Zero Punctuation: Medal of Honor Warfighter & Doom 3 BFG Edition Pages PREV 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 NEXT | |
I'm pretty sure we have a word for 'warfighter'. They're called soldiers. -.- | |
Nope. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_in_the_War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%93present) Read 'em again. In the first few years of the way, significantly more Afghani citizens died as a direct result of U.S. action than U.S. soldiers died in the entire Afghani campaign. Oh dear. Let's take a few out of that Iraq article too: The Lancet said that there were over 650,000 deaths in Iraq. 31% of those were attributed to Co-alition action. That's over 200,000 deaths. Even if the U.S. is only responsible for 1 in 5 of those deaths, that's still 10X the U.S. losses in Iraq. I hate to be the ones that tell you, U.S. citizens, but, well, your country's been a bit of a dick here. We've got an Iraq invasion without UN approval for the purpose of changing a dictator the U.S. didn't like. A murdering, brutal dictator, but still an illegal invasion. And Afghanistan's been an equal failure. The Taliban may be gone, but the cost in doing so has been worse than leaving them there. | |
Usually I just watch these and write nothing, because whether I agree (mostly) or not (rarely or nitpickingly or Minecraft), I find myself brilliantly entertained so all I can come up with would be "lol". This time, however, it is the same. Nice :) | |
The last minute had me in stitches. Spunkgargleweewee... :D Not sure that you can really nail a new genre onto games like Call of Duty, Battlefield and Medal of Honour, but they certainly aren't as fun as the shooters I played growing up. | |
I used to work on an Army base, and "warfighter" was the approved generic term for soldiers, marines, airmen, and seamen in combat. It's a real American DOD neologism. One time my department got a new Powerpoint template. At the bottom, in a blue underscore bar, was "Our Focus is the Warfighter" (Yes, really. This actually happened). Spotting a factual inaccuracy, I fixed it to "Our Focus is the Bureaucrat" and routed it to a friend for a laugh. I don't work there anymore. | |
Spec Ops is the first game ever to make people (myself included) feel guilty about killing things in a game. No other game in history has accomplished that as far as I'm aware, this alone is reason enough for people to play it. | |
I'll join. That entire last minute or so was just outstanding. Started the review fairly boring, but damn did it end spectacularly. | |
Well, I agree with a lot of it except for the political/racial garbage thrown in. I myself tend to seriously dislike shooters, and don't play much of them as a result. That said, political correctness has gone too far as it is and getting on modern warfare games for portraying things realistically, where most of the bad guys ARE going to be of a differant ethnicity and culture than the good guys is just plain wrong. To be honest these games put a good deal of thought into their plots and why the fighting is going on, well usually, the mismatched power levels are both accurate, and in many cases it's the fault of the idiot bad guys for having provoked this to begin with, and that's kind of the point. To be honest I think games like "Special Ops. The Line" did represent a differant kind of war experience, showing another side of things. Sort of like how there are differant kinds of war movies. It's the kind of work that speaks to the whole "peace at any price" movement in all it's misguided glory much like the movies that inspired it. Showing that things might not always be quite as straightforward as presented in other modern warfare themed games. That said, I do very much agree with the genere's failings in of themselves now, lame, linear, tunnel shooting progression, overuse of cover, and too many cinematics that get in the way of actual gameplay. Today there is no real excuse for a single player campaign in an action game being anything other than a fairly open sandbox, to do otherwise is lazy design, but then again I suppose that is the gist of things as shooters are grinded out like crazy and the main idea is to promote the multiplayer so they can demand extra money for unlocks and map packs. I haven't played "Warfighter" but I'm guessing that's pretty much the case, and why the campaign sucks. If it's a game that revolves entirely around it's single player campaign... well, then it's just a sick dog, one that happens to be worse off than a genere that is already populated by ill canines. | |
blame gears of war for that the game that pretty much single handedly made the wall humping stye of regen play the norm for this gdamn generation. Cod was never good it was a slowed down version of quake 1 with normal weapons. and its single player campaign were so scripted it took amnesia to replay the thing and not recall every clown car spawn spot and the exact route those guys would take and those guys would take so the whole single player game was a duck shoot once you played a level once. quake 2 about wrote the book on fun fps, how the hell could id go from near perfection to ruining the whole feel of the game for quake 3 then quake 4. made no sense to me after all that quake 2 got right even hru the accidental bugs inthe code that made double jumping and straif jumping possible but completely changed the level of gameplay. took mods to get that back in q3. | |
