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    •  
      CommentAuthorlilyWhite
    • CommentTimeOct 11th 2013
     

    Is there any point in favor of using the same three maps over and over? Or having most of the encounters be waves of dudes teleporting in?

    It’s ignorant exaggerations like this that make me wonder if people complaining about DAII have actually played it.

    Or it could be that there’s basically no reason to actively like them and lots of easy reasons to dislike them.

    Their LGBT support is a big reason. Or maybe just the fact that they publish a lot of successful and popular games. Including the ones that idiots on the internet complain about and blame on EA for not being exactly how they think that the developers are obligated to make the game.

    •  
      CommentAuthorSìlfae
    • CommentTimeOct 11th 2013
     

    It’s ignorant exaggerations like this that make me wonder if people complaining about DAII have actually played it.

    Well, a lot of the random waves are quite repetitive; everything you find in the parallel dimension known as Kirkwall at Night is a group of mercenaries/thugs swiftly followed by another group of mercenaries/thugs, just bigger. And a certain amount of quests requires you to go all the way across the same randomized set of maps, somethimes even getting in and getting out in the same mission (like for the Starkhaven mages’ quest), killing anonymous waves of enemies, hoping to reach as soon as possible the end of the dungeon where you’ll find the interesting point of the gameplay/story.

    • CommentAuthorRocky
    • CommentTimeOct 11th 2013
     
    bq. I never liked AC’s overall plot very much(gameplay owned though) because I felt like the framing story was just getting in the way....

    I can agree with that. It was really just the first game; my interest in Desmond's story waned significantly after that, and I was always more heavily invested in the historical setting. But the first one managed to pique some genuine curiosity from me, which is rare. Probably says more about the sort of games I play, though.
  1.  

    It’s ignorant exaggerations like this that make me wonder if people complaining about DAII have actually played it.

    I played it. I wish I didn’t. I kinda wonder if you played it though. See how that works?

    Still waiting on a valid artistic justification for the caves and waves reuse though since apparently it’s not corner-cutting.

    Their LGBT support is a big reason.

    I’d personally give them more credit for this if they hadn’t used it as a lame ass smokescreen when they won the Worst Company thing again. That just makes it seem like a cynical PR move.

    Or maybe just the fact that they publish a lot of successful and popular games.

    People who care about who made those games are more inclined to credit the developer than the publisher.

    Including the ones that idiots on the internet complain about and blame on EA for not being exactly how they think that the developers are obligated to make the game.

    This really reads like you’re implying that DA2 falls under this umbrella, but based on what sales data is available and the fact they cancelled the expansion pack, DA2 was neither successful nor popular relative to Bioware’s other games or their expectations for it.

    I can agree with that. It was really just the first game; my interest in Desmond’s story waned significantly after that, and I was always more heavily invested in the historical setting. But the first one managed to pique some genuine curiosity from me, which is rare. Probably says more about the sort of games I play, though.

    Yeah, I probably would’ve liked it more if it felt like they were really doing something with it.

    •  
      CommentAuthorlilyWhite
    • CommentTimeOct 11th 2013
     

    Well, a lot of the random waves are quite repetitive; everything you find in the parallel dimension known as Kirkwall at Night is a group of mercenaries/thugs swiftly followed by another group of mercenaries/thugs, just bigger. And a certain amount of quests requires you to go all the way across the same randomized set of maps, somethimes even getting in and getting out in the same mission (like for the Starkhaven mages’ quest), killing anonymous waves of enemies, hoping to reach as soon as possible the end of the dungeon where you’ll find the interesting point of the gameplay/story.

    ...which pretty much sums up Dragon Age: Origins as well.

    I’d personally give them more credit for this if they hadn’t used it as a lame ass smokescreen when they won the Worst Company thing again. That just makes it seem like a cynical PR move.

    That would totally explain all of their LGBT support prior to a bunch of idiots voting for them on a poll for a sensationalist website pandering to said idiots.

    Logic!

    •  
      CommentAuthorSìlfae
    • CommentTimeOct 11th 2013
     

    ...which pretty much sums up Dragon Age: Origins as well.

    I don’t know, in Origins there seemed to be more variety, except in certain circumstances (as the Deep Roads); at least usually encounters didn’t respawn each time right after offing the first wave, just to keep the player busy.

  2.  

    That would totally explain all of their LGBT support

    Why yes, it would. Publicly traded corporations don’t do nice things purely for the sake of doing nice things. When they sponsor causes, it’s because they’ve determined that the net result of sponsoring those causes will make more money for their shareholders. It’s in their charter. If they ever determine their LGBT support is hurting their bottom line more than it’s helping them, they’ll drop it in a hot second.

    Granted, it’s nice when you are able to do something good in the process of making money, but hiding behind it when people criticize you is cynical and gross.

    sensationalist website pandering to said idiots.

    Have you ever actually read The Consumerist before or are you just making assumptions?

    Logic!

    No, not really.

    •  
      CommentAuthorlilyWhite
    • CommentTimeOct 11th 2013
     

    Publicly traded corporations don’t do nice things purely for the sake of doing nice things.

    So basically, everyone’s a self-centered jerk because…well, if everyone’s a self-centered jerk, that provides you with a counterargument.

    Have you ever actually read The Consumerist before or are you just making assumptions?

    I’ve read their “articles” on EA. When EA points out several highly-successful games that idiots on the internet were whining about, the Consumerist said that those games had nothing to do with EA being in the poll. And then when EA “won” their “poll”, they listed those exact games as reasons why EA sucks.

    So yes, they were blatantly pandering to the idiots who actually think that a video game developer is worse than companies that destroy the environment and people’s lives. EA-bashers practically parody themselves.

  3.  

    So basically, everyone’s a self-centered jerk because…well, if everyone’s a self-centered jerk, that provides you with a counterargument.

    What does this sentence even mean.

    Let me explain it again, because your response doesn’t make it seem like you understood, since it seems like you’re assigning weird personal motivations to a giant corporate entity. The function of a publicly traded corporation is to make as much money as possible for as long as possible. The job of the board of directors is to make business decisions in the best interest of the company itself and the company’s shareholders. Understand that in this case, it’s referring to their best financial interest, not their best social interest. EA is not trying to make life in general more liveable for its gay shareholders.

    If EA’s support for LGBT stuff ever began to hurt them more than it helped them, continuing that support would mean the board of directors were actively failing their primary duty and they would be violating their stated role in the charter.

    If you want to love them and buy more of their games because when they were looking for causes to support they picked yours, go nuts. Just understand that getting you to do that was the reason they did it, not because they wanted you to be happy or whatever, and when they were embarrassed by an internet poll, they (erroneously) blamed their support of you for making them a target.

    I’ve read their “articles” on EA. When EA points out several highly-successful games that idiots on the internet were whining about, the Consumerist said that those games had nothing to do with EA being in the poll. And then when EA “won” their “poll”, they listed those exact games as reasons why EA sucks.

    So yes, they were blatantly pandering to the idiots who actually think that a video game developer is worse than companies that destroy the environment and people’s lives. EA-bashers practically parody themselves.

    Well if you “read” their “website” you would “know” that it’s “about” “monitoring” “consumer relations.” The poll wasn’t designed to render moral judgments, just to indicate consumer dissatisfaction. If you actually had read the “articles”(seriously why is this in scare quotes, they were pretty clearly articles whether you agreed with the content or not), you would have seen the purpose of the “poll” explained.

  4.  

    The Consumerist thing was kind of annoying considering the competition is a lot worse in terms of morality. That doesn’t suddenly make EA a good company though. They’ve got quite a few years of bad will built up and have been pretty poor on actually fixing some of their issues, or did EA somehow have nothing to do with their servers crashing when they tried to launch SimCity earlier this year?

    Though this whole thing did make me go back and reevaluate my views on Bioware. They have always been a pretty terrible developer as far as gameplay goes. I’d also like to flat out say I have the same view on Skyrim as Dragon Age 2. If I ever have the crazy idea to go back and replay either, I’m starting a tally on reused maps on sidequests. I know on Dragon Age 2, there was one map used at least three times for three different side quests.

    On another note, a couple of friends made a game. It’s nothing ground breaking, but it does kill 5 minutes. http://www.rocketlizardgame.com/

    •  
      CommentAuthorlilyWhite
    • CommentTimeOct 12th 2013
     

    they (erroneously) blamed their support of you for making them a target.

    Oh wait, their usual haters did attack them for their LGBT support. In case you haven’t noticed, the same idiots who constantly bash EA will bash them for any reason. It’s exactly why sensationalist crap like The Consumerist can say two completely contradictory things: as long as what they’re saying is attacking EA, the bashers will swallow it down.

    But if you want to tell yourself that all corporations are soulless entities only concerned with money, go ahead. Insisting that doesn’t make it reality about EA, just the same as what you say about EA’s games.

    • CommentAuthorRocky
    • CommentTimeOct 12th 2013
     
    I really enjoy how the flame war between Call of Duty and Battlefield continues to rage.
  5.  

    But if you want to tell yourself that all corporations are soulless entities only concerned with money, go ahead. Insisting that doesn’t make it reality about EA, just the same as what you say about EA’s games.

