Deleth

Going to buy and play it. But I'm not as excited as others are over the whole "perma death" they're gushing over. Especially in late game it will only lead to you being not able to go on anymore if you get unlucky just once and have one of your highly trained and experience soldiers killed because with the stronger aliens you wont be able to train a new one to be as strong.

So all it does is bring people to save scum and while many will not admit it most will do it.

@sprode said:

@Mesoian said:

The fact that you remember it so vividly means that it stuck with you and gave you an emotional charge. More stories need to do this. Of course, the real question is, is there an equvilant emotional response you get from "solving the problem"?

Being upset at something in a story isn't necessarily a bad thing. The thing that makes it so interesting in games is that you get to be in the role of the dealer of vengeance, which should add to the emotional outcry you feel. It just needs to be handled well.

I agree completely. This is a requisite to great storytelling, and the fact that a story makes one feel a negative emotion such as disgust doesn't mean it should be met with repulsion.

And considering what comes out of some sectors of politics lately (and Duke Nukem and Game X), it would seem that telling such a story about such a topic is both a positive and a necessity.

While I have never played a game I couldn't handle, the most disgusting thing I can think of was Dragon Age II... nah, it has to do with rape in DA:O. Well, having played as an elf, there seems to be a lot of it in that game, but just think of the Broodmother's poem...

Think about that line just indefinitely worse and you have the whole Arcanum thing. And while things having an impact on you is a necessity if you want to tell a decent story there are loads and loads of ways to do it wrong. In fact I don't remember the Arcanum incident not for it being good but for being utterly disgusting and nauseating to the point where it made me give up on the game and feeling physically ill.

Sandbox game's should mostly count. Stuff like GTA, the X - Series like Albion Prelude and other things. There's quite a variety of them.

@Ghostiet said:

@Deleth:

Duke Nukem Forever. Duke is running through an alien hive filled with husks of girls that were raped and impregnated by aliens. He comes along two twins whom he was cordial with that shared the same fate and now have alien fetuses in them. Duke responds with that line callously before their bellies burst and they die horrifically as hosts for monsters.

And you can smack tits on the ship to increase your ego.

Well yeah. That is pretty nasty. I'd give it an 8/10. I think Duke Nukem Forever might've deserved an even lower rating then it got.

@Ghostiet said:

@punkxblaze said:

Duke's "I guess you're fucked" line made me want to punch babies and that fucker who wrote it.

Would you guys care to elaborate what that line and this picture is about?

I'm sure as hell not one to defend someone who was actually convicted or proven guilty. But do we really know the context of all of this as of now? Because some people here are reacting as if he forced her to bend over his office desk and then went on to do some very nasty things with her.

Youtube in general is fairly tame. So how offensive exactly can a video from youtube be? I personally send and receive quite a few youtube links every both by female and male friends and I'm fairly sure American law would allow me to sue some of them for sexual harassment even while it isn't.

As for the survey. I've got send some of those several times. Once by an ex girlfriend. I never really felt offended by something like that but to each their own. The question here should be did he actively single her out and only send this stuff to her or did he generally send this stuff around. If it's the first case then yes this could very well ammount to sexual harassment. If it's the second then the question is was he sexually harassing all of the people who received it if no, why not?

As for the whole "not because you are hot", this could've been very will critique on her performance during said conference. It would be ill worded and not the best way to go about it. But does this really ammount to sexual harassment?

In all honesty I don't like frogboy from what I've seen from him on the old stardock impulse chat. I don't know the name of Miletta so I can't say anything about her. And I couldn't care less if he's guilty or not as it is the courts job to find out if he is and undertake appropriate steps. But I think it is kind of worrisome how fast some people are to judge even when we don't really know the context and what really happened and mostly take her side just because she is reasonable attractive.

I've seen the consequences of something like this in real life where the guy turned out to be not guilty. Even after that nobody really cared and most still acted as if he was guilty. That it wasn't very pleasent to him would've been a massive understatement.

@SuperJoe said:

I am unfamiliar with the gestation period of half-ogres, but if they are to be born in a human womb I assume it's a 9 month cycle. Considering the 3:1 birth ratio of half-ogres, this scenario must have gone on for hundreds of years for the gnomes to amass a sufficient army. It would require a centralized birthing facility of unprecedented scale, equipped with a full-time staff of doctors and nurses to keep the women healthy during pregnancy. Hopefully, births to female half-ogres would lessen the amount of human females needed for breeding over time, since over time there would be a sufficient number of both male & female half-ogres to breed internally.

I don't think they amassed a whole army. They apparently settled for a few hundred female half ogres. It still went on for quite some time and they must've murdered a large number of women with what they did in one of the most gruesome way I've heard about in any kind of game. In all honesty it was the first time I thought the genocide of an entire race the gnomes would not just be justified but one of the best things that could possibly happen to the world of Arcanum. I've ever since despised gnomes even in completly unrelated games.

@EvilNiGHTS said:

I've never really felt as if I'm watching Birth of a Nation while playing a game, firstly because I don't find many games that are overtly trying to push a political agenda, and secondly because I seem desensitised to the idea that many videogames have you acting out things that are reprehensible as if it's second nature. Even some of the darker elements of games like Fallout are done in the style of a black comedy.

