I am torn. On the one hand, To the Moon is not really a game, because its gameplay is almost nonexistent. It’s linear, story-driven, and completely lacking any form of meaningful interactivity. On the other hand, it has fantastic pacing and a sad riveting story definitely worth being told. However, I have a number of issues regarding the morals of this story.
The first real conflict arises when Watts disagrees with Rosalene over the purpose of their mission. It is revealed that Johnny wanted to go to the Moon only because of his autistic lifelong friend and wife, River. They had made a childhood promise to regroup on the Moon if they ever got “lost”, a memory that Johnny forgot when he underwent treatment for his PTSD after his twin brother’s death. So, when River died, this memory resurfaced as a vague and unexplainable urge to go to the Moon. Rosalene figures that, in order to create a fake but believable memory of Johnny becoming an astronaut, she has to erase his memory of River. Watts argues that this is pointless, since the very reason Johnny wanted to go to the Moon in the first place was River herself. And he is right. Rosalene counters this with some bullshit excuse that this is what the contract says and that they have to do their job.
Eventually, Watts fails to convince or stop Rosalene, and she manages to recreate a new “life” for Johnny, where Johnny’s brother is still alive, he becomes an astronaut, and he meets River in NASA, who is also an astronaut. Happy end, right?
Wrong. I have a huge problem with this. First of all, any game that identifies a specific choice and then pulls the rag from under you is flawed. I did not agree with Rosalene. She was wrong. I, playing as Watts, wanted to stop her, but I couldn’t, even though I tried, because the outcome of the whole conflict was scripted. Rosalene always fucks shit up, no matter what you do.
Johnny hired them to change his memories because he thought he wanted to go to the Moon. He didn’t. He was just trying to remember his promise to River. In fact, River spent the last decades of her life trying to remind him. That’s why she made all those origami rabbits. That’s why she was asking him the same questions over and over again. When Johnny had told her the “truth” about why he first asked her out, River realised that Johnny didn’t remember that they had already met when they were children, so she was trying to remind him. And Johnny dismissed it all as weird symptoms of her autism. It’s one of the saddest stories I have ever witnessed. And Rosalene destroyed the whole thing because she is a fucking dumbass.
If you think about it, it doesn’t make any sense. She says that they have to fulfill their end of the contract, because they agreed to create a memory of him going to the Moon, and that’s what they have to do. But why? Johnny was comatose and about to die from his illness in a matter of hours, if not minutes. He wasn’t going to tell anyone. So, even if they didn’t send him to the Moon, no one would know. Why didn’t they just fix his memory so that he could finally remember why he thought he wanted to go to the Moon, and die in peace, understanding what River was telling him all those years?
Of course, none of this is real, but does that really make a difference? A person’s memory is essentially their identity. What we remember, what we experience, is who we are. By changing Johnny’s memory of his entire life, they actually changed his personality. He wasn’t Johnny anymore. In fact, living under the shadow of his twin brother made him who he was, and his death painted a great part of his character. If his brother didn’t die, he wouldn’t be the same person, so there’s a chance his relationship with River would not be the same when they eventually met. And the worst thing is, it was all pointless. They didn’t have to make him believe he went to the Moon. They changed his entire life for nothing.
It was the perfect story. Johnny met River after an argument with his brother. They stargazed, talked about the stars being lighthouses, the Moon looking like a rabbit, their promise to meet up on the Moon if they ever got separated. Johnny then forgot about her because of the betablockers treatment, but still asked her out when he met her again at school. When River realised that he didn’t remember their first encounter, she desperately tried to remind him. She made thousands of origami rabbits to remind him of the Moon. She carried that little toy platypus everywhere, because it was his first gift to her. She asked to have their wedding next to a lighthouse on a cliff. They started building a house next to that lighthouse. When she got sick, she asked Johnny to not spend money to save her, but to finish building the house. She literally died trying to remind him. And Rosalene fucked it all up.
What bothers me about To the Moon is that it offers no closure whatsoever. There’s no catharsis. In the very end, after the credits, Watts and Rosalene casually talk about their next patient, hinting at a sequel. They were on a case that severely questioned the very nature of their jobs, and it blew right past them. There’s no personal growth, no character development. They didn’t learn anything.
I would accept such a tragic conclusion if it weren’t for the fact that I can tell that the writer thinks it’s a happy ending. It is clear that the writer thinks Rosalene was right. That’s what annoys me. It’s a horrible, soul-crushingly sad ending that made me feel so hollow I wanted to gut myself, masquerading as a happy ending.
I never much cared for Call of Duty multiplayer. It’s boring and full of immature children. What I had always appreciated was the campaign, because it almost always delivered.
The first Call of Duty game was absolutely amazing. It was a reconstruction of the first-person shooter of its time, with the game starting with you as a lone pathfinder dropped behind enemy lines to set up a beacon for the airborne Normandy landings. So you kill a couple of bored Nazi soldiers and do the objective as you’re used to, and then the actual War breaks out. Screaming mechanical sirens filled the air. The sky was flooded with planes, parachutes, and black clouds of flak. Deafening artillery fire struck everywhere. The game started off as the usual Quake-style shooter only to have the second World War slap its dick in your face, and if you didn’t shit your pants in that moment, you are dead inside.
Call of Duty 2 had the Omaha beach storm in Pointe du Hoc. (Call of Duty 3 was shit and I simply refuse to acknowledge its existence.) Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare was a masterpiece. Call of Duty: World at War was the first game to ever make me feel uncomfortable with violence. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was a Michael Bay epic. Call of Duty: Black Ops was a weird psychological horror, but still interesting at times. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 was kind of dull. Call of Duty: Black Ops II is absolute shit.
Each Call of Duty game had its own designated badass. The first one had Jason Statham. The second one had Captain Price. The Modern Warfare series also had Captain Price. Also, Soap. World at War and Black Ops had Resnov. So, who’s the badass in Black Ops II? Well, that would be Raul Menendez. The bad guy.
Imran Zakhaev was pretty cool too, but his beard wasn’t that great.
I don’t know whether Treyarch did this on purpose, but the villain in Black Ops II is so fucking badass that he manages to eclipse every other character I have seen in the entire series. His awesomeness is so vast that the good guys look like incompetent jackasses. During most of the game I felt like I was playing as one of the countless and nameless Blackwatch soldiers in Prototype, vainly trying to chase Alex Mercer down. Now, designing such a great villain is not a bad thing, but it becomes problematic when it brings about so big an imbalance, because sooner or later you start rooting for him.
