A descent documentary on the Korean war that seems to have been made while the conflict was still ongoing or just after the shooting had ended. All footage is in Black & White with only limited repeat sections here and there.This looks to have been made for propaganda purposes a bit, but its NOWHERE near as slanted as some WWII series'. The biggest handup to me was the 'over' concern for civilians several times during the film.
Once or twice is ok, but 3-4 times gets a bit old.The best footage to me was MacArthurs fairwell speach and it actually touches the heart to hear it. I also let my father watch this film as he is a Korean War vet and even he said it was a pretty fair rendition although he did say that the mountains he had to fight over were a whole lot higher than the ones depicted in the footage;).
When it comes to the Korean War (1950-53) the that I complained about here previously persists. Unlike World War II, the Korean War simply hasn’t been a popular setting for games or film. The reasons for this are open to speculation; my own view is that it’s much tougher to map the sides of the conflict onto simplified notions of 'good guys' and 'bad guys,' and that the west runs into difficult moral territory when we start talking about how the fighting came to a provisional close. Korea was a difficult, brutal, and depressing war, and the lack of a clear-cut resolution makes it unattractive as a source of American myth-creation.All that to say this: I’ve decided to cheat heavily in creating this list. The selection of actual Korean War games is small enough that it’s hard enough to even create a list of them that are playable on modern machines, much less a list of 'the best' of those.
Therefore, I’m expanding my scope to include a few categories that wouldn’t otherwise be considered. These are:. Games about the Cold War, as long as these actually include the Korean War somehow, and. Korean War mods and user-created scenarios for relatively well-known strategy and wargames.Preliminary throat-clearing out of the way, it’s time to strap in.
We’re in for a bumpy ride. Reader Recommendation.Theatre of War 3: KoreaPublisher: 1C CompanyReleased: March 24, 2011Tags: Strategy, Cold War, RTSPurchase:Right away, I’ll have to qualify my recommendation here.
While 1C Company has made some very nearly excellent real-time strategy wargames - particularly the Assault Squad series - Theatre of War 3 can’t honestly be counted among the best of them. AI ranges from fiddly to terrible, the “dynamic” campaigns aren’t actually very interesting, and it’s riddled with the jankiness that even newer 1C titles haven’t been able to rid themselves of completely.That said, Theatre of War 3 provides one of the vanishingly few dedicated, out-of-the-box Korean War strategy experiences available, and it added some key innovations to the 1C formula.
The campaigns were non-linear and changed based on your performance and decisions, and it adopted a more squad-focused control scheme, saving you from having to manage each individual soldier as in the first Men of War. Theatre of War 3 also adds some of the important new hardware of the time, like transport helicopters, new artillery pieces, and jets. Libreoffice database example. I’ve been particularly impressed with the terrain, which features steep Korean mountain ranges and rural architecture that set it apart from 1C’s WWII games.You’ll have to be pretty forgiving with this one, particularly if you’ve gotten used to the new-fangled conveniences of Assault Squad 2, but as Korean War games go, this is one of the most focused and modern, sadly enough. MiG AlleyPublisher: Empire InteractiveReleased: November 30, 1999Tags: Flight sim, Korean WarPurchase: Used CD-ROM, viaThe late ‘90s saw several ambitious flight sims take on the Korean War: Virgin Group’s Sabre Ace: Conflict Over Korea and Rowan Software’s response, MiG Alley two years later. It was the latter game that really shone, though, with a healthy selection of aircraft, a very good flight model for its time, and not one but five dynamic campaigns.
