Is this a fucking joke?

@Voidoid said:

I agree with you on almost every point, and am mostly commenting just to add another voice of approval in the midst of this onslaught of childishly defensive over-reaction. You're brave to bring this discussion up on a forum like this. Like you I will not buy this game on account of its violence, even though the tactical puzzle action it offers, if moved to a more neutral or abstract setting, would absolutely intrigue me.

What I disagree with is something that others have already brought up: from the footage I've seen it does not at all seem like this game "glorifies" violence. To glorify is to portray as beautiful, virtuous or positive.

But why would we stop this critique of glorification once violence becomes "fun"? How is this not similar to portraying violence as "beautiful, virtuous or positive"? Do we not equate "fun" with "positive"?

If you take out the violence of the game, it ceases to be fun (or, at least, it ceases to be Hotline Miami). If the game isn't fun, most people would want nothing to do with it, yes? So I don't see what's so inappropriate about me saying that the game is, overall, glorifying violence and being praised for it. The little guilt trip postludes everyone keeps mentioning aren't convincing to me.

To those of you criticizing me for not playing the game... here's the problem: I don't want to do the part that you're supposed to feel bad for after you had been gleefully doing it for 15 minutes. And then do it again. And again.

Though I haven't played much of his work, I do have a general understanding of Cactus's aesthetic (and I respect him). However, that doesn't mean I can't question whether Hotline Miami is an overall positive for our medium or culture at large.

Again, I'm not going to apologize for taking games seriously. Media is important. It shapes who we are. Games aren't exempt, no matter how much you may want them to be.

@OppressiveStink said:

Hey everyone, this is copypasta from an article in Gamasutra. Except there, most people had enough sense to not reply to the topic.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DevinWilson/20121026/180284/Why_Hotline_Miami.php

I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to post my blog on two different websites if I want to. I don't have an exclusivity deal with Giant Bomb or Gamasutra, and it's the best way to get my ideas out there (as evidenced by the nearly 200 comments on this thread).

@jakob187 said:

Also, the chick in the game was about to get tortured and murdered (and possibly more, who knows) by some big fat black guy that I bucked three times with a shotgun before rescuing her. For all I know, she cleaned up the goddamn apartment as a thank you for saving her life. She never speaks, and it's all interpretive. By the way (***SPOILERS***), she ends up becoming your girlfriend at some point, gets murdered on your bathroom floor, and you go after and murder the people responsible for that.

Thanks for clearing up the specifics. In my opinion, you've proven my point(s) (and then some).

Whether or not I'm missing out by not playing this game is beside the point if, with every new bit of information about it, I'm more and more certain that I don't want to play it and that it's not good.

If someone wants to send me a copy of Hotline Miami on Steam, I promise I'll play it before the end of January 2013 (I'm busy) and write a review of it. I'm not saying this is a generous deal, but it's a promise I'm willing to make. I don't want to pirate the game (I prefer to pay for media created by living people), but I'm not rewarding them for what I perceive to be a negative influence on culture. If it's not negative per se, it is at least disagreeable to me (obviously)... so my purchasing decision will follow that sentiment.

Finally, as always, sorry if I'm not responding to anybody who would like me to, and thanks for reading/commenting. I appreciate it. I wouldn't have written this if I expected everybody to agree with me, but it is certainly encouraging that some folks at least see where I'm coming from.

@DevWil: The game is an homage to cheap 80s and a few 90s exploitation films in the vein that Tarantino likes to emulate, what people think are awesome are the references to many such films and specifically (with the soundtrack in particular) to the film Drive.

why you got so many bugs up your ass?

Hey look, it's someone criticizing a game they have never even played.

@DevWil: They aren't convincing for you because you haven't played it? You are just handwaving away all of our explanations and I honestly think you don't want to be proven wrong so even if you did play it you'd say you were right all along anyway.

Games fun to play. I must be a murderer.

Hotline Miami gets a lot of points for being good retro instead or middling retro like a lot of the indie types. It seems like a lot of the attraction is the very high difficulty as well (kind of a Binding of Isaac esque thing going on). Going for that nearly unfair instant death side of things either lands you into universal acclaim or scorn for being unplayable (if you screw it up).

ah yes, 'murder simulators'.

OP, Jack Thompson called. He wants his buzzwords back.

@DevWil said:

If someone wants to send me a copy of Hotline Miami on Steam, I promise I'll play it before the end of January 2013 (I'm busy) and write a review of it. I'm not saying this is a generous deal, but it's a promise I'm willing to make. I don't want to pirate the game (I prefer to pay for media created by living people), but I'm not rewarding them for what I perceive to be a negative influence on culture. If it's not negative per se, it is at least disagreeable to me (obviously)... so my purchasing decision will follow that sentiment.

You've got to be fucking kidding me. You realize that someone else's 10 dollars is just as good as yours to the developer if they buy that for you, right? Furthermore, sorry to tell you but your review is really not that valuable.

