America's Truly Terrifying Fears...in VIDEO GAMES?!

WARNING: READER DISCRETION IS ADVISED! If you are unsafe reading this weblog, then please leave immediately and do not return with a second thought.

Well, I'm back at it again, and this time, I'm dealing with more serious subjects. The events of September 11, 2001, America's worst and most fatal attacks, have been the subject not only of some stupid jokes all over the internet (By God I have seen so many horrible and disgusting and offensive jokes and memes on DeviantArt and other rotten websites about 9.11 and THEY AREN'T FUNNY AT ALL! That's not the accurate way to have fun online, it's completely WRONG!), but also of some very controversial video games, which are often compared to Hong Kong 97 and Super Columbine Massacre RPG. There are three particular games which have garnered attention for their depiction of 9.11: Terrifying 9.11, Laden VS USA, and 08:46. We are going to examine each of these and see how truly terrible these are, especially in more recent years.

First, let's take a look at Terrifying 9.11.

Released around 2002, exactly the year following the events of 9.11 '01, Terrifying 9.11 (also known as Shocking 9.11 and Special Forces 2 Base) is a Game Boy Color bootleg adaptation of NeoGeo's Metal Slug: Super Vehicle 001, disguised as a game about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. This makes it arguably one of the most offensive bootlegs to ever exist and a big insult to the US. Due to the copy protection system, the game was lost for over ten years. At first, only the Chinese version of the game was released in late 2015. In 2016 or 2017, the original Taiwanese version (in English) was released. Both ROMs only run well on an obscure emulator.

The game begins with an FMV cutscene with real-life footage of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, which is in EXTREMELY bad taste to the victims, their families, and Americans in general if they even bothered playing or watching it. Even worse, it's unskippable! This is, however, one of the only Game Boy Color games to have FMVs, but its graphical hardware limitations mean it can show only up to 56 colors at once. In addition to this disrespectful introductory scene, the song that's playing is ear-grindingly jarring. The song is "Shir LaShalom" (or "Song of Peace"), an anthem for the Israeli peace movement, which is disgustingly unfitting for this scene.

To add salt to wounds, the game is even more incredibly offensive to Muslims and Afghan people as the cutscenes between the levels are dialogues from George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden claiming that the game levels are American soldiers invading Afghanistan; the level's names have been also altered to fit this.

There are types of special ammo, but unlike Metal Slug, the ammunition is infinite, giving an unfair advantage to the player. Also, every gun (including the heavy machine gun) is not automatic, which means it shoots only one bullet/ammunition at a time, you had to repeatedly mash the button just to properly shoot the gun. This also applies to the SV-001 (the drivable tank vehicle) as well, which made the SV-001 an extremely useless vehicle even without the fact that it consumes your special ammo; if the player enters the SV-001, they will lose the special ammo.

The level music never stops playing, unless you mute the Game Boy. Also, the bosses have no proper music. Since the normal level music plays during them and there are no visual cues, you never know when you are facing a boss. In addition there are also no visual and sound cues when the game is paused. The game just freezes and the background music keeps playing. So, if the player pauses the game accidentally without noticing it, they may think that the game crashed.

Despite the game taking place in Afghanistan, there are several geographical inaccuracies including (but not limited to):

• Mission 1 (Zaranj) makes no sense as it takes place in the jungles of Cambodia and the crashed submarine in the lake has Japanese writing on it, despite Pashto and Dari Persian being the official languages of Afghanistan and the fact that Japan never invaded Afghanistan to begin with also Afghanistan never had a Jungle because it's only covered with deserts.
• The levels have large bodies of water in the background despite Afghanistan being a landlocked country in South Asia, the largest continent on Earth.
• All of the geographical inaccuracies stem from the fact that most of the level environments in the original Metal Slug barely resemble any place you would find in Afghanistan.

Putting aside Terrifying 9.11, let's next look into Laden VS USA.

What we have here is an obscure LCD handheld electronic game from around 2003 supposedly created by Chinese company Panyu Gaming Electronic Co. Ltd, known as Laden VS USA (or, in literal Chinese, Bin Laden's Challenge of the Century). It is unknown if the company actually manufactured the game due to mass counterfeiting in China. Laden VS USA was also released in two different designs. Laden VS USA is based on the 9.11 incident in 2001, all superimposed over a 9.11 photograph.

Like Terrifying 9.11 before it, this game is extremely insensitive as it's based on the 9.11 attacks that occurred in 2001. Enemies are portrayed as jets that fly around, which is a disturbing reference of the jets flying into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Heck, even the packaging art is offensive and tasteless as it's a photo of the World Trade Center with one plane flying into one of the towers while the other is collapsing. I'm absolutely not kidding! Laden VS USA also bears the mark of "Ages 5 and Up" on the packaging, but children would very much feel traumatized just from seeing the package art. Did these guys seriously not learn from Terrifying 9.11?!

