inever-asked-for-this: Nothing is worse than spending over 350 cyber modules over the course of the...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 22:46:30 -0400

Nothing is worse than spending over 350 cyber modules over the course of the game tricking out your psionic abilities, then at the rickenbacker dropping the fucking psionic amp down a bottomless pitt.

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Tue, 11 Jun 2013 22:07:08 -0400

Maybe they are still working on season 2? I dunno I really...

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 22:34:41 -0400

Maybe they are still working on season 2? I dunno

I really wanna see teen clem and molly as best bros kicking ass

inever-asked-for-this: New York — Deus Ex With all the...

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 11:14:16 -0400

inever-asked-for-this:

New York — Deus Ex

With all the negativity circulating about DXTF, I decided to make one of these in photoshop since it looked cool.

I might do one for the whole game later.

"College is good for one thing, okay? It prepares you to make $45,000 a year instead of $40,000 a..."

Sun, 26 May 2013 22:54:00 -0400

“College is good for one thing, okay? It prepares you to make $45,000 a year instead of $40,000 a year and to drive a 2010 Chevy Malibu instead of a 2008 Chevy Malibu. Jim Halpert Face. Yo get my Jim Halpert face because I’m gonna twitter it.”

- Sam Hyde (via young-kinderhook)

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Wed, 03 Apr 2013 09:50:03 -0400

Spec Ops: The Line review

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 21:28:09 -0400

dream-dad:

I normally don’t write reviews but this game has really meant a lot to me on a lot of levels so I felt like I had to put everything together in one big post to refer to whenever it gets brought up.

(If you have had any prior intentions of getting this game, just go buy it now, don’t even read any reviews. I’m not going to spoil anything, but for your sake this game is best played entirely blind).

First, I’m just going to say how much this game surprised me. It came out on steam last summer to barely any reception, negative or positive. Most people tended to write it off as just another mindless CoD imitator, which I guess I cant really blame them for if they just saw it at a glance. The first, and most vocal person I remember talking about this game was Ben Croshaw, a man I’m personally not all that crazy for. Last month, I noticed several people talking about the game again, so I decided to give the game a try; and boy, were my expectations shattered.

The Line may be a cover shooter about 3 grizzled delta force agents in the middle east, but all cliches end here. Yager apparently was already quite aware of the “Wisecracking Jingoist black ops team leaves a trail of bodies and shell casings behind them as they chase a mustache-twirling foreigner through cinematic locales with comically high-tech weapons systems” trope, and as a result this game pokes far more at the modern military genre more than it ever borrowed. War is portrayed as anything but righteous, and as a massive surprise to me, they go by doing this in a way barely ever used by any medium. While most war games, books, and movies will show that war has a dark side, they always do it in the safest way possible: the other guys are the ones committing atrocities. The Hurt Locker had it’s dead child soldier, but it was the terrorists who did that - America would never do something so horrible! Or, in Saving Private Ryan, The Axis slaughters people from the safety of their hidey-holes with entrenched machine guns and mortars, but the American soldiers are simply noble heroes being cut down by “those other guys”.

The Line is a horror game about the abominations of modern combat, but its not as simple as a group of homegrown heroes being placed at the mercy of some insurgents or Nazis - instead, it seems to exemplify how everyone involved loses their humanity. The antagonists of Spec Ops are hardly sympathetic, but throughout your quest for answers in Dubai, you might commit some atrocities of your own; more often than not you will find your conscience reassuring you. “Yes, we had to do that”, or “we had no other choice”. Unlike Inglourious Basterds or Django Unchained, Spec Ops is not about to hold your hand and reassure you that you are killing some comically evil shell of a human being, and because of that killing caries real weight. Again, The Line is a horror game, but not a horror game like you’d think - It exists to scare you of yourself, not some giant monster or crazed murderer. Guilt is the name of the game here, and if you are as jaded about the modern “horror” genre as I am, this will actually manage to affect you emotionally, and that in and of itself is worthy of acclaim in my book.

Now, onto the actual review.

Story: Without spoiling anything, this is the reason you should buy this game. Everything else is passable to good, but the plot is without exaggeration the best thing here. This is actually excellent writing with features sadly bereft from a lot of modern games, such as subtlety (cough Bioshock Infinite), pacing (cough Dead Space 2/3), actual substantial character development (cough Deus Ex 3), and consistency/closure (cough Mass Effect 3). This is movie-level writing folks, and what should be the standard for video game writing. Walt Williams is wonderfully talented and the fact that he worked on the Darkness 2 should give you an idea of what he can do.

The game begins with a group of three Delta force soldiers, Walker, Adams, and Lugo sent into Dubai on reconnaissance after the worst sandstorm in written history literally buries the entire city. Colonel John Konrad, known as the best military strategist of the 21st century (but also of questionable mental condition after his strategic failure in Afghanistan), volunteered the entire 33rd battalion to help the evacuation effort, but haven’t communicated with the outside since the storm hit it’s peak. If you are noticing any similarities to either the 1899 novel Heart of Darkness or the 1979 movie Apocalypse now, you aren’t mistaken; that is actually what got me into this game in the first place. That said, like Apocalypse Now, The Line makes a name for itself despite the inspirations and even if you have seen and read both of its predecessors, it will still surprise you in countless ways. Although the goal is clearly to leave a personal impression on the player, Spec Ops retains an exceptional narrative about themes such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, American Imperialism, and if good intentions excuse you from your actions.

