ViewtifulJC
Banned
Let me just say that ENDING SPOILERS
that final plot twist is just the DUMBEST fuckin' thing. The DUMBEST. I can suspend my disbelief pretty far, but I think that one snapped it
Oh God. Don't even get me started on this shit.
Don't even.
I tried a bit of the demo. Blowing up birds is kind of fun. Maybe I'll buy the game someday.
I do have to wonder if killing wantonly in video games has any impact on how we view killing in real life. Otherwise there really isn't a point to the game's criticism is there? I guess it might act as unintentional propaganda in the case of war games. Though is unintentional propaganda effective?
Google "An Image of Africa" for Heart of Darkness. Is basically you whole complain with criticism to inherently colonialism and racism, but transplanted to Conrad's work.
To Call of Duty's credit, a lot of the series is actually surprisingly cynical about the conflicts they're presenting, Call of Duty 4 especially.
With that said, does Conrad's racist depiction of Africans have any bearing on the setup or introduction of the novel?
On the topic of Call of Duty, what's been the general tone of the recent games? I keep on seeing youtube commercials for Black Ops 2 accompanied by AC/DC's Back in Black. I realize this is mostly just marketing's doing. But I haven't played the first Black Ops or MW3, and for the life of me can't remember any music from the first two Modern Warfare games.
I ask because when I think back to the military shooters of last gen, when it was all WWII all the time, the tone was pretty somber across the board. What sticks out the most in my mind is playing the Market Garden in Medal of Honor Frontlines to this. Watching Allied and German soldiers fight and die while that played was poignant and chillingmuch more than anything I experienced in Spec Ops. Real talk.
A lot of people interpreted Spec Ops as a critique of real-life violence, but as a lot of people in this thread are saying, I think it has more to say about war games.
I honestly don't see a problem with war games treating violence as a good thing (or having binary us vs them scenarios) unless they would desensitize us to real life violence.
Dude, like I said before, that point in Spec Ops is totally subjective, at least as you try to argue. To many of us it didn't feel off. That is kind of your opinion and not much to do with inaccuracy and more with tone.
Many good novels, poems, music, films, etc starts with ludicrous stuff. Not everything needs to be "gradual" or "starting in a grounded position".
PD: About your actual point, Yeah, I don't remember how it starts also, to be honest, but I don't think it would matter that much for the point that the essay tries to make.
It was probably my mistake for not mentioning this in the beginning.With that said, I do not mean to imply that you, or anyone else in this thread, should not be able to enjoy the game or are wrong for liking it. I, personally, just do not see the game's appeal.
The writer himself posited that interpretation in the Gamespot Spoilercast (skip to 47:35).
oh shit, ErikB got permed.
further evidence that spec ops is an incredible and important work of post-modern art.
eh I have a pretty big problem with it, but that's probably neither here nor there in the context of this discussion.
(I have a bookcase filled with unread books. How is that for a backlog?)
It was probably my mistake for not mentioning this in the beginning.
Way to completely invalidate everything that happens in the last fourth of your own game!
So the player gets to the finale and after being jerked around by false choices throughout the game, finally can make a decision on their own which will determine the ending they get, right? Nope! They're all equally pointless because none of this even happens!
And for what? A cheap gotcha moment? Not only is it an eye-rollingly bad cliche, but nullifies the other much more interesting endings. Walker goes back home but has to carry the weight of everything he has seen and done with? That's interesting! Walker goes nuts and becomes just like Konrad, the monster he tried to fight? That's interesting! Walker goes to Dubai, fucks shit up, crashes a helicopter, hallucinates then dies? That's.... completely lame.
Care for a PM discussion then? I'm actually very interested now.
oh shit, ErikB got permed.
