[Gorblax]

Parker's GTA character should be a canon antagonist in a GTA episode.
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[Rei]

[misadventurous]

ugh.

[Rei]

[Gorblax]

"post op" is kind of funny
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[Rei]

[Felix]

it is fascinating to me that Saints Row IV is consistently in way better taste than GTAV.

[misadventurous]

[parker]

It must be some improvement over Saints Row 3 then cause that was like GTA written by the 90s WWF writing team
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[Felix]

yeah, my understanding from not playing them was that 1 and 2 were fairly ugly, low-budget, tasteless GTA ripoffs, 3 was a substantial shift in tone but not all that well-executed apart from a few standout bits, and 4 is the actually-fun-to-move-around-in kitchen-sink open-world game that finally works for me. it is extremely sophomoric but actually a lot less tasteless than GTA, especially if like me you customize your player character as an overweight hispanic woman with a bandanna and a french accent.

[misadventurous]

i'm just kinda dumbfounded that this is 2013 and here we have a game whose writers think that edgy '90s shock comedy & tranny jokes are still were ever funny.

i mean "post-op" is gross but fuck at least it's clever ("your package is safe in our hands" made me smirk, now take that innuendo and make it not a transsexual joke. i know you can do it, rockstar writers!). the rest is gross and boring. it's not merely offensive, it's obnoxious.

that fans are really defending it by saying that the rest of the gameworld is just as offensive to everybody else is putting me off all the more and i was already pretty disinterested in GTAV.
i don't want my avatar to be a dude who casually bashes trans people when he walks by them, nope no thanks

[parker]

It's past the point of the previous games though, this one is so far up it's own ass in the name of satire and offending everyone it has ads that unironically portray the 1 percent as hardworking and everyone else as lazy and wanting to steal from them, just to balance out the ones making fun of the rich I guess. It just ends up feeling like a world of meaningless shittiness populated by nothing but awful assholes. And after the send off they give the cast of the Lost and Damned, the most likeable characters in the gta universe, it's hard to care about any of these new people. Michael's shitty family is back together and going to "try harder" whoopty fucking doo, hopefully they don't end up murdered by the serial killer protoganist of gta 7.
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[CubaLibre]

4 had a lot less of this bullshit. I like 4 a lot more.

RDR had none of this bullshit. I like RDR the best.

I'm kind of slogging my way through 5. For every cool mechanic or mission there's something like this that just makes me want to put the controller down and play more Mirrormoon.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Rei]

[Gorblax]

Yeah "No One Is Safe" brand satire never excuses poor taste.

Rockstar has never been a social pioneer, but they know how the wind blows. The Ballad of Gay Tony featured a cast of legitimately interesting gay characters who had at least as much depth as any of the other major GTA figures, if not more. I feel like Rockstar specifically took the game in that direction as a sort of apology for their offensive gay stereotypes in previous entries. Hell, even in V, Trevor is a pretty cool character with a canonically non-zero Kinsey value.

We'll get more respect for trans* characters in video games once the trans* community garners at least as much (still quite lacking) recognition as the gay community.

And yeah harvey I was removing the joke from context.
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[Felix]

anecdotally there are a lot more MTFs in our particular subculture than a lot of others; we should be doing better.

[boojiboy7]

well, in players, yes. in AAA devs? not so much, as it is still sadly the white straight male show.

[allensmithee]

yeah re: post-op

i half-laughed and then turned the game off.
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[Gironika]

So!

Is the online-part finally working (properly)? I kinda want to join some multiplayer-fun this weekend.

and I thought I have posted somewhere in this topic that the game felt a bit bitter at points. tbh, I (still!) haven't progressed much since reaching a certain point in the game but rather have spent travelling the world, driving cars while listening to radio stations.
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[Felonious Monk]

So, after killing a bottle of wine, me and the missus started playing this last night. We decided to explore the countryside after the first couple of missions, and found ourselves at the beach, where there were some people around a campfire.

Missus: "Hey, you should go to talk to them."

Me: "Sure, why not?"

So I approached them, but they all started leaving in disgust, as one of them pulls out his phone and starts to call the police. I panicked, and shot the guy in the face. In doing so, I walked into the campfire and self-immolated.

There's...a message in there, somewhere?

[parker]

The multiplayer seems to be all sorted out
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[Gironika]

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

I watched my brother play this for a few minutes the other day and I gotta say the shooting/combat mechanics look like a huge improvement over all previous 3D GTAs, to the point that I am kinda curious to give it a go.

That's about all I have to say about it really, except that I still don't completely understand why anybody would expect a GTA game to be anything other than an orgy of abominable taste.

Probably the Rockstar game that should be at the top of my to-play list anyway is RDR though, since I've been led to believe that for a number of reasons I will probably like it a lot better than I've ever liked any GTA.
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Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

[Kilroy]

That's fair. So where are the normal trans women? Because it's only bigotry if the stereotypes aren't presented as explicitly 100% true. He's not shit talking people who clearly don't deserve it, thus establishing himself as an asshole, he's shit-talking people who were constructed in advance to be an exact fit for his shit-talking.
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DancefighterRedux | X | X

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

You're probably completely right, I haven't played the game or seen any footage of the offending scenes. I was just pointing out that this is kind of a bizarre argument on principle.
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Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[parker]

I don't see anything contradictory or wrong with being okay with murder and violence but not bigotry, there's right kinds of crime.
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[parker]

Which is exactly what I'm trying to teach these kids online. I've seen them out there justifying their shitty behavior with "but you're playing as criminals, you're supposed to make life as miserable for all human beings around you constantly" as if a criminal were some degenerate animal thing with no control of itself. But I break down my Outlaw Values philosophy for them with a few simple to understand bullet points.
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[GcDiaz]

I see what you did there.