Raul Menendez is introduced when Alex Mason, the protagonist, gets the drop on him while he is talking on the radio. Menendez glances at him and then ignores him as he continues to talk on the radio for a few more seconds. When he is done, Mason instructs him to use the radio to do something, but before he even finishes his sentence, Menendez punches the radio with his bare fist and it explodes. He then gets up and taunts Mason as he feebly tries to control the situation with pathetic attempts to intimidate his own captive. Menendez then does something amazing. As Mason grabs him and uses him as a human shield against soldiers coming to rescue their leader, Menendez casually and calmly holds up his hand and reveals that he just pulled the pin of a grenade. Mason panics like the bitch he is and clumsily makes Menendez drop the grenade, who in turn pulls a knife and almost stabs Mason, but Mason finally remembers that he is holding a gun and tries to shoot him in the face. Menendez, who was in no way done being a badass, pulls some Gun Kata right out of his ass and dodges the bullet, just before the grenade explodes and sends them both flying in different directions. Then, Mason flees the scene because he realises that he is no match for the awesomeness that is Raul Menendez.
“Wow!” I instantly thought. “That guy sure is amazing. I wish there was some kind of electronic medium through which I could pretend to be that guy and feel good about myself.”
My prayers were soon answered in a particular scene where I think the game was supposed to make the audience see how insanely fucked up Menendez is, but, for me, it only served to make me like him even more. Some dudes manhandle his little sister and he goes fucking berserk. You play the whole sequence from his own point of view, seeing red, screaming incoherently, and slaughtering an entire army in slow motion. I always had a soft spot for the person bringing a knife to a gunfight and ending up being the only one who walks away.
He also punches Manuel Noriega in the face.
In another scene, he blows both of Jason Hudson’s knees off with a SPAS-12. Yeah, kind of a dick move, but Hudson was no longer voiced by Ed Harris, so who cares? Besides, he was kind of an asshole, putting broken glass in people’s mouths and punching them. Menendez also crippled Frank Woods, but he was a dumbass, so it’s also okay.
You see, this is a problem when it comes to history. We know who the bad guys were in the Vietnam War or the Bay of Pigs. We know what assholes the Americans have become in the last decade towards the rest of the world, and having a character who lives in the year 2025 utter the phrase “he is the most dangerous terrorist since Osama bin Laden” comes off as really contrived, if not downright hilarious.
Menendez’s plan was to gain control of all American unmanned drones. I’m talking about a whole fucking army of drones. Like, thousands upon thousands of flying killing machines. And what does he want to do with them? He orders them to self-destruct. Wow, what a terrorist. As a civilian living in 2025, I would be more concerned about the government that actually built all those fucking drones in the first place.
However, Black Ops II is the first Call of Duty game with a dynamic scenario, meaning the player’s actions affect the outcome of the story. I couldn’t be bothered with all the stupid tower defense missions, so I ignored them all and let Menendez succeed in his plan, so I got the “bad” ending, which, in my opinion, was the best ending of all.
“Oh noes, we are no longer a military superpower!”
It’s interesting to see how Spec Ops: The Line has influenced the genre. I don’t know who was in charge of some of the decisions taken in the development of Black Ops II, but it was like some idiot somewhere said: “Hey, that Spec Ops game received quite a bit of critical acclaim for its portrayal of PTSD, why don’t we put PTSD everywhere?” So, almost every single character in the game behaves like an unlikable crazy motherfucker whom you feel completely disassociated from.
There is an utterly stupid scene where Woods, played by you, is ordered to snipe Menendez while he has a bag over his head and is being held by two Panamanian soldiers. I have no idea what the person who designed this mission was thinking. Overlooking how weirdly uncanny the whole scene was, this mission was a flashback, so we already knew that Menendez was still alive, so it didn’t make any fucking sense. So, I chose not to shoot him, because I’m not retarded. I shot the soldiers holding him, who were un-fucking-killable. Great job, Treyarch. You suck.
Turns out the bagged guy was Alex Mason, and when I say “turns out”, I mean I don’t think there is a human being in the whole fucking world who didn’t figure that obvious shit out. Afterwards, I found out online that you can choose to disobey the order and shoot him in the leg. Fuck you, that’s not a choice, that’s fucking stupid and it makes no sense. If Woods had so much doubt, why didn’t he disobey the order completely? What was the point in shooting an unassessed target in the leg, especially since it is so fucking obvious that it was Mason? I didn’t regret killing him at all. I enjoyed Woods’ grief for killing his best friend, who was also a dick.
There was another scene that almost gave me hope of something actually interesting happening. At some point, some child-soldiers appear, fumbling with the weapons their holding, clearly showing inexperience and lack of consent to participate in the war. I thought that would have been a very interesting moral conflict, being forced to return fire upon armed children who are in turn being forced to shoot at you. But nope, the children run away in that same cut-scene, never to be seen again.
Another stupid scene was the appearance of Lev Kravchenko. In one of the many, many cut-scenes, right in the middle of a war, you overwhelm a tank, and Kravchenko comes out of it, punching you. What the fuck was he doing inside a tank? Colonels don’t drive tanks! At first, I thought Mason was hallucinating again, but no, Woods sees him too. This is the type of bullshit that makes video game scripts laughable. Don’t do that.
And lastly, the racism. I had heard people talking about the subtle racism of the game, but I usually don’t pay much attention to that kind of thing. When I was playing the game, I noticed that the protagonist’s task force consists exclusively of white men, with the exception of a token brown guy named Salazar and a black guy who is the Admiral and can’t seem to stop saying “cocksucker”. (There is also an aircraft carrier named USS Obama that eventually sinks.) It’s the oldest trick in the book: “Oh, we’re not racist, the brown terrorist just happens to be brown! Look, we have a brown guy with us who also hates him, so it’s cool.” However, I found it particularly funny when Salazar betrays you in the end, revealing that he actually supported Menendez all along.
Anyway, the game was shit. (The only good thing I noticed was the fact that non-English speakers finally speak in their own language, instead of English in a stereotypical accent.) I thought this was generally understood, but, after looking around on the internet, I realised that Activision was probably right in publishing such a stupid game, because, apparently, everyone who reviewed it is equally stupid. Gamespot’s Chris Watters, the man who gave Spec Ops: The Line a rating of 6.5/10 gave Black Ops II an 8.0/10. Fuck you, Chris Watters.
Video games are created for the sole purpose of experiencing fantasies. You fantasise about killing Nazis, and Infinity Ward offers the opportunity to relive the Normandy Landing. You fantasise about being worshipped, and Lionhead Studios lets you be a god. You fantasise about being a supervillain, and Radical Entertainment lets you become a shape-shifting monster terrorising an entire city. You fantasise about controlling your own pet family down to their personal hygiene and toilet routines, and Electronic Arts tells you to go fuck yourself and steals your money. When, however, a bald dude in a suit murders the shit out of eight female assassins dressed in sexy nun outfits, everyone is shaking their judgemental fingers at him.
How dare you.