I do feel we've stretched into genocide territory and its very awkward. "So what is your country up to?" | |
Yup - A term created out of pure excrement somewhere deep within the crevices of some consultant's arse. See the members of the different branches of the U.S. Military apparently don't think they are all on the same team from the same country, so they take IMMENSE insult at being called "soldiers" since apparently that ONLY refers to the Army, not the Marines, Air Force or Navy. Of course that like any other arbitrary distinction is entirely voluntary and doesn't have to mean that if we don't want it to. So up until a couple of years ago the appropriate terminology was "members of the military" of "armed forces services members". But since that was a bit too much of a mouthful and sounds too passive some linguistically challenged genius in marketing shat out "warfighter" as a catchy catch-all that seems both militaristic and tough. And it caught on - which it never should have - the top brass could have killed it in its infancy but they embraced it because hey, war is great PR for the US. | |
Im quite sure we all agreed that MoH: Warfighter will be called MoH: Doorfighter from now on. Also still dont care much for Doom 3 as it still isnt as fun as the previous Dooms. Bu8t atleast you can still carry a shit-ton of weapons and a fucking chainsaw. | |
Speaking of shooters I wonder if Yahtzee will do a Halo 4 review or AC 3 review next week, apparently the single player campaign of Halo 4 is only about 10h long. Also would someone please tell me what the 7th bloke down on page 1 did to receive a warning? I'm not trying to be a %^$& I really don't know. | |
Actually that's old hat. Bioshock with it's dillema about the little sisters is an example of a fairly recent take on the whole "guilt" thing. You can go back further to things like some of the revelations in Silent Hill 3, or even perhaps games like "Dreamweb" for those who have heard of it. Games like Dishonorered are largely based around the evil of killing and pretty much punish you for doing it. "Special Ops. The Line" is more like the video game version of say "Apocolypse Now" or even "Rambo" (the actual movies are hardly about the glory of War) as opposed to other gun toting action flicks which have a rather straightforward set up. It's a differant take of things motivated by a political perception. Okay now for a long explanation of something many people might not have realized or put much thought into, but might have heard of (which has little to do with politics). Action movies are a lot like comic books. In comic books you have regular "default" comics with the good guys who are GOOD on one side, and do all the super hero stuff as you'd expect, and BAD guys on the other side who do all the super villain stuff as you'd expect. Then you've got the "deconstructionist" comics which tend to bill themselves as being "super heroes meet the real world" this is the kind of thing where noone wears costumes, everyone including the protaganists is generally a bad guy in the big picture, and everything is murky shades of gray. Then you've got the "reconstructionist" comics which are pretty much the hardest ones to do but tend to be comics for adults as opposed for a younger audience or emo teenagers/young adults and the ones that actually "get it right". The reconstructionist movement is one where the deconstructionist movement's points about realism are acknowleged, but it's demonstrated that everything eventually goes back to the original status quo. The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, it's just their motives are xplained in more realistic terms. People wear costumes because simply put to do anything heroic and stop these guys you need to be able to avoid accountability, as opposed to the classic reasons of not wanting to be attacked by your enemies. This is a very basic run down on it. Action movies, and to an extent games, tend to do the same basic thing accross generes. You've got your typical straightforward goods vs. bad shooters like say "Doom" where everything is straightforward (humans good, demons bad because they are demons, and that's pretty self evident), then you've got your deconstructionist shooters like "Special Ops. The Line" and "Bioshock" where there are strong elements of analyzing these kinds of events and portraying everything as being bad pretty much (in Bioshock your literally a complete tool), and you've got the reconstructionist games like a lot of the modern warfare games which acknowlege war sucks, and that shades of gray exist (the "No Russian" mission) but ultimatly come down to the good guys still being the good guys and the bad guys still being the bad guys. Both have more understandbale motives than simply demons are bad just because, or Doctor Doom is an insane megalomaniac which justifies any stupid thing he wants to do as opposed to just sticking to his own country where he's actually well liked and has the technological resources of a super power due to him... but it all ends in the same place where your heroically wading through a