was superb.

The US Navy just released another document under FOIA that supports the Swift boat vets claim that Kerry received a Silver Star without "coming under intense automatic weapons and small arms fire from an entrenched enemy" -- which turned out to be a lone wounded Viet teenager Kerry chased into the jungle and summarily executed.

The SBVT version is confirmed in the film "Brothers in Arms" which was intended to assist Kerry in building a heroic Vietnam image.

I'm amazed the Kerry Campaign hasn't shutdown all these games and films. (He must not have the power the Kennedys had.) With help like this, Kerry needs no opposition to lose the election.

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