While the first four had you flying pre-planned scenarios, the fifth campaign depicts the 1951 Spring Offensive, and gives you operational control of more than a hundred aircraft involved.In terms of roster, MiG Alley was pretty generous: you had the F-84 Thunder jet, several variants of the F-86 Sabre, the P-51 Mustang, F-80 Shooting Star, and a couple MiG-15 variants as well. They all felt distinct in the air, too, thanks to the game’s attention to detail on the individual aircraft flight models.MiG Alley came out back when it was normal to pack 100+ page instruction manuals with flight simulators, and Rowan went the extra mile by further including not only a keyboard overlay and a booklet solely dedicated to explaining the difference between the F-86 and the MiG-15, but also a paper reproduction of an actual 1952 RAF briefing sheet.Unfortunately, despite glowing critical reviews, MiG Alley sold abysmally. Empire Interactive shut down Rowan Software in 2001, but the source code was released so that the player community could keep updating the game. The license for the source didn’t include textures or terrain details, but you can find the rest of it. John Tiller's Squad Battles - The Korean WarPublisher: John Tiller SoftwareReleased: No date providedTags: Turn-based strategy, classic wargamePurchase:Given his prodigious output and accompanying stature in the wargaming space, John Tiller’s games represent a glaring gap in my gaming history. Tiller has covered the Napoleonics to modern conflicts like the 1985 Fulda Gap and everything in between, so it should come as no surprise that he’s found time for an entry devoted to the Korean War.Squad Battles: The Korean War uses an older version of Tiller’s 40-meter hex system for turn-based battles focused on individual fireteams of five soldiers, and it includes three separate campaigns that span a total of 70 scenarios designed by “Wild” Bill Wilder. These cover the full shooting war period from 1950 to the 1953 ceasefire, and it includes units from Australia, Britain, Canada, China, and Turkey along with the United States, South Korea, and North Korea.Tiller’s games are in the classic wargame style and have very little in the way of modern frills.
But they’re surprisingly accessible and simple to pick up and play, while still affording enough room for a healthy level of tactical depth. The campaigns follow individual officers and their units as they’re carried along in the see-saw fighting back and forth across the 38 th Parallel, and while the presentation is a bit Spartan, Tiller Software provides additional color with historical flavor text and a wide variety of accurate missions.Tiller returned to the Korean peninsula for a hypothetical modern conflict with. Steel Panthers II: Modern BattlesPublisher: Mindscape Inc.Released: 1996Tags: Turn-based, top down, historicPurchase: The free and enhanced version, winSPMBT is available fromI regret the fact that I missed out on the Steel Panthers games back when they were fresh - my interest in tanks around that time was largely eaten up by a ridiculous little sci-fi game called Command & Conquer. But even though I skipped over SSI’s hex-based armor classics at the time, their influence can still be felt today. Matrix Games bought the rights to Steel Panthers and released Steel Panthers: World at War in 2000, and the Strategic Simulations DNA runs through modern titles like Order of Battle.Steel Panthers II: Modern Battles covers 20th century conflict from 1950-2000, and it includes several Korean War scenarios. The Battle of Chongju is represented, there are two scenarios for the Battle of Chosin, and one each for Pork Chop Hill and Bunker Hill.For games that are now old enough to order their own cocktails, the Steel Panther games hold up surprisingly well, provided you’re willing to put up with the process of getting them running on or a similar emulator.Since this article was first published, I've been made aware of winSPMBT, a complete overhaul of a massive modding project for Steel Panthers II called Steel Panthers: Main Battle Tank.
Originally a standalone DOS application, winSPMBT updates the game for Windows environments (including supporting resolutions higher than 640x480), adds several new scenarios and a new campaign, and even reworks several game mechanics. It's, and you don't need any additional software to run it. Steel Panthers: MacArthur's War: Battles for KoreaPublisher: Strategic Studies GroupReleased: 1988Tags: Top down, turn based, historicPurchase: Play for free atThis one is notable for its wildly ambitious scope way back in 1988 - imagine, thirty years ago, the hardware we had available and the moxie it would have taken to try to make a fully-functioning tabletop wargame work on that.
MacArthur’s War: Battles for Korea pretty much pulls it off, recreating the cardboard counters and colorful maps of tabletop wargaming for Commodore 64.I didn’t play this at the time, since I was eight years old and was still trying to figure out how to play the dreadful Ghostbusters game that appeared on the Atari 2600. But fortunately, MacArthur’s War has been saved and made available by the Internet Archive, and you can play it right in your web browser, free of charge.I’ll confess I haven’t had much luck with it - I haven’t been able to turn up the original documentation, and the tinyscreen resolutions and dinky RAM chips of the era made abbreviations vital. That means it’s pretty tough to decipher what your commands are, or how things like turn order and combat resolution work.But just looking at the thing as a wargamer three full decades later, it’s impossible not to be impressed by MacArthur’s War, mysterious as it is. Units are grouped into historic regiments, you have accurate military symbols for infantry and armor divisions, and several historic scenarios to choose from.
