@Hippie_Genocide: Okay, we're going to have to agree to disagree. I think the comparisons are skin deep in the overall review. When he discusses X-COM having free-aim and XCOM not having free-aim, he gives reasons why, tactically, it gives less options. Is that not true? When he brings up X-COM's strategy layer being more fleshed out than XCOM, he goes into why XCOM's strategy layer is lacking by evaluating it on its own terms.
And I still don't get why anything he said warrants "eat a bowl full of dicks".
This whole thread has been terrible in general. It's just a bunch of assholes being complete dicks to a readership that hasn't done anything to deserve any of this ill will. What did they wrong? Having an opinion on games, apparently.
Have you read any RPS comment threads at all of late?
Yes. What about them?
@Superfriend said:
@Ping5000 None of the two quotes was exclusively talking about Rock Paper Shotgun. @GaspoweR made an even more general statement than me. I said it was "forum disease" and yes, it happens everywhere. Didn´t say that website was the only one ever.
The problem here is, their opinion (and forum opinion in general) often seems a little too dismissive and negative. But yeah, I guess it´s the internet that brings out the cynical bastard in all of us. And trolling of course, these days every second post on a forum could be considered trolling.
Why is it even considered a problem? And why is the approach to this "problem" is to just be assholes? Why even care?
Are we trying to start some internet conflict with RPS?
Hell yeah we are! I suggest we roll in there with a small team, Walking Dead style. Couple of loud guns, some smoke and flashbangs. Oh and stabby-glass. Only we stab at both eyes.
Who is down for some eye stabbing?
Seriously though, it´s forum disease. Everybody thinks he is the coolest, most experienced fucker around. The irony is: These people don´t know what they´re missing by skipping games for random reasons. Hipsterism leads to playing games only on Ipad-ism and then to not-playing games at all. ism. But you know what: Fuck these guys. I´m having a lot of fun by not skipping games because they´re "brown" or considered "boring" by 12 year olds. I have no problems with consoles or the PC.. or.. saving systems?! Let the good times pass these fuckers by.
This is not a unique quality to RPS.
@GaspoweR said:
There are people who are more often than not just either so cynical or dismissive that they can go into a comments section or in an internet forum and be a jerk. The anonymity makes it convenient for them to leave a comment that if said in an actual conversation with other people might have or would have elicited an unsavory response, which they would have needed to deal with at that very moment and not be able to get away with it. Well, unless he would just run away from the other people in the conversation but that would be just plain weird.
This is not a unique quality to RPS, if that is what you are implying. It's happening in this very thread.
This whole thread has been terrible in general. It's just a bunch of assholes being complete dicks to a readership that hasn't done anything to deserve any of this ill will. What did they do wrong? Having an opinion on games, apparently.
Actually, I went back and read RPS' review of XCOM, and yeah they can eat a bowl full of dicks. An exerpt:
If you are inclined to feel that there is simply no good reason to not replicate all that made X-COM great, I am inclined to believe that you simply will not abide XCOM, with all its alterations, omissions and new explorations.
This is all that needs to be said. The writer doesn't need to go on and on and on with all the comparisons and his niggling complaints on how it isn't as good as a damn near 20-year old game. He could have saved the reader the time and wrote "nostalgia is a motherfucker".
Are you getting mad at Meer for essentially writing a review? Did you even read it? His final thoughts are:
"XCOM is a bounteous strategy/roleplaying feast, and I’m not particularly dismayed that a couple of the side-dishes taste a bit suspect. It’s a triumph that XCOM even exists, so that it’s also bloody brilliant and thoroughly modern with it excites me to introverted core. X-COM’s tiny, precious world has seen many unwelcome invaders over the years, but trust me – this one comes in peace."
“Davis! Davis, he's – he's pinned down, the muton's got him pinned. Oh christ, Davis, just hold on!”
