#401
Post rating: ~
- British forces raid the suburb of Camden where a cell of brown people with northern English accents have taken root; in set-pieces reminiscent of Zionist propaganda film "Munich", there are ambiguities* about the unarmed female brown people

*ambiguities helpfully assuaged by the colour of the subtitle text and the fact that the only "good" one isn't shrieking hysterically but rather calming her child

- some dialogue between CIA Bro and Mia Khalifa in Kurd-drag may or may not imply some foreshadowing of backstabbery and general brown person untrustworthiness

- US Marines assault yet another TV station except this time it's a "hospital" and capture a man that looks like both the main antagonist AND the Not-Kurd Gf's uncle
#402
Post rating: ~
- some Chris Kyle set pieces
- some bizarre "rebel teaching the CIA guy how to shoot" set piece
- inevitable "reveal" that it was the Good Rebels who stole the poison gas, at least the menfolk. the Mia Khalifa stand-in remains pure and virginal
#403
Post rating: +
flashback fun time!

- POV from the young girl, being dug out of rubble by none other than the White Helmets, circa 20 years ago
- her father, with a Pashtun pakol hat, mourns the loss of his wife
- despite there being no Americans/Britons, they're speaking English in lieu of Arabic (slight American inflections)
- a bunch of soldiers start massacring civilians right after some danger-close bombing
- turns out they're Russians, who are apparently the guys who do 20-year long interventions or whatever
- they're dispensing poison gas, not via aerial assault but 10 metres away with grenade launchers, because that's sane
- PRESS X NOT TO BREATHE THE POISON GAS
- son they're killing us because they think we help the rebels *starts to clear the house of gas masks and multiple burner phones*
- jacked Russian porn star breaks down door and eviliciously murders baba
- girl finds screwdriver and goes stabby on him
- does this
- weird incestuous dialogue as the kids suddenly go full mujahdeen operator and start systematically checking the dead Russian for gear, all of a sudden knowing precisely how to get to safety
- some last-breath words of wisdom from daddy
- the russians are for some reason abducting the women folk
- the kid knows when the air is safe all of a sudden
- he also suddenly knows they need to exfil on a truck and use those phones as distractions. not to mention arm up
- these kids are like Bana al-Abed's twitter feed in 5 minutes
- Russian general shows up and seems over-joyed that two little runts killed 3 of his soldiers


this is truly insane and inept
#404
Post rating: +
oh boy

- after murking the old fella, the SAS-CIA-Mary Sue rag tag team goes back to base and is confronted with the fact that she and her forces are designated as a terror group, which means the Americans aren't going to be nice to her anymore, which is appears to contradict the US-YPG/US-FSA storyline in the other universe, but I digress
- CIA Bro just straight up says he's leaving with her, and not only aren't they shot on sight, they actually leave together, the absolute mad men

another flashback to 1999

- girl in prison
- russians are raping prisoners next door
- fallout 4-esque interrogation options
- russians doing waterboarding
- it's got a very obvious rape POV implication
- absurd prison break stuff with a rusty spoon
- the SAS saves the day (wearing late 201X gear, despite it being '99)

present day
- secret SAS attack on terrorist HQ in... St Petersburg
- usual inane crap with RPGs being fired from inside a vehicle
- they interrogate the baddie by threatening the wife and child, who are at your ~reluctant~ mercy
- optional murder stuff


edgy

- suddenly terrorist is not-terrorist again
- freakin' ebin "ON YOUR FEET WE ARE LEAVING" reference for the winrar

some more boring crap that ends with the russian general getting murked. the whole "we don't want to engage russians" stuff goes right out the door and never comes back in, final mission involves a Bradley IFV and UAV support

appalling even by normal CoD standards
#405
Post rating: +
damoj thank you for your service
#406
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i forgot damoj was transcribing a video game plot when i clicked on this thread again and thought they were just schizophrenia posting, but nope, just the plot to a CoD game
#407
Post rating: ~
i started playing destiny 2 since it went free to play. having fun but it's also possible that it sucks and i just miss fps's.
#408
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#409
Post rating: +
great bargains friends.
#410
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Game critics found out that you can shoot a baby in Call of Duty so get ready for this to become the thing about it now and not the fact that it's literal fascist propaganda
#411
Post rating: +
im playing morrowind, fighting fantasy gamebook deathtrap dungeon mod, it owns
#412
UNUSUALY COOL
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#413
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cars posted:



#414
Post rating: ~
WHERE IS BEARD?!?!?!?
#415
lies half the time
Post rating: ~
it's later
#416
lies half the time
Post rating: +
haven't u ever watched start wreck. at the beginning of every episode rikers has no beard, and by the end it is full grown
#417
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
#418
Post rating: ~

tears posted:

im playing morrowind, fighting fantasy gamebook deathtrap dungeon mod, it owns



*enters as an imperialist stooge, gets dunked on by all the natives*

#419
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~
that character gives you helpful keywords about healer and trader but has to look tough in front of everyone to cover... could’ve not even mentioned them... maybe be a little more observant/grateful next time smdh...
#420
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
with heavy hard I report that Hideo Death Stranding is ok and boring. Sorry man i dont want to save United States and backpack all over United States.
#421
Post rating: +
i dont even know what thread this belongs in

#422
Post rating: ~
I'm sick and staying home today, so I'm trying out Politics and War instead of "being productive". It's a fun and relaxing clicky pastime
#423
Post rating: ~
Valve just announced a new half life game
#424
Post rating: ~
lol half life ityool 2019
#425
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finally something for gamers to use VR for other than porn
#426
Post rating: +
#427
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
With Death Stranding out, people are talking about Silent Hill again because of how Kojima's latest grew out of Konami firing him from the Silent Hill series. The consensus seems to be that most of Silent Hill's player avatars, its "heroes", are bad and pathetic people, and then others point out that they're not supposed to be good or resilient people and feel clever about pointing that out, and so on. But there's one exception.

It's weird to see celebration of Heather Mason from Silent Hill 3 presented as a reexamination of the game from a wiser, contemporary vantage point, because it's done almost entirely through a version of the facile late-'90s/early-2000s pop girl-power thing, meaning all the language used is pretty much contemporary with the game's release almost 20 years ago. Weirder than that, the argument it offers, that Heather is admirable in some moral calculus of characters because she's a "badass", is just plain wrong. It's amnesia. It's not something the story can support.

Like, sure, Heather becomes more and more contemptuous as Silent Hill 3 heads into its last stage, she begins reacting to scenes of horror and despair by telling everyone how much they suck, how she doesn't care, bragging about how it doesn't matter if she kills them because they're just monsters anyway, in contrast to the heroes in the games before it, men who struggle through the whole story with their obligation to protect daughter figures and their guilty lust for women as brutalized, abused sex objects. If you see only what you want to see, and what you want to see is the cheapest, most worthless sort of role model for young women, you end up with an idea of Silent Hill 3 that no one can prop up. It says Heather thinks Stuff Is Lame because Heather is a "badass" Hollywood sarcastic superhero, a cheap-as-free shelf product, the "magical girl" the game's hidden jokes laugh off as a send-up of its real plot.

Silent Hill 3 provides a straightforward explanation for Heather turning "badass"—it's evil manifesting itself. It's a "fate" someone else tries to force on her, and if she chooses to accept it, she loses. Another woman, the franchise's first classical villain, pushes Heather into adopting the contempt and hatred she comes to show toward others and toward her own safety. Inheriting the burden of her metaphysical ancestor from the first game, Heather incubates "God", more explicitly a goddess, inside of herself, the object of worship for a dangerous and disappeared religion. The villain gifts Heather with both incredible pain and people for Heather to despise and oppose, because Heather's rage and hatred are the only way to bring about what the villain sees as a transcendent, amoral, anti-materialist paradise for everyone. The game further suggests that what's inside Heather has always influenced her. She carries around a switchblade "just in case", but leaves the stun gun her dad gave her at home because it's "too bulky" for her bubble vest. Heather becomes a "badass" at the peril of her soul.

