Quick Look: Beat Cop

This just seemed really boring to me :/

I'm not a cop.

Man, why can't someone make a new cop game that doesn't have frustrating gameplay issues; unearned, poorly handled to the post of tone deaf political content...or both?

Interesting, colour blindness strikes again :P

Jeff kept checking the parking meters at random to see if they were ready but never noticed the red flag over each meter when they are expired. he missed so many! :P also noticed some people just don't put money in and its instantly red.

GiantBomb is a community where this racial stuff is managed in order to foster an inclusive and respectable exchanges of ideas. That said, I must express that the kind of invective racism and casual acceptance of it being plastered all over indiscriminately within the game is disappointing. With this only so much being glossed over and flippantly attributed to be nothing more than contextual nuance in a game sets dangerous example and should be dissuaded at all times. If this racism does not enhance the gameplay or the fun factor of the game in question, and can end up offending and hurting people why bother including it?

Life shouldn't be taken too seriously, yes, but as a victim of racial abuse and discrimination, I must express that life that shouldn't be taken so seriously is unfortunately out of my grasp and the normalcy of how life should be understood.

Just my opinion.

Eh, I get made fun of for being jewish, this wasn't that bad.

Can we get someone on here to be pissed about the first criminal you see being a Italian, in the mob, in a fucking pizza shop? Just to make sure everybody who was stereotyped in this game is pissed. That would be great.

great art style and the casual racism is kind of jarring because it is so out of place in all of the conversations jeff just clicks past it all and I dont think they even notice it as much as we seem to

the guy saying "the gook at the l.aundrymat messed up my clothes" seems like wait a second, what was the purpose of that dialogue whatsoever? I'm sure you could have some racist cop be part of the story and it is no problem but why does a passerby gotta be racist. he could have easily said that jerk or anything no one cares that it is an asian person except for the developr I guess.

Always wondered what he did before NOFX

31:32 "Shove it up your ass!"
The writing is indeed a bit off.

Apparently this game remembers protagonists being racist as being a common trope of American 80's cop shows. I've not seen a lot of them, or possibly any, of any era, so I defer to Jeff on the subject of this game's authenticity. I'll just say the game is released today, and has a racist cop protagonist, and I hope he has a redemptive arc. Or that the game at least in some tangible way acknowledges and distances itself from his racism.

Oh wait, I've seen Police Squad!

This seems cool, I might actually pick this up (which is unusual for a retro styled indie game)

pretty funny to see all the misplaced outrage in the comments though. Really shows the kinda crowd GB unfortunately kinda attracts, but then again being based in SF who could say it's surprising

Fuck the police, comin' straight from the underground!

(This looks cool)

Pulling the same "everyone is racist" move Crash won awards for.

I like the format of this game quite a bit.

@giantstalker: I would find it highly amusing if the majority of people here were from San Francisco, not to mention highly illogical, but yeah alright, sure.

I really think you're both analyzing this too much, and at the same time, missing the point entirely. This isn't about taking "life" too seriously, it's about taking a silly little video game too seriously. I haven't watched many "80s cop shows", but I've watched plenty of 70s cop movies, and I can attest that this is pretty accurate to the tone of a lot of those movies (not to mention pretty much every single movie Martin Scorsese has ever made). They're not just throwing around racial slurs for the sake of it. They're doing it to create a specific atmosphere. I'm not saying you have to like or appreciate that. If you never watched and enjoyed those kinds of movies, then the setting of this game isn't going to make a whole lot of sense to you. I'm just saying that people need to stop pretending that context doesn't matter. It matters a whole lot.

I don't know what this thing is going for exactly but boy does it not seem great on several levels. I couldnt get into Kart Life or Papers, Please on a mechanical level anyway, and it seemed like those games at least had something to say re: enforced tedium as a gameplay mechanic.

Also yeah I guess people showing up in the comments to drop alt-right buzzwords in defense of its writing is a turnoff as well; who knew?

@electrotherobot: I agree with you but I think in 2017 if Scorsese made Taxi Driver people would probably freak out about it too.

Something being present in fiction is seen as an endorsement by people instead of merely being present now. I noticed it when discussing fiction in school and I have only seen it be more and more of a trend. I'm not sure how people square old movies and stuff like that with that thinking (they probably don't bother).

I don't think the game is above criticism. When you see like 5 NPCs during this video complaining about the G--k at the cleaner it seems questionable. But a game can present racism in it.

The one thing I'll say in defense of the writing is that I grew up just outside NYC in the 80's and I do remember a similar level of casual racism, unfortunately. But even that doesn't excuse the game's use of epithets, because it never claimed to be a realistic recreation of a time and place. They could have easily captured the vibe of both 80's cop shows and 80's New York, and even expressed a level of racial tension, without resorting to the constant use of slurs.