bunch of generally inferior opponents (because it makes for a cool game) for the right reasons. Being regular, deconstructionist, or reconstructionist doesn't nessicarly equate with quality or always follow the pattern. Bioshock for example is a deconstructionist game, a movement mostly aimed at the disenfranchised youth, but is actually superior to a lot of reconstructionst games and has probably has drawn in a more mature crowd. Likewise most military FPS games are utter crap and despite being from a more mature style, tend to get more of the kids, despite the general pattern. Incidently a lot of this can be tracked by looking at the generations that grew up with their escapist media, as opposed to simply putting it away like generations before. Comics having evolved with the last couple of generations for example. The whole 1990s era of comics for example had pretty much everything turned into a totally emo deconstructionst work, half the heroes were murdering sleazebags, couldn't turn around without doing something bad to torment themselves, and might not even be able to use their powers 90% of the time due to being too powerful and unable to control it if nothing else, this being compared to say the more straightforward comics of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. In the late 1990s and the beginning of the last decade you started seeing reconstructionism as those people became older and gained a differant perspective. Things like Warren Ellis' run on "The Authority" more or less defined the movement, where the super heroes were pretty super, they actually did things, had them turn out well for them (though this changed after he left) but acted within the context of real world motives. "The Authority" for example took the whole "evil goverment" schtick from the 1990s that was built up, and then had a team roughly analogous to "The Justice League" pretty much blitz the living hell out of it in a straightforward Good Vs. Bad way with the sides simply being explained. With FPS it's pretty much the same thing, the reconstuctionists pretty much acknowleging the moral ambigiouty of pounding the crap out of the 3rd world and what it might mean to civilians, but realizing that it's still nessicary, and the people on the receiving end are the bad guys even if it's for cultural reasons rather than more direct ones. A long rant, but I think understanding that trinity of design (which applies to a lot of things) let's you evaluate where works are coming from and their intent. | |
A form of white privilege right there: "I can be sure that generic 'Rooty Tooty Point and Shootys' will not be filled with snuffing out persons of my own ethnicity." Is my whiteness showing? I tried to show it. I'm hungry. | |
Well gargle something else! This was a great review, glad he brought back the whole "Spec Ops killed your entire genre, what the FUCK are you doing, EA?" thing.
You really need to play Spec Ops: The Line. | |
Spunkgargleweewee, brilliant! Having watched roughly 9 hours of people so bored to death of Battlefield 3 that they have to use logic-flawed methods to kill people (like setting up a claymore mine, running 20 feet away and shooting it oh haha you magnificent troll bastard) just for a dry heave of a laugh I knew there was a reason I never picked up games like that. Spunkgargleweewee games suck. | |
Yes, it articulates well the various beefs anyone who's played Doom or its kin have with modern shooters (maybe call the genre the Conveyor Belt Shooter? That seems to be the most frequent analogy). I also laughed at the dialogue in this one: Sadly Yahtzee, one game going against the flow won't change developer's minds, certainly not while the CBS games you loathe continue to sell as well as the first Modern Warfare. After the last one didn't sell so hot I really thought we'd seen the last of Medal of Honor, which I found indistinguishable from Call of Duty. On the bright side, MoH at least has to come up with an amusing new subtitle each time instead of putting a number on the end. I can see it now: MoH: Guykiller | |
"But then Spec Ops The Line came along and showed us what a bunch of violent, paranoid gloryboy twats the whole genre was making us look like. You were supposed to slink off in shame! Nanny caught you with your hand in the cookie jar. You don't just continue eating the cookies!" Brilliant. After The Line, won't be able to see military shooters the same way again. | |
Wonder why he hates Borderlands if he's not into sgww?? Borderlands in the anti-Modern Opsfielder. | |
Ok I'm just going to say one thing for those of you out there debating what a "real" shooter is. The primary form of engagement in CoD or Battlefield is competition. This means the games encourage aggression between two or more sentiant beings. This is also the primary form of engagement in sports such as football, baseball, basketball, ect. In games like, Painkiller, Bulletstop, Doom, ect, the primary form of engagement is catharsism. They also rely more on aspects like story telling, aestetics, atmosphere; essensially what amounts to more of a narrow engagement or an individual experiance (basically immersion is the goal).This is a form of engagement that is also common in good books. So to sum it up, the shooters that are sited in the video fulfil different needs for different consumers. Oh and this is the way I veiw it, so anyone is welcome to agree or disagree. | |