I was also impressed by how great of a case Spec Ops makes for video games as a creative medium; similarly to how Rant does things that only a book could do, this game does things that really couldn’t work in a movie or a book. As I said earlier, this game uses guilt liberally to get you where it hurts, The Line is an expert at running that fine line between too much fun and too much hand-wringing. It will let you loose for a few minutes, and right in the middle of mowing down a squad with a mounted machine gun or blowing people into a fine paste with a grenade launcher, it will snap back the leash of reality, showing a soldier who probably is nothing more than a victim of consequence choking on his own blood or that Emirati father who was only protecting his family that you just beheaded. Neither of those are scripted, either; they were simply randomized instances that happened on my own play-through. Combat gets intense and maybe even fun in the middle, but at the end you are usually left feeling relieved, if not sickened and disappointed in yourself. And that is what gritty, realistic war games should be like!

In addition it also has choices throughout. At the risk of ruining them for you, I must say that these choices are all complex and well-done. None of them seemed as binary and unambiguous as what Mass Effect sometimes got away with. Also like a video game, there will be multiple endings, and I see this as a great opportunity to tailor the ending to what the player finds most consistent/pleasing/impressive/whatever. Movie and books just cant do that (unless you are talking about those choose your own adventure books, I guess). Even the loading screens contribute a lot, surprisingly, giving valuable nuggets of information such as explaining a character’s past or explaining what cognitive dissonance is, or in some cases even taunting or reassuring the player. At certain points in the game, Walker will begin hallucinating, and as much as I abhor the lazy video game hallucination trope, this game actually manages to pull them off, and I have to give the game a massive pat on the back for subverting it.

Visuals: In case you haven’t noticed by these pictures, Spec Ops is an absolutely beautiful game and Dubai at the same time manages to be both a terrifying and alluring locale. A lot of effort was put into making the buildings and streets all look like a real place despite being filled with sand or collapsed, and most rooms will actually provide a story themselves if you look hard enough. The cutscenes are all acceptable by anyone’s Unreal 3 standards, and from time to time sandstorms and sand physics all come into play looking great.

Where the real visual strength of this game lies is in its animations. People aren’t just walking guns that scream taunts and throw grenades from time to time; they are all real, living breathing people that move around like a person would, get scared like a real person would, and then die like a real person would. The aforementioned death animations are always striking; they serve to remind you that you aren’t just killing “insurgents” or “Nazis”; you’re killing actual human beings. There is an extremely long list of subtleties over the course of the game, as Walker gradually grows more and more insane from his experiences. I’m not about ruin all of them, but for example, the execution animations gradually become more grotesque, from at first merely shooting someone in the head to curb stomping their skulls and blowing their kneecaps off.

Sound: The Sound of the game also compliments the visuals rather well in making the player feel dread. Along with the gruesome death animations, which provide more character in one dead mook than in the entirety of certain games, their cries for help and choking noises make it even worse. Emotions, especially negative ones such as regret go a long way in media and the sound will get you very emotional, I can promise you that.

The Music deserves a lot of praise too. The game plays a lot of industrial and alternative rock throughout the game, such as Deep Purple and Alice in Chains. Like them or hate them, the music definitely accentuates the atmosphere here, and in an age where video game music tends to be either generic orchestral themes or lazy-as-hell ambiance, any music whatsoever is a step forward, let alone music that compliments the theme and gameplay.

Gameplay: Okay, here is where the game lets me down a little. Gameplay is for the most part unimpressive. It most certainly gets the job done, and at times it definitely gets fun, but at it’s core it is a military cover shooter and not much more. A sand gimmick is ever present, but it really does little to stir things up; it almost always consists of shooting conveniently-placed windows to cover nearby enemies in sandslides, blinding sandstorms, or dropping men to their death by shattering the precarious glass platforms they stand on.

I was not able to play this game online, so I cannot comment on the multiplayer, but from what I’ve heard it isn’t remarkable either. Other reviews may elaborate on that, but I honestly doubt anyone thought it made a tremendous difference.

In conclusion, I just have to laud this game for dragging the medium forward, kicking and screaming, whether it liked it or not. If you are reading this, I think its a fair assumption that you want video games to take its rightful seat on the list of “mediums of storytelling kitsch enough for everyone to agree that it is worth using and capable of just as fucking much as books or movies or whatever”. Television did this 15 years ago, and now it is time for video games to ascend too. But if games are going to do so, they have to learn a few things. And one of those things is that you don’t have to necessarily make the player happy or be fun to be a good game. The Line realizes this.

Spec Ops is easily the best video game narrative of last year. I cant exactly promise that everyone will like it, but if you are even marginally interested in interactive fiction and what it is capable of if the industry applies itself, then you owe it to yourself to experience this.

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Tue, 02 Apr 2013 14:38:27 -0400

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Tue, 02 Apr 2013 10:56:47 -0400

dorgles

inever-asked-for-this: Nothing is worse than spending over 350 cyber modules over the course of the...

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Maybe they are still working on season 2? I dunno I really...

inever-asked-for-this: New York — Deus Ex With all the...

"College is good for one thing, okay? It prepares you to make $45,000 a year instead of $40,000 a..."

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Spec Ops: The Line review

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