Last month I was invited to a press event held at the luxurious Ruby Skye Theater in San Francisco, put together by Konami, which publishes games on various platforms. There were several titles previewed for the press that night, but two really stuck out in my mind. The first was , a survival/horror game based on the where a bunch of poorly realized and dimly lit characters are thrown into a number of elaborate death scenes. Fun!

(Image Caption: Six Days in Fallujah is a realistic depiction of the battle of Fallujah, made with the help of U.S. Marines who were there.) The other major title that Konami previewed was , a third person shooter/combat simulator that is based on the battle of Fallujah during the Iraq War. The game draws from the experiences of real life marines and depicts real life events, environments, and scenarios. The developers interviewed not only 47 US Marines, but also civilians and enemy insurgents.

Recently, Konami announced that though was only months from being launched, it would the game. No one in the gaming community is particularly surprised, of course. In between taking advantage of the open bar and the free hors d'oeuvres, game journalists took turns decrying the game's controversial topic and in the same breath grinning with anticipation at the amount of fodder this would provide their Web site.

But while the journalists at the Konami event sensed that , the developers of Six Days in Fallujah, were playing piñata with a hornets' nest of controversy, the truth is that there have been of Mid-East Conflict-themed war games. 50 Cents: Blood in the Sand and Atomic Games' own either directly or indirectly reference modern political climates. did everything but throw up the Iraqi flag when depicting a Middle Eastern city for the Marines to invade. Six Days is, however, one of the first to attempt to cast aside the mask of allegory, and instead tackle the subject directly.

Peter Tamte, president of Atomic, knows better than most what kind of high wire act his company has to perform. Atomic Games has done their best to sidestep the political issues surrounding the Iraq War and instead focus on objectively and accurately telling a story. In , Tamte defends Atomic Games' intention: "'Six Days in Fallujah' is not about whether the U.S. and its allies should have invaded Iraq. It's an opportunity for the world to experience the true stories of the people who fought in one of the world's largest urban battles of the past half-century."