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Captain Bravo posted:There's a difference between something being derivative, and something being an homage. There are a lot of people that cannot grasp any form of subtlety. To be fair, when a game that's a deliberate homage to Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness has a major character called "Konrad" I dunno if subtlety's the word.
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Jun 9, 2015 18:30
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Unless I'm misremembering, Spec Ops: The Line's gonna show you where its bullets come from too.
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Jun 11, 2015 07:55
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You think you're here to save people? Kill EVERYONE. Humanely, of course. They'd thank you if they could.
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Jun 20, 2015 08:51
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Spudd posted:Ah right it's 'this' scene, it's at this point in the last thread that I stopped caring. Watching it again a few years later still has the same effect. Maybe I'm heartless or jaded, it just does not affect me. I get where you're coming from here. The "big shocking moment" doesn't really have the emotional punch you learn to expect from how people oversell it when they rave about the game. Spec Ops: The Line as a whole shines because of what it is not as much as for what it is. It's a game that presents war in less than glowing terms, which is sadly an accolade worthy of note by itself. It contrasts really well with stuff like the AC-130 mission or controlling a predator drone in the modern warfare games, though, as it presents such weapons as the indiscriminate, unanswerable and brutal terror weapons they truly are. The perceived lack of choice is a bit false, though. There is always the choice to stop playing and walk away, a theme the game constantly beats you over the head with. Still can feel like a copout though, because why make a game where the only winning move is not to play? People have the same problem with things like Telltale adventure games, where they go on about how their choices don't profoundly effect the story, ignoring that their character's agency is narrowed and limited by their circumstances and that in stories just as in life some people's only choice is how they react. Add to that the fog of war and battle fatigue which has likely descended on Walker by this stage of the game. Dude's in full kill-or-be-killed mode.
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Jun 23, 2015 16:57
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This game cribs heavily from Apocalypse Now in its entirety, but the one scene it most reminds me of is the outpost they stop off at to pick up the mail, some knackered bridge in a forgotten stretch of the Meikong river or whatever. Martin Sheen stops off to hunt down the CO and finds the place in a state of dissolute anarchy with nobody knowing what they're doing, which way they're shooting or when and if they're going home. I could easily see the 33rd falling prey to the same kind of rudderlessness, cut off as they are, just giving in to the carnivalesque insanity all around. It's a very Vietnam-like situation altogether; the 33rd charged with shepherding and protecting a resentful population that might well be harbouring their enemies, constantly unsure of whether they're rounding them up to keep them safe or to summarily execute them in reprisal for attacks by unknown groups that may have nothing at all to do with them.
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Jun 23, 2015 23:55
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If I remember right, the main 
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Jun 25, 2015 16:37
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Wiggy Marie posted:Jorg's attitude is very much so in the style of Heart of Darkness. The message isn't supposed to be YOU SUCK, it's supposed to be "Think about what you're doing and the outcome." Personally I find either of the two intended messages work just as well for me. Then again, I also enjoyed Michael Haneke's Funny Games for pointing the finger at me, the viewer, and telling me what a bastard I am. With a game like this it works on multiple levels too, I think. Firstly, you're entertaining yourself with the spectacle of violence and inhumanity, even taking part in some of the worst atrocities. Secondly, your taxes are spent on doing things very much like this to other people in various parts of the world due to the policies of your government (if you live in a belligerent western state). Which, if you're anything like me, you then spend five minutes impotently watching unfold on the news before saying something cynical and moving on with your life without a second thought. It may have been a bit clumsy and heavy-handed in this instance, but I think slapping the player/viewer/reader and telling them "NO! BAD!" is a worthwhile artistic statement, however unfair it may feel on the face of it.
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Jun 26, 2015 23:00
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Evil Tim posted:Yeah, but war isn't generally nice to look at, and the game certainly doesn't bother to make anything of how horrific, say, grenade injuries are, they're still little poot-they're-dead game grenades rather than an expanding wall of boiling hot metal shards that can tear through interior walls like they aren't there and set entire buildings on fire. The game's pretty good about making the violence look appropriately horrific, to be fair. The execution kills are nasty and brutal and people's heads pop and their limbs come off from headshots and grenades. The problem is we've already seen it as a source of instant gratification in a whole ton of other shooters so any impact from it is lost. In Fallout 3 I can systematically cripple every limb in someone's body while they're still living before splattering their head into an indistinct red mush with a shotgun, hacking them to pieces post-mortem with a dull kitchen knife and feasting on their corpse, but that all just seems like harmless slapstick fun. Taking the banal violence of a shooter game and escalating it to real world levels of gore and graphic injury in the context of a gunfight won't do much to change the player's opinion of it. A gunshot wound, for instance, is a horrible way to die, but there's no real way to effectively get it through to the player. We already have wounded enemies writhing on the floor in agony, but the implications don't really register to the average gamer as he unthinkingly presses shift to step on a dying man's chest and shoot him in the face. In stark contrast, the WP scene pulls the ground away from beneath the player and (hopefully) gets them to re-evaluate the violence they've already mechanically, unthinkingly perpetrated up to that point. We're not just meant to feel bad that we accidentally killed a bunch of civilians in our crusade, we're also meant to realise that we've been pumping bullets into living, breathing beings up till this point too. People can criticise this game as heavy-handed all they want, but you kind of have to browbeat the player with the idea that such mindless killing is wrong, because they've been so thoroughly conditioned to the idea that they're a good boy and deserve a biscuit for their efforts. That the message gets through at all is a minor miracle.
