The Air Force once injected an unsolved, 1000-year-old mathematical puzzle written in another language into the game Prometheus, and an unemployed college dropout genius who lived with his mom solved it, got recruited to participate in a highly classified mission to the planet P4X-351 where he, a crew of Air Force officers and personnel, and a few civilian scientists ended up being forced to evacuate due to an impending planet-wide explosion (as well as an aerial assault by a band of space pirates) by jumping through a stable wormhole whose terminus was aboard the starship Destiny - an abandoned scientific vessel launched one million years prior by a species known as The Ancients who had planned to use it to travel to the center of the known universe.
I heard on a podcast a long time ago that the Army considered it one of their most successful recruiting tools. Not because it brought in more recruits, but because fewer recruits dropped out, apparently because playing the game led to fewer surprises after joining.
Til
Didn’t expect so much hate for this game… In terms of simulations, in 2002, the original game was light years ahead of its time. They did a lot of things right that it took the more popular mil sims years to get correct. I’d go as far as to argue it is one of the most realistic squad-based tactical shooters of all time.
I’ll suggest that there hasn’t been anything like it. I’ve tried a couple that were supposed to be more realistic mil-sim and not just FPS run-‘n-gun, but they don’t hold a candle to AA.
It being that realistic made it a terrible choice for me.
So I did all of the medical training that had on there, which I did learn stuff from but also found out that I should never actually work in the medical field.
But because it didn’t easily identify friend from foe, I kept killing my own team. Not on purpose I was just really bad at identifying friend from foe and if I saw it moved I killed it.
Otherwise it was a solid game. All the issues I had with it were with me.
It was really good but they found other recruiting methods more effective
Had big vans parked on the UT Campus lawn paid for with Pentagon money, where you could play the game right next to a real live military recruiter.
I like to think about this while I’m looking at videos of Palestinian student protesters getting maced, tackled, and dragged away by campus security.
I unintentionally TKed people on the bridge map constantly. It was a fun game though.
To be fair that’s because so many people never bothered to learn the suppression angles. So they ran right through streams of tracers. Repeatedly. Then blamed the machine gunners for not being riflemen and charging into knife range.
I played the crap out of AA Proving grounds. Was a ton of fun! Had a bunch of shit “join the army” bs in it, which I doubt worked on anyone with a few brain cells, but the game was great.
🎶Yvan eht nioj🎶
I prefer the superliminal messaging, personally.
HEY YOU, JOIN THE NAVY!
Superliminal is why I joined the Navy.
Pretty sure I got a copy from the army recruiter at my school. It ran slow as shit on my parents ’ janky ass Gateway, so I never got to really play it.
Yep, pretty damn messed up. They put out like 3 or 4 of them before I guess enough people complained about the overt propaganda targeting minors
It was a legitimately good completely free multiplayer FPS game. I was into it for a while ages ago, and it was quite fun.
I genuinely doubt it actually inspired a remotely meaningful number of people to actually join the army, though.
Probably the opposite. Who wants to do a job where you die the first hour on the job?
lol yeah the learning curve was pretty steep, because for a very long time there were no heal mechanics, so if someone winged you decently without outright killing you, you were gonna have serious trouble contributing to the round.
I recall playing the tutorial. Never went online. Dial up sucked. Interesting tidbit, if you shoot your drill instructor at the range you’re dropped into a prison cell at Fort Leavenworth. All you can do from that point is listen to somebody whistling and drag a tin cup across your cell bars.
Wait…can you quit to main menu?
No, no, they come to your home and take you to the prison. That’s not part of the game.
Ooooooh. Like the real game is escaping Guantanamo
I definitely played this in high school. Never joined the military
Played this a lot. My favorite map is bridge.
This game and the OG Planetside both taught me the simple joys of fighting for/on a bridge.
You can have a huge overworld, you can have an intricate map with all the lanes and passageways you want, but, in the end, the (much, much older) children yearn for the bridge.
Yes the map is beautiful but the kill lines here at the bridge are
when_the_light_hits_the_hills.pacha
Same.
Something soo satisfying about shooting snipers who thought you should stick the barrel out if the upstairs windows
