First of I am gonna jump up and down a bit crying about it not coming to PC. Ok all done.
Next: Why are people so afraid of controversial games? In this specific case we only have a vague outline and a name. So political commentary, critical questioning and artistic depiction is not allowed for things that are too close to home or too terrifying?
"Six days in Fallujah" was cancelled because of this. It was too fresh or it was unpatriotic or whatever it was they said. I say these are copouts. Thinly veiled attempts to not dealing with the hard questions and truths of our time. Historie has a tendency to repeat itself if we indeed do not deal with them. There is also this thing where people have this thing where we have to honor the troops, the heroic dead and so forth. I agree. But lets not honor them by brushing aside what happened. We need to know and understand how, why and for what they died even if knowing makes us uncomfortable, because in knowing we show that we care. It is very easy to honor a dead soldier when all you know is they died for their country while defending freedom. It gets somewhat harder when you know they died from friendly fire or from some mistake. Only when we know the concequences of what sending people into battle really means can we truelly honor them, otherwise our feeble cheers are only so much hot air.
And that brings us back to the cartel. Here we again are faced with a hot button issue. The are still open wounds. But those wounds will only fester, to continue the imagery, if we do not treat them. just leaving these events go unscrutinized is not the answer. I will say that people are perfectly entitled to be worried I might suggest that people give the creativ minds the benefit of the doubt expecially seeing the quality of the latest game in the series. A truelly beautiful story about good versus evil, innocence lost and found, temptation and sacrifice.
Now on to another point: The glorification of the criminal lifestyle. To be quite honest I can't come up with one game of the top of my head that gloryfies criminal life. I can mention games the parodies criminal behavior and social structure but these are as I say parodies and not to be take seriously by anyone and kids know this (saying anything else is frankly insulting to chldren if you ask me). I can also come up with plenty of games with strong lead characters that seem to enjoy the criminal life but invariable the brutality of the criminal and the horrendous sacrifices that they are called on to make was enough to make me turn to a life of lawfulness. In case people were wondering I was thinking of GTA 3 and all its follow ups for the first catagory with a bit of saints row 2 sprinkled in, for the first catagory and GTA 4, Kane and Lynch and interestingly also saints row 2, for the second catagory. There is also a 3rd catagory that you might call: "Totally over the Top".
It seems to me that it is a general missconception that if a game allows you to do certain moraly wrong things it is implicitly glorifying them. A good example of that I mean is GTA 4 (I really like this game) where you can pick up prostitute, drive to a secluded spot and get down to business. There however is nothing glorious about it. In fact every time you do it Belic says something derogative about himself.
So to sum up: Stop being afraid of every little thing. Stop sweeping your controversies under the rug but instead deal with them in a mature way. This is usually done by shining a bright (or not so bright) light on the issue and then examining it with an open mind. For case studies I suggest watching the movies: "Children of Men" and "V for Vendetta".