Speaking of Fallout though, there is one section of Fallout 3 that stirred something in me far more than the rest of the game, which was the Tenpenny Tower quest. Although Roy Phillips was clearly a douchebag early on, his followers certainly weren't and he was at least right in that he should be just as entitled to live in Tenpenny Tower as anybody else. So after vouching for him, to find out what he and his followers had done afterwards made me so displeased that I had to murder him. With mitigating circumstances, of course.

That's probably one of the most interesting parts of the game though. Moral choices in games typically don't mean much other than "do good things and good things happen for everybody", and it's rare that your altruism pays off in such a way that you damned an entire building full of people by doing what you thought was the right thing. You usually don't get shades of grey like that.

Oh I remember that one. I solved it by staying out of the matter. The problem was that it wasn't really much of a choice. Either you did the apparently "good" thing and helped everyone get along just for the Ghouls to then turn around and murder everyone for no apparent reason whatsoever aside from being douches, you help them kill anyone right away because you're evil or you kill the Ghouls. The problem I had with it was that if you killed the Ghouls you get trash talked by three dog for the rest of the game while the game never even let him acknowledge what happened if you helped "everyone get along".

So the only winning move here seemed to stay out of everything. Thus nothing at all happened and everyone could live on happily. But at least these people had a "clean" death. They were "just" shot by the ghouls and didn't went through years of unimaginable horror just to have something far to big tear itself out of them killing them in the process and being repeatedly raped. :|

@psylah said:

@Deleth said:

@peritus said:

@Damodar said:

What did they want half-ogres for?

Im curious about that too.

Bodyguards. The half ogres they've bred that way are pretty much a "slave race" of bodyguards to them because they themselves are puny and can't put up much of a fight. It's even stated that they keep the female half-ogres away from the rest all of them locked up in factories as breeding slaves. They unlike the human females don't die from it though. Aside from that not much better.

@nintendoeats

Yes all of them are someones daughter. But seeing as how they were abducted alongside their mother's it's safe to assume that they were adolescents or even children at that time. Putting this on a whole other magnitude.

I don't know, the way you phrased it was that they were the daughters of political opponents, that does not imply that the daughters themselves were not fully grown adults themselves, simply their relation to the political figure.

Yes some of them might've been fully grown, others most certaintly wouldn't have been. It was never stated they made any kind of difference and doesn't change how messed up it was. It is pretty much a parasitic race (gnomes) forcing their way into another one and more then destroying any kind of opposition to this while doing stuff right out of someone's nightmare.

@peritus said:

@Damodar said:

What did they want half-ogres for?

Im curious about that too.

Bodyguards. The half ogres they've bred that way are pretty much a "slave race" of bodyguards to them because they themselves are puny and can't put up much of a fight. It's even stated that they keep the female half-ogres away from the rest all of them locked up in factories as breeding slaves. They unlike the human females don't die from it though. Aside from that not much better.

@nintendoeats

Yes all of them are someones daughter. But seeing as how they were abducted alongside their mother's it's safe to assume that they were adolescents or even children at that time. Putting this on a whole other magnitude.

Today I was looking through my game collection since I didn't feel like playing one of the games on steam I own when I came across Arcanum Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. At first I wondered why I didn't really remember this game and then why I never bothered to finish it. Then I remembered and I honestly wish I hadn't. The game overall was unlike to many others fairly unremarkable to me till I ran across the gnome conspiracy.

To those who never played the game and still want to don't read any further from her on out unless you don't really care. The gnome conspiracy was about the large scale abduction of human women by the gnomes. The reason they did this was to force them to mate them with ogres so they could breed half ogres, a lethal process to these women.

You actually try to uncover this and make the knowledge public. While doing so you only find out how vast this project really was and that literarelly every single gnome supported this or at least did not really mind. They started with prostitutes whom were apparently to sickly to last long or survive surgery which enabled women to be used up to three time before dying. So when the king of tarant found out they had him murdered, abducted the queen pinned the blame on her and made her the first successfull attempt at breeding a women several times to an ogre, she died after the third half ogre.

They then went on to pretty much seize controll of Tarant abducting even larger numbers of women some of them the wives and !daughters! of everyone who politically or somehow else opposed them. And during the time Arcanum takes place they got away with it.

After uncovering all of this nothing ultimatively comes from it. As the gnomes simply one up you at the end of the story line with you unknowingly helping them destroying the last evidence. They then go on to taunt you about it and how you can't do a damn thing because nobody would believe it. Personally I think many people never really bothered to really think about the implications of all this.

It means that hundreds or even thousands of women were abducted, raped by ogres and often died by giving birth. The utter horror, terror couldn't be possibly imagined of this couldn't be possibly described in words. And with the mention of "daughters" it isn't just fair to assume that it wasn't only fully grown women whom this happened to or who were abducted for this purpose.

So why did Sierra Entertainment feel it necessary to include this mini arc into their otherwise decent game? So they could come up with a cheap X-Files shout out. For nothing else but this did they created the to me most disgusting, infuriating and sick story I've ever seen in a video game. Never before or after did a game make me feel this disgusted and physically ill. I don't know why I kept this game in the first place. But I today broke the cd and threw it away. This game sure as hell wont be missed by me.

What about you guys. Do you had similar experiences with other games or even worse ones? What do you think about this?