I told you, play Norrland and you will not need to scam someone of 10 dollars to speak intelligently about this developer. You will see they are definitely way too smart a bunch of guys to be putting out Hotline Miami without some deeper meaning.

@DevWil said:

I am quite literally embarrassed by the overwhelmingly positive response to this game. We keep talking about how video games are a young medium and how we’re eager for it to grow up. Then we see what is, as far as I can tell, a wholly immature work named Hotline Miami, and its ultraviolence and gore are greeted with the stereotypically uncritical responses of “Awesome!”.

Something people have been saying about immature ultraviolent movies for a good long time. A medium which is not very young.

Get off your high horse mister, cause you clearly aren't very suited to be on it.

@DevWil said:

@jakob187 said:

Also, the chick in the game was about to get tortured and murdered (and possibly more, who knows) by some big fat black guy that I bucked three times with a shotgun before rescuing her. For all I know, she cleaned up the goddamn apartment as a thank you for saving her life. She never speaks, and it's all interpretive. By the way (***SPOILERS***), she ends up becoming your girlfriend at some point, gets murdered on your bathroom floor, and you go after and murder the people responsible for that.

Thanks for clearing up the specifics. In my opinion, you've proven my point(s) (and then some).

Wait a minute, are you seriously just ignoring everything I wrote about this very issue? I think you've somehow fundamentally misunderstood the idea of serious video game criticism. The point isn't to just scrabble around and find a reason to hate whatever's popular. It's to actually think deeply about video games, rather than just accepting (or rejecting) them at face value and then ignoring any opinions that criticize yours.

What you're doing is actually harmful to serious conversations about the medium of video games.

@Animasta said:

@bvilleneuve said:

@Animasta said:

@jakob187: we have spoiler tags for a reason dude D:

Also her being killed doesn't really disprove his point (her dying is just motivation for the character to get revenge)

I literally just wrote a whole screed addressing this. I think it's tempting to misinterpret the woman's role in this game, but she's really fantastically done.

I agree with you but I'm just saying it's not hard to come to that conclusion (and that conclusion is neither right nor wrong)

Well, now we're getting into ideas about literary analysis. No hypothesis is completely wrong, but the idea that she's just window dressing or that she's just cleaning up the main character's apartment to reward him for saving her ignores a lot of textual evidence, most of which I pointed out in my earlier post. The fact that it ignores that evidence renders it significantly more wrong than my conclusion. I'm sorry if I'm putting this in really harsh terms, I just care a lot about this stuff.

I just finished the game a couple hours ago, and I never saw the woman cleaning the apartment. I actually thought the main character was the one cleaning it to make it more comfortable for her. Or, maybe they cleaned together while getting to know each other.

@DevWil said:

And it might be somewhat anti-feminist judging from this line of the Rock, Paper, Shotgun review: “There’s even a strange vein of sweetness, as a female presence introduced into the player’s apartment in an early mission sees it gradually evolve from dingy cesspit to clean, decorated home.”

The main character's apartment represents himself; and the woman that he saves transforming it from a dingy cesspit to a clean and decorated home is a metaphor for her making him a better man.

Your entire post is misguided, but I just thought I'd chime in on that one point.

It's neat or shitty, all you need to say. In my case I found it neat. But playing the game would help determining.

@DevWil said:

If someone wants to send me a copy of Hotline Miami on Steam, I promise I'll play it before the end of January 2013 (I'm busy) and write a review of it. I'm not saying this is a generous deal, but it's a promise I'm willing to make. I don't want to pirate the game (I prefer to pay for media created by living people), but I'm not rewarding them for what I perceive to be a negative influence on culture. If it's not negative per se, it is at least disagreeable to me (obviously)... so my purchasing decision will follow that sentiment.

...So in the end this was just a gigantic ruse to get a free copy of the game on Steam. Well played sir, very well played!

@DevWil said:

If someone wants to send me a copy of Hotline Miami on Steam, I promise I'll play it before the end of January 2013 (I'm busy) and write a review of it.

@DevWil said:

If someone wants to send me a copy of Hotline Miami on Steam, I promise I'll play it before the end of January 2013 (I'm busy) and write a review of it.

Um...

This goes for me, too, guys.

Yup, I'm really against the depiction of violence in this game, and intend on writing a thesis on my reasoning behind it.

So, if someone would just go ahead and buy me it on Steam, that'd be great.

Definitely don't want to just play it.

Nope.

Disclaimer: I totally do.

I have to say, I think that the OP has made a fair point, though I don't agree with it in large part. He's also presented a far more cogent defense of his opinion than 90% of the following responses which are mostly lame straw men and ad hominems.

I LOLed hard at this thread too, but not at the OP like some of you. I find it pretty fucking hilarious how hot and bothered the hive gets when it's status quo is challenged, especially on a moral level.

Wow OP, keep embarrassing yourself, it's fantastic.