Yahtzee... THAT... was awesome. Seriously, I'm adding that last tirade about how you liked FPSs when CoD fans were even more little screaming brats than they are now straight to the 'Crowning Moment of Awesome' page of your TV Tropes entry. I liked Doom 3 back when it first came out. Yeah, it wasn't the endless blast-a-thon that the previous Dooms were, but frankly I was never into FPS before about Duke Nukem 3D when they started putting effort into fleshing out the setting and inventing set pieces a bit. I've always held up Doom 3 as the point where graphics basically peaked- they finally finished rounding off the edges of the polygons so you couldn't see you were playing a game any more and everything after that was just adding more layers of polish. And frankly it was pretty fucking scary as well, even if it was mainly jump shocks. | |
Now that Painkiller HD is out, I'm curious as to whether or not he'll actually do a review of it. I'm also glad he mentioned Resistance 3 again, it really was one of my favorite FPS games in more recent years, and sold horribly thanks to Sony's disastrous marketing for it. | |
The driving section was done by Black Box, that's why it was decent. The driving section had nothing to do with the devs that made the rest of the game. | |
Fantastic review/s, shine on you crazy diamond. CoD WaW was just painful to play and it seems MoH has hit even greater extremes of unpleasantness. | |
Exactly what I was thinking, after trying it. Guilt! That emotion I've barely ever felt. We meet at least in a video game of all things. | |
This could be the first Zero Punctuation I gave a standing ovation to. | |
"Paranoid American power fantasy"? Sorry, I just don't agree. Portraying a war through the eyes of Americans while portraying the Americans positively is not the same as a power fantasy. Also, taking military action to stop Osama bin Laden was definitely justified, it's just the way it was handled as well as the war in Iraq which were questionable. Finally, I don't think you even know what the word "genocide" even means, my friend. Killing enemy combatants in a combat zone is not genocide (although I will admit that you do kill an unrealistic amount of enemies in these shooters).
The Taliban are currently responsible for the vast majority of civilian deaths occurring in Afghanistan, though. Furthermore, I'm Swedish, not American, and I don't at all agree with torture or other violations of human rights and think that civilian casualties are unacceptable - however, I would throw my weight behind the US a million times before throwing my weight behind their enemies, especially seeing as their enemies are our enemies as well. The bottom line is, I'm not down with the idea of throwing away the entire concept of military shooters just because there's been too many of them trying to copy Call of Duty. There is potential for good storytelling and gameplay within the context of modern war, and I think that potential is too good to squander. Just wait until ArmA III comes out - that isn't going to be a Call of Duty clone. | |
Ugh, did he seriously just say that games asking you to stumble around in the same cleared out 4 rooms for 20 minutes looking for the fucking key/switch/jump point you missed is a good thing? howabout not, that was by far the worst thing about Doom 3, is that it was frequently not clear where the hell you were supposed to go next, and it isn't the only game to do this. also regenerating health can be a bad thing, but so can fixed health, you know what I remember about Half-life 1? replaying the same goddamn section until I could do it perfectly down to the nanosecond so I would have enough health to survive the next room, because have 3 health packs in the entire game and no way to carry them with you is the very definition of fake difficulty. I would point to Dead Space or STALKER as examples of games that do limited health well. | |
How about we just call them DPPFRWSIWWBTONOTMTWHAAFAPAHD shooters? Like you said in the bad company 2 review? | |
Everything he said about RE5 was correct. They only made it worse with RE6, which basically plays like L4D. Hopefully, Capcom will pull its head out of its ass and go back to either the basics or at least returning to RE4 which is the best title in the series aside from Resident Evil 2. | |
So because Spec Ops: The Line was apparently a good game, we should never even try to make another military shooter ever again? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, I'm not so sure that the people eagerly anticipating ArmA III or Battlefield 4 are going to want that, buddy. Everything doesn't have to cater to what you want. | |
I was one of the few people (at least it seems like there's few of us) who actually liked the fact you couldn't use a light and a gun at the same time. The expansion's pistol with a light was alright too, since you couldn't just use any weapon that way. Having said that, I do have to ask if you can turn the light off. I'd much rather play it the original Doom 3 way given the choice. That's actually something that might decide if I buy it or not. | |
Legitimately laughed my ass off for once.