Various video game journalists rushed to praise this response from the gaming community, treating it like a sign that gamers oppose female objectification and violence towards women in games, but this isn’t new at all and it’s not what this is really about. I was there when society shamed pre-adolescent boys for liking Lara Croft back in the 90′s, thus creating the perpetual stereotype of the lonely, fat, ugly gamer. I was there when Team Ninja’s members were called creepy perverts for developing Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball about a decade later.
Granted, the notion that today’s society has a pathological aversion to displays and expressions of sexuality is fast becoming cliché, but I simply can’t understand why people feel so holier-than-thou specifically when it comes to sexuality in video games. This “oh, so you’re into that?” mentality is both hypocritical and pretentious, especially when it comes from fellow gamers, because there is a saying about glass houses and rocks.
How many times have ignorant non-gamers accused games of promoting violence? How many times have we tiredly defended our art against people calling games like Mortal Kombat“distasteful”, “disgusting”, “vile”, among other things? I never even liked Mortal Kombat, but I always defend it. It’s not just a matter of freedom of expression through art, but the liberation of doing something in a game that you cannot do in real life is something precious, if not sacred, to mankind.
Since the dawn of humanity, one of the few things that sets us apart from other species is our lore. We tell each other stories. We write them down for other generations to remember, reshape, and retell. For a long time, books had this magical ability to transport us to fantastical worlds where anything was possible. Since the last century, movies took it a step further, offering us the visual and audio stimuli to complement our imaginations. Now, through video games, we can live in those worlds. To call someone else’s fantasy “vile” is vile in itself.
All Tomb Raider games sucked monkeyballs, and the only reason one could like them was either because they had never played a game before or because they wanted to stare at Lara Croft’s polygonal ass all day. That’s not a bad thing. The bad thing is acting all uppity and claiming superiority for not wanting to bone her.
Maybe because she didn’t have an ass like that.
Some people like big breasts. Some people like big breasts that bounce. Some people like big breasts that bounce individually. So, why not put breasts in video games?
“But those aren’t breasts! Real breasts aren’t that big, and they don’t bounce like that!” I hear you say. Well, my dear rhetorical device, real guns and bullets don’t behave the way they do in shooters either, but we still enjoy them. You can’t reload half a magazine and still magically keep the lost ammo. A shotgun blast is still lethal beyond 10 meters. Pistol bullets don’t cause heads to explode. Zombies don’t really exist. Uppercuts don’t decapitate people. But whenever someone says that violent games are distasteful or disgusting, gamers are always there to call bullshit. Why don’t they do it when it comes to sexuality?
I’ll tell you why. It’s because any form of fantasy that deviates from your own is perceived as disgusting. If you like beating prostitutes to death with a giant purple dildo and then doing a shadow blowjob dance in Saints Row: The Third, you just dismiss people who stare at you as being narrow-minded prudes, unable to see how fun it is. However, when someone likes doing something that you don’t, you see them as perverts. You hypothetical hypocrite.
I was never fond of Lara Croft and I prefer small, perky boobs. But I would never say that these games are tacky or sleazy, because that would be unfair, as I too enjoy games that have absolutely no substance beyond satisfying my personal vice. Am I saying that all artistic expressions are essentially equal? No. The distinction lies in the objective quality of the games themselves.
Like I said earlier, all Tomb Raider games are terrible. They’re not terrible because Lara Croft is dripping wet and barefoot; they’re terrible because they are bad games. The low quality of games such as these is not because of the oversexualisation of their female protagonist, but because of the fact that publishers believe a game can hold up on that alone.
Objectification and oversexualisation are not bad things. Call of Duty objectified Nazis, and it was a great game. The fact that not every German soldier who fought in the War was a Nazi was irrelevant. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines oversexualised almost every single female character you met, and it was also a great game. Bloodlines had all the signs of a sexploitation game (namely, boobs attached to extremely horny girls), but it also had great characters, immersive dialogue, and compelling storyline.
Also, boobs.
So, Agent 47 kills a bunch of women in dominatrix outfits. Sexualisation of violence is a tricky subject. For example, is a scene where a bunch of shirtless men brawl considered sexualised? I know a lot of women who would be genuinely turned on by this. It’s really not that big a deal. It’s not like Agent 47 was purposefully killing innocent women (although I wouldn’t mind if he did). They blew his house up. Was he supposed to not defend himself against rocket-launcher-wielding assassins, just because they’re dressed in skimpy outfits?
All fantasies are inherently amoral. If they weren’t, you would just go out and do whatever it is you fantasise about. Decapitating people with shovels and then peeing on their corpses is usually frowned upon, so that’s why you do it in Postal 2. Fantasies are not fair or just, they are not politically correct, and they are not about gender equality. Video games are a medium through which we get to live our fantasies. Instead of being so judgemental towards each other’s, maybe we should start being a little more tolerant and a little less puritanical.
To understand what Spec Ops: The Line accomplished, one has to understand the history and purpose of video game violence. So, please bear with me, because this shit is important.
Most video games are about killing. Humans are hunters, and their social structure — much like that of chimpanzees and ants — includes warring factions. In other words, we like killing things, because those who didn’t died a long time ago. Through civilisation, however, we have been teaching ourselves that killing our own people is wrong, for the obvious reason that it weakens our own tribe’s numbers against other tribes that might want to harm us. Also, people are more likely to defend their way of life when they are happy with it, and experts agree that not being murdered is a solid step towards peace within a community. This, of course, doesn’t mean that a few millennia of civilisation could cancel out millions of years of evolution, so normal people still fantasise about murdering their boss or their geography teacher. The problem is how people differentiate friends from foes and what they do with that information.
On one side, the human brain has a very simplistic view of the world. Catchphrases like “you’re either with us or against us” exist because of that exact reason. When you disagree with someone, your brain often pits them with the “others”, and you view them as the enemy. This is why people get so violent (and stupid) in situations or discussions involving politics. After all, a tribe’s socio-political structure is the most fundamental aspect of its very existence.
It’s also the root of all types of prejudice.
It’s not just politics, though. Look at how people react to atrocious crimes or extremely anti-social behaviour. For example, when a serial paederast is apprehended, there are always many people who say that criminals like them should be hanged or burned or have their genitals removed or something else equally torturous. Opponents of onychectomy have been known to claim that people who have their pets declawed should have their own nails removed by law. On a not-so-related note, I have often found myself amused when people express death-threats when a hit-and-run involves an animal or a child or a woman, but not when it’s an adult man. This takes me back to that argument I once made in another article about how most games won’t allow you to kill children or animals or women, but men are open-season. Not sure if it’s hypocrisy or just plain stupidity, but I shouldn’t get side-tracked here.
The other side of this whole thing is schadenfreude. A few years ago, they did a study, where they found out that men enjoy watching people whom they consider “bad” get hurt. They hooked their brains up with scanners, and their pleasure centres actually lit up. And yes, this only happens in men; it doesn’t affect women (mostly). My interpretation is that men are designed to be killers. I mean, what better way is there to watch someone you don’t like get hurt than by actually hurting them? It’s not like prehistoric men had YouTube.