It’s tremendously advanced for its time, and I’m keen to keep poking at it until I can figure out how it works. Twilight StrugglePublisher: Asmodee DigitalReleased: April 13, 2016Tags: Board game, strategy, simulation, Cold WarPurchase:, or the tabletop version viaThe Korean War was a bloody, horrible three-year conflict, but it wound up being just one of the many proxy wars that erupted at friction points between the two global superpowers who found themselves locked in the Cold War for most of the second half of the twentieth century. Twilight Struggle is a game about the nightmarishly complex web of relationships and the razor-thin balance that existed between the U.S.-led West and the U.S.S.R., and while very little of it deals with the Korean War as a conflict, it’s a fantastic game that provides some valuable context.The best way to play Twilight Struggle is with a friend, on a tabletop, but with the tabletop retailing for more than $100, the more affordable Steam version (or the even more affordable ) might be a good way to see if it’s up your alley. The digital version also serves as a perfect way to learn the game, and you’ll be able to drop straight into the traditional experience once you’ve played a couple games on the computer.There’s little I could add to what Matt Thrower has already written on Twilight Struggle, so I’ll point you to his, and to his discussion about the game with.
As Twilight Struggle is Matt’s favorite game, he’s welcome to do the heavy lifting on explaining how it works and why it’s good. But one element of Twilight Struggle that Matt highlights in both pieces is the game’s card draught system, which I think is relevant here. Both players draw cards and conceal them from each other, making Twilight Struggle a game about asymmetric information.
That’s something that traditional wargames don’t often do very well, but it’s arguably the most important driving element of the Cold War and abstracting it to a simple mechanic like a hand of cards is very clever indeed. User-created mods and scenariosIn the interest of time and space, I’ll go quickly through a few Korean War mods and scenarios available. Several total conversion projects focused on the Korean War have launched, but most of these have petered out before releasing a final version. But there are enough bits and pieces out there to get started.
It all depends on what you want to accomplish.If you own The Operational Art of War IV , you’ve got Korea as the setting for its starter scenario. It takes some doing, but scenarios built for previous TOAW titles, as well as Alternate Wars, can be converted to work in the latest software.
Matrix forums user CaptainKoloth found an Alternate Wars Operation Chromite scenario, recreating the landing at Incheon, and updated it for TOAW4,. It’s included in a massive pack of converted for use in TOAW3 available from The Operational Art of War Legacy Project, courtesy of Matrix forum user Ryan Crierie.You can also pick up a Korean War scenario by the creator of The Operational Art of War himself, Norm Koger. He published his scenario in 2002, and it's a 52-turn (one full year) battle between 239 Communist units and 174 United Nations forces. Koger built several interesting triggers into the scenario - for instance, if the UN drops airborne troops into either Soviet or Chinese territory, those countries will opt to intervene in Korea. 'Korean winters are harsh,' he adds in the description. 'Be prepared.' I can personally attest to the accuracy of this statement.For John Tiller’s Campaign Series, forums veteran Mike “Warhorse” Amos has a Korean War mod that he’s been updating for years, now in version 2.02.
You can find the download link.There are several Korean War mods for the Men of War series,but they’re all a bit half-baked in one way or another. You can try for the original Men of War, or for Assault Squad 2.
sic for Assault Squad has gotten a little attention on YouTube, but there’s very little to it and the project hasn’t been updated since 2012.ArmA 3 players are in pretty good shape here. There’s the by JackAttackJRMV.
Right now, it’s just adding U.S. Marines and North Korean Army factions and vehicles to the game, but he has a host of additional features on the 'planned' list, including ROK forces, PRC forces, a new map, plus the MiG-15 and F-86 fighters.
Jack recommends installing the by jarrad96, which adds period-accurate uniforms and gear. Both these mods require subscribing to several others in the Steam Workshop, but Steam will give you a handy list of links to go through whenever you’re missing any required components.
Of course, if you’re just browsing and don’t feel like installing several gigabytes worth of mods, you can use the (requires Apex) and pop on the while you fly around Altis in a Bell 47.And that about wraps things up for our list of Korean War games. Researching this piece, I found that other writers have been complaining about the lack of games - of any genre - dealing with the Korean War for the full 30 years represented here, and the situation is unlikely to change any time soon.If you have a favorite Korean War game, mod, or scenario that we've missed, please be sure to let us know in the comments.
