Osama bin Fragged: a review of terrorist propaganda games

While I can't claim to be a great scholar or art critic or movie buff or historian, there's one appeal to credibility that I can make: I've played a ton of video games. On countless systems and across countless genres, I've played pretty much everything there is to play, including some of the serious games that Andrew Webster described in yesterday's article. But in my lengthy gaming career, the one type of game that I'd never dabbled in was the "terrorist propaganda" genre. I'd long heard stories about evil terrorist games designed to indoctrinate youth with evil terrorist agendas, but I'd never actually played such titles. Indeed, it seems that few game reviewers have.

The more I thought about it, the more I began to realize that no good game reviewer could claim to have a total, all-encompassing knowledge of gaming without dabbling in every possible form. So, I began my quest to perfect my game reviewer resume: I would search out and review terrorism games. Are any of these "horrific, bone-chilling" games fun? How do they stack up against their non-terrorist competitors? Are any of these games worth playing? And, most importantly, can I play such games and emerge with my patriotism still intact? (Who am I kidding, eh... I'm Canadian!)

These were the questions I sought to answer, and in this article, I give you the results of my experiment: a review of two representative terrorist propaganda games.

Night of Bush Capturing

Night of Bush Capturing is the grand-daddy of the propaganda games that can be found readily on the internet. Relatively speaking, the production values are high, and there's a surprising amount of content that appears to be designed specifically to provide a somewhat compelling gameplay experience wrapped in an anti-US message. In fact, when compared to its contemporaries, NOBC, or as it's more popularly referred to, Quest For Bush, could nearly pass for a retail release.

Surprisingly, Quest For Bush isn't the worst game ever made. Sorry, Superman 64.

Developed by an independent "studio" called the Global Islamic Media Front, Quest For Bush attempts to fit into an already-stuffed first-person shooter genre by introducing a novel, anti-American twist. The game picks up where its "predecessor" and full stateside retail release, Quest For Saddam, left off. While the Americans have managed to finish off Saddam, the Islamic forces have discerned the location of President Bush in a secret hideout deep within the desert and have begun a campaign to eliminate him.

The game revolves around the exploits of a single Islamic soldier on the hunt for Bush. Through the course of the seven-mission campaign, players will be required to fight against elite American soldiers, solve some pretty grueling puzzles, fend off the natural enemies of the desert, and eventually, confront US President George W. Bush himself.

Quest For Bush takes the increasingly-complicated aesthetic of today's first-person shooter (FPS) games and throws them out the window for a decidedly more minimalist and natural feel. At its core, the game abstracts the FPS genre back to its basics: you have a gun and you have an enemy, and the speed of your mouse click is what separates you from victory or defeat.

Weapon selection is relatively limited. There are no grenades or special items, but the trademark weapon archetypes of any normal retail FPS are present. You'll start the game with a basic assault rifle, but eventually you'll be able to procure a shotgun, a chaingun, and a grenade launcher. And, should your weapons fail you, you'll be able to resort to your own strength by attacking enemies with your feet—which looks completely ridiculous, as you don't kick forward so much as you swing your foot side to side, as evident in the first gameplay video.

You really won't need a huge arsenal, though, as the game rarely throws up anything other than the most tiresome of genre norms. Exploding barrels to blow up strategically-placed enemy encampments? Check. Relentless "find the blue key" fetch quests to get from area to area? Check. Confusing, maze-like levels with numerous enemies and absolutely no health packs? Check. In terms of level design, Quest For Bush is basically a beginner's guide to worn out first-person shooter clichés.

Not helping the already limited amount of play value are the poorly-implemented difficulty settings, which offer little in the way of replayability. Players can choose to engage the infidels on novice, intermediate, or advanced, but the differences between the difficulty levels are pretty basic. True to form with most generic FPS games, the only changes made across difficulties are the amount of damage taken by the player and the accuracy of the artificial intelligence. The limited attack and position routines of the game's AI do little to help it stand out in an age of titles like F.E.A.R. and Crysis, let alone Half-Life and Doom 3.

But it gets worse. Just wait until you see the videos I captured.