The same applies in real life, by the way. Many people harbour fantasies about someone trying to mug them or rape their girlfriend or generally wrong them in any way, just so they can have the necessary justification to unleash their inner monster. That drive to kill is always there, always looking and wanting the excuse to murder everyone. This empowerment fantasy is pretty much why video games even exist.
“Thanks, I have been waiting my whole life for this. Now I can go Man on Fire on your asses.”
The most common way developers implement this is through association with a group that is already generally despised or one that nobody would dare to defend. The best example of this is Nazis. It’s not so much that people still hate Nazis today (they’ve become irrelevant in most parts of the world); it’s because, if anyone gives a shit about them, they are immediately branded as bad people. That’s why there are so many games about killing Nazis. Who would dare to stand up and say that they don’t deserve all kinds of punishment? Wolfenstein 3D, which arguably gave birth to the very genre of first-person shooters in 1992 (and wasn’t really 3D), used Nazis as bad guys and Hitler as the Final Boss. How could a game about murdering Nazis possibly be unethical?
Another way to remove all guilt from killing something is to make it soulless. Things like monstrosities, zombies, skeletons, aliens, vampires, robots, lizards, spiders, insects, demons, etc, are all entities that people are usually willing to destroy without remorse. Of course, one could argue that all of the above are nothing but projections of different human personality archetypes, so they would essentially still be killing humans, but I don’t want to get into that right now. Shooters have some history that needs to be told.
It should be noted that the first video game ever was a shooter. It was developed in 1947 and was called CRT Amusement Device and it was about pointing a dot at some shitty monochromatic image resembling a Nazi aeroplane and shooting at it. In 1961, out came Spacewar!, a two-player deathmatch game about two spaceships shooting at each other. As you can see, one was about Nazis and the other was about players killing one another. The game, however, that became popular and defined the genre arrived in 1978.
Nishikado Tomohiro was the one who said “Fuck aliens!” and developed Space Invaders (called Supesu Inbeda in Japan). It is considered one of the most successful games in history, grossing billions of dollars. It was a great game as well, simplistic and elegant, but its level of violence was relatively low.
It also inadvertently introduced the concept of a difficulty curve.
Asteroids, 1979, was even worse. You weren’t even shooting at living things. It was a very successful game, with great gameplay innovations, leaving a huge legacy behind, but, in hindsight, I think the reason it didn’t turn out to be as successful as Space Invaders was because people can’t get very excited about murdering a bunch of rocks. The first truly violent game, interestingly, was a racing game.
Three years earlier, in 1976, Exidy developed Death Race, an arcade racing game about a car running people over. Notably, it seems to be the first video game to ever attract media attention with regard to its graphic depiction of violence. The game’s visual realism is laughable by today’s standards; you moved a bucket car around to run stick-figure pedestrians over, leaving tiny cross-shaped tombstones behind. Of course, it wasn’t the violence itself, because that would have been a particularly simplistic way of looking at this. The problem was that you weren’t killing soulless creatures anymore. It wasn’t aliens or Nazis, it was real people. Funnily enough, the developers claimed that the pedestrians were, in fact, gremlins, so it was okay.
Not sure how it happened, but this is how I picture it.
The year Wolfenstein 3D came out was also the year that Mortal Kombat managed to create an actual moral panic. Being the first video game in history to receive a “Mature” ESRB rating, Mortal Kombat was about people beating each other in hilariously spectacular ways, that also featured special moves which the player could use to finish off their opponent when their health had reached zero. This time, the reasons people went crazy were because the developers had used rotoscoping to capture the characters’ motion making them a lot more realistic than other games, and because of all the murdering of helpless defeated foes.
After Wolfenstein 3D, Id Software created Doom (1993) and Quake (1996). Both of which were about shooting demons or demon-like creatures, and Quake was also the first game to feature flying polygonal giblets, even though the concept of gibbing dates as far back as 1990, with Smash TV, the spiritual predecessor of games like Alien Shooter or Alien Swarm.
Enter Carmageddon. Stainless Games developed a spiritual successor of Death Race, only this time the graphics were amazingly realistic (for its time). Basically, you drove around freely in a pimped-out car, running hundreds of pedestrians over. Needless to say, this caused enormous controversy among conservative people, causing developers to release two alternative versions; one featuring zombie pedestrians with green blood, and one featuring robot pedestrians with black blood/oil. (There was also a toggleable Nice & Fluffy Mode, with no pedestrians at all.)
People would have been even more outraged if they had known that the driver giggling like an idiot was a 14-year-old girl.
In the world of Grand Theft Auto, where you run a couple of prostitutes over every time you try to park your car, such a gimmick may not seem like such a big deal, but it was ground-breakingly revolutionary back in 1997. With all the ragdollised, almost cartoon-like physics, even today’s games can’t compete with the visceral dismemberment and disembowelment of Carmageddon or Carmageddon II, which replaced the rotoscoped sprite pedestrians with polygonal ones.
The games also rewarded you if you murdered people creatively.
However, what set Carmageddon apart from other violent games wasn’t so much the violence itself, but the type of violence used. First, it was vehicular violence, meaning that it was instantly relatable, since almost everyone drives cars. Second, it was violence against thousands of screaming innocent pedestrians, meaning that the act was by definition unethical. For example, Quarantine (1994) was pretty much the same thing, but the pedestrians were all criminals in a dystopian prison city, so it didn’t cause as much controversy.
Onwards to Soldier of Fortune. In 2000, Raven Software broke new ground by developing the GHOUL engine, which allowed this first-person shooter to depict the most realistic gun violence anyone had ever seen. In my opinion, it’s still better than many contemporary shooters. Soldier of Fortune was one of the very first (and few) games where a single pistol shot could kill a human being. It featured 26 separate damage-zones in each character model, meaning you could shoot people in different areas of their bodies with different results. A shot to the arm would prevent them from shooting, while a shot to the leg would make them hop to cover, a shotgun blast to the abdomen would spill their guts out, a high-calibre headshot would blow their brains out, and a fine-aimed shot through the throat would have them clutch their necks and stumble onto the ground, drowning in their own blood.
This one time, I shot some dude and walked to the next room to look for health pick-ups, and, when I returned, the guy was still on the floor writhing in agony. I shot him again, in the head this time, to put him out of his misery. He instantly became still, his final breath slowly escaping his lungs, visible in the cold weather. The only other game I’ve seen do this so well was Assassin’s Creed. Unfortunately, as it is with most awesome stuff, this feature was removed in the sequels. Anyway, my point is, Soldier of Fortune was truly an amazing game, in a time before everything became ragdollised and decal-free.
This shit was art, and I’m in no way being ironic here.
