EVER wanted to know how it feels to ambush and kill a US soldier?
Fancied yourself as a bit of a dab handler of Improvised Explosive Devices?
You're in luck - the latest instalment in the popular Medal of Honor video game franchise will let you play as a Taliban soldier plotting against the Coalition troops in Afghanistan.
For the uninitiated, Medal of Honor is one of several first-person shooting games largely responsible for keeping the flagging video game market alive in recent years, giving gamers the chance to get behind the sights of a soldiers' rifle and experience war first-hand.
Previous incarnations of the game - the brainchild of blockbuster director Steven Spielberg - have been set in famous world war arenas through history and their combined sales have run in to the billions of dollars' worth.
And while in the multiplayer games, there's always been the necessity for some players to take the role of opposing forces, it's the fact that the newest release is set in a war from which dead bodies are still arriving home that's causing so much outrage, particularly from those who have a personal stake in the conflict.
The game will be released in October, in one of Australia's worst years for casualties in Afghanistan.
Some critics say it's a desperate attempt to reignite the franchise which, despite an impressive opening in the acclaimed 1999 debut that featured recreations from the Normandy landings, has fallen well behind the record-setting sales of the rival Call of Duty franchises.
Competition between the two in the lead-up to Christmas is becoming increasingly intense in a year marked by a lack of blockbuster titles.
Yesterday, the maker of one of the year's most anticipated multiplayer online games, APB, went broke just 12 months after raising $80 million and being named PricewaterhouseCoopers' hottest prospect at a technology investment conference.
The latest installation in the CoD franchise, out in November, will be packaged with a remote-controlled buggy that carries an on-board video camera and microphone, based on one of the game's new tools.
In a statement, Electronic Arts defended its position, saying: "In the multiplayer set-up, soldiers are fighting against the Taliban much like Allies fight Nazis in WWII shooter games.
"In Medal of Honor multiplayer, we give gamers the opportunity to play both sides.
"Most of us have been doing this since we were seven - if someone's the cop, someone's gotta be the robber, someone's gotta be the pirate and someone's gotta be the alien.
"In Medal of Honor multiplayer, someone's gotta be the Taliban."
EA's having a hard time of justifying selling a video game based on a real-time conflict though, particularly when there's families of dead soldiers lining up to voice their disapproval.
"Right now we're going into a really, really bad time in Afghanistan and we've just come off of the worst month of casualties in the whole war and this game is going to be released in October," Karen Meredith, the mother of a fallen US soldier told Fox News.
"So families who are burying their children are going to be seeing this and playing this game.
"My son didn't get to start over when he was killed. His life is over, and I have to deal with this every day...it's just not a game."
The release of Medal of Honor in Australia will depend on how it's classified.
If it doesn't fit the MA15+ requirements, it won't get a release in this country under the current classification guidelines.
Last year, Modern Warfare 2 achieved a MA15+ ratings, despite the fact one feature allowed participants to gun down civilians in a terrorist attack on a busy airport.