@Akrid said:

@DevWil said:

If someone wants to send me a copy of Hotline Miami on Steam, I promise I'll play it before the end of January 2013 (I'm busy) and write a review of it. I'm not saying this is a generous deal, but it's a promise I'm willing to make. I don't want to pirate the game (I prefer to pay for media created by living people), but I'm not rewarding them for what I perceive to be a negative influence on culture. If it's not negative per se, it is at least disagreeable to me (obviously)... so my purchasing decision will follow that sentiment.

You've got to be fucking kidding me. You realize that someone else's 10 dollars is just as good as yours to the developer if they buy that for you, right? Furthermore, sorry to tell you but your review is really not that valuable.

I told you, play Norrland and you will not need to scam someone of 10 dollars to speak intelligently about this developer. You will see they are definitely way too smart a bunch of guys to be putting out Hotline Miami without some deeper meaning.

Then calm down and don't buy me a copy of the game. I'm honestly not offended, and I'm not expecting anybody to take me up on this.

I obviously really don't care to play it, but if someone is so sure that I need to that they're willing to buy it again, then I will accept a copy of the game and play it.

Even if I think Norrland is brilliant, it won't change anything about the actual content of Hotline Miami. Just because someone makes one good thing (or even many good things, as the case may be) doesn't mean they're incapable of making a thing that isn't so good.

@HarlechQuinn said:

@DevWil said:

If someone wants to send me a copy of Hotline Miami on Steam, I promise I'll play it before the end of January 2013 (I'm busy) and write a review of it. I'm not saying this is a generous deal, but it's a promise I'm willing to make. I don't want to pirate the game (I prefer to pay for media created by living people), but I'm not rewarding them for what I perceive to be a negative influence on culture. If it's not negative per se, it is at least disagreeable to me (obviously)... so my purchasing decision will follow that sentiment.

...So in the end this was just a gigantic ruse to get a free copy of the game on Steam. Well played sir, very well played!

I'm not new to this whole "Internet" thing. If I wanted to play a video game without paying for it, I know how to do that.@bvilleneuve said:

@DevWil said:

@jakob187 said:

Also, the chick in the game was about to get tortured and murdered (and possibly more, who knows) by some big fat black guy that I bucked three times with a shotgun before rescuing her. For all I know, she cleaned up the goddamn apartment as a thank you for saving her life. She never speaks, and it's all interpretive. By the way (***SPOILERS***), she ends up becoming your girlfriend at some point, gets murdered on your bathroom floor, and you go after and murder the people responsible for that.

Thanks for clearing up the specifics. In my opinion, you've proven my point(s) (and then some).

Wait a minute, are you seriously just ignoring everything I wrote about this very issue? I think you've somehow fundamentally misunderstood the idea of serious video game criticism. The point isn't to just scrabble around and find a reason to hate whatever's popular. It's to actually think deeply about video games, rather than just accepting (or rejecting) them at face value and then ignoring any opinions that criticize yours.

What you're doing is actually harmful to serious conversations about the medium of video games.

I'm acknowledging your comment. Let me look back at what you've said, because I'm honestly confused by your reaction.

@BRNK said:

I have to say, I think that the OP has made a fair point, though I don't agree with it in large part. He's also presented a far more cogent defense of his opinion than 90% of the following responses which are mostly lame straw men and ad hominems.

I LOLed hard at this thread too, but not at the OP like some of you. I find it pretty fucking hilarious how hot and bothered the hive gets when it's status quo is challenged, especially on a moral level.

what fair point did he actually make? That people were obsessed with the gore for the wrong reasons? he's been responding to all of the responses that weren't very valid, he's been handwaving arguments with "I don't see that", and making a large number of basic assumptions that aren't actually true.

Can we at least find some common ground in the fact that this illustration kinda sucks? Guys?

@bvilleneuve said:

@joachimo said:

For the record, the girl who 'moves in' and cleans your apartment is not just some random girlfriend, well.. she is, kind of. But the point is that you save her life from being a drug riddled hooker, and I guess as payment for taking care of her she cleans up the house.

I think this might bear some discussion, because that wasn't how I interpreted it. The way I see it is attached to the ending of the game, so don't read on unless you've finished all the chapters and put in the password.

SPOILER WARNING: Click here to reveal hidden content.

So you're getting calls throughout, and they always come from PHONEHOM, but they always originate from those two nationalist dudes in the sewers. Aside from their ideology, they seem to just get some sick pleasure from seeing guys do what they want them to do. In the third chapter, what they want your guy to do is kill all the guys in the building and then save that girl. Their minds see that as good and just, and they don't understand on a metatextual level how problematic the "damsel in distress" character is.

But that's when the magic begins. With the usual damsel in distress, you get thanked (a kiss or something) and then you never see her again. But with this woman, you get none of that; rather, over the next couple chapters, you see her apparently deep in isolated thought (looking into the bathroom mirror, taking a bath), and then ultimately coming out but staying in the apartment. Over the next few chapters, things start getting tidier around the apartment. It's important to note that this isn't just saying "a woman's touch is needed here"--the apartment beforehand is in such a state that any human being would do the same bits of cleaning. So things get cleaned up, and then the other bed in the bedroom has sheets put on it, and then the beds get pushed together, and then she gets killed by another masked man. It's a really fantastic emotional arc.

