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[Tawa]

It was most certainly not a riff on the nature of all videogames.

Well, yeah, I know that. I was referring to Neo's statement that

Games where your only choice IS to kill and they criticize the player for even bothering to play the game... Is pretty much just criticizing you for playing a violent videogame.

and the fact that you specifically don't have a choice in that particular instance. For the record, I like the message of SO:tL.

-snip-

I like the way that Metal Gear handles pacifist runs too. The Sorrow is probably one of my favorite boss fights in any game. This kind of thing works in Undertale because the choice of doing a pacifist run or not is basically the selling point.

I agree that Spec Ops works as a "ride" rather than a game where you have a choice, and that is specifically because your average "SoldierMan in BrownLand" shooter is a choiceless, straight-line, shoot-everyone game anyway.

[Neonivek]

I presume you didn't like Spec Ops after the WP came into play?

Except that Spec Ops was a riff on a very specific subgenre of videogames, i.e. the brown military shooter genre of yesteryear and while it tackled the concept of "violence is bad" it did so entirely to showcase how ridiculous and kinda messed up said genre was.

It was most certainly not a riff on the nature of all videogames.

Depends if it criticized the player while it was at it.

[Parsely]

I hate Spec Ops: The Line. I don't think the exhausting, shitty gameplay enhances the message at all. If anything, making the game actually fun would've made the ending come across way stronger. The game has a good plot but I never want to fucking play it ever again.

[Neonivek]

Here is the ONLY time "You are a bad person for playing a violent videogame" message has ever been anything but groan worthy.

It was an episode of Reboot where the characters were stuck inside an Evil Dead game where the User was basically just shooting at things while saying Groovy constantly.

Which then Dot says "He's just shooting at things. What sort of person would entertain themselves by playing this sort of thing?" prompt all the characters there to look right at the screen.

That was funny because of the context that videogames in this universe, and conversely in ours, are real.

That is... the ONLY example I can think of...

[Krevsin]

I presume you didn't like Spec Ops after the WP came into play?

Except that Spec Ops was a riff on a very specific subgenre of videogames, i.e. the brown military shooter genre of yesteryear and while it tackled the concept of "violence is bad" it did so entirely to showcase how ridiculous and kinda messed up said genre was.

It was most certainly not a riff on the nature of all videogames.

Depends if it criticized the player while it was at it.

Depends on how you see criticizing the player really. What the game does is basically take your average brown military FPS tropes and then turns them on their head. Examples in spoilers I guess.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Say the infamous scene with the white phosphorous. You reach a point where you as a player are given a setpiece for the purpose of clearing out what is an impossible challenge. The setpiece itself is a piece of military hardware that's basically presented to you as a cool toy to play with, like the chopper/bomber sequences in CoD games, a cool military toy to get your power fantasy on and clear out a bunch of badguys in the process.

However as you do the thing and set everything ablaze with white phosphorous, you later come to directly, in person see that your high explosive solution also came with a whole bunch of collateral in the form of murdered civilians.

The scene isn't powerful because player choice or killing civilians. It's powerful because it takes the CoD power fantasy and slaps it in the face. While the riff is annoying, unjust and railroady to people who are aware of it, it is a truly powerful subversion of what was at the time the most popular and prevalent game style (power fantasy brown-gray shooters) and its mechanics.

Another example, when you are faced with the mob of civilians and seem forced to shoot them. The natural instinct bred by CoD and its ilk is to raise your gun at the civilians and mow them down (No Russian, anyone?) for which the game naturally berates you, but the game also offers you a non-violent solution if you're clever enough, which is to just in the air and the civilians will disperse. Once again, subversion of genre elements in that unlike most brown military shooters, not all your enemies are willing to fight you to the death and will in fact run away because they are deep down terrified of you and your weaponry.

Or how it turns out that the prosecuted CIA agents turn out to be major destabilizing factor and how your helping them has only made an already unbearable situation worse. Again contrast this to your average CoD and clones where they are usually in the role of the good guys.