You know, I'm kind of done with this game. Aside from replaying the story to try alternate heists, there's not much pulling me back. Online is fine, but personally I need a constant friendly group to stay engaged. What's primetime for this game?
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Steam/PSN/Xbawks: GcDiaz

Let's bring sexy back!

[misadventurous]

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

[Tulpa]

it's about the distance between fantasy and reality. playing a mass murderer in a video game is different from playing a transphobic bigot in a video game because one of these is shockingly rare in the real world and the other is shockingly common.
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[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

I mean I get the chain of reasoning that leads to people having reactions like misadventurous' I just think that when you step back and look at it the reasoning is kind of absurd. We want to be able to project ourselves onto this outlaw who transgresses social and moral boundaries, whether in realistic or wildly over-the-top ways, but we also want him to be someone we don't find personally distasteful because we want to sort of be able to like him and route for him while he mows down other human beings in the pursuit of profit and nihilistic thrills. Isn't that kind of a sick fantasy to begin with? To most of us living in privileged middle-to-upper class environments the threat of physical violence is an abstract and therefore fantastical one, whereas the "threat" of hurtful words is "real". When that cool roguish gangster on the screen stops beating and shooting and stabbing people and starts saying things that are just unfair and mean, shit gets uncomfortably real.

I kinda thought SB liked Dog Days specifically because it pulls no punches in depicting the kind of human beings who might be the protagonists of a game like this as horrible people, denying the audience the comfort of an appealing avatar?

Now, again, I think if you're going to critique my post specifically in relation to GTA the proper way to do it would be to make a distinction between the character being prejudiced and the game being prejudiced, which is a legit argument at least insofar as I can't present any evidence that the game itself isn't prejudiced (and I'm more than willing to take your word for it). But the expectation that fictional portrayals of amoral violent criminals should stay within certain boundaries of politically correct behavior is both silly and kind of disturbing in that it suggests a desire to romanticize such people. GTA-caliber psychopaths may not be all that common in the real world, but gangsters, thugs and criminals are a fair bit moreso and they are not generally known for their tolerant and progressive views. Bigoted thinking derives from a lack of empathy, which is also a characteristic feature of sociopathy and predatory behavior.

Anyway this is kind of getting blown out of proportion, all I meant to do was semi-facetiously poke fun at the absurdity of misadventurous' argument even though it's not like I can't understand his thought process. I'm just saying that, in theory, a game that puts you in the shoes of a sociopath and depicts that sociopath as being bigoted in one way or another would in all likelihood be a more honest and responsible game than one that would gloss over such traits because the audience might find them uniquely distasteful. I'm not saying GTA V is that game, though. It probably isn't.
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Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[misadventurous]

[Ni Go Zero Ichi]

I'm down with the less characterization = better philosophy towards game protagonists - I mean, not that characterization can't work - but in a game that provides as much unavoidable context as GTA a certain degree of characterization is either necessary or inevitable by virtue of what you're actually doing in the game. (There are a lot of gaps to fill with your imagination if you ask yourself what kind of person a Dragon Quest protagonist is, based simply on what he does/you do during the course of a game. With any given GTA protagonist there is by the very nature of the game a lot less ambiguity.) Plus, GTA is most certainly interested in characterizing its protagonists and contextualizing its mayhem to a certain degree, arguably to its detriment. Putting you in the shoes of some random mute asshole might actually be an improvement, narratively.
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Just another savage day on Planet Earth.

[parker]

Well they did that and it was called GTA3 and I don't think it's an improvement narratively on 4, red dead, or even 5. It's just weird and limiting. So is being mute in the online. Previous GTAs wouldn't even make the characters drug users. The only time Niko even accepts alcohol is the mission right after he kills or spares darko. So to jump straight to bigotry (with both of the only protagonists who can greet people positively, trevor can only antagonize people) now just because well they're criminals, and in a world that doesn't even offer one non shitty trans character but does offer representation time to the complete fantasy that the 1 percent are hardworking and deserve all that money they have, it seems a little absurd and shitty.

I don't think making anyone mute is the answer. They need to do like Jaffe was talking about earlier, they need to make a game with some prominent trans characters, which would necessitate them spending time around and working with actual trans people. They made Ballad of Gay Tony and all the sudden the series has a lot less dumb gay jokes and stereotypes, even Tony's voice becomes less stereotypical from 4 to the Ballad. Red Dead had a female writer and we got Bonnie McFarlane, and John Marston, a protagonist who gets pissed off at the double standard when people bring up his wife's history as a sex worker while overlooking that he was a robber who actually murdered people. That's the way to go, not "let's not even try just make everyone mute"
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[parker]

They patched the game again and now you only get billed 500 for dying instead of 2k. Not sure if that's actually a good thing. But I think the cost also only applies to free roam now not the missions or deathmatches which is good.
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[misadventurous]

[allensmithee]

[GcDiaz]

[parker]

I think it's brought up by some peckerword who'd been in Marston's gang, or that government guy. She'd been a prostitute and been with a bunch of the gang members before she married Marston. Marston's more mad that they disregard his own much worse past than bothered by anything she'd done.
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