In my mind, what actually set Soldier of Fortune apart wasn’t the realistic depiction of violence itself. It wasn’t so much the dismemberment and disembowelment using firearms and surprisingly sharp hunting knives, or the accurately visible bullet wounds that appeared on the models, but what these above elements managed to create. The realism made the violence real for the player, which caused an extreme personalisation of each and every person they killed in that game.
I like to juxtapose Soldier of Fortune with Deus Ex, another great game that came out about a year later. Deus Ex was a masterpiece in many ways, but it failed to deliver on the visceral aspect of death. You would crawl around in the darkness, picking off guards with a sniper rifle as if they were pawns. Through dialogue, the game tried to remind you that you were a law enforcement agent targeting real breathing humans, but it was frustratingly hard to give a shit. There wasn’t any real violence; you just shot them in the head and they fell down. No bullet wounds, no blood spatter, no exploding brains. All humans were nothing but annoyances, irrelevant objects blocking your path to wherever you wanted to go. What was even worse was the fact that the game itself sort of forgot about that whole “killing humans is wrong” thing after the first couple of missions.
Of course, you don’t always need in-your-face personalisation to make violence work. Sometimes the horror itself is in the impersonality itself. The idea of a protagonist becoming so desensitised and distant that human life ceases to be relevant can be quite tragic, if used correctly. This can work great with war games, and the initial Call of Duty series managed to make some progress in this area.
Early shooters tended to focus on the lone genocidal hero. It was the obvious thing to do from the developer’s point of view, because programming friendly A.I. was no easy task back in the day. It was also quite fitting; whether it was Space Invaders or Doom, having to kill an awful amount of bad guys makes convenient gameplay mechanics.
Call of Duty was the first game to pit you in the middle of a huge battlefield as one of the lowliest soldiers. Suddenly, you weren’t the super-commando you were used to; you didn’t matter at all. You were nobody, among millions of other nobodies fighting and dying around you. A buddy of yours died, and another would take his place. You killed a Nazi, and another would take his place. This vainness was even more emphasised in the historically inaccurate Battle of Stalingrad mission, where Soviet soldiers were ordered to charge the battlefield as cannon fodder without so much as a weapon in their hands.
The Modern Warfare series went for a different approach. Although the first title was somewhat modest, Modern Warfare 2 and Modern Warfare 3 came down with a serious case of Michael Bay. While many critics applaud the Hollywoodian take on video games, I find it represents a step backwards in this issue. I mean, yes, the chase sequence in Modern Warfare 2‘s Hornet’s Nest can only be described as the epitome of total fucking awesomeness, but it brings a certain “I do shit like this everyday” glorification that I find distasteful. If it had been just this scene, it would be okay, but almost every extraction in every mission is like that. That’s why I said the first Modern Warfare game was modest; because it knew how to pace itself.
Modern Warfare blew a lot of minds in 2007, when it had a player character die in the middle of the game.
Now let’s talk about Spec Ops: The Line. At first glance, Spec Ops: The Line seems like another Gears of War clone, but it’s not. Compared to it, Gears of War looks more like a sack of Locust shit. So, what’s so special about this game? I don’t want to talk about its great story both in pacing and content nor the profoundly well-made characters — actually, I do, but I won’t, because I don’t want to stray too far away from this interesting subject.
Spec Ops: The Line handles violence in the best way I have ever seen in a game. It’s not Soldier of Fortune‘s mindless violence rubbed in your face, and it’s not Modern Warfare‘s gung-ho attitude. It’s not even the romanticised old-school Call of Duty‘s heroism and glory. Spec Ops: The Line holds your head under the waters of the very worst kind of violence. It tells, on many different levels, the story of heroes becoming villains. The most interesting character arc, however, is that of the protagonist.
Read the rest of the article only after you’ve played this soul-crushing masterpiece.
Captain Walker’s progression of his state of mind is what drives the entire plot. In the beginning of the game, he appears to be both righteous and rational, a capable man to professionally lead his unit to accomplish the mission at hand. By the end of the game, he is a shell-shocked war-criminal. The whole story revolves around the player’s ride through this downward spiral of his, that makes you really wish would eventually end.
The pivotal point in the narrative is the iconic White Phosphorus scene. It’s the mark when the protagonist stops being a good guy and becomes the personification of pure evil. He tries to rationalise his position in order to still make himself to be the hero, but it becomes increasingly hard for him to do so, with his men gradually distancing themselves more and more from him.
While Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare broke a lot of new ground when it came out, Spec Ops: The Line totally destroys its AC-130 scene. In Modern Warfare‘s Death From Above, you get to rain fire down on terrorists like a god, totally detached from the violence. Although I can see how this could be perceived as disturbing in itself, I have to admit that didn’t feel anything while I was playing that mission, or even afterwards when I was thinking about it. It’s hard to give a fuck when you’re so far away from the action, but I guess that’s the whole point. After all, the mission was based on an actual real event.
In Spec Ops: The Line, you use a UAV to drop White Phosphorus shells on American soldiers. The gameplay is quite similar to the Modern Warfare mission, with the minor, albeit important, detail of being able to view your character’s own mirrored face when the laptop screen is brightened by the explosions; a nice touch. But here’s the game-changer: when you’re done, the game then makes you walk through the kill zone. It makes you witness what you actually did up close, finishing off with slapping you in the face with the realisation that you have just burned dozens of civilians to death, whom the soldiers were trying to help.
White phosphorus is serious business.
Walker never manages to recover from that. He starts having both visual and auditory hallucinations, but what I really appreciated was the little things of how the unit’s behaviour changes throughout the game. In earlier stages, their battle chatter is professional and cold. They sound calm and formal, just like you would expect from trained killers. (In fact, in the very beginning, they’re even joking with each other, even at the prospect of danger.) In later scenes, they seem to have lost all composure and resolve, and resort to simply screaming out curses and insults full of hatred at the top of their lungs.
“Waste the motherfuckers!”
Another thing is the mêlée executions. In the first act, Walker kills downed enemies quickly and efficiently, like with a bullet to the head, but later on he starts doing some really nasty shit, like needlessly shooting them in the kneecaps first, or bashing their skulls to paste with the buttstock of his rifle, after which he swears at them.
What Spec Ops: The Line essentially does is deconstruct the entire modern war shooter. Earlier war heroes in both movies and games were kinda like John Rambo; all-American genocidal psychopaths. Captain Walker is basically the same thing, but this time it is presented in a much more believable way. You are not a lowly insignificant soldier like in Call of Duty; you are a deadly Delta Force operative and, instead of being the action hero (or even anti-hero) Cold War era movies would have depicted, you are a monster, because that’s what you’d realistically be in real life.