    You’re right, my position that an organization that exists for the purpose of making money for its stockholders is principally concerned about making money for its stockholders is a less realistic position than your position, in which a multinational corporation willingly weakens its earning potential because it loves you and wants you to be happy. Such an organization would never do things like lock their gay Star Wars planet inside an expansion pack.

    Just like how Dragon Age 2 was a actually smash hit that resonated with Bioware’s intended audience and got unfairly hated on by a vocal minority of haterzzz, and it definitely was not an unfinished turd that sold worse than every Bioware game in the Mass Effect era, so much worse that they had to cancel the expansion pack they’d already started on, so much worse that they never released an Ultimate Edition because they couldn’t get retailers to stock it.

    My bad. In the future I will try to look at reality more.

    I really enjoy how the flame war between Call of Duty and Battlefield continues to rage.

    is this a metaphor rocky

    •  
      CommentAuthorlilyWhite
    • CommentTimeOct 12th 2013
     

    so much worse that they never released an Ultimate Edition because they couldn’t get retailers to stock it.

    And evidently the Mass Effect games sold horribly as well, because there was no “Ultimate Edition”. Because obviously a game has only sold well if there is an “Ultimate Edition”.

    You can stop now; I don’t think you could possibly top that argument in terms of absolute nonsense.

  6.  

    •  
      CommentAuthorlilyWhite
    • CommentTimeOct 12th 2013
     

    And that means what you want it to mean because…you want it to mean that way and you’re incapable of accepting anything else.

    It’s always a waste of time to argue with people whining about DAII.

    • CommentAuthorRocky
    • CommentTimeOct 12th 2013
     
    bq. is this a metaphor rocky

    Not at all. I've been playing the BF4 beta and reading up on the new features for Call of Duty: Ghosts. There's still so much vitriol between the two parties it's wildly amusing.
    •  
      CommentAuthorlilyWhite
    • CommentTimeOct 12th 2013
     

    Ghosts looks quite interesting, especially the CoDdog (whom I will never refer to as anything but “CoDdog” or “Shadow”). It’s probably going to be the first CoD I buy since Modern Warfare 2. At which point I’ll probably discover that the multiplayer is as unbalanced as ever and lose most of my interest. Optimism!

    I haven’t been paying as much attention (read: even less) to Battlefield 4, but BF3‘s multiplayer has been fun for me so far.

    • CommentAuthorRocky
    • CommentTimeOct 12th 2013
     
    Battlefield 3 I didn't find nearly as much fun as Bad Company 2. The fun thing about the BF4 beta is how they've dealt with scale. Being in Shanghai, you have access to a few elevators that can take you to skyscraper rooftops. And then there's the central building, probably close to 100 storeys high that can actually be collapsed into a ruined heap. Dust is thrown everywhere.
    •  
      CommentAuthorsansafro187
    • CommentTimeOct 12th 2013 edited
     

    And that means what you want it to mean because…you want it to mean that way and you’re incapable of accepting anything else.

    It means retailers did not believe they could sell a fancy version of the game. Maybe the retailers are part of the Hater Brigade too. I dunno.

    All the publicly available sales estimates suggest that DA2 sold around half of what DA:O sold, and a huge chunk of DA2’s sales came from the first week, which has more to do with DA:O’s success than DA2’s.

    And the fact remains that they cancelled an expansion pack in which they’d already invested significant time. You’ve never responded to this and I’m curious why you think they would do that.

    I mean, sure, the official sales figures for games aren’t generally made public, but there’s a bunch of giant-sized red flags and the only hard number EA has ever released in an earnings report(2 million shipped, not sold, mind you, but shipped) is really low during what was apparently its peak sales period. Coming to any sort of conclusion, positive or negative, requires some amount of deduction.

    you’re incapable of accepting anything else.

    There is certainly somebody in this conversation that’s true of, but I don’t think it’s me. If you have arguments other than “because” and “idiots on the internet” and “haters” you should use them.

    e:

    Battlefield 3 I didn’t find nearly as much fun as Bad Company 2.

    Agreed. I still like BF2 the best of all army man shooter games though.

    •  
      CommentAuthorlilyWhite
    • CommentTimeOct 12th 2013 edited
     

    (stopped caring about your arguments more than an hour ago…)

  7.  

    Sure you did.

    • CommentAuthorRocky
    • CommentTimeOct 12th 2013
     
    I'm pumped yet cautious about EA's Battlefront game. It's just been far too long since a really good recent Star Wars game has occupied my time.
  8.  

    I gotta go with Sansa. I liked DA2, but EA puts microtransactions in their games like its going out of style. They have little interest in creating an interactive narrative. It’s all about money. Which doesn’t make them any more evil than another company, I guess, but they also seem to have a flippant attitude towards their customers and have shown that they have little respect for the consumer.

    I don’t really care if they support LGBT or not. Like, is that even a factor in a video game/software company? It feels like if my favorite sandwich supplier let me know that they support limited government. Like, I don’t care; provide better sandwiches.

    •  
      CommentAuthorlilyWhite
    • CommentTimeOct 13th 2013
     

    Eh, as far as I’m concerned, I couldn’t care less if a game provides microtransactions as an option as long as they remain an option and not practically required to play. To use a sandwich shop metaphor, it’s like complaining about Subway giving you the option to pay a little extra for extra cheese or meat. The best example to point to is ME3, where the profits from microtransactions allowed them to put out the multiplayer DLCs for free.

    • CommentAuthorRocky
    • CommentTimeOct 13th 2013
     
    Microtransations I find very annoying because, while you're not paying for anything integral, it instills a sense you're being nickle-and-dimed. It's yet another reason I want to get back to PC gaming, as I wasn't too far removed from the days of modding. When you spent time in your youth playing through _Jedi Outcast_ with a wide range of awesome cheats turned on, and then fast-forward to see a single weapon, piece of armor, or restylized map pop up on the grid for 5-15 bucks, it makes you scratch your head.

    What makes it even more frustrating is how difficult it's become to determine if developers were unable to finish A, B, and C in time for launch, or if it was all pre-planned in order to adhere to a "DLC launch schedule".
  9.  

    I don’t like Microtransactions because they absolutely gut any sense of immersion I have in a game.

    •  
      CommentAuthororganiclead
    • CommentTimeOct 17th 2013 edited
     

    This Humble Bundle is looking pretty good. Worms Reloaded, the Bard’s Tale, Ticket to Ride, Greed Corp, Incredipede and Anodyne. I’ve heard good things about Worms Reloaded, the Bard’s Tale and Incredipede, though the others look pretty interesting as well. The only one I’m iffy about is Ticket to Ride.

    • CommentAuthorRocky
    • CommentTimeOct 17th 2013
     
    I'm absolutely loving the score for Assassin's Creed 4.
  10.  

    They just released Squirrel Girl on Marvel Heroes.

    what.

    •  
      CommentAuthorTakuGifian
    • CommentTimeOct 18th 2013
     

    who?

    •  
      CommentAuthorApep
    • CommentTimeOct 19th 2013
     

    Look her up. Apparently she’s pretty badass. She’s one of those Lethal Joke Characters.

    •  
      CommentAuthorswenson
    • CommentTimeOct 19th 2013 edited
     

    Squirrel Girl! She took down Doctor Doom once, didn’t she? And probably, like, Galactus.

    •  
      CommentAuthorlilyWhite
    • CommentTimeOct 19th 2013
     

    Twenty seconds on Google has made me more interested in Squirrel Girl than Iron Man, Batman, Spiderman, and Superman combined.

    •  
      CommentAuthorswenson
    • CommentTimeOct 20th 2013
     

    In other news, Planetside 2 continues to be great.

    • CommentAuthorRocky
    • CommentTimeOct 22nd 2013
     
    I just realized _Batman: Arkham Asylum_ was only Rocksteady's second game.
    •  
      CommentAuthororganiclead
    • CommentTimeOct 23rd 2013 edited
     

    Not bad at all for their second game. Kind of curious what kind of skill they had on their staff though. (One of my favorite games of all time, Psychonauts, was Double Fine’s first game but they had a pretty skilled and experienced team working on the game.)

    Every once in a while, I feel like I’ve become completely jaded to games and their effect on me. I breezed through Spec Ops: The Line with no issue, Red Dead Redemption never really tugged at any heart strings and I just kind of got mad at Mass Effect 3 for ruining one of my favorite songs.

    Yet every time I pick up Mother 3, I can’t get through it a second time. That game gets to me.

    Also, stay away from Time and Eternity, it sucks on every level a game can suck. The music is grating, the character designs are wonky, the combat stays pretty static through the game once you get over the neat initial features, the gameplay feels like one giant fetch quest, there’s a weird glitch in the saving screen where it always saves twice, the plot is interesting in theory but so poorly pulled off it’s offensive and there’s little to no replay value, and none of the characters are particularly endearing. I’d spork this game if I had the money to buy the equipment needed to record PS3 games.

    Currently playing Recettear and Incredipede. Have Aquaria on hold until I can find a better mousepad. Both looking forward to and dreading the Thief reboot. I’m really hesitant about the gameplay, though the story is what’s going to sell or lose me. I’m also a bit worried that they’re going to gentrify the main character and make him more of a thief with a heart of gold instead of the absolute jerk he was in the original Thief trilogy. Can’t wait for The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth.