You don't save that woman. You only give her the opportunity to save herself. Hotline Miami's nameless female character with hardly any dialogue is one of the best female characters ever in a video game. Hotline Miami is art.

Is this what you think I was ignoring?

Sorry, I see this as the domestication of a former damsel in distress. I don't like either part of that. The fact that "any human being would do the same bits of cleaning" doesn't change the fact that they (apparently) made a woman do it in this game... after being rescued by a man.

I'm not convinced that she's "saving herself" in any meaningful way, and it's not because I'm so invested in my perspective that I refuse to acknowledge any others. I'm simply and honestly not convinced.

Your interpretation is as legitimate as any, but I think you're being pretty creative.

But I'm working on second-hand information. I've acknowledged this from the beginning, so I humbly ask that folks calm down and not put words in my mouth.

@BRNK said:

Can we at least find some common ground in the fact that this illustration kinda sucks? Guys?

it's true but I like the top part of it (with richard, don juan and rasmus)

Violent games and non-violent games aren't an either/or situation to the entire video games industry.

The OP reminds of me of when my friend said he hated Clockwork Orange because he took it as just being an excuse to show violence. And he also stopped watching Breakfast Club after the first half hour because "nothing happened".

What's essentially been written is a very face-value approach to something that has not actually been grasped.

@Animasta said:

@BRNK said:

Can we at least find some common ground in the fact that this illustration kinda sucks? Guys?

it's true but I like the top part of it (with richard, don juan and rasmus)

Fair point. Also, you were totally right in your last reply. OP is completely out of his depth now and needs to play the damn game to make claims like the ones he's making.

@DevWil: idk, for me what makes the game good isn't its over the top violence but the gameplay- you die easily so you must have perfect executions, the controls feel very precise, trying to go through the levels and kill everyone without getting hit or shot once honestly feels more like a puzzler than an action game. The art and action are over the top but ultimately what makes it good for me is how well it plays.

Violent games and non-violent games aren't an either/or situation to the entire video games industry.

The OP reminds of me of when my friend said he hated Clockwork Orange because he took it as just being an excuse to show violence. And he also stopped watching Breakfast Club after the first half hour because "nothing happened".

What's essentially been written is a very face-value approach to something that has not actually been grasped.

I'm only going to say this one more time:

There's a fundamental difference between interactive and non-interactive media. It's not hard to spot this difference. It's interactivity. In other words, participation.

If a game designer asks me to bludgeon people with a pipe and watch their blood spray all over the room, they'd better give me a good reason. None of you have persuaded me that there's a good reason to do it in Hotline Miami other than the non-fictional (and nebulous) reason of "fun". It doesn't mean that some of you haven't tried, but I'm not convinced and that's just the way it is.

Conversely, whether or not I want a character to be violent in a piece of non-interactive fiction is immaterial. I don't control that character, and watching their arc can be interesting even if I don't approve of their actions.

However, when you put me in the driver's seat, so to speak, I have the right to not engage. With Hotline Miami, I've read reviews and watched videos, and the conclusion I've come to is that I don't want to do the things the game asks its players to do. Even if I owned the game, I doubt I'd finish it because of how much of its content (as far as I can tell) is based on the assumed joy of beating people senseless and covering rooms with their blood.

If it wasn't designed to be enjoyable, people wouldn't be hitting 'R' over and over to try it again... but I don't stop my criticism of games at whether they're designed to be enjoyable. Synthetic drugs are designed to be enjoyable, and I don't use those either.

@DevWil said:

I'm only going to say this one more time:

There's a fundamental difference between interactive and non-interactive media. It's not hard to spot this difference. It's interactivity. In other words, participation.

If a game designer asks me to bludgeon people with a pipe and watch their blood spray all over the room, they'd better give me a good reason. None of you have persuaded me that there's a good reason to do it in Hotline Miami other than the non-fictional (and nebulous) reason of "fun". It doesn't mean that some of you haven't tried, but I'm not convinced and that's just the way it is.

Conversely, whether or not I want a character to be violent in a piece of non-interactive fiction is immaterial. I don't control that character, and watching their arc can be interesting even if I don't approve of their actions.

However, when you put me in the driver's seat, so to speak, I have the right to not engage. With Hotline Miami, I've read reviews and watched videos, and the conclusion I've come to is that I don't want to do the things the game asks its players to do. Even if I owned the game, I doubt I'd finish it because of how much of its content (as far as I can tell) is based on the assumed joy of beating people senseless and covering rooms with their blood.

If it wasn't designed to be enjoyable, people wouldn't be hitting 'R' over and over to try it again... but I don't stop my criticism of games at whether they're designed to be enjoyable. Synthetic drugs are designed to be enjoyable, and I don't use those either.

In other words, it just isn't a game for you. Like someone who isn't big on turn-based strategy games or puzzle games. There's no shame in having your own personal preferences. Just avoid the game if you like and play the games you feel more comfortable playing.