Agree to disagree. My interpretation of theThey're Dead Jim interpretation is that Walker is reliving the decisions he'd made, so whatever happened in life, happened in the hell he's going through. We (the player) don't know what decisions these are until we make them, but they're retroactively cast in stone from there. Far from invalidating the ending, it gives it more resonance in my opinion. No actions Walker takes up to that point would lead anywhere good. At the end, no matter what you pick--go psycho, go super psycho (i.e., actually win the psycho portion), go home and get the white out screen--Walker's screwed and can't save himself. He's stuck reliving the end of his life over and over again.
He really did play his own version of Spec Ops in this thread
He really did play his own version of Spec Ops in this thread
But the player actually has no agency. Everything is predetermined.
and if the truth is undeniable, you create your own. The truth, Erik, is that you're in this thread because you wanted to feel like something you're not: A hero. I'm here because you can't accept what you've done. It broke you. You needed someone to blame, so you cast it on me. A bombed game. I know the truth is hard to hear Erik, but it's time. You're all that's left and we can't live this lie forever. I'm going to count to five, then I'mIt takes a strong man to deny what's right in front of him.
Max Payne 3 is another game I think worthy of some greater critical analysis. I'd love to see someone tackle it in more detail. To me, it seems like a commentary on the decreasing relevance of the action hero archetype.
In gameplay, Max is downright clumsy. His trademark dives often result in a tumble, leaving the player open to attack. The time it takes to get up from a prone position, swap weapons or even reload is often more than what the NPCs need to shoot him dead. His opponents are younger than he and far more capable, able to react quickly. Success requires that the player maneuvers Max strategically, playing around his various limits.
i love dreamweb!
And the blanket condemnation on FPS games is a presumptuous one. One that only works on games that offer the player no choice, which Spec Ops is equally guilty of. But there are FPS games that I can buy and not be complacent in the violence. I got the pacifist achievements to prove it.
okay, this question is only tangentially related to the thread, but does Spec Ops: The Line have a co-op campaign? I feel like I need to give the game a try.
No horde mode, but instead 4 short 2-player coop missions.As far as I know, the campaign is strictly single play but there is a horde mode.
You know TDKR has been out for like 6 months? Well everyone, like everyone has seen it now, so don't bother with spoiler tags."Hey guys, how it was the new Batman movie?"
"I got bored after Bane killed the secret agents. So it sucked, socialist indoctrination BS"
"That was not the point, you see, Bane was onl..."
"It sucked, stop lecturing me"
You know TDKR has been out for like 6 months? Well everyone, like everyone has seen it now, so don't bother with spoiler tags.
Oh wait...
Fucking hell, same thing with Mass Effect 3, if you haven't finished it within a week of release, prepare to tread very carefully on GAF, for all the big piles of spoil everywhere. Just use tags FFS, it's not hard!
I meant to address this earlier before ErikB went on his shit show. I'm having trouble understanding why you think Spec Ops critiquing a certain kind of a game by mimicking its style is such a bad thing, outside of a knee-jerk need to have a list of choices outlined during scripted sequences.
Spec Ops isn't condemning a game like CoD for not offering choices. It's condemning CoD for what it has players do. And it critiques it by apeing its style. The difference is that Spec Ops goes out of its way to highlight how horrible your actions are, making the player recognize that was they are doing is awful. The only reason you even feel the game should be offering you choices is because it's telling you what is going on is awful, sometimes in gruesome detail. And that's the point the game is trying to make.
So again, the criticism isn't that CoD doesn't "properly use the medium". It's what it makes players do to "win", and what that means.
I do think that we need to focus more on the player creating their own narratives and anecdotes from systems and mechanics rather than it being a prescribed story with a twist but who knows what the future may hold.
Ah, OK then, my apologies.That was in like the first five minutes of the movie. Sort of the point of that post. I'm not sure what you're complaining about here.
EDIT: That was also in the trailer.
That sounds more like a preference thing because I don't think Spec Ops' narrative would be bolstered by that "immersive sim" design philosophy. None of those immersive games have had memorable narratives. I like the world states and reactions to your presence in those games, but leaving the player to create the narrative sounds a bit lazy like built-in machinima tools and a potentially divisive experience.
