Tom Clancy Reality

Ok - I am not a big gamer, but I appreciate the ability to walk around and blast 3rd-world uglies and space aliens with little regard for decorum or civility.

And truly the closest I'll probably ever come to a real flamethrower is in a WWII-themed "Call of Duty"-esqe game.

However, as a reformed news hound as well, I thought this was pretty interesting . . .

Georgia-Russia conflict predicted in 2001 video game
Life imitates Tom Clancy

Recent news coverage of the worrying ground war between Russia and Georgia could well leave gamers with a sense of deja vu.

The South Ossetia war, which began on August 7, bears a close resemblance to events portrayed in the 2001 Xbox and Playstation 2 game "Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon," the first level of which takes place against the backdrop of a struggle between Georgian rebel forces and the legitimate Georgian government in the South Ossetian region.

Ghost Recon's plot follows these skirmishes with a full-scale Russian invasion of the region, a subsequent evacuation of US forces, and ultimately the fall of the Georgian government. Ghost Recon almost got the timescale right, too: the game's imaginary events begin in April 2008, just a few months before the real war kicked off.

If Ghost Recon's uncanny trend continues, we can expect the South Ossetia conflict to culminate in a dramatic assault on Red Square and the Kremlin by NATO troops -- spearheaded by an elite US special forces team under the control of a pimply fourteen-year-old with a joypad. Considering that the most recent game in the Ghost Recon series climaxes with an oh-so-narrowly-averted terrorist nuclear strike on the US, we hope the predictive power of the game runs out. Soon.

Too bad life can't imitate a game like Tomb Raider . . .

Oh wait . . . maybe it has. :)