Heather wins when she realizes that her dad loved her and trusted her to take care of herself, that he'd given her what she needed before the game's story started, and it wasn't a knife, a gun or a note saying, "In case of my death, become a badass and avenge me against the spooky cult of Silent Hill." Heather never fights the game's villain, which is how Heather succeeds. She reaffirms the virtue of a loving and stable family life, takes the medicine her dad gave her and pukes up God. Then, she kills her, stomping God's face in, her own face in, just like James's default option to kill his wife at the end of the previous game, and doubles over crying because her dad is still dead. And if you play the game through a second time and affirm yourself as a holy figure who dishes out wrath and absolution to inferiors, you get the ending where the being growing inside Heather wins anyway; she follows up deicide by murdering a wounded ally who'd helped her tormentor in ignorance. Heather pulls out that switchblade she's been carrying around the whole time, just in case, and stabs Douglas until he's dead.

It's an entertaining story, in my opinion, or maybe a good story for this series... but like I said, the best Silent Hill games try to pare away the context of politics as best they can, replacing it with ostensibly apolitical, pop-psychoanalytic themes of intimacy and its deceits, enabled to varying degrees by the threat of an esoteric, polytheistic Colonial-Era religion that only exists in the West in colonialist and post-colonialist fantasies (and characteristically invokes made-up native traditions).

Heather doesn't become callous because she's a third-wave feminist role model, she becomes callous because she's losing herself to something old and bad, a weird-tales nightmare, a guardian angel who wants to drag her, dead or alive, into a neo-pagan delivery room. The resilience Heather musters from herself, not from the thing nesting in her, comes explicitly from her father's care for her, which the game communicates through his virtuous, Elektra-complex absence, a voice we can't hear on the other side of a phone-call check-in, a faceless corpse suggesting childhood's end, a horse pill inside a teenager's locket. You can't really get rid of politics that way, but Silent Hill 3 really, really tries.
#428
Post rating: ~
i enjoyed disco elysium, the game about the alcoholic cop stumbling around in a post-counter-revolutionary slum

Edited by thirdplace ()

#429
Post rating: +
im playing the vampire the masquerade visual novel

#430
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
#431
Post rating: ~
Apart from occasionally firing up some kind of online game that I can use to hang out with a distant friend, I have not been playing anything much lately. I am looking forward to picking up a couple of PS4 games after xmas, when I will have a little bit of gift money to treat myself with. Probably going to get the new star wars game, and also Control.

In the meantime I am thinking I should fire up the old psp I have lying around and have another crack at Snatcher. I had the mega cd version running and it was pretty fun. Would be nice if there was like a fansub version with japanese voices and english text but I'll take what i can get.
#432
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
#433
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: +
#434
UNUSUALY COOL
Post rating: ~
#435
Post rating: ~
if i really dig snatcher this time round i suppose it means i should give other visual novels a go? because that's basically what it is, apart from the little shooty bits, which tbh aren't very good and feel shoehorned in. it's the cyberpunk setting and vibes that really do it for me. anyone know any other cyberpunk visual novels i should try? don't say va11 ha11a or whatever that's called, the venezuelan fascist game about how child sex trafficking is actually good and cool
#436
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well the Game Awards are in and its a surprising result of 4 awards for a game called Disco Elysium. i havent played it because gaming PCs are bougie but i was pleased to hear they shouted out marx and engels in an acceptance speech. so i looked into it and i was disappointed to learn you not only roleplay as a cop, but worse - sole characters are voiced by members of the "chapo trap house". I boo.
#437
Post rating: +
shame untitled goose game didnt win that award



edit: u roleplay as a GOOSE

Edited by nearlyoctober ()

#438
Post rating: ~
i have the goose game, and it is Good.
#439
Post rating: +

Petrol posted:

well the Game Awards are in and its a surprising result of 4 awards for a game called Disco Elysium. i havent played it because gaming PCs are bougie but i was pleased to hear they shouted out marx and engels in an acceptance speech. so i looked into it and i was disappointed to learn you not only roleplay as a cop, but worse - sole characters are voiced by members of the "chapo trap house". I boo.

you play a cop but he's a total fuckup who everyone hates and who constantly gets his role as a stooge for imperialism and international capital thrown in his face. it's good, def rec'd to anyone who likes old school rpgs like planescape or fallout 1/2, or to anyone who likes thinking about the world materially

#440
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that sounds alright. i was just being funny. might give it a shot when it comes out for the play station.