I had noticed this trend with the release of Duke Nukem Forever. When I was a small child, I literally thought Duke Nukem was cool. He had huge muscles, a badass voice, I thought his one-liners were witty, and I mistook his misogynistic bravado for sexual potency. Today, Duke Nukem comes off as a complete and utter douchebag who has either been punched in the face way too much or not enough. I don’t know whether I’ve changed or society has changed, but judging for the various articles I read at the time, it seemed that most critics agree with me. The idols of yesterday are the obnoxious outcasts of today.
James Bond, the archetypal alpha male of a whole generation, was an absolute ponce.
Spec Ops: The Line destroys this idea and reveals these heroes for what they truly are, and what makes the experience even more compelling is the interactivity. The game not only exposes the protagonist; it exposes you. You are the one who wanted to kill a bunch of people and see things explode. You are the one who smiled smugly as the white dots disappeared under the clouds of white phosphorus. Even the game itself taunts you, replacing loading-screen tips with lines like: “How many Americans have you killed today?” You are no longer the hero.
I have always thought that guilt is one of the least utilised motivations in games. This is really a shame, because I believe it has the capacity to be the strongest and most visceral of emotions. Planescape: Torment tried to do this in 1999, but the guilt referred to something the player had nothing to do. However, it did contain one of my favourite quotes of all time: “Every living thing has a weapon against which it has no defense. Time. Disease. Iron. Guilt.”Sleeping Dogs seemed to do a much better job at this, as did I Am Alive at some points.
I hope to see more games try to walk down this path. In a time when the term “realistic shooter” has come to mean “one cool guy kills a bazillion terrorists”, Spec Ops: The Line skillfully deconstructs the genre and shows what an actual realistic shooter would be like, and, man, that wasn’t a pretty sight. It’s as if this game holds a huge mirror for all first-person shooter enthusiasts (both developers and players) to see themselves in.
This marks a very important point in the history of video game violence. It seems to be a turning point in the industry’s trajectory, where a player can experience something much deeper than blowing shit up (while blowing said shit up). Up until now, games, especially shooters, have mostly been just power porn, but they can be a lot more. Spec Ops: The Line proved it.
Hello, Internet, it is I. Forgive me, I didn’t mean to bother you again so soon, but I have a confession to make; today I came this close to participating in flamewars.
I know, I know, and it is, you are right, but you should have seen those guys.
*Sigh.*
I guess you’re wondering what this is all about. I will gladly elaborate, not because it’s 6 7 in the morning and I have insomnia, but because FORTHELOVEOFGODSOMEPEOPLE.
To spare myself a few hundreds of words, help yourself. Assuming you did, I continue my story. (In case you didn’t, I am talking about the game Killing Floor here. Also, you suck and I don’t like you.)
Yesterday afternoon, as I was strolling merrily around my HD Hengsha Cityscape wallpaper, a Steam notification popped up. And who was it by, if not the beloved-by-most Tripwire Interactive, happy to announce the new things they cooked up for us for Halloween?
The update included: new hillbilly-themed zeds ( = zombies), a map, 15 achievements, one character skin unlockable during the event, four official weapons, four additional DLC weapons, and a purchasable character pack. Soon after, a patch was released fixing several bugs (not all of which were related to the update). Upon noticing this, I felt a blossoming wave of appreciation for those people, that still offer to the community while demanding nothing in return.
(And then there’s the morons that take it for granted, from what I gathered from the comments.
Entitled Idiot said:
I was expecting this.
Psh. Dickhead.)
But, eh, that was far from my point. There’s worse out there.
So, you noticed all that free stuff up there, right? Let it be noted that the money for the weapons do not go to the company, but to the modders that made them.
Yes, as in the people from the modding community.
Yes, it is awesome indeed.
Well, this is when I paid a visit to the forums to check about the previous Halloween achievements. I still remember my last seconds of joy, because what I witnessed afterwards tore it out of me. I chose to not intervene, and the classes I needed to attend made sure I would not stray from that decision. I am, however, still bewildered, so I will now attempt to vent reasonably.
To the people who overused the words ‘pay to win’: Killing Floor is a cooperative game without PvP modes, so the notion of a player winning against another is a pretty inaccurate one to begin with. I did notice posters could not decide whether it was having to pay for content that bothered them or the dread of n00bs using their awes0me gunz to beat Hell on Earth (highest difficulty). In any case, if you are good enough, your fun is threatened by no man. Players incapable of surviving without the new weapons will remain the same with the new weapons on higher difficulties, and let me help you understand that: dead, deceased, passed on, having ceased to be, expired and gone to meet their maker, stiffs, bereft of life, resting in peace, pushing up the daisies, and, to put this simply, EX-PLAYERS. (Also, that’s the part where you go and grab the new weapon from their not-yet-cold arms, and I think that’s also the part where you stop bitching.)
To the people who suggested that the modders should have been given a PayPal button instead of releasing the DLC:
Fuck you, you would never donate. Or notice. Those people worked hard and created something worthy, and given how the world works, it’s completely normal for the product to be exchanged for money. One would think more people would know that already. Now grow up and let’s move on, shall we?
Apparently Tripwire has been too nice for their own good. They never owed us anything; they were just awesome enough to offer so much stuff for free.
Allow me to help you with that. You once went to your local pastry shop for something to eat, and the clerk gave you an extra cupcake for free. From that day onward, said clerk has been giving you more free food on a regular basis, without you having to buy anything first. If you ever stop staying “thank you” and start saying “why are you still charging for those other things nobody is forcing me to buy?”, or even “I was expecting this”, you are a gigantic fucking douchebag. Do you see it yet?
You should be grateful, you [CENSORED] little [CENSORED][CENSORED] of a [CENSORED].
They are amateurs and therefore should work without payment. That’s because if we don’t get money out of this then neither should anyone else, and I also can’t seem to find an argument I can hang on to because I am butthurt and it is hard to hide.
Here’s what I gather: you are either so envious your eyes have turned into empty gaps of poisonous bile; or you are the fucking epitome of retardation. You read the word “amateur” on a dictionary and probably thought it would make you sound sophisticated because it looks french. Following your stream of thought, indie developers should offer their games for free, because if they were professionals they would have already been hired. You even hint on being a modder yourself, and yet you do not realize how this whole deal you’re opposed to in the end is beneficial to you and the people you attempt to speak for.
But wait, none of that is your point. Your point is something about “principle”, which you probably like so much because it looks… er, it sounds… like… uh, english, I guess. Still, the views expressed on the link above make no sense. People who make mods do it as a hobby, it is the first time anyone thought of paying them for it. This we know. Now we also know that since so many modders in the past have not received any compensation, it is forbidden by principle that anyone should attempt to change that. Let’s recap: you are envious and stupid enough to not see how this is good for you, ERGO both of what I said above stands. QED.