The quavering orders from command didn't help, but it's not like Davis had a choice. He hunkered down onto the earth beneath his feet. The suppression of plasma tore his cover in half. All he could do was get down as low as he could and stare at the dirt until it was all over.
“Fuck, goddammit. We need to, um, who has smoke grenade?”
“Flores? No, fuck, but I can definitely imagine a scenario where we're going to need all three of those medkits.”
“Vandermeer! Yes, thank christ almighty, get that smoke grenade on him, get him that cover, now.”
It fizzles and pops into a dense, purple cloud. Davis hears the hiss of the dissipating smoke all around him. He feels a little safer.
“ALIEN ACTIVITY, EVERYONE. HOLD ON TO YOUR TITS.”
The mutons push forward with a force of a thousand black belt-tier karate kicks to the sternum. They open fire, almost blindly, at Davis.
Davis looks up. He will live to see another day.
Here's the reality of it: I made a bad click in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the most ass-clenching game of 2012, and Davis overextended, triggering some mutons that wound up suppressing him. I made him hunker down, giving him that defensive bonus while cutting off line of sight. I tabbed through my soldiers until I got to the support with smoke grenade, giving Davis that extra defensive bonus. The result was some missed muton shots, leaving Davis unscathed once more.
But the magic of it was how much of the scenario turned into a scene of peril and suspense when filtered through someone completely involved in the game. There's little about XCOM that's actually literal; it's an abstraction of numbers and dice rolls where you can take as long as you want to figure out the most optimal solution, but the imagination bubbles.
I'm imagining how much shit is in their pants.
You aren't just stacking up two assaults up a door – that's Ramirez and Tymon readying for a breach into a room they know they haven't cleared. A reaction shot isn't just a mechanic in the game – that's rookie Valdez on anxious patrol and then TOTALLY FREAKING OUT by the sectoid skirting around her line of sight, making her anxiously pull the trigger. And when sniper Grant is taking his reaction shot with the opportunist perk, that's a man with ice in his veins, for his tour of duty spans over two dozen missions and has an uncanny cool. Double Tap isn't just a final ability. Grant can take out two x-rays in a blink of an eye. Everyone looks up to him.
It's – it's that word – immersive, which makes a game like XCOM such a nice reminder against an industry that's so obsessed with the term. It's understandable and admirable, but incredible visuals and being very literal with the presentation of the world isn't the only way to pull this off.
Hotline Miami has a great understanding of this too. What you're seeing is a top-down perspective of your guy pushing through a door and seeing a little pixel fist knocking some other top-down guy off his feet and then clicking to smash his pixel face in. It's another abstraction, but the grittier details are being filled in with great precision by the player – Ryan Gosling's kicked that door down, rushed the Miami gangster before he had a chance to react and now he's feeling the steel of his own crowbar as Gosling smashes his face in. There's blood everywhere – on the curtains, the mirrors, the tiles. It's like he fed this guy a live grenade.
It's a bit of a demand, to be imaginative, especially when so many games aim for an explosive literalness that has come to define Uncharted and Call of Duty's greatest, most “immersive” moments, but it's an amazing part of the brain that's gone so underutilized. It's the internal narrative going on in the player that's most interesting – what he's thinking, what he's interpreting from the going-ons in the game – but obviously a lot of games just can't support this. Being in first-person is going to be inherently incompatible with abstractions. A tightly scripted video game has little room for the internal, player narrative to spring forth. A game like Dishonored must show very literally what the player is doing because of its perspective and it does so with some incredible results. It's perhaps a greater achievement than either XCOM or Hotline Miami because it lives up to what is being imagined, but the point is:
And there's some light vignetting going on on the bottom of the screen to further indicate you're crouched. And there's the icon toggle if you want to be extra sure.
I think it's more outlandish to consider it to be just a coincidence, especially considering it's given its own paragraph, its own color and is the final line in an announcement with very pragmatic text. All their other last lines in this brochure follow a similar form, but that line is too convenient for me.
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