While it seems most of you could care less, here's a little context for why I feel @DevWil has a fair point. (Even if his consequent arguments got a bit misguided.) It's from professionals who know what they're talking about, even.

http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2003/10/anderson.aspx

@DevWil said:

@bvilleneuve said:

@joachimo said:

For the record, the girl who 'moves in' and cleans your apartment is not just some random girlfriend, well.. she is, kind of. But the point is that you save her life from being a drug riddled hooker, and I guess as payment for taking care of her she cleans up the house.

I think this might bear some discussion, because that wasn't how I interpreted it. The way I see it is attached to the ending of the game, so don't read on unless you've finished all the chapters and put in the password.

SPOILER WARNING: Click here to reveal hidden content.

So you're getting calls throughout, and they always come from PHONEHOM, but they always originate from those two nationalist dudes in the sewers. Aside from their ideology, they seem to just get some sick pleasure from seeing guys do what they want them to do. In the third chapter, what they want your guy to do is kill all the guys in the building and then save that girl. Their minds see that as good and just, and they don't understand on a metatextual level how problematic the "damsel in distress" character is.

But that's when the magic begins. With the usual damsel in distress, you get thanked (a kiss or something) and then you never see her again. But with this woman, you get none of that; rather, over the next couple chapters, you see her apparently deep in isolated thought (looking into the bathroom mirror, taking a bath), and then ultimately coming out but staying in the apartment. Over the next few chapters, things start getting tidier around the apartment. It's important to note that this isn't just saying "a woman's touch is needed here"--the apartment beforehand is in such a state that any human being would do the same bits of cleaning. So things get cleaned up, and then the other bed in the bedroom has sheets put on it, and then the beds get pushed together, and then she gets killed by another masked man. It's a really fantastic emotional arc.

You don't save that woman. You only give her the opportunity to save herself. Hotline Miami's nameless female character with hardly any dialogue is one of the best female characters ever in a video game. Hotline Miami is art.

Is this what you think I was ignoring?

Sorry, I see this as the domestication of a former damsel in distress. I don't like either part of that. The fact that "any human being would do the same bits of cleaning" doesn't change the fact that they (apparently) made a woman do it in this game... after being rescued by a man.

I'm not convinced that she's "saving herself" in any meaningful way, and it's not because I'm so invested in my perspective that I refuse to acknowledge any others. I'm simply and honestly not convinced.

Your interpretation is as legitimate as any, but I think you're being pretty creative.

But I'm working on second-hand information. I've acknowledged this from the beginning, so I humbly ask that folks calm down and not put words in my mouth.

You're working on incomplete second-hand information, and (shock of all shocks) you're drawing faulty conclusions from that. You were turned away from this game by its intentionally provocative first impression, and you're refusing to take new evidence into account, or to even put an effort into gathering any evidence about something you seem to at least want to care about. Furthermore, I've read other blogs of yours, and this is not new behavior from you.

You're the height of intellectual laziness.

@DevWil said:

However, when you put me in the driver's seat, so to speak, I have the right to not engage. With Hotline Miami, I've read reviews and watched videos, and the conclusion I've come to is that I don't want to do the things the game asks its players to do. Even if I owned the game, I doubt I'd finish it because of how much of its content (as far as I can tell) is based on the assumed joy of beating people senseless and covering rooms with their blood.

You seem confused. I'm not trying to tell you that you have to play the game. I don't give a care whether you play it or not. But your argument is not limited to "I don't want to play this game." It extends to (and I paraphrase) "This game is detrimental to the culture as a whole and anybody who enjoys it isn't smart enough to think seriously about what the media with which they engage."

Saying that you don't want to play a game based on how it presents itself is fine. I do it all the time, myself. But making a specific and pernicious claim about the game's audience based on no knowledge of the game itself is, I repeat, intellectually lazy, and it needs to be interrogated.

Hipsters, huh...

I think there's certainly some merit to be found in OP's post, and I think my problem with gaming as a whole--particularly with console gaming--is that it seems like games nowadays are just the same two military shooters or third person action game. So really, I respect your decision to not play Hotline Miami. However, I'm willing to defend the game on the basis that I find it particularly unique. There's not a game on the market that looks quite like it, and it's trippy, demented 80s aesthetic is something I'm drawn to (helps that it reminds me of the film "Drive)

I'm not going to waste my time and try to justify the game's violent nature; you have every right to be disgusted by it. I just don't think the main reason people are digging this game because you could totally smash people's heads in a gory fashion. Sure, there's a place for shock (something early Rockstar is certain guilty of) but there's more to this game's critical success than just a bunch of people getting off on gore.

Should we expect more from our games? Absolutely. Film and literature both have the potential to be something more than timewasters, and I think gaming should definitely come into its own in that aspect. However, I just don't think there's anything particularly wrong with a game like Hotline Miami.