I can't believe the amount of backlash about this. A story can't use racist words to set a tone and context? I think it's perfectly fine in this story. Chill out. Everyone gets you aren't a racist, words are words.

@tanstaafl: I didn't notice the markers you're talking about at all.

You mean the first one?

I was okay with the racist talk, considering the historical context and that the main character doesn't seem to be a great person in the first place, but then the disclaimer says it's not meant to be an accurate representation of how people actually acted, so now I don't know what the intention was. I'm definitely okay with the black gang, though; how man white people did you see in Grove Street? If you complain about the black gang, you have to complain about the Italian mafia too.

808 is disturbing the peace, that's why 808s and Heartbreak

Is there a game that purposefully goes against common tropes? Because that "cop one day from retirement" trope is so fucking dead it's not even worth reacting to in any way. Not negative, not positive, just there. I'd love to see a game that aggressively averts tropes, except for every 8 or so. If it subverts your expections 7 out of 8 times that'd make for a much more interesting story, I think.

The racial stuff stands out even more because practically all the writing in the game feels like it was done by the Drawn to Death team. It's trying so hard to be gritty and edgy and push the envelope that it mostly comes across as pathetically tone-deaf. No one is saying that you cannot make a game that deals with racism seriously and uses fucked up epithets for a purpose. But come on, y'all, it's pretty clear that's not what's going on in this game at all.

Like, for real, maybe this is unfair since the game is Polish, but it feels like this was made by people whose only understanding of America is The Wire and they mostly wrote a story to have an excuse to do the scene where the dialog is nothing but people saying fuck for ten minutes.

That's where the argument goes off the rails for me, though. Do those same people see the developers of games like Payday and GTA as supporting or endorsing cop-killing on a massive scale? How about the fact that most of the games we play these days revolve around killing people?

All of that is fine and accepted by the vast majority of gamers, but as soon as a racial or sexist slur is uttered, games have crossed the line, and the developers are clearly promoting racism?

That's insanity.

I can only assume that none of these people have read a book or watched a movie that was made before the 21st century.

I'm offended by how many errors this disclaimer has, frankly. This already tells me a bit about the level of their writing chops.

@gyozilla: Or that they are Polish.

Police State

@artisanbreads: Their in-game stuff isn't as clumsy, though. That bit there feels like it was written last minute to try to stem possible backlash that they already see coming. In any case, it still needs a proof-reader.

I say we discourage people from trying to do interesting things for fear it might be offensive!

hate to be that dude, but 808s are drum samples from a tr-808, which is one of the most ubiquitous sounds in hip-hop.

sorry for being a dumb pedant :/

That's the exact same logic that motivated anti video game mommy blog petitions, Jack Trenton, and scumbags like Leland Yee blaming games like GTA for street violence.

Adults can separate video games from real life. If racist language in a video game, a small indie one directed to 30-40 year olds at that gets a player to think talking like that is ok then they were probably a piece of shit who can't be helped anyway.

I say we discourage people from criticising games for trying to be edgy and fucking it up for fear they might quit or try and improve!

@evilashe: or maybe people can just have different opinions

Have a Pepsi, my dude.

@moab: Yes. Who was saying otherwise?

First time I've heard the mouse being clicked in a Quick Look. What's up with that?

Yup. Life must be really hard for some of these guys.

tfw you can't decide if you want your game to be an homage to 80s cop shows or just plain racist

Weird. I thought GB did a video of this before

@darkcaedus: The game was written and put together by two Polish guys (the developer Pixel Crow). The characters are their creations, not entities unto themselves with their own agency. This argument has been used many times and its not great, because - and here's the simple rebuttal for actual people in real life, not fictional characters - minorities can also be bigots too.

I think it's just weird how many people jump up to play moral gymnastics when anybody wants to think about the content of their media. Media is one the chief channels of cultural and values communication in society. To not think about what the content of that media is will leave you consuming large amounts of garbage, which you will then integrate and regurgitate, as this kind of communication is recombinatory.

Imagine a massively multiplayer online death match, but with generalizations as weapons instead of guns. Now read these comments, and imagine no more!

@sabeau: It's not moral gymnastics, it's a representation of the actual world that we live in. Who cares what race the guys who wrote it are?

That's not even mentioning that this video only shows the first 30 minutes of the game, the first CRIMINAL shown was a white mobster, the guy in the store didn't actually seem to be shoplifting (all he had in his pockets was five dollars), and there are way more black people in the game than the ones arrested. You haven't played the game, how are you qualified to talk about its themes?

I'm a black man who lived in the south for a good chunk of my life, and I understand the weight of depictions of people of color in media, but I never want to live in a world where any time a minority is put in a negative light in media it has to be accompanied by preaching.

Personally my take on the racism in this game is that it might just be portraying the police as they actually are: a violently racist institution.

Gotta see more of the story before I say they do a good or bad job of that, or just pull a bioshock, showing it without really denouncing it.