[Rud31]

wait did he really bitch about that?

In Uncharted you get the feeling, "Man I'm kind of killing a lot of people." In Dog Days, "I killed a lot of people."
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My Hawt Blog Vita Games

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[Dracko]

[negativedge]

sounds like someone took too many creative writing classes

[costel]

[JamesE]

Oh, stop making such a big deal out of one tiny statement at the end.

He does have a point: "cover based shooter" is such an insanely boring concept now that I have no real desire to play one that's straight-up again. Even Gears threw in powerful chainsaw melee attacks and orbital weapons to break up the tedium. Assuming the demo is representative of K&L 2 it has some of the dullest gameplay I've experienced recently.

It's also entirely reasonable for someone to despair of a plot resolving completely around death, murder and rape w/torture. I'm going to stretch a metaphor painfully here: Joy Division were glum but they had a beat you can dance to. Halo: Reach ends with an entire planet being wiped clean of life but it has actual moments of fun in the mechanical design.

I do appreciate the character design and art direction in the game, but like so much else these days it seems to have been undermined by depressed, boring shitheads who have no interest in making playable videogames and who don't have the writing chops to make watchable movies.

He is a cunt, but he has some points.

[negativedge]

You're right, James. Kane and Lynch should have learned important lessons at the end and flew home on a unicorn, like the nobel literature prize winning Halo Reach plot. Afterall, violence is only acceptable if it is trivialized by histrionics.

[T.]

why can't these guys make a game with the aesthetics of this but the level design of blood money
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o tempora, o mores

[Dracko]

i don't see how those two are reconcilable t.



james the game is solid and its design completely in service of its plot and aesthetic, so there goes that theory

i bet yahtzee whined at the ending of no country for old men
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[T.]

such intimidating box art for a game starring mr. heli
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o tempora, o mores

[JamesE]

I played the demo, and "solid" might as well be a synonym for "dull as fuck". Design in service of plot? Terrible notion. I don't see any reason why the aesthetic couldn't be appended to a good game, but there you go.

[JamesE]

And none of that was what I was suggesting at all negativedge, you intellectual termite

[CubaLibre]

There's no rape in Kane & Lynch 2.
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[JamesE]

According to a plot synopsis your girlfriend is raped and murdered.

[negativedge]

[JamesE]

I know not ignoring you is like lying to you that you're worthwhile and we really need you around, but beardy hat-twat was only really condemning the complete and utter bleakness of the plot, rather than the concept of having bleak moments or moral corruption in games.

[negativedge]

plots that are bleak cannot be good

James has your number, Dostoevsky

[negativedge]

if only Shakespeare had known this when he was writing Hamlet

[negativedge]

Franz Kafka, I have seen the light

[parker]

Do I come into your home and start shitting all over the floor? No? Then why are you doing so in my thread right now?
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[Dracko]

[negativedge]

Oh come on Parker, you can shit in my threads all you want

[CubaLibre]

She's cut up and dead and naked but I don't think there's any implication that she was raped. (Kane and Lynch are cut up and naked too and only not dead because, you know, they can't be.) The game's too concerned with violence to bother with rape, if that makes any sense.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[JamesE]

I think that situation strongly implies rape, actually (assuming the torturer is straight).

Definitely sounds like something I won't be burdening my mind with, honestly.

[negativedge]

if you automatically associate violence with sex, perhaps you have problems that Kane and Lynch cannot solve for you.

[stotelheim]

nothing about what any of the characters say during, before or after the torture (off-screen) imply rape or anything sexual, i hadn't even considered the possibility until it was brought up here
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go away extralife

[JamesE]

She was stripped naked, that in itself is a sexual assault.

