War is a terrible thing -- a malignant disease, as novelist Martha Gellhorn once put it -- but in our boyhood years, we reveled in anything that approximated the battles and bloodshed. When we weren't drafting our G.I. Joes into military service, we were conducting mock battles with our friends (pew pew) or drawing preposterous weapons with a wide array of arbitrary lasers, scopes, and barrels.
This week's edition of Promotional Consideration takes a look at several playful commercials for three war-themed Nintendo DS games. Though war can be hell, you wouldn't know it from how these titles are advertised! Grab your rifle and report for duty past the post break.
The new program is called STAP-BOY (space-time adaptive processing) and the goal is to turn "any Soldier, any Marine [into] an advanced sensor platform." To do this, the military is looking to take "commercial Graphics Processor Unit (GPU) hardware and software of the type currently used for fast geometry computations in hand-held electronic games like Nintendo's GAME BOY," gifting soldiers in the field with a "technique that enhances the ability of radars to detect targets that might otherwise be obscured." Right now, this can only be done by the most advanced of supercomputers.
The DS plays games. It is the prime directive. Yet, the budding engineers inside us call for creative ways to use said device. There are simple things: using the twin suns also called screens to illuminate dark areas, or as a convenient excuse to ignore that annoying dude on the bus. Sorry, man, I'm busy being a male cheerleader.
