Phished0ne

I just came across a 2nd fielder named "DP Turner" and...man these names are good as hell.

the game didnt earnthat read though. It simply waved its hands in front of you a few times and held a mirror up in a "got ya! you are the monster!!!!" moment. It simply played like a run of the mill shooter, at no point in the game did a "Breakdown" happen, like as was done so well in Spec Ops, or even some of the other Far Cry games. You never turned on people in the story, you were always a monster, and the story they were trying to tell doesnt work that way(at least in a game where you are 100 percent supposed to *BE* the PC). You have to change, you have to start out feeling right and BECOME the monster. This game simply posits you were always in the wrong. For the vast majority of people playing the game, that is going to come off as hollow and wrong, because it is. No one THINKS they are wrong at the outset, you need to re-contexualise and show the story from other perspectives to EARN that story beat. They didnt.

Not only that, but any possible "Breakdown" of the PC would be covered in muck by the BRAINWASHING AND DRUGS plots. Its sloppy storytelling.

To me the biggest problem is with how they handle stuff like "brainwashing" in a shitty, cliche sci-fi way. On Waypoint, in his post review audio podcast thing, Austin talked about how(which was also discussed on polygon) UBI had press sign legal documents to not talk about some of the stories they used as inspiration, UBI said the devs talked to cult experts, met with people, and were going to do this correctly. They were telling press they were going to take this seriously. I would bet they realized they couldn't because they got worried about the content. So they started hamfisting in stuff like shitty scifi brainwashing with trigger-sounds and drugs, when now we know how cults work, is with social pressure and coercion. This means at the end, they could do a "WHOOPS BRAINWASH TRIGGER YOU KILLED EVERYONE" bait and switch instead of actually facing the issues in the story(how and why did this cult exist, why didnt anyone do anything about it, why wasnt the national guard called in sooner, etc).

The other problem with the "walk away" ending is that isnt world war 3 just going to start anyway? are we supposed to assume that all the impending doom stuff you had heard on the radio was just propaganda anyway? if so, where do you draw the line? was the whole game a farce? The ending is such a cop out for a game that distinctly pushes you away from thinking about the world outside of the county to go "WHAT ABOUT THE OUTSIDE WORLD HUH?!?! NUKES!".

It almost makes me think that the "joke" ending is the 'real' ending. The Sheriff looks at the Marshal and says "if we put the cuffs on him, no one gets out alive" and glances at the player. I like the idea that the Marshal could've just said "fuck this im calling in the national guard and we're taking care of this shit".

in the end I hate that i am stuck thinking about this game so in the afterglow, because i slogged through the story to see the end, and of course i was disappointed because the ending went down like a lead balloon. The game didnt earn this level of discourse from me, but here I am.

@chaser324: Yeah i just found that article as soon as you responded. Guess i'll go back to TPP and return to check this article again in 5 hours when ingsoc now links to a video of a couch with backmasked talking on it or some shit.

So..I just remembered after seeing the Silent Hills petition...werent there reports from back in July that said Del Toro and Kojima were still planning on making a game?

@xbob42: Just for shits and giggles i tried to reverse google image search that image but no go due to the framing of the image as a fake Polaroid.

Misdirecting a misdirect eh? Bold Strategy, Cotton.

So much Monking going on today :(

That video was pretty humorous though.

@mrplatitude said:

pretty good..