NireBryce

reality is the battlefield

the first line goes in Cohost embeds

🐥 I am not embroiled in any legal battle
🐦 other than battles that are legal 🎮

I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.

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email: contact at breadthcharge dot net

I live on the northeast coast of the US.

'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.

conceptual midwife.

https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut

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NireBryce
@NireBryce

(this post was last updated at 1345h edt)

like we def got frogboiled on that.

Diablo? yeah, i mean. that's the genre.

DooM? sure

postal 2? i hate to say it but like, it's part of the design. i don't respect it but we're defining genre

but these have gratuitous gore. it's intentional and, in all but the Postal case, there's SOME thought taken. They aren't just decoration thrown on.


NireBryce
@NireBryce

where it's actually got the possibility of being very deep. I don't think the authors intended this, though they may have pivoted to it in the middle. I forget who said it, errant signal or GMTK probably. but the game plays like a last gen game with current gen but generic graphics, is largely about dissocistion, etc etc etc.

I don't think it's intentional but go back and play the game as an adult and i think it'll be clearer to you.

the gameplay not feeling like you expect a shooter to gives you this constant sense of being detached from things that are happening. the games got good ebb and flow for you to relax into, little is that challenging. so about 3/4 of the way in, when the games' been relatively easy and i daresay boring, the hostile forces are storming the building you've fortified to hold off in.

you pull out a hardened laptop, a drone downlink.

heavy stuff about description of war crimes under the fold


you're given an areal view of the battlefield, as they're approaching, but it's limited field of view, and the aircraft is orbiting. you can only see so much of what's going on at a time. soon, even more hostiles come, in trucks and commandeered buses and trucks with guns on them.

you're playing whack-a-mole with airstrikes, boring. this trope is getting old; to a seasoned gamer it's a railshooter in the middle of an action game. the subtle reflection in the monitor of the drone screen shows your character is as bored as you are.

but you suffer through one of the least engaging sequences in gaming history. probably enough that you didn't notice that the next wave of trucks and buses didn't have rifles on their backs anymore.

and then the sequence ends, you go outside, and for the first time in the game, you cannot sprint. they make you walk. through the bodies. picking a path around their torsos and arms and legs that tangle like very old jungle vines.

but most games?

the bodies are just there for decoration. setting the scene.

ambiance.


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in reply to @NireBryce's post:

A) I think you're thinking of Brendan Keogh's book on SO:TL - that was one of those that I disagreed with vehemently but was glad it was written. (This was pre-Gamergate, when serious games crit was becoming important, thus the reaction of those who insisted games were only to be toys.)

A1) I wrote a (much shorter than a book) piece essentially as a direct rebuttal, because I found SO:TL's morality (of gaming, not war) sophomoric. Again, this was back when it seemed like games crit could be important.

B) Later in the game there are several places where the bodies are definitely just for ambiance (or some Important Point delivered via environmental ambiance), especially the executed people under the big flag.

Thanks -- yeah, I know it's mostly only that one -- the rest of the game (especially the middle parts) feel like they didn't know where they were going and did most of it retroactively; my memories of it are foggy though.

if you've got a link I'd love to thumb through it eventually but I can't promise I'll remember to respond by the time I get to it.

I def wouldn't... recommend it -- and I don't even know if the designers intended it. But it's one of the few times it felt like someone got it and drew attention to it (if, not overtly and instead slipping it past people), for a shooter, in... 2012? whenever it was released. in ways that still seem rare today outside of where you expect (Kojima, at times, i guess. I can't think of others but I know there are more)

Maybe I just don't play enough games anymore, though. I've kind of been just generally unable to deal with them outside of things friends drag me into because of... the players who are the type who would demand gore for the sake of it being abundant in almost all of the games, let alone the other things associated with uh, that.

as for the piece, i remember it being in a form other than text, but I'm sure it's very possible they either were half remembering the book, or read it but didn't credit it.