There’s a throwaway gag in a classic episode of The Simpsons when, faced with the shocking possibility of increased funding for his school, Principal Skinner says one of the possibilities ahead of him is “history books that know how the Korean War turned out.” Like the show’s best jokes, this one worked on a couple levels: Americans have a terrible sense of history about the Korean War, so much so that most – including Skinner – don’t even realize that it.And who could really blame us? Our primary school history books tend to lose steam around the turn of the 20th century, and while World War II and Vietnam have gotten their sepia-toned, big-budget Hollywood treatment by Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, the Korean War’s biggest cultural impact has been M.A.S.H. For a conflict that was so important in shaping the geopolitics of the next half-century, there’s precious little collective consciousness in western countries about the brutal three-year proxy war between the United Nations and the post-WWII Comintern nations that played out over the 38th parallel that splits the Korean peninsula.This is a space that games – particularly wargames – could easily rush in to fill the void. And yet, games set during the Korean War are as uncommon as are feature films about the conflict (perhaps, you might think, there’s a connection of some kind). We’re lucky here at Wargamer to have some far-reaching archives that include contributions from past wargamer writers, who wrote about the Korean War quite a bit back around 2003:.Will Trotter wound up reviewing the first computer game I came across in my research for this article, Korea: Forgotten Conflict. I’d found it in a list created by the Giant Bomb community and was delighted to find that we’d covered it right here at The Wargamer.Unfortunately, Will despised the game so much that he could barely bring himself to describe what it’s like. Here’s one quote from his:I hated this game.Okay, there’s more:Korea: Forgotten Conflict is unique.
I can't think of any other game that has rubbed me the wrong way so quickly, induced in me such a sustained mood of foul distemper, or managed to antagonize me in so many ways, before I had even finished the first tutorial.This is even harder than. Alas, this is the extent of what I could unearth on the game, and Trotter's article is unfortunately incomplete due to past problems with the archive.It was around the time that Will was going through the clearly miserable process of reviewing this game that I was literally in Korea, as a “public affairs specialist” (think “Private Joker”) with the U.S.
Army’s 2nd Infantry Division. I’d finished college by that point, but had gone to my first duty assignment with only vague notions about Korea and why there were American military bases there to begin with. And if I’m completely honest, when I boarded the plane to cross the Pacific, the only idea I had about Korea was that it was “sort of close to Japan and Vietnam.”But I was quickly disabused of any Hollywood preconceptions as soon as I groggily staggered off the plane in Osan. Stepping onto the tarmac with my over-stuffed Army duffel, there was a tinge of earthy vinegar on the air, odd in the way it smells different when you walk into someone else’s home for the first time. The outskirts of high-tech, metropolitan Seoul rose in the distance, hugging steep hills and vanishing instantly into studiously-groomed farmlands. Hours later, I was on a bus to the city of Tongducheon, heading north of the capital and into the short but dramatic Korean mountains, which seem to stick like vicious granite teeth out of the otherwise gentle landscape.There’s a strong temptation to wax into memoir here, but suffice it to say that the year I spent in South Korea was educational.
At Camp Red Cloud, in Uijeongbu, I was less than an hour’s drive south of the 38th parallel and the demilitarized zone that separates the country from the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea. I got to work alongside ROK Army soldiers, called KATUSAs (Korean Augmentations to the US Army), and meet a few Koreans who had lived through some of the worst warfighting seen in the 20th century. Yu, a wizened Korean photographer who had worked extensively with 2nd ID for many years and had adopted the cursing perennially favored by GIs, was reticent when I asked him about a place near modern Tongducheon, just outside the back gate of Camp Hovey, called.“It’s a terrible place. Terrible,” he told me, and no more.Mr. Yu’s reluctance to talk about Tokori frightened me, and it turns out it was with good reason. Korea is a place where the ghosts outnumber the people.
Us Korea War Games
Korea is a people that is now two nations, torn apart and ultimately incinerated by the superpowers who remained standing among the ashes of World War II. And the two Koreas, north and south, rebuilt themselves with what they had along the lines of the now-well-established Cold War.The few games we have now that even reference Korea as a conflict zone are almost uniformly Cold War propaganda. I recently picked up Homefront: The Revolution, which is a modern “hyper-realist” fantasy in the Red Dawn mold that hilariously posits a DPRK takeover of the United States using North Korea as an absurdly-thin stand-in for China (in order to make the game saleable in foreign markets). Eugen’s fairly-excellent Wargame series includes Red Dragon, which imagines a modern Korean War sparking due to student riots over a “democratic” junta control handover in the South in 1987. As in the actual war, the Red Dragon scenario imagines a massive invasion by North Korea, pushing ROK forces back to the Busan “punch bowl,” but it never gives us a rational geopolitical reason for why it’s happening – the east/west divide is taken as given instead of a politics that found its first firing line on the backs of the Korean people.That’s not to say that good Korean War wargames don’t exist – they just don’t exist as software.
