[bloody heartland]

http://blog.capcom.com/archives/1116

"We're creating a game about light and darkness".

In-game footage bringsinto focus how menacing, poor, beat up and shitty all the black people in-game look before they're turned into zombies!
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[shrugtheironteacup]

Video does not confirm zombie child soldiers.
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select button
the nature of beards in war

[Daphaknee]

im sure its better than resident evil: apocalypse

also have you guys seen pep bonet's photography? a lot of sierra lieone's civil war survivors remind me of what resident evil 5 might be based on.

its scary stuff, and sad

its estimated that the war left 50,000 psychotic and 300,000 in need of treatment

CRAZY ZOMBIES rarrrr hmmm

actually no, i just WISH resident evil five was based on this stuff, because this is way scarier than resident evil
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a/v club

[!=]

The behaviour, the way this man talked really put me off; I don't want to have anything to do with a game whose creator is at the same time thriving for some sort of realism (as he claims to) while at the same time reserving his own interpretations and comments to the level of subatomic particles.

He exhibit here a combination of myopea to the world surrounding him and hypersensitivity to the message that comes from that deincarnated crowd they call "fans."

Part of me hope it is only for promotion purposes, because he is expected to talk like that. The same part of me calls him a corporate serf/whore.

[Mr. Brooks]

Honestly, my interest in this one's gone up a wee bit, if only to see how they, uh, pull the whole thing off. Could be gleefully car-crash.

[CubaLibre]

I dunno guys, aside from the rampant racial ignorance I think it looks pretty awesome.
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[Mr. Brooks]

The animations certainly seem pretty slick, and the art direction's got some texture to it - something a notch or two up on normal-mapped dismalism. The adjustment-to-light thingy could generate some crafty setpieces too.

My hope's that they don't ram it with cutscenery. A fool's hope.

[Vikram Ray]

i'm really still waiting to see all this racial ignorance everyone's talking about.

[Chuplayer]

[table_and_chair]

the producer (or whomever) interviewed genuinely reminds me of a cracked sideshow barker or someone like sam raimi with regard to Evil Dead and I was a little bit surprised I was interested at all. Still just walking around shooting people though.
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hello.

[Daphaknee]

resident evil 5 is as racist as resident evil 4, it just seems like you guys actually hate spaniards and feel guilty about black people or something

like what the hell
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a/v club

[vision]

[bloody heartland]

The spanish aren't usually portrayed as marauding psychopaths - maybe you could work a mexican immigrant angle in there, but it'd be pushing it. Much of that stereotype (aside from the language) could be extended to rural france, rural england, rural germany, modern wales...

Black people, and Africans, are often protrayed as angry mobs. Much of the RE5 asthetic is grounded in Black Hawk Down, which is.... problematic.

RE4 was not mired in stereotype to the degree RE5 is.

It was cute when Yahzee said it too, but he wasn't any less off the money.
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[thatbox]

[DonMarco]

[Cycle]

guys i hate black people so im really looking forward to this game
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Man’s maturity: to have regained the seriousness that he had as a child at play.

[sam]

i'm sure the game will be awesome and there's almost certainly no dubious intention behind it but i think it's pretty clear why people might get up in arms over imagery like that. the spanish thing was different, there's no history there - no-one would mistake the imagery in resi 4 for racist propaganda as it's not predicated on racial stereotypes.

i doubt anyone would in resi 5, either, but it's at least conceivable. i mean, look at it, if you knew nothing about the resident evil series or even videogames i can totally see how you might assume the worst. it's pretty heavy-handed.

i'm looking forward to the game for sure, but i'm a bit surprised no-one at capcom USA could've predicted how all of this might go down at least.
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[DonMarco]

And one more fucking thing. I want to be absolutely clear that not all third-world countries are dominatly one race. Japan is a first-world nation and is 99% Japanese. 1% Chinese/Vietnamese/Korean/European/Russian/American and so on.

It's really great America is the melting pot. It'll be even more so with the Hispanic/Mexican/non-white caucasians gaining.

I blame this on the dominance of American technology. AC electricity, Cars, interweb tubes (you- and sex-related), animation, cellular phones and Girls Gone Wild. Sure, the US may not have the largest population, the largest military force, or the wealthiest quality of life... But it's my country, dammit.