    EDIT: Ahahahahahahaha! This game. I love it. I think I sprained my cheeks while playing it. (EDIT 2: Warning, blood and violence and stuff.)

    •  
      CommentAuthorlilyWhite
    • CommentTimeOct 23rd 2013
     

    I’ve played a bit of Spec Ops: The Line. Really, what ruins any sort of effect that the game is aiming for is based on two things:

    1. The game constantly trying to shame the player based on an attitude that the game assumes anyone playing it would have.
    2. The game constantly trying to shame the player based on events which the player had absolutely no control over.

    And of course, on top of that, the gameplay just isn’t good. Really, making a game “deep” (read: pretentious) isn’t an excuse for lackluster gameplay.

    •  
      CommentAuthororganiclead
    • CommentTimeOct 23rd 2013 edited
     

    I can agree with the gameplay portion, though I thought the plot came pretty close to getting the message they were going for. The things I think they really screwed up were two key plot points.

    EDIT: I also really don’t like it when a game gets labeled as “pretentious” when it’s trying to tackle themes. It’s usually brought up in the same vein that games can’t be art and that people should stop caring if a game has something offensive in it because “this is supposed to be fun”. It says that games can’t even attempt to be anything other than toys.

    •  
      CommentAuthorApep
    • CommentTimeOct 23rd 2013
     

    I’m with organiclead on this. I think the point of Spec Ops: The Line is to be an unpleasant and disturbing experience. Yes, they railroad you a bit, but how many gamers wouldn’t even question doing some of that stuff if the game didn’t go to extreme ends to say “hey, this is messed up.” How many FPSs have the player character mowing down enemies without a second thought?

    It might not be good as a game, but it’s kinda hard to have a dialogue like that when the player can just go “No, I made a different decision, so that didn’t happen, so you have no argument.”

    •  
      CommentAuthorlilyWhite
    • CommentTimeOct 23rd 2013
     

    I like to see games as art. I like to see games handle deep themes and ideas. Just look at, say, Mother 3. The problem with Spec Ops is that it handles its themes with all of the subtlety and precision of a sledgehammer, that there’s a clear difference between how much effort they put into pushing their message and how much effort they put into the medium that they were pushing their message through. The entire delivery of the themes is based around trying to make the player feel bad because of a mindset they are assumed to have and the consequences of actions they never chose to do. Saying “hey, this is messed up” in response to a horrible event that the player had absolutely no input in is an entirely different thing that saying “hey, you are messed up”.

    •  
      CommentAuthororganiclead
    • CommentTimeOct 23rd 2013 edited
     

    I can agree with most of that, though I still think the game is solid and would be a good game if they just changed those two points I mentioned above. I’m not even saying it was a great game, but it was definitely above average.

    EDIT: I also don’t think being obvious about your message makes anything any less artistic or themed.

    •  
      CommentAuthorApep
    • CommentTimeOct 24th 2013
     

    On a completely different note, I just played the demo for The Stanley Parable. Saying that I’m confused doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel.

    •  
      CommentAuthorswenson
    • CommentTimeOct 24th 2013
     

    ^^ that is exactly how I feel about it.

    •  
      CommentAuthorApep
    • CommentTimeOct 26th 2013
     

    Okay, I bought the game, and it’s frighteningly addictive. I mean, most of my play-throughs might be half an hour at most, but my god, I just keep playing to find more endings.

    Also, I love the fact that turning achievements on is itself an achievement.

    • CommentAuthorTim
    • CommentTimeOct 29th 2013 edited
     

    There’s a lot of reasons why Spec Ops: The Line isn’t a good story, here in approximate order of appearance (spoilers, obviously):