And another, less talked about way in which the game subverts its genre is in the fact that your enemies for pretty much most of the game are american soldiers. Whereas in most other shooters of the time, you were pretty much invariably an american (or at least from a nation in the anglosphere) and your opponents were foreign types, usually nondescript terrorist-alikes or russians.

Spec Ops: The Line gives you the tools of a CoD game and then slaps you in the face not because it has an important point to make about the importance of choice in games or the use of violence in games as a whole, but specifically to subvert and discredit the brown military shooter subgenre. It berates the CoD player and the genre for just how ridiculous, overblown and lost in its own power fantasy it has become. But just like any subversion, it does not really hold up when applied to things outside of the genre it is intentionally subverting.

It's also not a perfect game by any means, the shooting is terrible and at times it falls into the trap of becoming what it is trying to subvert but overall, Spec Ops: The Line is pretty much one of the best examples of intentional genre subversion. The best way to experience it isn't as a wise person or coming to it from more cerebral games but rather as a person whose gaming pallete consisted of mostly grey-brown military shooters. Y'know, just like people were back when it came out in 2012.

Which is also an important part people leave out in discussing the game nowadays, the ever important context of its release. Back when brown military shooters were at the height of their popularity (just before their decline started, really) and realistic military power fantasy was all the rage. Removing it from that context and trying to shoehorn it into a different context (say trying to portray it as part of a subset of games which have something to say about the medium as a whole) only makes its flaws stand out and its subversion of genre norms come across as railroady holier-than-thou bollocks marred by average at best shooting.

[Nighthawk]

On a slightly related note, I get really annoyed at games that make you do something stupid and roundabout to get the "good" ending.

Take, for example, Tales of Symphonia 2. Not a great game, but the gameplay was passable enough. Fun combos, silly characters, not a bad experience.

Then, at the end of the game there are several final battles. If you want the best ending, you have to win the first one and LOSE the second one (at which point you get to fight a third one, which you have to win). In a game where your goal the entire time has always been "Beat the enemies, don't get your entire party KO'd" you're randomly supposed to do the exact opposite. Like, what?

[itisnotlogical]

Mass Effect 2's ending was kinda like that.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

While the loyalty missions are obvious now that the original ME trilogy has been over with for years, they didn't seem like a life-or-death thing while I was actually doing them in the game.

If anybody dies in the ending, they're killed off in a cutscene; it's not because of anything you did during gameplay, it's just whether or not you made the right choice and/or used a loyal team member for that section.

And even then some characters can still randomly die at the very end of the game, after the final boss, based on a hidden stat that is never seen or brought up or even hinted at anywhere in the game.

[A Thing]

On a slightly related note, I get really annoyed at games that make you do something stupid and roundabout to get the "good" ending.

Take, for example, Tales of Symphonia 2. Not a great game, but the gameplay was passable enough. Fun combos, silly characters, not a bad experience.

Then, at the end of the game there are several final battles. If you want the best ending, you have to win the first one and LOSE the second one (at which point you get to fight a third one, which you have to win). In a game where your goal the entire time has always been "Beat the enemies, don't get your entire party KO'd" you're randomly supposed to do the exact opposite. Like, what?

Yes so much. I'm still pissed that I got the bad ending for Metro: Last Light because I failed to give one hobo a little bit of money.

[Mech#4]

On a slightly related note, I get really annoyed at games that make you do something stupid and roundabout to get the "good" ending.

Take, for example, Tales of Symphonia 2. Not a great game, but the gameplay was passable enough. Fun combos, silly characters, not a bad experience.

Then, at the end of the game there are several final battles. If you want the best ending, you have to win the first one and LOSE the second one (at which point you get to fight a third one, which you have to win). In a game where your goal the entire time has always been "Beat the enemies, don't get your entire party KO'd" you're randomly supposed to do the exact opposite. Like, what?

