The surprising part isn’t that they set us as their personal villains again.
You know, every time North Korea releases something vilifying the U.S (in this case, a game called Hunting Yankee, which is exactly what it says on the tin), I kind of just laugh. Partially because no one’s been successful vice versa; the remake of Red Dawn trying to make the North Koreans out as some terrifying invasion force bombed (HA!), and pretty much everything else that’s tried it followed suit. It’s hard to convince people into willing suspension of disbelief when the country you’re trying to make look scary is filled with people who are forced to eat tree bark to supplement their diet of not terrifically nutritional things. It’s just kind of sad.
Which is probably why North Korean media’s so damn entertaining to people outside the communist state. For example: it’s common in children’s stories to have the good characters be fuzzy, adorable woodland creatures. While the bad characters are predators and vermin. Which is exactly what they did with their children’s propaganda series Squirrel and Hedgehog, except they screwed up. They made the U.S. representative characters into buff-ass wolves with glowing blue eyes and laser guns that fly around in Dynablade. Oh, and all of our women are stone cold foxes. Meanwhile all of the North Korean Flower Hill residents are insufferably cute little woodland critters. Their most intimidating trait is that they all have actual guns.
Nope, I’m not making any of that up.
So, it’s not surprising that they’ve cast us as the antagonist in their game. No, the surprising part is that it looks like a PS1 game. And that they’ve armed the player character with a modern sniper rifle, rather than a pistol of the smallest caliber and range to keep hunting the most dangerous game sporting. As a matter of fact, pretty much all North Korean computer games have us as the villains anyway. They’re kind of fixated like that. At this point, I think they’re mostly meant to fool Dennis Rodman into believing that North Korea is a totally modern state. Because I doubt most of the country has the means to even play the damn things. Most of their GDP is spent in pissing everybody (China included by this point) off.
I’m guessing that, much like Red Star, Hunting Yankee’s going to be really interesting for coders to dissect. You know, assuming they get the chance.
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