@ervonymous said:

The combat has a great flow to it, controls are tight, enemy placement in levels is thoughtful, music is amazing, atmosphere's unhinged and the narrative certainly isn't without merit, but you wouldn't know.

Yes.

@Example1013 said:

I'd just like to say I fully support the developers' position here. Murder is in fact awesome, this is a scientifically proven fact, and women do belong in the kitchen, also proven by science. I'd like to thank the OP for such an enlightening review. Had I not read this, I probably wouldn't even be buying the game.

Hahaha.

@DevWil: Well evidently you do not care to actually get to the bottom of this, which is rather flabbergasting to me. 237 responses and counting and you still don't feel any obligation to actually back up the claims you stick with. I can only hope the rest of Giant Bomb gets bored of this conversation as quickly as you've seemed to.

@bvilleneuve: QFT, everything you say. Sir, I like you.

The OP continues to be extremely persistent in making a fool of himself by refusing to check out the game to give his outlandish claims a lick of credibility. It's one of those cases where persistence ain't a positive trait.

@DevWil said:

I'm only going to say this one more time:

There's a fundamental difference between interactive and non-interactive media. It's not hard to spot this difference. It's interactivity. In other words, participation.

If a game designer asks me to bludgeon people with a pipe and watch their blood spray all over the room, they'd better give me a good reason. None of you have persuaded me that there's a good reason to do it in Hotline Miami other than the non-fictional (and nebulous) reason of "fun". It doesn't mean that some of you haven't tried, but I'm not convinced and that's just the way it is.

Conversely, whether or not I want a character to be violent in a piece of non-interactive fiction is immaterial. I don't control that character, and watching their arc can be interesting even if I don't approve of their actions.

However, when you put me in the driver's seat, so to speak, I have the right to not engage. With Hotline Miami, I've read reviews and watched videos, and the conclusion I've come to is that I don't want to do the things the game asks its players to do. Even if I owned the game, I doubt I'd finish it because of how much of its content (as far as I can tell) is based on the assumed joy of beating people senseless and covering rooms with their blood.

If it wasn't designed to be enjoyable, people wouldn't be hitting 'R' over and over to try it again... but I don't stop my criticism of games at whether they're designed to be enjoyable. Synthetic drugs are designed to be enjoyable, and I don't use those either.

see, requiring a good reason is even more misguided; can a good reason really explain away excessive gore? Just because I'm saving the world doesn't mean the excessive gore is warrented. and by your logic, surely just watching someone ELSE play it is completely fine, so when LP's come out you can just watch those and then actually watch through the whole thing.

You're also denigrating the people who like the game with "oh you like it because you like beating people senseless and covering rooms with their blood". I don't. You don't think I'd rather the character just knock people unconscious within the context of the game world? I mean it'd make the story less impactful but it's not like I revel in gore like you seem to think the supporters of the game do. I get your point, I do, but you are being extremely judgmental of the game, as well as the people who like a game you've never played and are not going to play.

edit; I made a video of the ending (the base ending that is) that, basically, sums up what the game's trying to say, I highly suggest you watch it (spoilers obviously) (they are supposed to be the developers in this scene)

: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcLjKkMO7Kc

"Man, this murder violence is for babies - sexual violence is where the future lies.

We could have whole new genres of games like "stealth" and "prison"-rape..."

^ That was written as sarcastic, but more I thin of it, more it seems likely. I mean tea-bagging is not so far from full man on man rape. Look into your soul, you will know it is true. Videodrome is soon here.

I really don' t get it. And I'm sure my inability to understand comes form the fact that I'm a libertarian, what makes me a freak. I am a walnut grower, never killed anybody and haven't been in a fight for almost 20 years and I think glorifying violence in video games is OK.

1. If you don't like a product, don't buy it.

2. Being ashamed for other is the most stupid thing a human being can do.

Finally, judging or wishing how a whole industry have to behave is childish and naïve.

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. H. L. Mencken

@Karkarov said:

@LikeaSsur said:

I share the sentiment on being baffled, but not because of all the reasons you listed.

I'm baffled on how a top down shooter became so loved so quickly, while doing absolutely nothing new or unique, save for the soundtrack.

Same. I have no clue why people like this game. I watched video's, read reviews, and am sitting here scratching my head saying.... so this game is good why again? It has a good soundtrack... okay. And? Gameplay from the early 80's except with a mouse and keyboard... uh huh... Oh it also takes "maybe" 4-5 hours to beat. The story is also complete nonsense and sounds like it was written by someone high on crack. Yeah... so why not just buy the sound track and ignore the game?

I'm using a Xbox controller and find it better for the game than k + b...

It took me 12 hours to finish, I died a lot.

The gameplay is tight.

The story is fucking crazy you got that right.

@DevWil said:

If you take out the violence of the game, it ceases to be fun

I seriously doubt that. It seems to me it is the intense high-risk tactical gameplay experience that is fun. Since I have not played the game I cannot comment on what is fun about it with any certainty, though, and since you haven't played it either (right?) it seems like a pretty wild claim to make.

(or, at least, it ceases to be Hotline Miami).