To the people who claimed that Tripwire is becoming Activision/EA:
Tripwire Interactive has an annual revenue of about half a million dollars while Activision and EA are both multi-billion dollar companies. That alone should hint on how wrong this claim is, but wait! There’s more. Let’s take a look at the various DLC types currently available:
Content Originally Belonging to the Game but Sold Separately:
Deus Ex: Human Revolution:Explosive Mission Pack. Unlocks the Tong’s Rescue Bonus Mission, which is a tad important given that there is a whole sequence making little to no sense without it. Also given to loyal customers upon pre-order. The rest of us could go fuck ourselves.
Saints Row: The Third:Unlockable Pack. Gives you what you could already have if you made different choices in the game. Also known as “game content you could be given for free”. Plus the Witches & Wieners and Invincible packs that offer outfits and cheats you had for free in the second game of the series.
Mass Effect: Legends have it that there was code discovered in Mass Effect’s 3 disc, referring to the day-one DLC From Ashes. Tedious excuses were released by the publishers in a vile attempt to mask the fuck-up.
Dungeon Defenders:Quest for the Lost Eternia Shards Part I to IV; several new challenges, character packs and heroes.
Saints Row: The Third:The Trouble with Clones, Gangstas in Space, Genkibowl VII. New missions and activities.
The Binding of Isaac:Wrath of the Lamb game-altering expansion, adding a shitload of new stuff. Has the potential to drastically raise game difficulty but can be reverted via Cheat Engine.
PAYDAY: The Heist:Wolfpack DLC. What’s innovative about this is that the players that have it can play with their friends that don’t. Ubisoft could learn a few things here, but then again Ubisoft can afford to learn a hell of a lot of things, and they don’t seem to intend to. Hi̸͞s͡s̷҉ss͠s͡.
Borderlands:The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned, Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot, The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, Claptrap’s Robot Revolution. New missions, new level cap, new weapon types, and finally a chance to kill those obnoxious little bastard things called claptraps. What more can a person ask for?
Magicka:The Other Side of the Coin, The Stars Are Left, Dungeons and Daemons, Vietnam, and several challenges and versus maps.
In this category, new content for the game is released and you have to pay to access it. This is normal, since (as mentioned earlier) obtaining products via equivalent trade makes the world go round.
Free Content Updates:
Dungeon Defenders:Anniversary Pack, Capture the Flag Pre-Alpha Pass. Free downloadable content. Event skins and challenges for Valentine’s Day, Christmas, Easter, etc.
Left 4 Dead 2: The Cold Stream Campaign, plus all the maps from the previous title.
Magicka:Mea Culpa DLC. Offered as an apology following an extremely buggy release, giving the “Bugged Staff”, the “Broken Sword”, the “Patched Robe”, and the “Crash to Desktop” magick. So nice of them. Did I ever mention I love these guys?
Bastion: The Stranger’s Dream and two new game modes (the No-Sweat Mode and the Score-Attack Mode) got added on an update. Achievements included.
PAYDAY: The Heist: The Mercy Hospital Heist, with a new heist, masks and a zombie theme. Other updates have included achievements, masks, and random events.
Terraria: This is the one case where there’s so much to say that speaking is deemed unnecessary. Terraria has had an amazing amount of work put into it even long after its release. Version 1.1 was probably the most important update in, um, the entire history of games. If you can read this without shedding a tear, you are probably made of wood.
Killing Floor: to be explained below.
These people are saints. And, given your behavior, also martyrs.
You are probably wondering why Killing Floor is on the latest category. Congratulations, you are awarded the Moron Of The Year trophy. Fear not, though, the Delorean is just around the corner; let’s go back a bit. Since its release back in 2009, KF has been constantly updating and releasing bug fixes. Other than that, the following have been added: weapons, maps, animations, particle effects, a perk, an increased level cap, achievements, menu improvements, new audio tracks, new zeds for every single fucking event, and overall more free stuff than I could ever list here. Cosmetic character packs don’t count since they serve mostly as a way to support the company. Also, this ordeal is going to give me carpal tunnel syndrome. Oh well. I hope the point is at least starting to sink in.
To the people who uninstalled the game due to one or more of the reasons mentioned above: Thanks. Now we will not be in danger of playing with you, since you would probably have gotten us all killed, rebel-without-a-cause. You probably think you showed them, eh? Those bastards, how dare they do that to you. But you… You got back at them. You had your voice heard, you took a stand, and you made a difference. Well done, little one. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to wake you up. Tripwire does not get money for as long as you are in-game, and nobody gives a fuck if you took your dad’s Che Guevara shirt out of the attic. What you did was not revolutionary, Tripwire lost nothing, and you only cost yourself. Now I suggest you relax, have a cappuccino, and go reinstall the game, as long as you keep away from public servers. Bitch.
Now, where was I…
Right.
Well, for the remainder of my stay at the heartwarmingly welcoming forums of Tripwire, I had the chance to witness enough drama to last me a year or so. I even stumbled upon a post that was not unlike the following:
Rationalising Douchebag said:
Now that Tripwire has done something I unreasonably disagree to, I am entitled to pirate every single other thing they ever publish and feel okay with myself.
The message I’m trying to purvey here is that the kinds of people mentioned above hurt the community in horrifying ways. The vast majority of companies do not treat customers this well; Tripwire has taken content created by modders and is selling it in the name of its creators. Many other devs would have probably stolen the content and used it as their own, just like Notch did with Minecraft. In fact, the sad thing this that there are fanboys out there who have made the argument that devs have the right to steal any mods they want, because its their code the modders are using and therefore have no rights over what they create. Accusing Tripwire of greed when they attempt to do something so great for the modding community is a fucking disgrace, because their stance has proven time and time again to be the exact opposite.
This whole thing could encourage a large amount of people to give it a try themselves and might even serve as a back door into development. Yet there those people are, bitching about how they do not support IJC to give them their money.
Now those people had better make a wish to a djinn that Tripwire does not listen to them, because otherwise I will find them and I will shoot them.
A company tries to do something great for the community. And then these dicks come along and make the developers think that theirs is the dominating thesis over the matter. This is why we can’t have nice things, people.
I recently played the third and latest game of the F.E.A.R. series, or, as it is officially named, “Fuh-three-uh”. F.E.A.R. stands for First Encounter Assault Recon, and you already knew that, because you’re here to read about the third game of the series. I have no idea what F.3.A.R. stands for, but I figure it’s just too genius for me to comprehend.
So, as I was saying, I recently played this little co-op gem. Then I lost my saves, so I am currently playing it again to get to my former glory and challenge progress. The information above has nothing to do with this article, other than showing you that its author is a moron. But enough about me, let’s talk about ghosts.
#6 Paxton Fettel
When I played the first F.E.A.R. game, I recall finding Paxton Fettel absolutely great. His voice was astounding; the way he smashed your character’s face with the board-thing in the beginning was so elegant; the way he cannibalized that guy was just plain charming. Then he died.
