Top credits Director Samuel Gault. See more at IMDbPro. Photos Add photo. Top cast Edit. Rami Hilmi Simon as Simon. Vanessa Hingston Theresa as Theresa. Paul Lancaster Andrew as Andrew. Alex Mileman Martin as Martin. Patrick Regis Tony as Tony. Samuel Gault. Storyline Edit. Add content advisory.
User reviews Be the first to review. Details Edit. Release date September 5, United Kingdom. United Kingdom. London, England, UK. Box office Edit. A lot of people knew me. Muramoto, 21, looks up at Wentworth with a grin of affirmation. You were own -ness. Knife them, club them, blow them apart with a shotgun, set them afire, vaporize them with a shoulder-launched missile, drill them through the head with a sniper rifle—the choice is yours. Depending on the game, blood will spray, mist or spout.
Sometimes your kills collapse in crumpled heaps, clutching their throats and twitching convincingly. Sometimes they cry in pain with human voices. Their bodies lay there for a while so you can feed off them if necessary, restoring your own health. Some psychologists and parents worry that such games are desensitizing a large, impressionable segment of the population to violence and teaching them the wrong things.
But that depends on your point of view. If, like the U. First-person shooters originally were designed as contests between man and machine, but, as with many things, the advent of high-speed Internet connections changed that. Now, from the privacy of your home, you can take on players the world over.
Best of all, it costs nothing to play other than the initial price of the game. It is endless war, day or night. On a recent Wednesday morning, more than 29, servers were hosting games of Counter-Strike , and more than 66, people were playing. For gamers, the attraction of online play is obvious. Your immediate surroundings vanish. Crickets chirp, bushes rustle, bullets whiz by your head and shower you with chips of concrete.
Shell casings clatter to the floor. Mortars crump in the distance, and grenades send up gouts of rock and dirt. Yet it is oddly exhilarating. Games are probably the purest example yet of the Internet melding with reality.
Top Counter-Strike teams and top players have developed cult followings, and with that has come fame and fortune. Management teams have sprung up to develop new talent, and cash tournaments are commonplace. Team 3D, arguably the best clan in the United States, boasts sponsorships from Subway, Hewlett Packard, Nvidia which makes graphics processors and Sennheiser which makes audio equipment. Fatal1ty, a legendary Counter-Strike gamer, also has a clothing line and a Fatal1ty-brand computer motherboard coming out.
For thousands of Counter-Strike players, the game quite literally has become their life. The only way to win this game is as a team. Stanford University psychology professor B. To master our world and get better at stuff. Video games, in dishing out rewards, can convey to people that their competency is growing, you can get better at something second by second. But what is it kids are getting better at when they play first-person shooters, hour after hour?
But the U. As the number of people playing Counter-Strike soared into the millions, the U. Army could only watch wistfully. For years, Army recruiters had diligently pursued the very same demographic— middle-class teenage males—with dwindling success. In late , after missing their recruiting goals that year, Army officials got together with the civilian directors of a Navy think tank at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey to discuss ways of luring computer gamers into the military.
Casey Wardynski, a military economist who came up with the idea for an official Army computer game. What are your tools? What is your facility in doing that? What is your level of comfort? How much load can you bear? Kids who are comfortable with that are going to be real comfortable … with the Army of the future. More importantly, when young Americans enter the Army, they increasingly will find that key information will be conveyed via computer video displays akin to the graphical interfaces found in games.
With the vast funding of the U. It was released in digital double surround sound, which few games are. The gaming world gasped and then cheered. Plus, it was free—downloadable from the Internet at www. The game and its distribution system were difficult by design, Zyda said.
First, they would have to be smart enough to download the game off the Internet. To attract those kinds of people, that was the mission. The game does a good job separating the wheat from the chaff. Once inside the game, it gets no easier. The virtual battlefield is enormous, and your enemy is often hidden under cover of darkness. There are now more than 4 million registered users, more than half of whom have completed weapons training and gone online to play, making it the fourth most-played online shooter.
But not everyone saw the game as a good thing. He was deluged with angry e-mail and allegedly received death threats. You are the latest guinea pigs. Thompson was more right than he knew.
The other purpose, aptitude testing of potential recruits, has gotten virtually no publicity. But the creator of the popular AAO Tracker system, a year-old German computer engineer, quit in disgust in August after learning that the Army was rolling out its own statistics tracker for the game. As far as what we can track, that is really up to what we want to track, as every single event in the game can be recorded and logged.
From every shot fired to every objective taken. It simply becomes a matter of which events we want to parse out. Why would the Army spend tax dollars tracking and collecting arcane statistics about the players of its game? And it was designed that way from the start. I had people tell me the researcher had done PowerPoint presentations and research papers on it, but I was never able to see any of that, and I asked to see it.
Wardynski confirmed that the aptitude testing research had been successful. Recently, an updated version of the game called Special Forces was released, and there was a reason why that particular theme was chosen—one that had little to do with entertainment value. Paolo Banzon is a harried man. He looks around the Yobags Internet Cafe in Hayward, where he works as a technical engineer, taking in the sight of dozens of milling teenagers, most of them Asian, many of them wearing backpacks, shorts, chains and expensive tennis shoes.
Banzon has been running from table to table, answering questions about unacceptable frame rates and lagging processor speeds, rebooting computers, loading and unloading drivers.
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