Sure. It also wouldn't be Hotline Miami if you took out the phone call conceit, but that doesn't mean that it glorifies telephones. Violence can be prevalent in a game without being glorified.

I agree with you that it is praised for its violence, and that this is absurd. I think it is horribly exploitative, but not all forms of exploitation are glorification. It may present violence as "awesome"; it may even present it as "fun" (although I doubt it does) but as long as it does not portray it as "glorious," (justified, morally commendable etc.) it is not glorification.

Let me remind you again that apart from that one poor choice of a word (glorify) I agree with everything in your original post, and was happy to find out not every gamer out there is apathetic to violence.

@OfficerMeatbeef said:

I fully back the position that this entire first post is purely a knee-jerk, poorly thought out reaction based on only a cursory glance at the game in question, and thus pretty much utterly devoid of value. But unrelated to the story and aesthetics being discussed here, there's something else I keep seeing that I feel deserves to be discussed: having Hotline Miami referred to as "just another top down shooter" is a misnomer that is both hardly accurate, and that does it an injustice. It is certainly top down, and you can certainly do some shooting in it. But labeling it as a "top down shooter" is functionally equivalent to calling Thief or the recent Chivalry "first person shooters". I mean, you can shoot arrows at enemies in both of these, but nobody will ever consider those games as "shooters".

Similarly, in a game like Thief, you can (if you are good enough) certainly sword and arrow your way through everything in your path. But it's rather damn hard, and I think most would agree that it's hardly the ideal way to play. In Hotline Miami, going gung-ho with guns is also often a valid and workable strategy. But unless you're using a mask that supports it and/or are very carefully laid out your positioning and plan and are very good at both aiming and fire discipline, just thoughtlessly opening fire on whoever is around is a very fast ticket to getting slaughtered FAST.

First of all, the enemies are very fast when they're alerted, and they can fire on you VERY quickly. from well off the screen if you're not looking in their direction, and they have EXCELLENT AIM. Second, a single bullet nearly always puts you down. You can very rarely survive a hit from the rare smaller-caliber weapons, and there is a mask or two that lets you take like 1 or 2 bullets before death, but none of that will help you when you take most of a load of buckshot or when that one bullet you survive has a friend about half a millisecond behind it. In other words, 98% of the time if somebody gets the chance to open fire on you, you're dead.

Thirdly, when you find a gun, you get exactly as much ammo as is in the thing when you find it; fire at shotgun into some mook in a room, you better be aware of how many others are gonna come charging in and from where, and you better not waste a single shell. Because if you run out and the nearest gun is across the room and there's 2 or so guys coming at you, you are paste. Even then, safety is never fully guaranteed; a fully-loaded shotgun and careful firing and positioning might not save you if two guys bust through a door close to one another and the blast doesn't get them both, because during the so brief but oh-so-long pump delay between rounds, the remaining guy will splatter you across the wall. In other words, since silenced weapons are extremely rare, opening fire is nearly always a risky move, and even the best twitch reactions won't save you if you have guy coming in from every direction.

All this is to point out why eliminating enemies carefully and quietly with melee weapons is frequently the smartest and safest option. A lot of people are saying it's a great game because it operates purely on your "lizard brain" and your reactions, and that can be true, particularly if you are indeed basing your play on finding and using guns. But playing slowly and methodically is also usually a completely valid option, as you plan out a strategy for each room and finally burst in when the time is right, moving and attacking with precision and style such that everyone inside is dead in less than a second and nobody else is the wiser. Or you can often totally just rampage through an area like a madman, charging from room to room delivering precise blows with a bat or pipe, throwing them at far-away guys with weapons to knock them down so you can move in to finish the job and keep the steamroller moving.

Or maybe you just want to try playing with style and flash, bursting into a well-fortified room and knocking someone down with a door, flinging a knife at a poor sucker across the way, then grabbing the still-dazed guy on the floor's double-barrel and hefting his body up as a human shield to absorb the first few rounds coming at you from his friend while you carefully aim in a fraction of a second and let loose a blast from the scattergun that takes down your remaining assaults. And now you probably only have a second or two to determine whether or not the remaining shell in that gun is going to be enough to deal with whomever's rushing over to check what the hell just happened in there...

In other words, like many of the great games of our past, one of the reasons Hotline Miami works so well is because it allows great variation in how you want to play nearly every level, while also forcing you to modify your plans when somebody you counted on to have a gun didn't (many enemies will be carrying random gear from restart to restart) or when a guy who you didn't take into account randomly wanders into the room just as you charge in. The ability to restart immediately upon death (a la SMB) and the fact that no level is particularly long makes trying different strategies much more palatable. Then, it further rewards you for mixing up your play via the very well-considered scoring system, where playing dangerously and efficiently while utilizing varied moves provides you with much more points, which in turn gives you new masks and weapons that further allow you to try different play styles.

I guess to sum up: I just can't see calling a game where I defeated the vast majority of the opposition on my first playthrough with pipes, doors, golf clubs, fire axes, precisely thrown baseball bats to the knees, or often my own bare hands a "top-down shooter".