    • It has three copies of the same character (Adams, Walker, Konrad) who go or have gone though the same plot arc. Adams in particular is practically useless in story terms.
    • The premise is completely impossible. Logistically, meteorologically, politically, socially, take your pick.
    • In particular sending three men with no packs, almost no equipment and a day’s worth of water to search a 1,200 square mile city full of tower blocks is unbelievably bloody stupid. Especially when that three-man squad has two crew-served weapons in it.
    • The premise is also fundamentally broken because the “you could have left” argument presupposes that Walker, Adams and Lugo could have left at any time, but the main plot requires that it be hard to leave. It would work far better if it were in a sci-fi setting where your three-man ship could get through the storms caused by a malfunctioning weather control device or something.
    • The “you could have stopped” argument also presupposes that inaction is morally neutral, even though the situation the game actually shows is that everyone was about a week from running out of water anyway, and the scenario Riggs paints means that Walker’s actions might ultimately have served the greater good (though it’s a really stupid scenario). In other words, it can’t even work out how to agree with itself.
    • Starting with a tedious and ferociously scripted rail-shooting segment is a bad idea regardless of your excuse, and a poor use of in media res since it’s not a mystery why someone in a shooter would be shooting things with a minigun. It’s because they’re in a shooter.
    • The argument that Walker died at the start means nothing matters even from the flimsy perspective that anything in a game matters in the first place.
    • It also doesn’t fit the scene right after which is introduced with a title card and shot from a perspective other than Walker’s. The scene is dishonest since it’s framed as if Walker is talking to someone after the mission, even though there’s nobody he could possibly be making these comments to.
    • In its efforts to make war not-cool it’s actually completely untrue to reality; the Delta unit’s gear is ridiculously low-tech (no optics, no NVGs, no custom weapons aside from an M4 with a fancy handguard?) and they never act in a manner that suggests they’re seasoned professionals tackling a mission whose initial brief is so far beneath their skills they should be able to finish it in their sleep; Lugo’s the only one talking like a real Delta would in that situation. If someone says it’s midday and sunny and you say it’s midnight and scary, that does not help anyone to work out it’s 8:30 and the sun is setting.
    • The game constantly assumes a port can be “in the middle of the desert.”
    • Sandstorms do not create sand.
    • The majority population of Dubai do not speak Farsi. Neither are they Arabs (they’re mostly from the Indian subcontinent). And if the guys are supposed to be Iranian, then they’re not Arabs either, because they speak Farsi.
    • The game erases almost the whole of Dubai to turn it into a city as unreal as Rapture, including all lower-class housing and the massive container port and industrial estate that should be the first thing you encounter. The first thing you see is the Burj Al Arab, which is about 18 miles from the West tip of the city.
    • Around the time you encountered unknown militiamen speaking Farsi you would get right the hell back to command because 33rd or no, Walker does not have authority to start a war with Iran which is most likely where they would have come from. After all, it’s a legitimate local power with fairly significant forces that’s right across the Persian Gulf and has about as good a reason to help out as anyone.
    • The game doesn’t let you move away from Adams. I tried because I figured it was about to tell me to switch to the bit of cover to the left to teach me the ‘change cover’ control. I then realised it was one of those games and shot the pointless red marker placed because the developers did not trust me to correctly identify which of the many buses full of sand in the area Adams might be talking about. So everything happens because of an enforced stupid decision.
    • Despite knowing the city is occupied by ruthless foes, at no point is anyone even slightly cautious about the very real prospect of landmines.
    • You knock a guy down and rather than, say, trying to question him, the game uses this to teach you to execute people, which gains you ammunition for no good reason so the game can make you feel bad by cranking up the brutality of the executions later. This is basically Spec Ops: The Line in a nutshell.
    • The depiction of the local population shows them as a homogenous mass with no personalities, names, agendas or plan of action. It totally ignores the “my country is not a metaphor” critiques of Heart of Darkness that started in the 70s and treats Dubai as a framing device for a story about a bunch of white dudes. You could set the game in Las Vegas without changing anything (in fact it would make more sense because Las Vegas isn’t a major port).
    • It also completely discounts all the other regional powers. It’s effectively Homefront in reverse; it can imagine a complex enemy (but only when that enemy is Americans), but can’t for a moment bring itself to assign personalities to the locals. Both Medal of Honor and Call of Duty can manage to assign complex motives and agendas to foreign people, which means Spec Ops is actually more reductive, racist and morally simplistic than the things it tries to criticise. The worst case is when Riggs somehow crashes three trucks he is driving none of, because his whitey willpower is just that damn superior to the survival instincts of those silly foreign people. It’s like a reversed White Man’s Burden; rather than being a wise adult bringing civilisation to the Lesser Peoples, whitey becomes a corrupted adult spoiling the childhood innocence of the world. It’s still making white people in charge of everything, and still treats all other races as children.
    • You can summarise this depiction of foreign people as “misery dolls;” pathetic, inhuman vessels which exist to have suffering poured into them until they explode in righteous (but still pathetic) anger. Such as this game, where they only articulate anger by shoving or hucking rocks at you like fucking chimpanzees.
    • Almost everything it tries to say about military shooters is trite, wrong or outdated. Military shooters don’t make the player the hero, they make them an extension of the will of an actual character who can carry out route actions effectively. Call of Duty is known for its cavalier attitude to killing off player characters, and even people who think “if the game were completely realistic you could only die once” is a good rebuttal understand that in real life you only get to die once. The “bro gamer” who unironically plays the single player mode while going YEAH AMERICA is a ridiculous strawman that they should have realised as such when 2K insisted they needed a multiplayer mode. The sole truth of Call of Duty’s multiplayer is that sooner or later, no matter how good you are, you will die too – the only way to not die is to not play. Spec Ops only seems clever if you have a very generalised and supeficial knowledge of shooters.
    • The 33rd apparently do not encode their transmissions.
    • The game’s sense of visual storytelling is atrocious. Time and again you encounter situations pieced together nonsensically with no effort made to make them tell you something about what happened here; as here, where the A380 crash site makes no physical sense and the fact that it’s ejected a level from a videogame onto the ground next to it just seems awkward rather than natural. Instead, Spec Ops falls back on using text intels, which is like handing a movie audience a set of flashcards with the plot written on them. Actually, it’s like asking them to find the flashcards in the theatre while still watching the movie. It’s even more shameful when it tries to make major story points on the loading screens. Or when music choices are made based on “clever” lyrics rather than fitting the scenes they’re used in tonally, in a game where almost all of said lyrics are drowned out by gunfire.
    • These intels often create questions rather than solving them. Here we find an 80mph wind could somehow catch a plane that stalls in level flight at 140 knots. Also good thing we got that cliche of rich people trying to use their social standing to escape a disaster only to die an ironic death, I guess in fiction nobody knows that natural disasters are attracted to money. I guess that’s why the impossistorm is stuck around Dubai.
    • It becomes ludicrously contrived just how often someone dies just in time to not tell Walker that Konrad is dead.
    • It’s also stupid how often it kills characters before they’ve even done anything. Sure, sure, life is cheap in Dubai and all, but establishing the same thing in the same way over and over is not good writing.
    • Adams cannot open a door until Walker tells him to open the door again and then he can because of C4. Um…
    • There’s an intel talking about casting bullets from silver because shortages. Great, now you just need to explain where they’re getting cartridges, primers, powder, spare magazines and gun parts. And links for the belted ammo in the 50 cals we see them using.
    • We’re introduced to a secret CIA operative who is wearing his fucking ID badge in the middle of an off-the-books op that’s supposed to be completely deniable. Even Black Ops looks realistic in comparison.
    • The CIA base implies that the CIA were here before the storms hit (they have press bulletproof vests), contradicting everything else anyone says about them.
    • Despite the game claiming the 33rd have been here six months, they are all wearing virtually pristine uniforms, have fully-functional weapons and never run out of ammunition. Neither are they sickly from starvation rations and a lack of medical care. Neither does the game ever try to make you empathise with them through gameplay by having them, say, surrender, try to help wounded comrades, retreat if overwhelmed, etc. The lazy gunbot AI undermines the idea that you’re supposed to be killing anything but cartoony computermen. Because of that, everything rings hollow. Who cares what they shout or do in cutscenes if they turn straight back into gunbots the moment my bit of the game happens?
    • The use of off-shelf Havok physics also doesn’t work because having people bounce ridiculously into the air doesn’t mesh with the game’s flailing attempts at seriousness. It’s like if every third extra in Dirty Harry was wearing clown shoes that went honk because it was cheaper than getting proper shoes for them.
    • The attempt at reversing the standard game scenario doesn’t work because Spec Ops changes too many variables. If you had a clear reason to fight the American soldiers it would just be a regular shooter. We know that because we’ve seen it done in games like, um, Modern Warfare 2. Nevermind that in 50% of multiplayer matches a player will be shooting at the “good guy” team and nobody ever seems to have a problem with that.
    • That canyon is visually arresting but also physically impossible and pointless because they never use the long sightline for anything. Instead you quickly climb into the nearest cupboard so gameplay can happen.
    • Also, the game’s idea that the 33rd get around mostly by sliding along or down cables is a really silly and artificial way of stopping you going back. Especially when the animation used would be murder on Walker’s hands.
    • Two 33rd soldiers discuss how peaceful the canyon they’ve been able to see for months is in a manner that suggests that they’ve never seen it before. This kind of blatant THINK THIS, STUPID AUDIENCE pandering is entirely at odds with any claim the game is sophisticated, and the speech barely stops short of “I bet it would take a really smart person to make something like this with a computer” in the scale of self-congratulation.
    • Silly men with knives appear to further undermine any sense of seriousness, especially when the game starts inventing terms like ‘close combat expert’ and ‘bayonet runner’ for them and you realise they can dodge bullets.
    • Walker opens a door that, from the outside, would very obviously lead right into the sand dune. He is surprised when the door is full of sand and has to save himself from falling a billion feet with the Magic Rope he bought along. Precisely what he thought was going to happen is not clear. There are at least two instances in this sequence which should have crippled or killed him.
    • Walker is apparently so operator he can pull a Deagle out of his ass. I think this is supposed to be some kind of joke, but it’s entirely possible the devs really do think the Desert Eagle fires .50 BMG and that’s why it’s so stupidly powerful here. Would match up with half the weapons being modelled with the safety on.
    • The number of times it explains to you that FIRE IS NOT A GOOD CHRISTMAS PRESENT makes me seriously wonder if Walt Williams is pyrophobic.
    • Gould throws a grenade with the pin still in it which goes off out of pity and Walker instantly falls in love with him. Doesn’t take much to impress him, it seems.
    • You’d think before showing a helicopter firing miniguns you’d check if your helicopter model actually had miniguns on it.
    • The game forgets about Adams’ injured leg in the same cutscene it’s established in, since that’s the one he uses to kick the door open.
    • Apparently in all this chaos there’s still time for Banksy to go around putting up pretentious street art. Glad to see the people of Dubai have their priorities right.
    • Juggernauts randomly show up, cleverly, um…Wait, Juggernauts don’t appear in Call of Duty’s singleplayer at all. Also they’re about nine feet tall. Um…
    • It’s kind of bizarre how incurious everyone is about important things; for example, Nameless 33rd Guy questions Gould about Riggs, but doesn’t bother to ask him anything about the Delta team even though it’s a far more immediate threat. I guess he read the script and knows Gould doesn’t know.
    • The “sandboarding” torture method is, as far as I can tell, made up. It’s supposed to be clever because LOOK GUYZ DUBAI HAS NO WATER BUT SAND. Only, um…I imagine you can waterboard someone just fine with seawater, and the one thing the 33rd is going to be more short of than water is bullets after six months of continuous action.
    • Torture in Spec Ops is an incredibly effective and reliable method of making someone give you accurate information. Um, I’m not sure that’s what they were trying to say.
    • The game tries to present Gould’s death as inevitable, but if the Delta team hadn’t just sat there and cutscened they could have used their silenced weapons to take out all three of the guys, saving the civilians, the woman who was executed, and giving them more time to talk to Gould as well.
    • The WP sequence features a 60mm mortar with the visible effects of two completely different 155mm artillery shells, being fired below its minimum range with a targeting system that would be totally useless at targets it would be ineffective against, with no ammunition shown anywhere near it. The RPG-7 would actually be more effective against a vehicle than a real smoke / marker round from a light infantry mortar, since the latter is impact fuzed and contains less than one pound of WP.
    • It also cheats outrageously because the models in the trench are soldiers (look at their backpacks).
    • It also gives you almost no control; you can’t hit moving vehicles or the fuel tank to the left, and even if you drop a round right on top of the tent where the civilians are the game will ignore it. In the sequence about collateral damage you’re not actually permitted to cause any. This is somehow still your fault.
    • If the camera’s altimeter hits zero, Walker instantly dies for no reason. Even if the last Humvee, which you could easily beat on foot, is the only thing left.
    • Civilians get extra burned so it is extra sad. Also I guess we hit a fridge since there are more women here than anywhere else in the entire game. And per classic fridging, the suffering of women is framed explicitly in terms of the effects it has on a man.
    • If both you and your child are on fire covering their eyes will help and you will still have a sufficient amount of your wits intact to both do this and remain perfectly posed afterwards.
    • Three fades to white during this sequence…So, um, it didn’t happen anyway. Well, that’s ok then. Not that it’s possible to guess the fade to black / fade to white motif because there’s no way you ever could. And so what, the scene transitions are something Walker actually perceives?
    • This is entirely your fault even though the radioman could have contacted you and the 33rd didn’t bother to move the civilians despite being subject to a creeping artillery barrage, and the civilians themselves just sat there doing nothing.
    • The game echoes the very troubling belief that PTSD is a form of karma for people who do really mean stuff.
    • The bodies in the meeting room are decayed, not burned. Burned bodies are generally not sitting on intact chairs in intact clothes. This happened because Walt Williams got his ideas of what burn victims look like from watching discredited conspiracy nonsense-movie Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre rather than doing any actual research.
    • When Walker hears the voice on the radio, all three squad members immediately turn to the podium as if they can hear it. Oops.
    • You can do many things when fake Konrad does his Jigsaw act, but you can’t kill both men. The game disables grenades. More ridiculously, if you try to cheat your way around this by bringing an RPG into the level, the game will steal it off you when this level starts. So they knew it was possible, knew people would try it, but couldn’t be bothered to allow it.
    • The four snipers are visible before the fade to white, presumably meaning that four real snipers were waiting there to see which of two corpses Walker liked the least.
    • The game makes nothing of what could be a very good criticism of artificial player choices; it seems it honestly doesn’t understand that it’s presenting a scenario where you can try to kill four innocent men to save two guilty ones.
    • There needs to be some kind of military Bechdel test to fail for soldiers never talking about anything but their mission. Even here where the team has some downtime, nobody talks about anything at all. We finish the game having no idea who any member of the team is or more than one personality trait of any of them. This is largely because most of the dialog they do have is redundantly telling the player what to think, such as that WHITE PHOSPHOROUS is the MEANEST CHEMICAL.
    • The latter (along with the drone camera footage motif accompanying it) brings in a troubling tangent that war would be ok if we just put down all the mean weapons and went back to trying to kill each other like civilised people.
    • An intel at this point includes the only woman in the game with a given first and last name. She’s dead.
    • Riggs is clearly an important item of satire because it’s not like General Shepherd was already the bad guy in Modern Warfare 2. Oh wait.
    • Riggs admits to arming the rebels, meaning somehow the CIA smuggled weapons through the storm wall without bothering to talk to its agents on the ground. And they somehow communicated they needed weapons. And a constant supply of ammo. It’s about this point where you wonder if the storm wall looks like a revolving door on the outside.
    • The game then introduces ridiculous special troops with the military ability to, um, climb on tables and have P90s and tremendously shit pathfinding. Given Riggs is already a fucking cartoon character, it makes it almost impossible to take the remainder of the game seriously.
    • It’s entirely unclear why Riggs needs to do anything since 45,000 gallons of water is about a week’s worth for a 750 man infantry battalion, nevermind everyone else. Which removes Walker’s guilt, since everyone was seemingly going to die anyway. Oops.
    • Riggs steals three tankers but the water depot contains six, and at least two 4,800 gallon water tanks.
    • Oh ho the CIA guy was evil careful how many of my expectations you subvert soon i wont have any left
    • Walker’s progressively more beaten-up character model is neither reflected in gameplay nor made to fit the events that cause it. Apparently while unconscious he managed to, among other things, tie a bandage with surgical tubing he was never seen to be carrying. Also, he never really gets beyond being grimy and grizzled, when he really ought to end the game looking ripped up and hideous.
    • Since white people are the most important thing in the universe, as soon as the Angry Man sees Walker he instantly stops doing anything useful so he can shout at him. Securing water so he can live is much less important than shouting at a passing American.
    • Riggs’ scenario is impossible; the Middle East would have been utterly wrecked by a 180-day storm lifting billions of tons of sand from adjacent nations (nevermind the implication that the storm has somehow blocked travel in the Persian Gulf) and even if it hadn’t, the world’s only major blue-water navy is hardly going to be shitting itself about a power block with no aircraft carriers and the only nuclear power a friendly one.
    • Radioman’s increasingly bizarre psychic powers imply that Dubai has a fully functional power grid and surveillance system, but at least one of Dubai’s main power stations has a desalinisation plant in its footprint. So why is nobody using or trying to repair it?
    • Hey Spec Ops, you know what Games Workshop or Gears of War or whatever the big figure is supposed to be referencing have that you don’t? WOMEN WHO AREN’T DEAD.
    • The game seems to believe that desensitisation is about enjoying killing rather than not caring about it.
    • A bunch of snipers are shown using normal scopes to aim through an impenetrable cloud bank.
    • Radioman’s stolen-from-XKCD skit is absolutely fucking painful, especially since he’s clearly making them up as he goes along. That scene would work if Konrad was rattling off name / rank / service number / something about them, but Radioman’s such a stupid character it defeats the whole thing.
    • Lugo proceeds to become the best character by shooting the Radioman, then immediately dies because of the Goose Law (comic relief characters must die to show the Grim Nature of War).
    • Oh I’m sure glad we got to do the tedious rail section again.
    • The 33rd are the best US military unit, which means that if they’re facing a helicopter with a gun mounted on only one side, they will all attack it from that side.
    • Adams apparently does not know helicopters can go up as well as along.
    • Indeed, unless the storm wall is four miles high (it’s not), they should have been able to fly out over it any time they wanted to. An infantry battalion shouldn’t have helicopters to begin with (or Strykers) but it’s clearly a very strange day in Dubai.
    • The Eye of Konrad is just silly. It looks like this was supposed to be like the scene with The Sorrow in MGS3 but they only went for three deads, the first of whom you didn’t even kill. Also this sequence is Freudian as fuck, especially if you apply it to Walt Williams’ feelings of inadequacy at failing to make it through basic training in the military (his father was a soldier in Vietnam). It doesn’t help that before the spectre of Konrad’s immense flaming edifice his own little man is shrinking away into nothing.
    • Well, there goes the entire Persian Gulf.
    • The last Radioman intel shows a bizarre obsession with “art” on the writer’s behalf. The “art” that apparently inspired him was either a pretentious bit of stencil street art of a guy blowing his brains out, or a ridiculously twee image of a winged dolphin shitting a rainbow. Either way, it shows a certain ahumanity that such “art” is more inspiring than people coming together in dark times to make the best of things, despite the mention of the Blitz where that was exactly what happened.
    • The sequence with the civilians shows Spec Ops can only conceptualise human suffering as an obstacle. This is the best case of their anger (righteous, of course) being pathetic, since despite that this crowd would probably have access to weapons (in particular Lugo’s Tavor which is at the other end of the camp) they stick to throwing rocks.
    • I guess we don’t need a mortar to attack this gigantic firebase.
    • Mega Lugo is just fucking silly.
    • If we assume that Konrad’s wife took his name, she becomes the only woman in the entire game to both have a name and not be dead. While Konrad’s letter addresses his son as a person, the poem instead mourns that he is unable to put Konrad Jr. in her sausage cozy anymore. Walt Williams considers himself a progressive, btw.
    • Summary of the twist:

    Martin Walker waited. The lights above him blinked and sparked out of the air. There was darkness in the base. He didn’t see it, but had expected it now for years. His warnings to Cernel John Konrad were not listenend to and now it was too late. Far too late for now, anyway.

    Walker was in Delta Force for fourteen years. When he was young he watched the wars and he said to Konrad “I want to be in the wars Konrad.”

    Konrad said “No! You will BE KILL BY DARKNESS”

    There was a time when he believed him. Then as he got oldered he stopped. But now in the dust bowl base of the UAE he knew there was darkness.

    “This is Konrad” the radio crackered. “You must fight the demons!”

    So Martin gotted his palsma mortar and blew up the wall.

    “HE GOING TO KILL US” said the 33rd

    “I will shoot at him” said Mega-Lugo and he fired the rocket missiles. Walker plasmaed at him and tried to blew him up. But then the gatehouse fell and they were trapped and not able to kill.

    “No! I must kill the demons” Adams shouted

    The radio said “No, Martin. You are the demons”

    And then John was a zombie.

    • The ending finally allows the player to make the choice they should have been allowed at the start, only allowing you to frame it in terms of who’s fault everything is (Konrad shoots / shoot Walker – your fault, go home – writer’s fault, get shot – Walker’s fault, win the shootout – it’s just a game). It’s kind of pathetic that Williams tries to undercut the reject ending with a fade to white as if anyone cares about that after taking it.
    • The game tries to frame the player blaming the developers for the WP sequence as like Walker blaming Konrad, but it’s a false equivalency; Konrad is dead and his influence was an illusion, but the developers really were there forcing your hand for as long as you attempted to interact with the work, even if you only did so because you felt you owed the text a full reading (as it were). When everything is a forgone conclusion, blaming the player is as valid as if Spielberg stomped onto the set at the end of Schindler’s List and demanded to know why the audience wanted to watch the Holocaust play out. What would it say about him if he thought that and made the movie anyway?
    • In addition the game’s ultimate conclusions are nihilistic; it ignores there are good decisions which could have been made which the game explicitly disallowed (eg moving away from Adams at the start so the militia didn’t get jumpy). It shows that all suffering is inevitable and that no attempt to alleviate it will do anything but make it even worse. Well, if that’s true, then there’s no point in even trying to reduce suffering, so we might as well just pull out the FASCAM and napalm and fire away.
    • Walt Williams thinks he’s Konrad, but he’s not, he’s Walker. The truth was undeniable, so he created his own, an easy little world where he could hide from the reality of his misanthropic, pretentious, racist views and sling mud at the literally imaginary crimes of other shooters and their players. The only people he hit in the end were people who already agreed with him anyway. And when you’re such an atrocious writer that the most coherent reading of your ending is the precise inverse of what you think it is, you deserve no respect or praise of any kind.

    • CommentAuthorRocky
    • CommentTimeOct 29th 2013
     
    bq. In particular sending three men with no packs, almost no equipment and a day’s worth of water to search a 1,200 square mile city full of tower blocks is unbelievably bloody stupid.

    I can attest to that. Just on a horizontal plane, Dubai is a monster. You could set the entire game in the Burj Khalifa and the adjacent Dubai Mall and never run out of space.
    • CommentAuthorTim
    • CommentTimeOct 29th 2013 edited
     

    It’s actually because the plot was rewritten late in the day: originally the 33rd had deserted to loot Dubai following a war with Iran (this is why there are those newspapers about a fortune left in Dubai in Konrad’s apartment in the intro, which in the final plot he couldn’t possibly have got because he was presumably in Dubai when they were printed). The squad was a three-man team with a sniper and two riflemen (Adams used to have Lugo’s rifle, which is why his character model has magazines for it, and Lugo had a UMP instead of the Tavor) and Walker was presumably an errand boy sent by a grocery clerk to collect a bill. Apparently that plot was canned because it would take too much time to explain the fictional war with Iran, leaving us with the same three-man team trying to search the entire city instead.