The second game slipped past me mostly unnoticed, because I could hardly see what was going on through the tears. So when I heard that Fettel would return (to life) as a playable character in the third game, imagine my enthusiasm.
Uh…
What the – hey, who put that there? That’s not what I meant! I was being quite literal, thank you very much. Nox says I was really ecstatic. Well, I have to take him by his word, because I don’t really remember. But it sounds plausible.
My point is, I was pretty surprised to see the impact death had on Fettel, and I don’t think I am alone in this. Instead of the charming character of the first game we all knew and most of us loved, we were now presented to a who-is-the-best-Spock-lookalike contestant. (Which has been the biggest extreme makeover since Chell stopped being Hispanic and started being Asian instead in just a few short decades of coma. Apparently, not being alive/awake does wonders to one’s appearance.)
“Other symptoms may include crimson flames, soul eating, and unfortunate hairlines.”
Also, Fettel had a weird new way of acting like a b-movie werewolf when he ate, but you only encounter that in one of the two possible endings, and you’d think that would make it ok. It doesn’t. I miss the decency he showed when eating human flesh in the far past.
Other than the transformation and the table manners, however, everything else went quite swimmingly. Not once throughout the game did I find anything I did not like in his character; but then again, maybe I was giggling too loud to notice.
#5 Pointman
Previously a silent masked protagonist, in F.E.A.R. 3 Point Man gains a face and a… nope, just a face. Surprisingly, he still manages to express a strong personality without ever having to mutter a word. He also manages to have people that like him while holding on to that habit. But possibly his greatest accomplishment in the game is that he manages to have conversations without giving up on that goddamn habit.
It should be noted that the Point Man we see through the third game is a character with serious anger issues, basically making his voicelessness a blessing to the rest of us. Not even Chell’s long-lost cousin, Jin Sun-Kwon, can make him drop his contempt, but that’s fine because she seems oblivious to the fact that apparently he wants to see her burn along with the rest of the planet.
They just saw each other after a very long time. See how happy he is?
On more than a few occasions I was expecting him to reply to someone with a growl, and the absence of such reaction disappointed me horribly. There are several cut-scenes among intervals, and also scripted lines by Fettel during gameplay, that presented such amazing opportunities. Ever noticed a dog making a gradually more aggressive sound before bursting into loud barking? It would have sounded perfect.
On the other hand, the fact that he didn’t end up biting anyone might be even worse in terms of anticipation and unfulfilment.
You mean to tell me that you don’t see the resemblance?
#4 Jin Sun-Kwon
Daww, isn’t she adorable?
We haven’t seen this girl in a while, and all of a sudden she’s like this whole new person. It’s almost as if she hit puberty off-screen sometime during the previous game. This comes as no surprise, as there is no character in F.E.A.R. 3 that looks like they used to, given that they do indeed have earlier appearances. That’s one thing we’re slowly getting accustomed to.
The fact that she is not able to recognize the expressions in Point Man’s face, though, is one thing we don’t want to get used to. It is kind of unsettling. She doesn’t seem to notice his homicidal, glassy eyes, the eyes of an unstoppable killer and also a bad mother fucker. One would expect that she, of all people, would see; but she never does. Instead, her face lights up like a freaking bonfire the second she lays eyes on him.
That’s her. What she doesn’t know is that she could be inside these flames.
Makes you wonder what kind of past she could possibly have that crippled her of this basic human ability. Also, makes you wonder how she navigated through life unscathed, seeing that she can’t have been able to identify rapists, molesters, abusers, etc., and there must have been a point in her life when she couldn’t defend herself.
#3 Michael Becket
Unfortunately for him, Sergeant Becket was on F.E.A.R. 3 too. Since following him to the therapist and listening to him pour his heart out about the rape was not a reasonable expectation for a horror game, his fate was expected to be nasty from the moment we heard he’d stick around a bit longer. And nasty it was.
Visual aid.
It so happened that at the same time it was many layers of awesome (and also a few layers of funny). Point Man yet again proved his anger issues by punching and pushing things for no apparent reason, or maybe he was jealous that the second-game protagonist got a voice and he did not. Becket looked like an abandoned puppy for more than half of the cut-scene. Fettel took part in the issues’ show-off and blew Becket up from the inside, but we forgive him, since he once took a bullet in the forehead from his own brother. Point Man covers the layers of funny. Fettel covers the layers of awesome, and also the layers of schizophrenia. Becket covers about ten square feet’s worth of surface.
Becket, shown here in order to attract more female readers. Uh, don’t mind the joke above.
#2 Harlan Wade
Harlan Wade is an evil genius who, as it seems, reaches the peak of his evil geniusness in the third game of the series. I mean, he probably would if he hadn’t died two games earlier, but still.
Harlan appears randomly as a creepy alien vagina-faced monster called The Creep. Of course, it’s not as if there were lots of those already scattered around in the many worlds of gaming (re. Borderlands).
I honestly don’t know which is worse.
He appears, scares the crap out of little girl Alma, and may occasionally save your life for no reason whatsoever. Radiohead have yet to confirm any kind of relation to him, possibly because they do not want to come off as child molesters. Or vaginas.
On the cases when he does not come in peace, if the players are not able to fend him off on time, he grabs them (stripping them temporarily of any control over the game) and molests them with his face. He disappears again after creating a few sessions’ worth of trauma, leaving them dazed and confused on the ground. Allow me to point out that this is still better than the Press X To Not Die events of the previous game.
As the final SPOILERS of the game, you have to kill the Giant Creep, and when you manage to do that he tears his, um, face-thing open to reveal a younger version of Harlan Wade than the one that died. It is no less disturbing than you’d expect it to be.
For those who have made the mental connection of Harlan Wade to an innocent-looking old man, switching from that to the Creep is going to be one long, tough Freudian struggle.
Google image search for “giant creep” proved to be a horrible idea, so here’s a puppy.
#1 Alma Wade
Approximately nine months have passed since the last time we saw Alma. She hasn’t changed at all, other than the fact that she’s carrying a freaking baby for the past nine months, and has obviously gotten huge. Also weak.
No pity. It’s not like someone forced her to rape Becket.
The players often encounter her as a frightened little girl, and also as a frightening little girl at the same time. The first time I played the game with nox, there was a particularly well-placed appearance in the third interval. I was ahead and I had a meeting with little girl Alma that took me by surprise and I, uh, I sort of yelled, ok? Shut up. Then nox laughed for five minutes straight. The second time we played it having switched characters, he went ahead having forgotten the whole thing. Revenge never tasted sweeter.
Shriek.
Anyway, in the end the brothers kill each other based on who had the best score on the final interval, which is stupid but there was not much of an alternative in the first place. Either Point Man leaves Alma to die and takes the baby, or Fettel eats Alma and takes the baby. She just can’t get a break.
If you ask me, the father should have had a say on who gets to raise his child before being blown to smithereens.