Your post is as long as it's accurate. This game has sublime game design as far as gameplay is concerned.

@DevWil: Sorry about my post earlier about people not replying to you, someone was using this article to troll and had I known it was actually yours, I would have taken the time to reply to it. So, here's my real reply!

I'm going to write from the same position as you, someone who has yet to play the game, but has seen some of the media around it and my retort to you is this: art and media is nuanced. You can dismiss something on it's presentation but unless you take that extra step to actually participate, your words end up lacking actual impact in an intellectual argument. To me, the value of a piece of media is the whole, not the parts immediately visible, if everyone were to choose a book by it's cover no one would read classic lit.

As a specific example, one that draws a close theme to Hotline: Miami is that of the movie Robocop. Robocop was advertised as an action movie where a man, in a robot suit, shoots the shit out of drug deals in an ultraviolent romp through the future. This much is true! Hell, the movie was so violent, they had to remove some of the more explicit gore, as if the movie were intact, it would have won an "X" rating by the MPAA.

But that's not all Robocop was, thanks to almost thirty years under the critical lens, we know that Robocop, despite being an ultraviolent action flick, was actually an honest-to-goodness social commentary. A commentary on 80's American materialism, a comment on how the poor were treated and how businesses ran the government and had absolute say in the lives of the common man. A commentary on jack-booted oppression and over-saturation of easily obtained designer drugs.

Now imagine that this movie was written off because of the way it treated violence, or, the way the advertising portrayed the film, we would have lost a classic american film; and I, for one, believe our culture would be for the worse without it. You could try and make the case that they could have done the same without all the violence, but I think it would have lessened the impact(and the point) intended in it's employment.

That point said, there are other arguments that could be levied about your sentiment to the game, but I will be brief, as to make this post less TL:DR.

One is your assumption that your taste and value structure is the only one that can be considered a valid, grown up opinion(as your piece sometimes comes off as a condescending parent) when there is an obvious spectrum of what can be considered culturally relevant(though, perhaps not sensitive.) This argument contains comments about how this game chooses to use extreme violence and killing as a presentation element ie: how humans are primarily predators(as dictated by our 3D vision and anatomy) which has a built-in instinctual bias towards violence and how this is not a bad thing, and classical conflict-resolution storytelling methods. That argument would be several additional paragraphs, but just pretend I made it.

The real take away is this: a man made this game. With his blood, sweat and tears, he created what he had a vision to create. He did not make it to cater to you, or, I would dane to guess, even a general audience. He made it for people who like this type of thing specifically and or you to tell everyone who is raving about this game that they're bad, simply because you're projecting your on value structure upon it, strikes me as trollish and disingenuous. I mean, did you make a similar post to this about American football and violence? Deriding the millions of fans who watch the Sunday gridiron? Hell, yearly, football contributes to hundreds of real-actual-no kidding deaths(some of which are children) and the fight you take up is the one against an indie game that the mainstream people won't ever play?

@Voidoid said:

@DevWil said:

If you take out the violence of the game, it ceases to be fun

I seriously doubt that. It seems to me it is the intense high-risk tactical gameplay experience that is fun.

DING DING DING DING! WE HAVE A WINNER, FOLKS!

The violence is merely that: violence. It's the gamer side of us that loves to see violence in our video games (ya know, rather than committing violence in real life). The thing that makes the game FUN is how tight, concise, and millisecond-reaction-driven the gameplay is. Getting through a full level in one full sweep without a death is a seriously rewarding feeling. The violence itself is just icing on the cake, the part where we say "hey, I executed that guy...and he is totally cut in fucking half". That's all.

@GetEveryone said:

@DevWil said:

If someone wants to send me a copy of Hotline Miami on Steam, I promise I'll play it before the end of January 2013 (I'm busy) and write a review of it.

Um...

This goes for me, too, guys.

Yup, I'm really against the depiction of violence in this game, and intend on writing a thesis on my reasoning behind it.

So, if someone would just go ahead and buy me it on Steam, that'd be great.

Definitely don't want to just play it.

Nope.

Disclaimer: I totally do.

I bought a pre-order on Steam, after playing 10 hours I thought: this is great and I've telling my friends so but this fucking morons are all over XCOM and Borderlands 2 and are not going to play it! So I bought 3 more copies and gifted to them. Two of them are loving it and the other is still playing the shit out of XCOM and hasn't even installed it.

P.D.: I've played 180 hs of Borderlands 2 and almost 40 hs of XCOM. Love them both.

P.D.: Hahah, as I write this Steam notifies me that my friend that hasn't installed the game is connected to XCOM!

People like violence. Violence can be fun.

It's been this way for ages. It's not going to change.

@DevWil: Violence is a natural thing for humans to gravitate towards. It's our tool of survival though we have become so complacent in our ways that we don't require violence in our day to day lives. Games that let us vent this violence are refreshing, which Hotline Miami is.