Yes so much. I'm still pissed that I got the bad ending for Metro: Last Light because I failed to give one hobo a little bit of money.

This kind of thing puts me off playing games like Disgaea. I think one of the things for the good ending there is to never hurt your own guys in combat but that's kind of inevitable when you're learning the art of prinny tossing.

[Gunner-Chan]

If I remember right, the actual bar to the best ending in the original Disgaea was to never actually kill one of your own party members. This didn't include prinny throwing unless it blows up a different one of your characters. It's pretty easy to never do that, especially since the main story missions are easy enough to do with nothing but the storyline characters.

[Andres]

I want my goddamn cheat codes back and I want my big head mode back. Christ, even the GTA series which was basically THE AAA franchise that uses cheats has a lot less of them in GTA V than they did in other games. I'm just hoping Bannerlord will have cheats like Warband and M&B did.

[KillerClowns]

Ah, yes, the eternal debate about games that lecture you for indulging in power fantasies... I'm not fundamentally opposed to that sort of thing. Done right, "you were a power-hungry bastard, there's consequences for that, life's a bitch" can work wonders. Especially if it's stupidity and incompetence you're being punished for -- you can be a true monster in Planescape: Torment, but running around murdering people for the lulz instead of being manipulative and subtle is a great way to attract the attention of the Lady of Pain. Not every game's gotta be Saint's Row. Done wrong...

Gonna borrow a scene from the The Stanley Parable, which I hated until I realized what it was doing. The Countdown ending. In it, the narrator starts mercilessly berating the player, snidely mocking their desire to indulge in a childish power fantasy, while a countdown ticks down to a nuclear detonation. Sound familiar and obnoxious? Except that the narrator is indulging in a childish power fantasy himself as he chastises the player. I find myself often thinking back to it when I find some omnipotent creator of the game world deciding it is their right to (usually much more metaphorically) lecture me for whatever imagined sin they deem me guilty of...

[pikachu17]

It annoys me a little when people say "Losing is Fun" is an unofficial community motto, because, well, It's actually in the game so how is it "unofficial"?

[Krevsin]

On a slightly related note, I get really annoyed at games that make you do something stupid and roundabout to get the "good" ending.

Take, for example, Tales of Symphonia 2. Not a great game, but the gameplay was passable enough. Fun combos, silly characters, not a bad experience.

Then, at the end of the game there are several final battles. If you want the best ending, you have to win the first one and LOSE the second one (at which point you get to fight a third one, which you have to win). In a game where your goal the entire time has always been "Beat the enemies, don't get your entire party KO'd" you're randomly supposed to do the exact opposite. Like, what?

Yes so much. I'm still pissed that I got the bad ending for Metro: Last Light because I failed to give one hobo a little bit of money.

Oh god that system.

On the one hand sure, I get the mentality of "players shouldn't get the secret ending on their first run", on the other hand "screwing up one thing outright removes any chances you had to get the secret ending" is dumb in anything but a visual novel (where you can skip to the choices on replays)

[94dima94]

I can't play Dishonored for that reason.

You have various endings, depending on how many people you kill during missions; to get the "perfect" ending, you need to leave everyone alive.

That would be good, and it would be nice to have a secret reward for people who put extra effort in the game; but what that means is you really are forced into a specific kind of playstyle; and you can't just ignore that, because it's not really a secret: loading screen messages constantly tell you "if you want to be good, leave people alive"; "your game will be judged based on the amount of kills"; "remember to leave EVERYONE alive to get the GOOD ending"; "every victim you leave behind will give you a worse ending"...

It's basically like someone telling you "No, you can do whatever you want in the game. Of course, doing THIS means you are better and you get something more than those OTHER people who are not good enough... but no pressure, you are allowed to play anyway you want, it's not a problem if you feel like playing the game wrong... Go ahead, I don't care; see you again when you have start everything againg because you lost out on the actual GOOD stuff..."