A good yarner is hard to find, especially one that helps to transcend the typical game experience, you’re very lucky ^__^

We have ANZAC day as a public holiday down here, it sounds much like your memorial day, though I have to say it hasn’t been overly commercialized. Though for many it is just a day off, a crapload of people do line up in the city for the ANZAC day parade.

Call of Duty 2 does not go out of its way to glorify nor condemn war. Some war games, Shellshock: Nam ‘67 comes to mind, really display the brutality of war. While others, BF2, remove most all of the controversial subject matter (as removed as it can be from a game about shooting people). Call of Duty 2 hits in the middle. The gore is there but not entirely realistic (puffs of blood and wounded soldiers but never dismemberment or innerds). However, it maintains some striking moments usually involving the death of a commrad. People get chewed up by machine guns. You’ll be hunkered down next to a friend and a sharp crack later he’s sprawled out on the ground, dead.

The best accuracy comes from the series’ trademark “part of something more” feel. So many friends and so many enemies make up the battles and you rarely feel like a “super soldier” that takes on the German war machine alone. The damage effects really help to make you quite afraid of enemy fire. The sound and screen effects are quite unpleasant and you start to breath heavily and such. The shellshock from a grenade or artillery is also quite disorienting.

At the beginning of the beach assault you get nearly taken out by a shell and fall to the sand. You watch the chaos from a dazed state with the audio sounding muffled and far away. A soldier carrying a flame throwing gets pegged and the pack explodes spreading fire onto him and those close to him. Its partially gruesome but never excessive.

As for realistic war games, you see some people complaining that it glorifies wars (war films have the same problem). But conversely it can surely be argued that it teaches younger people about wars through a medium that they understand, and one that they use. From what you say of the game, it seems rather brutal, and in that way it can seem like it is not glorifying tha war, but showing it ‘like it was’ (proved by the way your father could predict what was about to happen).

Games like this encourage people to become more interested in history, and so they may end up looking up for more information about the battle, and the overall context of it. And that for me, as a history buff, is a good thing.