    •  
      CommentAuthorlilyWhite
    • CommentTimeOct 29th 2013
     

    ...damn.

    Did you have that somewhere else online or copy that from somewhere? Because I totally want to share that.

    • CommentAuthorTim
    • CommentTimeOct 29th 2013
     

    It’s mostly rewritten from my notes for a playthrough / analysis video series I’m working on (slowly). Don’t have it up anywhere else.

  11.  

    While I disagree with the equipment portion (the US government functions on a “lowest bidder” policy for pretty much all of it’s branches, including equipment for the US military), you brought up quite a few points I didn’t notice and quite a few I haven’t actually seen brought up before, like the lack of research into Dubai and the misery doll thing. Thank you.

    • CommentAuthorTim
    • CommentTimeOct 29th 2013
     

    Oh, that’s certainly true for the normal military, not so much for top-tier SF like Delta: generally, what they want they get. You only have to look at those shots of what the SEAL DEVGRU team who killed Bin Laden were using to see that; it’s all custom top-shelf HK gear with every gadget you can think of.

    http://i50.tinypic.com/5v7rd3.jpg

  12.  

    Maybe, though I still think the crappy equipment thing helps with the over all game and it’s attempts at not being glamorous (despite the fact it failed hard at this goal), even if it really went against the character we were supposed to be following. Guess that’s another big failing in the themes VS the story it’s telling.

    Also, I have a sneaking suspicion the helicopter thing was only thrown in so they could throw it in their bait and switch trailers.

    • CommentAuthorTim
    • CommentTimeOct 29th 2013 edited
     

    I don’t know, I think you could make it fit the theme with a sort of digital man being gradually stripped of his technology to reveal a core as ragged as anyone else’s, and it would strengthen the contrast between the desperate situation in the city and the calm of the world outside if you were very obviously an outsider with much better gear. In the actual game it just comes off as damn weird when the 33rd start pulling out pristine laser-sighted P90s and AA-12s near the end of the game since your top-tier special ops team never had anything like that.

    Of course the big failure of the demo is that it did exactly what they wanted it to; most people who saw it went “oh, it’s another generic shooter” and didn’t buy it. Which, when you think about it, actually means the game undermined its own argument.

  13.  

    I didn’t take away a “war is bad” message from the game. I’ve always seen it as a game about Walker blaming everything else for things he’s done. The first step in the landslide of disaster that followed was Walker ignoring his orders. He then goes through the entire game complaining, “the environment forced me to… he forced me to… they forced me to…” when half the time it’s his own choice to do anything. The desperation in the beginning helps you sympathize with his actions until he goes into more and more terrible tendencies and drags you along with them if you don’t look for alternatives. In the same vein, I felt like they were trying to draw a parallel in the gameplay when it gives you two obvious choices but has a third, less obvious one not even mentioned or highlighted with a big marker.

    I guess I feel inclined to defend it because it could have been an interesting premise if they didn’t screw up on so many of the details and executions and everything really. One of those games I really wish I could go into and “fix”.

    • CommentAuthorTim
    • CommentTimeOct 29th 2013 edited
     

    Well, sure, but it’s a bit shallow to string an entire plot around one thing the protagonist happens to do (well, the protagonist, the villain and Adams all do), especially since we never really find out why he does it. Plus the beginning of the game is pretty easy (compared to the I WILL SPAWN MEN EVERYWHERE NOW excesses of the Uncharted games, anyway) so I can’t really buy that it’s supposed to seem desperate. Then again, I’m prone to playing Dark Sector and Shinobi for fun so my view of difficulty may not be normal. It definitely wants to say something about war, but I’m not sure even it really knows what.

    I’d agree with you on the second point, it’s far more frustrating playing a game that could have been something than one that was never going to be anything.

    •  
      CommentAuthororganiclead
    • CommentTimeOct 30th 2013 edited
     

    Still think it’s supposed to be building up a desperate atmosphere over the game, just listen to how the combat dialogue changes between the first few missions and the last few. Atmosphere and difficulty in a game aren’t always the same thing, just look at Amnesia for an example. It’s a pretty easy, straight forward game but the atmosphere it creates is one of vulnerability and paranoia. And I agree that the big event that keeps being brought up was terribly executed. As well as the ending.

    I look forwarding to seeing the full break down though. I only got to play the game once and I’d love to see the thing analyzed as a whole as well as in pieces.

    • CommentAuthorTim
    • CommentTimeOct 30th 2013 edited
     

    I always thought the part with most potential was the idea of being inside a war you weren’t really part of, with the ability to decide to what extent you interfered with what was going on. Spec Ops originally had more of a focus on stealth (rather than the silencers being there but virtually useless), and I imagine it would have been pretty interesting if they’d played up that aspect of it.

    I have already done a playthrough of this game’s opposite-twin Homefront, you can find that here: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL41F2A30FA4C8A2BD

    •  
      CommentAuthorTakuGifian
    • CommentTimeOct 30th 2013
     

    silencers being there but virtually useless

    i.e. true to life.

    • CommentAuthorTim
    • CommentTimeOct 30th 2013
     

    Naw, I mean “having almost no function in gameplay.” They’re still your average magic silencer that makes a gun sound like a mouse farting, there’s just something like four stealth segments in the entire game and all they let you do is skip the first spawn wave.

    •  
      CommentAuthorTakuGifian
    • CommentTimeOct 30th 2013
     

    oh, right. J’disappoint.

    •  
      CommentAuthorswenson
    • CommentTimeOct 30th 2013 edited
     

    No matter how good you are at Half-Life 2, it suddenly becomes a whole lot more difficult when you try playing with a controller and you’re awful with a controller.

    I got shot—as in, lost several points of energy and health—at the very first train section, right after you leave Barney! And I fell off the roof ledges when going to Kleiner’s lab twice! And this was on easy!

    how do you people use these things to play FPSes

    • CommentAuthorTim
    • CommentTimeOct 30th 2013 edited
     

    It depends on the FPS, really. Half Life 2 is a game built for mouse aim and WASD movement, so on a joypad it’s assuming you can both turn fast and precisely, which you can’t because of the range of motion of the stick (the entire reason iron sights are so popular is they’re a turning mode / aiming mode toggle). Now with a game that’s designed for snap-to-target aim like Call of Duty 4 you’ll actually find it harder on PC because it’s assuming you can very rapidly snap onto targets despite using free aim.

    Best example of how this works is PC Halo, where for the most part mouse control doesn’t really help because the guns are designed for console aim and so have ridiculously large cones of fire, enormous projectiles, scopes or homing projectiles. The one exception, the pistol, goes from being powerful to monstrously, idiotically broken with mouse aim.

    •  
      CommentAuthorswenson
    • CommentTimeOct 30th 2013
     

    That’s a good point I hadn’t considered, I suppose… you really can’t do the same precise control, or at least I think it’d take an awful lot of practice to get anything even approaching the point-n-click of a mouse.

    •  
      CommentAuthorlilyWhite
    • CommentTimeOct 31st 2013 edited
     

    Yeah, “practice” would be my answer, especially if you’re used to mouse and keyboard. The great thing about controllers is the simplicity; for example, you don’t have to push two buttons at once or a toggle button to walk instead of run. (Unless you’re playing an open-world game made by those stupid freaking morons at Rockstar.)

    Also, Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions so far has consisted of me cursing in my head at increased JP requirements, the nerfing of summons (to be fair, they were ridiculously overpowered in the original), and how much effort I’m going to have to put in in order to unlock Dark Knight and make the Onion Knight halfway worthwhile. At least the cutscenes are nice.

  14.  

    I agree with Lily and Tim. I could go on a huge rant about the differences in how the camera and movement interact in a PC VS a console game, but I’m not actually an expert on the subject and most of that’s just personal experience. All I know for sure if computers do first person and third person omnipotent** games better while the consoles do better with third person limited** games. It really doesn’t make much if a difference if you’re playing something that doesn’t rely of time or reflexes, such as an adventure game or a turn based game.

    **I don’t know if there is an official term for this difference, but I’m too lazy to look it up. Hack and slash games and platformers have a very different camera style than RTSes and simulators, at least with how the camera angle interacts with movement.

    • CommentAuthorTim
    • CommentTimeNov 1st 2013
     

    You’re talking about object-focused versus free cameras?

    •  
      CommentAuthorTakuGifian
    • CommentTimeNov 1st 2013 edited
     

    PC games will always rule because they can be cracked and trainers built for them.

    Infinite health and ammo from an executable running quietly in the background FTW.

    But even then, without trainers, there’s so much more you can do with a PC game than even a console version of the same game. Take Morrowind for example, the PC version comes with a built-in world designer where you can make your own races, spells, items, star signs, and even entire massive locations like new islands and castles and dungeons and so forth, with access to every single existing texture in the game and the ability wit the right 3d texture-rendering tools, to create your own.