Some people call them "breadcrumbs". Perhaps most depressing: This was a punchline back in 8-bit theater. If there's nothing else to say about the sad, pathetic state of level design in current shooters, it's this: Why stop at Doom 3's linear corridors sans idiot lights? Why not take us back to Doom 1 which featured "semi-linear" corridors with new encounters, and sometimes even new traps? Oh right. Backtracking is a deadly sin and nobody could possibly make use of it in good level design.
It never fails to make me laugh when people try to civilize war. EDIT: This has gone on for several pages, but I'm adding this to point out how stupid it is. Illegal Invasion: If the UN: If Iraq: Do I have to point out how fucking retarded this is? The Nazis didn't ask France or Poland if they could invade. Alexander the Great did not ask for permission, neither did Attila the Hun, Napolean, Richard the Lionhearted, or HUNDREDS of other figures and forces throughout the entire history of war. Trying to change the definition of war to fit our modern day squabbles is dangerous and fallacious thinking. It understates the severity of the mistakes we made in the past, and in doing so, increases the likelihood someone will inflict those horrors on us again. It's changing the foot to fit the shoe. "War is hell." is scarily accurate. It's an exaggeration, but not by much. The combat and conflict in Iraq is not without bloodshed. I've lost friends and classmates to Afghanistan and Iraq. But I also recognize that it's less bloodied overall than traditional open warfare. Soldiers fight, kill and occupy. Those are, historically, their fundamental traits. And at that point, it ceases being "war" as we knew it. So why do some insist on changing the definition of war to fit this when war has proven its brutality across history to before the written word? So, if you decide to start foaming at the mouth to call me out on this, I want to see proof that YOU READ THIS FIRST. I've already had one person repeatedly put words into my mouth, project their naive babble all over the place and then insult my intelligence on top of that. Don't follow their example. Don't spout pretentious bullshit like you know what you're talking about, or try to insinuate that I'm "confused" or "brainwashed". The matter is perfectly clear in my mind. This weekend was (in the United States) Veteran's Day. I write this in part out of respect for the living veterans, and of greater respect for the dead; both those that I knew and those I never met. | |
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It's not just a communications network, people (mostly the US military it seems) are calling some soldiers "warfighters" now, and it showed up as such on several dictionaries' web sites.
You have a point, but to hear him tell it your side had robots and their side had rocks, not AK-47s. He's probably exaggerating a little, and if it's more than a little then there's a problem here. Also some of the leaders of Al-Qaeda were pretty rich and could've had Armani suits and plenty of coffee from Starbucks if they wanted-- I don't know if that's still the case, but it was not too long ago.
We left Iraq* some time ago and we're scheduled to leave Afghanistan in two years, and anyway that's real life, we're talking about a fictional conflict. ...It is fictional, right? If they're using the current ones that seems... tacky.
I think Yahtzee's problem is mostly that a lot of recent games have you fighting only "non-whites", and after doing that all game for several games, well, there might not be racist intent, but it gets easier to believe there is or could be racist intent or some kind of subconscious racism, and anyway if all your enemies look the same it's kind of bland.
I'm pretty sure most people alive today were born after the Vietnam conflict ended.
Genocide is when you kill people because of their race, and that's not what the US is doing, in real life or in any major games I've heard about.
* we officially left some time ago, before that we drew down troops, and there still are some US troops in Iraq, but there are also troops in Germany and Japan and South Korea, and the number of troops in Iraq now is 10% or less of the amount that were there for most of the last 10 years