HannesPascal said:
Thing is I can't really make up who you should shoot in these games it's not like anyone would accept that Denmark started to conquer the world and you have to stop them.
Why not? That would be awesome. You could build a whole storyline about how they'd been biding their time as an apparently small player on the world stage, when really an extremist right wing faction had infiltrated the government and quietly grabbed some crucial reins of power... building up a massive war chest (from, I dunno, diverting the revenue from bridge tolls between Germany and Sweden, or taxes on butter cookies and premium lager, or secretly mining for gold and uranium in Greenland, or...), then used it (and various recent cutting edge technologies - 3D printing, dense supercomputer matrices made from smartphone chips and sensors, quadrotor drones, graphene, non-newtonian fluid armour, kilowatt lasers, suitcase EMPs etc) to develop a great arsenal of advanced weaponry ... maybe some metal gear/gundam type shit, who knows... recruiting footsoldiers from impressionable and easily swayed sectors of society... launching a blitz-style coup d'etat when the time came, and immediately launching a campaign to conquer western europe and from there the world.
If your plan and your weapon systems are integrated and fast enough, you could be bringing the rain on the capital city of every last one of the 40-odd sovereign states within the geographic borders of the Mediterranean, Atlantic, arctic ice cap and the Urals within the span of a working day. Denmark is actually fairly handy for that - the Alps and Pyrenees are a bit of a pain to get over in order to hit Spain, Portugal, Italy, etc, but not that much, and you could have sleeper cells anyway. All you need to build a few local giant robots is a tall enough warehouse in a little-trafficked part of town, a suitably large reprap, some diplomatic bags (or a light aircraft doing airdrops) full of plutonium fuel for their micro-reactors, a few willing operatives and a minor cash injection after all...
Kick off at 8.30 local, just as the EU is on its way to work (either setting out, mid-commute, or just settling in at their desk, and no-one paying a great deal of attention to breaking news stories), grab control of the government within an hour of the doors of beaurocracy opening for business and before they can effectively raise the alarm, and then launch your shock troops across the continent. Flatten the seats of power of much of the G20 within a couple hours more, batting jet planes out of the sky. Chaos rains, whilst much of the populace is still hacking away oblivious at work until the more twitter-obsessed person in the office drops by saying that they're getting a lot of strange reports off their timeline and it might be worth nipping down to the canteen and having them switch the TV over from The Hits to News24...
By 5pm, most of the significant army bases that could have mounted any kind of serious defence are smoking craters, and the union is in serious disarray, and effectively destroyed. Martial law imposed. TV and radio stations taken over. Everyone except essential healthcare staff ordered back to their homes under curfew... monitored using nightvision and infrared, or just keeping a lookout for torches, as all the street lights are turned off.
Population databases seized and used to rapidly identify and round up or just plain execute undesirables (given my chosen setting, this would turn the usual current trope on its head by the civilians singled out for massacre =being= those which a uber-right-wing nutjob would assume of being a filthy terrorist within a second of catching sight of them, or even just their name - both those who actually ARE, and the innocents who are the fourth generation of their family to live peacefully in the same once-white-bread town) before word can even get out that they need to find somewhere to hide. A second holocaust, but instead of dragging out over six years it swings rapidly into action within the first day, with a bodycount that would make a 1980s Hollywood action film director wince within 72 hours. Stormtroopers raised on a diet of FPSes sent out to claim headshots on a long list of people, with their addresses. How many n00bs might you pwn over the course of a five minute deathmatch? Now multiply that by a small but determined army of stormtroops, "working" in 8-hour shifts... 24/7. With poorly armed, poorly trained, unarmoured, largely unsuspecting opponents cowering with their families. The ethnic cleansing of the 90s Balkan conflict, or even the current Syrian civil war would look like a playground argument.
Though most lines of communication out of the continent would have been cut as part of the first wave of attack (not particularly hard to bombard the undersea/mountain pass cable hookup depots), word would naturally get out across the globe quite quickly; the cessation of normal business alone would draw a lot of attention. Such audacious tyranny cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged. The remaining members of NATO and other organisations, including parts of Russia and the former USSR not physically occupied or otherwise affected, go into emergency conference to try to come up with some plan of action. The few spy shots they actually manage to get, before all vantage points are covered, and overflying planes and satellites are taken out with laser shots, show unknown and alarmingly advanced types of weaponry, including entire classes that have not been previously seen outside of comic books. Obviously, this shit is fucking serious. The war on terror is abandoned in order to bring all possible troops and weapons to bear. A few raggedy terrorists hiding in desert caves are chickenfeed in comparison. In fact, even a few hasty alliances are forged with said guerilla fighters, who aren't exactly optimistic about their own prospects should the Danish Aryan steamroller start to roll their way, but have unique skills of their own to offer. Planes, tanks, ships are modified with experimental, duct taped and jerry rigged countermeasures against the new weapons - for once, the United States, China and the remaining Russian forces are on the back foot, even when allied together and with all the nations of Asia, Africa, South America and Oceania, thanks to the unique and overwhelming offensive power even of the otherwise quite small Army Of The New Danish Empire.
And so you are dropped into this narrative at the start of the first United Global Liberation Force offensive against the NDE, landing in... oh, let's say Cork, in Ireland, in an attempt to secure some kind of defensible base of operations which at least has the natural barrier of the ocean to allow a little more notice of impending attack than might be had from a guy on a hilltop 20 miles away popping up to take a few people out with his laser cannon then disappearing again, as might be felt trying to infiltrate via a more landlocked border...
Damn, man. Someone get me whatever the literary equivalent of a patent is on this shit, I feel a "first novel" coming on. Or maybe an elevator pitch for a triple-A FPS-creatin' studio. After all, it can't be worse than Daikatana. Or Kane and Lynch. Or Steel Batallion...
Backtracking down the ideas tree, perhaps instead it might even be the place where Terminators or the "Screamers" (for you classic sci-fi/horror short story fans) were ACTUALLY first developed and start to spread from? Something like that? Or ground zero for some domestic terrorists launching a biological attack using some incredibly potent prion-esque virus. Maybe not one that creates zombies (seriously, that's played out), but quite possibly one that mucks about with your DNA and body structure in other ways... and can lie dormant in soil or on surfaces for days or weeks whilst still being infectious. So you have to go in with a biosuit to try and clear up the quarantine areas as each attack is launched (eventually spreading outside the country's borders) and also attempt to flush out and neutralise the culprits, and secure/carefully destroy their remaining stocks of the stuff.
You've got a potential imaginative goldmine sitting there and you're so willing to just chuck it away. Why not Zoidb... er, Denmark? Does it have to be either dusky terrorists or a present-day superpower every time? Just look at how the global map of empire and power bases has shifted over the last 200 years; why can't it shift a little more in an unexpected direction in the next 50, for a near-future speculative storyline?
Damn, I wish I was in a position of more creative influence, I'd so steal that tiny grain of an idea and then run with it hard and long.
In fact, I'm saving this to a timestamped text file just in case some game using it comes up in five years' time, so I can say I Told You So, Look They're Nicking My Idea.