Fuck you Cubalibre.
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Collector of 1,538 strategy guides, and BlazBlue ain't one of them.


"Toups, can I ask you? Do you think love can bloom even in the Forum Axe?"

[Chuplayer]

[winkerwatson]

Spain more like somewhere in europe
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tim?

[Toptube]

Without purposefully being a shithead, isn't this sort of exactly what it might look like if a zombie virus broke out in rural Africa?

Or am I just an ignorant motherfucker?




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RE4's general residents were poor as shit too and lived in ratty houses and shantys.

The Cult were the ones with the nice places/castles. Which is usually the case with a dominant dictator/communist type power.

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I think RE5 is looking great. Except Chris is a bit too buff.
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[CubaLibre]

It's a game about the light versus the dark, you see
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[Mr Mustache]

I won't buy this game.
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The people are like wool to me.

[bruin]

I will!



I mean fuck guys come on
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[Mr Mustache]

No.
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The people are like wool to me.

[Eudaimon]

I was wondering when this was going to come back.

If you haven't heard yet, N'Gai Croal went on a kind of rant about this. I think he says some interesting things there.

Whether or not the people at Capcom are aware of it, this game is going to make for some interesting times.

[Predator Goose]

[CubaLibre]

[Predator Goose]

[CubaLibre]

Well I mean sure, valid enough point.

It doesn't bode well though. It also reveals an almost epic boneheadedness in Capcom's marketing department.
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[bloody heartland]

[Predator Goose]

[Toto]

What Isfet said about this game is still true :(

[dark steve]

It's really hard to shake the feeling that people are defending this game out of the fear that it will get cancelled, censored, or they'll just end up feeling too uneasy to enjoy it. This isn't about race politics in North American, either (though there's certainly enough here to make a person squeamish about that).

What are the differences between sub-saharan Africa and rural Spain? Colonialism and AIDS. How do these not raise flags for people?
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[!=]

I would contend that any zombie game is inherently racist, and this does not depend in any way of the color or origin of the zombies themselves.

Detailing their mechanics and what it is based on:

- the fear of being corrupted by what is seen as a subhuman (but still human in form)
- associating negative appearance to enemies with negative behaviour, in a deterministic way (which for me, is precisely the definition of racism, that of linking the phenotype to the worth and behaviours of people. Only racists know as a fixed fact what a race is)
- the fear of an hidden menace well inside the midst of the population. This person here might have the forbidden blood. This is further made worse if in the context of a game, the NPC are assigned a "will become a zombie / will not" fixed status, which makes becoming a zombie not much a matter of misfortune, and more an actual property of the character.

It also plays with the idea of objectifying your enemies in order to let you feel no remorse while killing them. That is not racist and is commonly found in all war-like games, though racism helps to reach this level of psychopathy. (As an aside this might actually explain why the racist feeling exist.. As an enabler for resolving conflicts violently)

What tops it in RE5 is the retardness of the marketers. If I was to trust the japanese designers to build a complex, subtle system, then the execution as it is now shown would not be problematic, however their reliance on linearity and fixed set pieces does not make me optimistic. The way the game designer talks is still stuck in the 16bit gaming mentality.. with its naïve portayals of reality.

In any case, even if they were to make it a subtle, non controversial execution of this game, they still are going to get grilled by the media in the west.

As a clarification.. even if I believe what I said above about the racist feeling being part of all zombie-type games, what will undo this particular game is the setting and the precise history surrounding it. Because no journalist would pick up the former, while the latter is going to be understood by just about anybody, especially those who've never played such games.

The game designers need to earn a certain level of credibility and maturity before being able to pull this off. I fear the graphics rendering technology has matured far faster than the participants in the game industry.

[spinach]

This could easily go either way. There's an obvious racial overtone here, there's no sense denying it, but the execution itself is what matters. That said, I honestly don't know what to expect from Capcom, ever.

[spinach]

[Psycho Ant]

No mention of toups and pizza and black people yet ITT.

[Pat the Great]

this is quite possibly the only reasonably intelligent discussion i've seen on the topic to date. christ, the comments pages on any given blog post about this are nightmarish. more nightmarish than USUAL.

even donmarco.

[Psycho Ant]

People overlooking the fact that this game comes from a country where racism is still seen to be legitimate in a lot of aspects ITT.

[WarpZone]