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Jun 27, 2015 05:31
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Evil Tim posted:But it isn't wrong, because the reason killing in real life is bad is that the victims are irreplaceable thinking people with ideals, hopes, dreams and people who care about them. An AI in a videogame isn't alive and can't die, if you start the game over it's right where it was before. The "civilians" at the gate aren't even that. They exist to be dead, they're never alive in the narrative. I'm not really sure what you mean by this. Of course they're not real people. Is the emotional impact of any and all human tragedy in fiction rendered null and void because the characters aren't real people existing independent of the page? As for your other complaints, I'm not disagreeing per se, but a lot of them seem to be gripes about things that are left intentionally unclear or are small concessions made in service to the narrative. Effective storytelling benefits more from narrative economy than exhaustive, slavish detail. Particularly if the narrative itself is intended to be anarchic and confused.
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Jun 27, 2015 06:26
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I think what people forget about writers is that these guys aren't necessarily geniuses. First and foremost, they're thinking about how to effectively tell a story. Even a team of excellent writers with a consistent and rigorous design document who've sunk an exhaustive 60-80 hours into meticulous research so they get all their guns right are going to get their work obsessively picked over and found inadequate by someone. So the best move in their situation is, rather than trying to please everyone, make sure they hit every story beat they want to hit. And, to be honest, I think people are wanting this game to be something it isn't. For all that it's a deconstruction of mindless shootman games, it still has all the elements of a mindless shootman game. That's the whole point of it as a deconstruction. To take the conventions of the shooter genre and see where they might plausibly lead in another direction. It's got the ridiculous middle eastern setting five minutes into the future. It's got the two-gun limit. It's got the implausibly small delta force fireteam with wisecracking sniper and tough, no-nonsense machine gunner. It's got regenerating health, turret segments and a cover system. It's got different grades of enemy with more or less armour and better or worse weaponry, including generic genre-standard brown insurgents with T-shirts tied round their faces. It is still, first and foremost, a game. And I would also argue that the civilians are established and humanised as characters, though only in a way that is still possible from viewing them as an outsider. The player (probably) doesn't speak farsi or arabic after all, and neither does the player character. But we do learn about the conditions these people live in as we walk through their homes, we do know that they resent us and don't want us here, we do know that they're living hand-to-mouth under some martial law imposed by the 33rd.
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Jun 27, 2015 19:04
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Considering how hosed up the situation already is, I say Walker should embrace the chaos and kill both guys, then open fire on the snipers if possible. It's the last thing Konrad'll expect.
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Jun 28, 2015 21:52
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I'm gonna continue my policy of voting for maximum casualties and say shoot Riggs and then anybody else that so much as looks at you funny.
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Jul 4, 2015 23:07
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When you're sneaking up on the standoff in the mall atrium you can actually vault over the barrier and send the dude in front of you falling to his death, his chums blissfully unaware of his demise. It actually meant I enjoyed dying so many times at that part, just so I could pull that move over and over again.
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Jul 9, 2015 02:51
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It'd be pretty inconsistent to change tack now. Kill 'em all and let god sort 'em out.
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Jul 11, 2015 01:42
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Evil Tim posted:*Walker has now switched to the "cartoonishly overdone" set of voice barks. Now he hates being shot! He says gently caress when he gets shot now! Oh come on now,  angry, unhinged psycho Walker is best Walker. I personally thought the whole "red mist descending, urge to kill growing" thing he gets going is a really nice touch. It certainly beats the silent protagonists or detached wisecrackers we get in other games and it adds another dimension to his character growth.Evil Tim posted:The game breaks the scenario by having them able to kill the two of you if you do nothing at all; while it shows them throwing rocks, mechanically they're basically armed with rifles. If it was just them hurling abuse and garbage at you and they weren't clearly linked to Lugo's killing it might give you some degree of insight into how angry, frustrated soldiers can take out that anger on innocent people they think have wronged them, but the game is asking you to feel sorry for a murderous, armed lynch mob. I would argue that if the mob stood relatively passively just shouting abuse and throwing pebbles or rotten fruit at the player instead of actively trying to harm them there would really be no dilemma in play. Shooting them woudn't make any sense from a gameplay standpoint in that situation, however much it would better fit the narative. It would need the player to actively buy into Walker's frame of mind at that point, instead of reacting organically to the situation. And as we've already established with the extensive criticism of the WP scene, if the choice was removed from the player the decision to shoot would lose a great deal of its weight. So at least in this instance it seems like not only have the goalposts moved, but they're on the entire other side of the pitch and what you'd prefer is that the player is constrained to making a bad decision arbitrarily, something that was a big sore point with the whole mortar situation.
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Jul 11, 2015 09:29
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Oxxidation posted:Ultimately Spec Ops is a study in how gamers, when deprived of their desperately-needed positive reinforcement for killing men, will bloviate entire tomes of undergrad philosophy to explain why this is a bad thing and not a good. The End, no moral. By jove! I do believe this man's cracked it!
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Jul 14, 2015 15:48
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