Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Commandos are not exempt.

Posting may be light; Call of Duty: Black Ops just arrived for my Nintendo DS. Looking at the cover illustration on the box, I thought I was seeing a classic video game error before I realized that the gun on the right was an XM-177 and therefore it actually shouldn't have a bayonet lug. Props to Activision for getting that detail right.

I always get a smile when the models in a video game or book cover or advertisement are posing with ban-compliant rifles. I've seen "Rangers" with no bayonet lugs and "SWAT teams" stacked on a door with AR carbines and nary a flash hider in sight.

You'd think in the era of airsoft that this would no longer be a problem.

Well, speaking of airsoft, actually one of the funniest was Dick Marcinko on the cover of Rogue Warrior posing with an "MP5K" that was obviously a Daisy Model 15 airsoft gun, although that may have had something to do with the felony convictions...

19 comments:

  1. The game is crack.

    On the 360 version i picked up last night, on can put on suppressors, different optics, and apparently paint your any way you want it.

    It's crack, i tell you.

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  2. Too bad the rest of the game is inaccurate with weapons like flat top CAR-15s/XM-177s. It's still fun but only the cover has that attention to detail, the rest has an amount of artistic license.

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  3. Well Marcinko's still a badass with an airsoft - at least in his own mind (to use the term very loosely). rouge warrior is more fiction than his fiction

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  4. I enjoyed using ACOG equipped FALS in Cuba in 1961 and red dot equipped MP5's in Russia a few years later.

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  5. The company that makes the ACH has a poster of a tactical tubby decked out in their product holding a pellet rifle. They have a no firearms at work policy.

    We had the poster on a wall at work for giggles.

    Gerry

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  6. "rouge warrior is more fiction than his fiction"

    Rouge Warrior? Was he in the Mary Kay Commandos? :P

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  7. I'm sensing that the misspelling was deliberate. ;)

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  8. Too bad the Activision folk don't know that the century old pistols on the cover have to have cocked hammers to be effective. Nobody gets that right.

    I'm just pissed because I didn't buy the game for fear that I would get it for Christmas, and then didn't.

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  9. Which RW book? The original just has him with a folded arms stare?

    I'm curious which book since I never noticed it and I remember a blurb in one of them about "Thanks to HK training for the weapons"

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  10. TheRock,

    It was the paperback of either Rogue Warrior or Red Cell; I haven't read any of the others.

    It's been 15+ years, but I remember the gun clear as day, since I used to have one (I was a huge HK fangirl back in the day.) The dead giveaway was the extra long gap between the magwell and the VFG, necessary because the Model 15 was a spring-piston gun that was cocked by sliding the VFG back and forth.

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  11. Just searched it on Amazon. It's Red Cell.

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  12. For what it's worth, the earliest reference I've found to a red dot sight being used by US Military forces is by one of the Son Tay Raiders on that mission.

    I was in OCS when a Son Tay Raider, OCS alumni, came to speak with us about his experience as an officer. Showed us a picture from the raid with Bull Simmons.

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  13. AM,

    Yup.

    (For those that didn't know, that was the first combat use of the Armson OEG, ancestor to all our modern red dots.)

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  14. "I'm sensing that the misspelling was deliberate."
    You're sensing correctly ... no surprise that you would

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  15. I also thought the red-dot where anachronistic of the period, but wasn't sure. What I am sure of is that the G11 wasn't even in prototype when all this stuff is going on, so it definitely shouldn't have been showing up in your arsenal.

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  16. This is amazing,that so many people comment about something about which I know jack, and also about which nobody else should know jack, because it is utterly silly.

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  17. "What is utterly silly?"

    Jack maybe?

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  18. I'm not silly!

    -Jack

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