Is by all accounts an excellent tabletop simulation that was strikingly innovative for its time, and by Joseph Balkoski is another 1980s-era tabletop game that meaningfully dug into the conflict both as an operational ground war and an air and sea superiority battle. As a strategic theater and the first war to feature jet-powered air superiority fighters, Korea has fascinated a niche of cardboard wargamers for a few decades.But as the second generation of westerners who have grown up “knowing” that communism is evil, we’ve failed on a basic to demand a broader cultural explanation for, or even a rational accounting of, why this bipolar version of the world ever existed, let alone prevailed.I don’t know for certain why the Korean War hasn’t been given its due in popular films or games.
But having lived there for a year, and learned from being there, I suppose I can offer an educated guess. It’s because of a deep, horrible, well-deserved sense of national shame.If like most people, like me and Principal Skinner, you never learned how the Korean War ended, I’ll:During the course of the three-year war, which both sides accuse one another of provoking, the U.S. Dropped 635,000 tons of explosives on North Korea, including 32,557 tons of napalm, an incendiary liquid that can clear forested areas and cause devastating burns to human skin.The U.S. Air Force, in other words, incinerated the North Korean countryside and everyone in it. And in the meantime, brutal purges of alleged communists were going on in South Korea – the massacre of more than a hundred thousand suspected Bodo League members and sympathizers (largely innocent civilians) was carried out in the South in the summer of 1950. As Cold War tensions deepened the post-WWII divide between Russia and the United States, it became increasingly important to push these distracting humanitarian “details” further into the background, which is where they remain to this day. To whatever extent we know that these things happened, we seem to pretend they didn’t.My experience in South Korea was one I’ll remember for the unfailing kindness shown to me by the Korean people: I was shown an almost embarrassing level of generosity and thanks, just for being a U.S.
But by the time I left I understood that the rift between North and South Korea runs deeper than the way it’s generally understood in the west. Games have an as-yet-unrealized capacity to help us learn more about this conflict, and in the context of renewed tension on the peninsula there couldn’t be a better time for a serious attempt at recreating the Korean War. There was never a real end to hostilities; no ‘final peaceful settlement’ was achieved between North and South Korea, meaning the two nations remain technically at war, which is arguably a worse, or at least a more frustrating, result.
And perhaps that’s contributed to the war’s failure to capture the imaginations of game designers thus far.But as a defining moment in the modern geopolitical landscape, and the West’s first large-scale failure against Communism, the Korean War has a gravity and tragedy all its own that we’re all the poorer for not understanding more fully. It’ll be unfortunate if, as in the past, we continue to pretend it just didn’t happen.
The Korean War stands as a key event in world history. It is well-deserving of further study. The first shooting confrontation of the Cold War, and the first limited war of the nuclear age, it is the only time since the Second World War that two of the world's major military powers fought one another - in this case the United States and China.Diplomatically, the war offers an interesting view of the miscalculation and ineptitude on both sides that led to open conflict. It also brings to light the United Nations' first opportunity to play a leading role in world military events.OCS Korea: The Forgotten War covers the first year of the war and highlights the mobile phases of the battle. Campaign victory is determined most often by the stable positions of the lines (relative to the 'neck' of the peninsula). A number of shorter scenarios are also included to allow players to explore specific operations or to use as a training scenario before taking on one of the campaign games.OCS Korea: The Forgotten War has 15 scenarios broken down as follows:5 1-map scenarios4 2-map scenarios6 3-map scenarios.
DescriptionKorea: The Forgotten War, is the ninth game in the Operational Combat Series (OCS) release by The Gamers.The Korean War stands as a key event in world history. The first shooting confrontation of the Cold War, and the first limited war of the nuclear age, it is the only time since the Second World War that two of the world’s major military powers fought one another – in this case the United States and China.Diplomatically, the war offers an interesting view of the miscalculation and ineptitude on both sides that led to open conflict.
It also brings to light the United Nations’ first opportunity to play a leading role in world military events.Korea: The Forgotten War covers the first year of the war and highlights the mobile phases of the battle. Campaign victory is determined most often by the stable positions of the lines. A number of shorter scenarios are also included to allow players to explore specific operations or to use as a training scenario before taking on one of the campaign games. Ages 16+. 2 players. 360 minutes playing time.