    It’s basically a game designer using the engine and existing props of the Morrowind game. People have created entirely new games (intricate new quests that can basically replace the main quest, etc.) with , and people have already re-textured the entire game to make it more like a happy green fantasy land rather than the drab swamp it is.

    The console version, however, is stuck with the default game setting, you can’t even download mods for it outside of the extremely limited official DLC.

    Or consider a game that doesn’t explicitly come witthe tools and instructions for creating your own mods, like Baldur’s Gate. People have cracked it and modified the game to add new bits, replace old bits, add entirely new sub-quests and so on, and re-texture the whole game (I don’t know why re-texturing is so popular…)

    Basically, PC games offer an unparalleled ability to modify, and far more in the way of free user-generated DLC, compared to the big consoles like PS, Xbox and Nintendo.

  15.  

    I’ve always viewed it as a question of time. Do you have TIME to download and experience a billion mods, or are you just after a game to distract you and entertain you during the little recreational time you do have? If the first, PC, if the second, Console.

    • CommentAuthorRocky
    • CommentTimeNov 1st 2013
     
    Picked up _Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag_ on Tuesday and have been having an absolute ball. The core naval mechanics are superb--the fact I can run from small, jungle-heavy ruins to a beach, swim to my ship, climb aboard, take the wheel, sail into open water, open fire on a Spanish frigate with a handful of different types of shot, ram the frigate, move alongside it, board it by either swinging across, jumping across, swimming across, or climbing the rigging, and finally fight off the crew _all without a single loading screen_ is fantastic.
    •  
      CommentAuthorApep
    • CommentTimeNov 1st 2013
     

    Started playing Fallout: New Vegas recently. I’m only a little way in, but I just took down a small-ish group of bandits that took over the first town after the beginning with what I assume is a homemade rifle. Really shows how repairing/maintaining equipment affects combat. Plus, I feel like a badass. NCR troops must be pretty incompetent.

  16.  

    You’re talking about object-focused versus free cameras?

    Pretty much, though I don’t know the official terms.

    •  
      CommentAuthorApep
    • CommentTimeNov 1st 2013
     

    I think “third person omnipotent” camera might be isometric view. That’s what’s used in older RPGs and RTSs (Baldur’s Gate, Command & Conquer, etc).

    Not sure what the term for the other is.

  17.  

    Isometric kind of fits, though I was trying to talk about the style of gameplay where you used the WASD keys for panning and the mouse and other keys for selecting. The best test I can think of is the ability to interact with something across from the room you’re currently in. If you’re playing God of War or Jak and Daxeter, what I was referring to as “third person limited”, you need to guide your character right up next to the object you want to interact with. If you’re playing Command & Conquer or The Sims, the style of game I was referring to as “third person omnipotent”, you click where you want your selected person to go interact with and they move there, even if it’s while moving through a wall of flames. It’s a minor aspect in over all gameplay, but one favors the controller and one favors the mouse.

    Object focused VS free camera seems closer to what I was talking about than isometric 3D, which can be used in both styles in my experience.

    PS: If you like modding, keep modding until the cows come home. As far as I’m concerned, if a game is good enough on it’s own, it doesn’t need modding. I can get behind fan missions and stories, but if you need to reskin the dragons in Skyrim to look like Fluttershy to keep the game from getting dull, it’s not a very good game.

    • CommentAuthorTim
    • CommentTimeNov 3rd 2013 edited
     

    So here’s some very interesting information on why Spec Ops is what it is, and why it’s not: Richard Pearsey, one of the writers, left before the project concluded and put up four chapters of the script as he wrote it on his personal site as a sample of his writing:

    http://richardpearsey.squarespace.com/writing-samples/

    Reading through, a lot of the stuff that’s just flat-out nonsense in the final game works a lot better in this draft: Konrad had gone full Kurtz and decided to settle as Lord of Dubai while a faction of his officers had split off and were trying to leave. Konrad’s control of the water supply was preventing an evacuation, which is why Riggs (a rogue 33rd officer, hence him wearing a military uniform with his name on it in the final game) was trying to take the water from him, as opposed to the mangled reasoning he gives in the final game. It’s amazing how much of the dialog in Pearsey’s script has simply been shifted around in the final one, if you’re familiar with that; it looks like the new plot was mostly created through cut-and-paste editing of existing material.

    Also, apparently Walt Williams takes credit for things he knows he didn’t do, and tried to get Pearsey’s name taken off the credits: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/wsig-main/FRM57T9GKls

    I think this game is more like Apocalypse Now behind the scenes than we might have been lead to believe.

    •  
      CommentAuthorApep
    • CommentTimeNov 3rd 2013
     

    It’s not “like” Appocalypse Now, it is Apocalypse Now. Or at least it’s heavily based off the same source material, Heart of Darkness. The biggest clue? Look at the Big Bad’s name. Heart of Darkness was written by Joseph Conrad. It’s not exactly subtle or anything.

    • CommentAuthorTim
    • CommentTimeNov 3rd 2013
     

    Aside from the overall theme of a journey into darkness it’s barely related to either Conrad’s book or Francis Ford Coppola’s movie; in the final game, Konrad’s name is basically just a red herring to make you think he’s going to be Kurtz when he isn’t. What I was talking about was that it resembles Apocalypse Now’s infamously troubled production history (the 5-month shoot that went on for 16 months, jungle fever, nervous breakdowns, heart attacks and general personal horrors among the crew (Sheen is actually drunk in the hotel scene and punched a real mirror), sets being destroyed by a typhoon, and a seriously overweight Marlon Brando at the height of his egomania throwing away his script and insisting on ad-libbing all Kurtz’s lines). The game was by various estimates in development for 5-7 years, changed completely from its initial pitch and discarded almost everything it was trying to do, dropped into development hell for two years almost immediately after being announced, and from this was apparently hacked apart and reassembled at the eleventh hour to have a totally different plot.

  18.  

    Marvel Heroes is releasing Loki tomorrow. That ringing noise you hear is the stowing of all them Tumblr dollars they’ll be raking in.

    They’re also shuffling the available starter characters, which is probably a good idea even if some of the new ones aren’t very good.

    • CommentAuthorRocky
    • CommentTimeNov 8th 2013
     
    We'll, after six years of annualized releases, I think I may be officially done with Call of Duty. I have to say I'm a bit embarrassed to have clung onto it for so long. The story isn't gripping, even with a decent setup—mostly I'm just tired of doing the same old schlock over and over, it's just a parade of shooting galleries with a change of ambiance. The multiplayer has just gotten to be too bloated, too much of a faff to deal with. There was a lovely simplicity in the original Modern Warfare with just three universal killstreaks and maybe fifteen perks all around. Now I'm having to put more work into assembling the bits and pieces than I am playing the actual rounds, not to mention the handful of things the IW/Treyarch teams implemented I never really liked.
    • CommentAuthorTim
    • CommentTimeNov 9th 2013 edited
     

    I must say I didn’t think much of call of zombie goasts (in front of a house) either, and I really liked Black Ops II last year. It seems Infinity Ward focuses too much on being cinematic rather than having fun, and aside from the fastest tank in videogames (which still wasn’t as fun as Menendez because it didn’t yell ARRRGH) there wasn’t really much to do but hear the tale of a nonentity and a boring man finding out their dad was the best dad ever and then going after a doughy secondary antagonist who had nothing to do with the main plotline because he’d killed like two people. Also something to do with a war but that never seemed particularly important.

    •  
      CommentAuthorswenson
    • CommentTimeNov 9th 2013
     

    There needs to be actual zombie goasts in a game sometime that you must exorcise by blowing up their house.

    •  
      CommentAuthorlilyWhite
    • CommentTimeNov 9th 2013
     

    Future Shop and Best Buy in Canada are doing an insane event where you can trade in any current-gen game (provided it’s in its original case and it works) for Call of Duty: Ghosts, Battlefield 4, or Assassin’s Creed IV. I hadn’t planned on doing it, since I figured I’d be too late and I didn’t want to wait in any lines for it.

    I just found out a few minutes ago that the friend that I “lent” (indefinitely) Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 to traded it in to get CoD: Ghosts for me.

    I’m more than a little stunned right now.

    • CommentAuthorRocky
    • CommentTimeNov 9th 2013
     
    Heh, after my little rant on Ghosts, Lily just reminded me of a new release that blew me away.

    Assassin's Creed 4 may actually be my favorite of the series. Edward Kenway, far and away, is the best protagonist thus far. How he becomes involved with the assassins is neither contrived nor gimmicky--and it could've been, given this is an Assassin's Creed game. Rather than being constantly dogged and doubting himself in the context of his ongoing actions, he's an unabashedly self-serving. He doesn't budge when he's called out for his lifestyle. But his journey is engaging and his resolutions toward the end are among the most satisfying and absolutely the most emotional of the series. Filling that out is a wonderfully colorful group of supporting characters. The naval gameplay is _incredibly_ fun and helps set the game apart from not only its predecessors, but also pretty much every other game out there.

    Now I need to go back and play the story again. But finish finding stuff first.
    • CommentAuthorTim
    • CommentTimeNov 10th 2013
     

    See, there was a point in Black Ops II when I realised that it was the game for me. That’s the point where you’re riding around on a horse with a magic Stinger missile that can blow up tanks and then Kravchenko turns up in his giant silly land battleship. And I thought this is a game that knows exactly what it is and could no longer be annoyed at anything it did.