[negativedge]

"strongly implies rape"

[glossolalia]

finally played the demo and i guess i don't have anything original to say about it but it really does bum me out to see this much visual ingenuity blown on something so intensely generic. also that i'm pretty crummy at shooters yet i waltzed through the demo on hard barely paying attention and fucking around because of course this game has regenerating health because of course because well i guess it worked for all those other games i guess. it might work if the enemies ever advanced on you but i don't think they do. i'd rather be forced to play smart than bumble around taking ten-second breaks but the game doesn't give me any reason not to. doesn't really mesh with the feeling the story/aesthetic is trying to convey either.

[Rud31]

man I maybe I should try the demo. I was chop-liver if I tried the real game on hard.
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THERE ARE DEFINITELY WORSE VIDEO GAME PODCASTS

[stotelheim]

But Kane and Lynch were also stripped naked. Does that mean that they too were sexually assaulted or possibly raped?

your opinion is like a poop
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[CubaLibre]

Yeah on Hard the game was pretty hard, especially in certain sections. Or actually I guess I'm talking about Extreme or whatever the hardest difficulty is. Anyway you can make the game difficult.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Ghost Dinosaur]

[stotelheim]

the nudity of the men is revelled in while the nudity of the girl is only revealed when you look at her corpse after you've broken free, it isn't shown as sexual or even important, what the game cares about here is the violence and the brutal ugliness of the bleeding, naked fat old men

do I think female nudity in violent contexts is different from male nudity? to an extent, but both are filled with threats of rape and sexual violence
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go away extralife

[negativedge]

there is also an ethos at work in the game that views women as a balancing force. The Bad Guy is chasing Kane and Lynch because they accidentally killed his daughter while chasing some low level mob type that happened to be dating her. the guy drags her into the fray, using her as protection. Lynch (Kane? which fucking one do you play as) knows the death of the girl spells trouble long before he's aware of her identity because it disturbs the order of things. If Lynch is a "good guy" it is because he makes every effort to keep his girl out of the picture, and he is clearly dependent on her. her being brought in is more than retribution--it is a sign things are Not Right. the game could have used rape as an overt metaphor, here. she could have been "corrupted" as a more forceful means of unhinging the violent forces (both in social mob order of the game's environment, and in Lynch himself) contained by an order that has been disturbed. no one could fault the game for doing this, except reactionaries with limited perspective (hi james). it didn't do this, however. it keeps the focus on endemic violence. it takes thought and reason to rape someone. killing them is emotionless.

[klj5j6li]

[JamesE]

[JamesE]

And dear negativedge, you're a cunt.

"Mature" does not equal nihilism. "Clever" does not equal empty violence. These concepts (which in themselves are fairly antithetical to maturity or intelligence) have been used as cheap and easy stand-ins for something to actually say in books, movies and comic books (grimdark shit like Identity Crisis) for a long time.

As a downloadable title it may have managed to escape the expectations of a retail release and there seems to be something about downloadables that's kinder to hamfisted "important" writing.

GTA IV (vanilla) did similar things, and it was also awful. At the end of the day the player is being asked to toil and labour to get to the end of an insubstantial/substandard game experience with the promise of experiencing a plot not quite good enough to go on a DVD. While I appreciate there's a weird masochistic clan around here that enjoys this kind of shit and is floored by the promise of lame crime writing in a videogame(!) it's a lamentable mistep in the evolution of the form, at least in my mind.

[negativedge]

I wanted to reply but you didn't say anything, James.

Well I guess you expressed some bizarre opinion on downloadable video games out of nowhere, and then crassly assumed people play video games for the plot. And maybe you called Shakespeare childish I dunno anymore.

[negativedge]

[parker]

I get the feeling your not a big fan of noir James. Didn't you once say that GTAIV was shitty because it ended with you in a depressing little safehouse in new jersey, instead of "masses of cash and respect?" What do you think about the film Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, would that have been a better movie if it ended with Warrens Oates in his mansion, tallying up the net gross of the various strip clubs he owns?
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[negativedge]

James makes the kindergarten mistake of attempting to tailor everything to his specific tastes and worldview. It's the "I didn't like X because I didn't like Character Y" argument idiots use when they are feeling especially spunky.