George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden are also featured on the console and its package, but they don't actually appear in this game. In fact, although the game is about the 9.11 attacks, the gameplay is seemingly and completely unrelated to it, as additionally, the instructions on the back of the packaging appear to have been lifted word for word from the blurb of a boxing game.

The gameplay involves controlling a submarine travelling across the bottom of the screen shooting at fighter jets flying by, even though there were no submarines involved in the 9/11 attack in real life, and multiple fighter jets weren’t involved in real life either when rather, it was only no more than four jet airlines that the terrorists hijacked and only two of them actually targeted the World Trade Center, while another targeted the Pentagon and the final presumably targeted the capital when it ended up targeting a field in Pennsylvania. Also, how is the submarine managed to be suspended in mid-air or perhaps on the ground in this game when it's supposed to be an underwater vehicle?

The game is divided into 20 levels and automatically levels you up to the next. The higher the level, the more difficult the game becomes. And each time you cleared a level, it plays a pinging version of "Deck the Halls", which is a Holiday song, and it feels very incredibly horribly out of place in a game about the 9.11 attacks!

The actual built-in game is in fact a bootleg copy of Submarine Battle (CG-330), a 1983 Casio handheld LCD game; Submarine Battle was frequently bootlegged on handheld devices around this time period. Due to the generic nature of the gameplay premise, it is unclear if the game is intended to be pro or anti-America and was possibly left intentionally vague, as the handheld is known to have been sold not only in the U.S., but also in Pakistan, where, worst of all, the game somehow was reportedly popular among children there.

Despite this, the game is very controversial and has even been banned from the shelves of a discount store in Warrington, Cheshire, England, after several protests from religious leaders. A teenager stated about the incident, "The images on the box bring back all the memories of September 11", while thinking that "it will desensitize children to what happened". The game has also created controversy in the town of Brooklyn, NYC, USA, where pedestrians were outraged over the presence of the game in the local store named Oakdale Dairy. It was described recently online by one toy reviewer as "the worst concept for a game or a toy in history intended for children", saying that "it boggles the mind that it was actually manufactured and sent to the United States".

So that's it about Laden VS USA, then. Now, last but not least, on to 08:46.

Seriously now, how desperate can any game developer get with cashing in on the September 11 attacks?! This 2015 simulation VR game, as its name implies, takes place in the World Trade Center and during the exact time that American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower.

Like the two mentioned before, it's blatantly a game based on the 9/11 attacks that occurred in 2001, which is extremely offensive and disrespectful toward Americans, except this time it's from a victim's point of view; as a matter of fact, it puts you in the shoes of an unnamed office employee working in 101st floor of the North Tower, re-enacting the event in which people there died, so it's very much a huge insult to people who have either died or survived the said terrorist attacks.

Aside from the offensive premise, the game is very much a run-of-the-mill walking simulator game that clearly doesn't even qualify as a game, with mediocre graphics and ugly character models despite running on Unreal Engine 4, in which you do a mundane errand until something serious happens.

The story is this: you're playing as an unnamed office employee working on the 101st floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center during the September 11 terrorist attacks. You do your morning telemarketing work in a room with one other employee. Suddenly, during your work, the building shakes and multiple ceiling tiles fall out of the ceiling. The door is jammed shut, and you and the other employee are trapped within the room. A man kicks open the door and hands you a flashlight. You are then warned about the slowly encroaching fire while you are trapped in the darkness of the floor after every door is tested and is jammed. You are trapped within these confines. You hear as your fellow employees and co-workers make phone calls to their families saying their final goodbye as smoke fills the room. A window to go to the outside is then broken open. Once you do so, as you stand there, you are given the option in which you have to make the choice between dying from suffocating the smoke inhalation or jumping out of a window off the building and falling to your inescapable death--a terrible ending!

What's worse about this game is that the developer behind it all, Anthony Krafft, is from the United States, but he had no problem making a game about an anti-American terrorist attack, yet when the game first released in the year of 2015, many news publications gave negative viewpoints on the video game, calling it "disrespectful", "horrifying", "distasteful", and "offensive".

So there you have it: all the offensive games of 9.11 disrespecting the dead: Terrifying 9.11, Laden VS USA, and 08:46. Keep away from these games at all costs, do not play any of them, and stand up tall for your country. Remember the lives we lost on that day...and most importantly, tell your country who you are, and you are proud to defend it.