    • CommentAuthorRocky
    • CommentTimeNov 11th 2013
     
    I haven't even finished that campaign. It just didn't hold my interest. I might be on a different page than you, but Treyarch just seems to me like a developer than has good stories, but can't tell them very well.

    I was actually referring to the multiplayer, which I figured would've been harder to screw up. And yet, once again, I'm watching hit detection do its own thing while cover that can be penetrated continues to frustrate. I appreciate the lean towards realism on that one, but when I'm getting mowed down by a suppressed SMG while I'm taking cover _behind a fat tree trunk_, you need to get your pants off your head. And their maps have yet gotten worse. On average, they're larger, which I like. And they're creatively conceived, which is even better. But they've continued their war on campers by taking their "all map hubs must have four converging entryways" and dialed it up to eleven. I've _never_ seen such labyrinthine level design for an FPS, and it's truly headache inducing. It's just a giant death machine; all you can do is happen across someone, kill them, and then have that happen to you three seconds later. Respawn. Repeat.
    •  
      CommentAuthorswenson
    • CommentTimeNov 11th 2013
     

    Camping is, after all, a legitimate strategy.

    (more seriously, I feel that the way to deal with campers is not design levels such that camping is impossible—although good level design would make it a less attractive option—but rather give everybody abilities/weapons that allow them to deal with campers.

    And at the end of the day, if it’s hard to camp and somebody’s still got the skill to do it, let ‘em do it.)

    • CommentAuthorRocky
    • CommentTimeNov 11th 2013 edited
     
    The problem is, they're trying to stop camping, but what you have in Ghosts are maps where you can't stop moving, period. They haven't just added more avenues of exit/entry, they've torn down entire walls. Camping was really a complaint from players who started the game and expected to just rush through and win, and now we have a multiplayer where you have to keep running to have a chance of losing as few lives as possible. Way back in the original Modern Warfare, I was actually consistently able to put my bloody ghillie suit to good use.
    • CommentAuthorTim
    • CommentTimeNov 11th 2013
     

    Yeah, not to mention the most consistently broken weapon choices (dual 1887s, FAMAS / Type 95, anything involving knives, etc) have always been short ranged in nature. From what I can tell, they’ve basically made huge, open maps which somehow still have no way to exploit their long sightlines, which takes some sort of talent but probably not the right sort. I’ve played the new Survival mode, whatever it’s called, and the number of times I’ve been bumrushed from four directions at once defies description. I’ve found myself discarding perfectly good marksman rifles and just carrying two SMGs all the time. Also, the laser effect on the ARX-160 is quite startlingly hideous.

    • CommentAuthorRocky
    • CommentTimeNov 11th 2013
     
    bq. huge, open maps which somehow still have no way to exploit their long sightlines....

    That frustrates me to no end. I didn't spend much time in _Black Ops'_ multiplayer, but I noticed everything from _Modern Warfare 3_ onward has been cluttered with so much *junk*. I would they have rather made sniping a harder prospect, but they decided to go to so much trouble blocking off sight lines by sticking street signs right in the way. Modern Warfare and its sequel were not at all afraid of long, broad sight lines and dangerously wide open vistas.

    bq. I’ve found myself discarding perfectly good marksman rifles....

    What an abundantly attractive but ultimately useless class of weapon (in the game). You spend more time hoping hip fire accuracy and a twitchy trigger finger can keep you alive than actually doing (what passes in Call of Duty as) marksmanship. That's one area where Battlefield has it trounced left, right, and center.
    • CommentAuthorRocky
    • CommentTimeNov 11th 2013
     
    Double post for new levels of disgust. I just realized my copy of Ghosts had the code for the much-touted "dynamic" map Free Fall. So, thinking this could be a unique map and possibly indicative of some good maps to follow (and it was, you know, free), I downloaded it.

    What. A. Pile. Of. Garbage.

    It's disappointing just on the basis of being "dynamic". Every few minutes the map shakes, dust spews forth, and the graphics beyond the map's edges slide upward to simulate the floors below you collapsing. Woop. But the map itself—the layout, the texturing, the design—simply skips bad and jumps straight to wholly offensive. It's nothing but a heavily destroyed high rise floor. That's it. All rubble and sparks and monochromatic walls with massive holes blown through them. It's one of the laziest maps I've ever seen and the worst for the entire series, bar none.

    Guh.
    • CommentAuthorTim
    • CommentTimeNov 12th 2013
     

    Oh, is that what it does? I always figured there just wasn’t enough ordinance being thrown around to make it get dynamic or something.

    • CommentAuthorRocky
    • CommentTimeNov 12th 2013
     
    Yeah, that's it. It's pretty unspectacular in and of itself, but the prior hype and "dynamic" misnomer drags it to an abysmal level. I'll see about mining the Extinction mode to see if there's anything to enjoy, but anything beyond that... no. Battlefield 3's Close Quarters maps (you can literally blow entire walls apart, chip away at columns and supports) are leagues beyond this "dynamic" nonsense (ooh, we can shoot a gas pump and topple the little structure). And now that Battlefield 4 has introduced "levelution", which could every well wind up in the upcoming Star Wars Battlefront....

    Call of Duty is dead to me.
    • CommentAuthorTim
    • CommentTimeNov 13th 2013
     

    Extinction is fun, though when me and a friend tried it seemed bugged as to how long it took for the helicopter to destroy the Barrier Hives. Also, it really doesn’t tell you much about what you’re supposed to be doing.

    It at least doesn’t feature the ass-backwards moon-logic puzzled Zombies sometimes gets stuck with; it can be thought of as either simplified Zombies or Survival with an actual point. It really assumes you have multiple players, though.

  19.  

    Fuckers nerfed my Loki :(

    • CommentAuthorTim
    • CommentTimeNov 15th 2013
     

    It’s interesting to watch a speedrunner show you exactly how broken Sonic 2006 is.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jfx57q1Jxw

  20.  

    Arkham Origins was pretty much just a reskinning for the first two games with. I’d be satisfied if it were DLC or a fan game, but as is it’s too little to really care about. It doesn’t advance the “story”, it doesn’t add in new mechanics and even the boss fights are old and reused. There aren’t even any particularly memorable set pieces. It’s one of the most forgettable things I’ve touched in a while.

    Plants VS Zombies 2 would have been a solid game, if not for the damn micro-transactions. The gameplay is varied enough from the original to actually call it a sequel with different plant types and stage set ups. The music isn’t as good, but that would be passable if they didn’t have those freaking ads on every freaking screen you’re on. You’re selecting plants? Hey, look at all these plants you can buy for 4$ a plant. You’re choosing a level? Hey, look at all these upgrades you can buy on your way to the next level, shine shine. Why not just pay 8$ to unlock the next level while you’re at it?

    Recettear was fun, though it gets kind of tedious if you decide to play through a second time. Really cute graphics, alright music and a cute story to go along with those. I found myself having more fun dungeon crawling than actually running the store though, though luckily the dungeons took about three times as long as any selling session. It did what ti did very well, it just doesn’t have much replay value.

    •  
      CommentAuthorswenson
    • CommentTimeNov 24th 2013 edited
     

    Somebody got an ESO invite…

    I dunno, I always have a hard time getting into MMOs, and this really isn’t an exception. Regular ol’ RPGs, I take my time and mosey along and explore, but in MMOs, they’re all about QUEST QUEST QUEST and I feel like I’m just running from one random place to another without ever stopping to actually look at the stuff around me. But I do have to say, the quests in ESO make a lot more sense than just “kill 8 of this, collect 12 of that”, they’re a lot more story-focused.

    Buuuut they also only take about ten seconds each. So it still has that feeling of me not actually doing anything. Instead of, you know, undertake this epic quest across the world to find X and retrieve Y, it’s walk ten steps to the left and do something over there, then come back. There’s just not the same feeling of actually doing stuff at all. Granted, I only had a couple of hours to play this evening so I only got up to, like, level 3, but I still felt like there should’ve been more to things, you know? More time to get a sense for a location and the story and characters before it’s like MOVE ALONG, NEXT QUEST, CHOP CHOP.

    But it’s only a beta, so we’ll see how things change later.

    I will say this, though: I may not have been able to make a truly fat female character, but I could make her ugly, and wood elves look genuinely weird compared to humans. So that’s a plus. :)

  21.  

    Dunno if MMOs will ever give you the ability to make an actual fat woman. I had heard they were gonna let you in SWTOR, and you could make a huge fat guy, but the corresponding female body type just had a big ass/thighs. If Bioware won’t let you do it, I don’t really see companies with less cred being able to do it.

    There’s lots and lots of weird nerds out there who would get legit pissed at being forced to see fat chicks in their elfgames, but you probably know that already.

    •  
      CommentAuthorTakuGifian
    • CommentTimeNov 25th 2013
     

    And probably a lot of weird feminists getting upset about the continued objectification of women in games.

    • CommentAuthorRocky
    • CommentTimeNov 25th 2013
     
    If I remember, Star Wars Galaxies let you do that. Don't quote me, though, as I only tried the obese end of the scales on a male character.