I'm all for longform games writing, and particularly a deep dive on one specific game as a text; will definitely check this out. I find it a little off-putting that part of the writer's intent seems to be to use this as a sort of tip of the spear for "proving" that critical analysis of a game can be as valid as critical readings of other media, but I do think The Line has enough depth and complexity in its layers to hold up to some close reading. Not to say it's the best candidate for such writing, but it seems to be a good entry point.
The Gamespot podcast interview with the game's lead writer was really illuminating. I don't remember the exact name of the cast, but it went up maybe a week after the game's release. The writer was asked why he chose to use a modern-military shooter to make a point about modern-military shooters -- wouldn't you be better served by not forcing players to go through all of the flimsy gameplay? -- and in essence, the writer said that the decisions about gameplay, genre, milieu, etc., were all predestined beforehand. He was brought in and told to write a story to fit a game about a small squad of soldiers in Dubai, so it was sort of a "cart before the horse" scenario. It makes the decision to frame the game as social commentary even more interested, IMO, because it was sort of subversive -- not just to players, but to the publisher and industry. Actively writing a shooter that makes you question yourself or feel bad about playing shooters is pretty ballsy.
I know that there's a growing sense of backlash about games that have done this whole "meta story twists make you question the nature of player choice/interaction" thing, but The Line really stuck out to me because it was so committed to the angle. And I think a lot of things that weren't inherently intended by the writers -- e.g., the casting of Nolan North in the lead, which adds its own spin on industry commentary -- can be examined for interesting effect.
I meant to address this earlier before ErikB went on his shit show. I'm having trouble understanding why you think Spec Ops critiquing a certain kind of a game by mimicking its style is such a bad thing, outside of a knee-jerk need to have a list of choices outlined during scripted sequences.
Spec Ops isn't condemning a game like CoD for not offering choices. It's condemning CoD for what it has players do. And it critiques it by apeing its style. The difference is that Spec Ops goes out of its way to highlight how horrible your actions are, making the player recognize that was they are doing is awful. The only reason you even feel the game should be offering you choices is because it's telling you what is going on is awful, sometimes in gruesome detail. And that's the point the game is trying to make.
So again, the criticism isn't that CoD doesn't "properly use the medium". It's what it makes players do to "win", and what that means.
The one thing I don't get is why Spec Ops is considered a sub-par Modern Military Shooter. It feels identical to any other cover based shooter to me, be it "high quality" ones like Gears of War or Call of Duty or "crappy" ones like Scourge Project or Quantum Theory. Sure I know of better games but they're all in different genres.
That's fair and all but I'm someone who is a big proponent of "theme is not meaning" in video games. Ultimately, both Spec Ops and the games it's commenting on are the same thing. They're about completing linear a set of combat puzzles using automatic and semi automatic hitscan weapons, everything else is just purely aesthetics. From these aesthetics, Spec Ops replaces bravado for condemnation but it's meaningless, they're both about the same thing. Putting a different skin on the same thing isn't really taking advantage of what makes video games as a story telling medium interesting. To make a super blunt argument, you wouldn't calk a game like Dr. Mario a game about medicine or Mario despite it having a picture of Mario in a white coat and that you're matching viruses, it's a game about matching similar icons. So now why should we call Spec Ops a game about deconstructing the shooter genre?
Last time I checked the battle of Guadalcanal happened in WW2To say that the way Spec Ops contextualizes what happens during gameplay is merely "aesthetic" really just shows a lack of regard for storytelling in gaming as a whole.
No logical person would describe the differences between The Green Berets and The Thin Red Line as merely cosmetic since they both are about the Vietnam war, so why do it with a game? The way a story handles its subject matter is important, and shouldn't just be scoffed at as meaningless. Hell, this is the first time I've ever heard someone even suggest that it was.
Last time I checked the battle of Guadalcanal happened in WW2