I don’t know if i agree with this. You put glass in a guy’s mouth and punch it as an interrogation technique in the Kowloon level. So much of the series fingers America as the source of these problems, not the victim, and this is the case in every black ops game. Hell, the entire plot of 2 is because Mason threatens a guy he didn’t need to and then shoots him in the head and then later explodes his sister with a grenade.
The CoD hoorah sub series is Every Game By Infinity Ward. Not black ops.
It’s less that they’re glossing over America Bad and more that they’re carelessly using these events as set dressing…like, there’s one level in Cuba, where the Bay of Pigs is depicted as total disaster and you participate in a failed extralegal attempt to kill Castro which ends with you getting owned by the Cuban army. Nowhere does the game pretend like the Bay of Pigs was cool, legal, a good idea, etc. There’s three Vietnam levels and the most egregious one is probably Victor Charlie, which does steal imagery from a movie, but not blindly…recreating the russian roulette scene from The Deer Hunter is pretty intentional. It’s also just as bad as it is in that movie, but like there was clearly thought involved. imo the really awful stuff with the Vietnam sections besides that specific section is all the NVA troops having southern accents and mostly speaking in complete gibberish. The big problem with Call of Duty has always been historical revisionism which those levels ironically largely avoid. I don’t think anyone would be happy if Call of Duty Black Ops had a My Lai massacre level.
has nothing to do with the plot of Black Ops. maybe you could say that about, like, Cold War with its overt mkultra plot and you being an enemy guy subverted to work for the Americans, but it’s also a game where America spitefully put nukes under every major european city as a contingency plan to teach communists a lesson (???) soooo i wouldnt really say its pro america… if anything the closest the game has to this is Reznov and Petrenko being betrayed by the evil NKVD man who doesn’t respect that Real Soviet Patriots fought and bled at the Battle of Berlin. What you’ve described is actually the plot of Black Ops 6, where the two factions are rogue black operators who must save the CIA from itself and an evil shadow faction inside the CIA.
Also, in black ops 1 the plot twist also happens well before the underwater numbers station facility at the end
Ah, well I disagree with a lot of this from the context of how it’s all presented in the game, but it’s clear we’re never going to come to an agreement on this so I’m going to stop engaging now. This isn’t going to get us anywhere.
need more people to see the unhinged parody of this scene in criterion collection film eastern condors…
I made it past the part in Armored Core 1 where a guy tries to kill you by locking you in a room with an explodable wall. I’m at about 85% mission success rate and 44% completion. My mission success rate went down because I stood too close to a plane when it blew up. All the other failures are like that too. I blew up a chemical truck by accident. I left an area without finding all the objectives. The only one of consequence was I got destroyed by the AC Valkyrie during a terrorism mission. It’s refreshing how playable this is on a 3DS. Seems to run down the battery really quickly though.
joyce godenzi is so baller in that movie…
That’s not a critique. That’s a really cool and dark and gritty thing to do. This is like saying NCIS is critical of American imperialism because Gibbs does extrajudicial killings.
I wasn’t using it as an example of “critique”, but an example of how Black Ops is not “glossing over what America was doing”. Punching someone so glass shatters in their mouth is pretty objectively not glossing things over!
But also: Is it? Even when I played it back in the day I was like “uhhh what the fuck, this is obviously extremely psychotic” and the game treats it as unnecessary (since the guy you do it too is not ideologically opposed to you, he’s just some scientist guy, and he immediately helps you which always felt very off to me given how brutal you were directly preceding lol) as I recall. Does the game need to flash “DO NOT DO THIS AS IT IS EVIL” in text on the screen?
If someone punched my mouth full of glass I’d probably just pass out and be useless, personally. But I’m not John Blackopscivilian.
To my knowledge, the “dark and gritty men do extralegal murders that the game considers fully justified” aspect of Call of Duty is mostly stuff like Task Force 41. Black Ops as a whole is very much obsessed with the cycle of repeating violence as a result of black ops teams with no oversight. It’s the outright thesis of the first three games and the implied thesis of the fourth (with the whole clone plot).
I think “can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs” definitely constitutes glossing over.
That you so often get valuable and reliable intel from torture is a justification in itself, even while it pretends to wonder if such cool brutality is justified.
The torture scenes in the old cod games are funny because there isnt even the neocon pretense of “actionable intel” in most of them, they are largely there for the players benefit or to make them upset that a celebrity voice actor is about to be killed.
The actual problem with the kowloon level is it makes no fucking sense because you do a random torture qte almost as if to wake you from your gaming slumber where they learn basically nothing and then spend the rest of the level fighting side by side with the guy like someone else took over designing the level and forgot what happens at the beginning. It’s too incoherent to be critique or endorsement.
I think when a game’s message is incoherent then it’s a tacit approval. like for people with a (correct) critical opinion of the US, they can interpret it through their worldview. and for players who are more hoorah, they can “fuck yeah that’s cool as hell”. which is the dominant position
well, gamers aren’t the most rigourous critics. so, might help!
The entire mediascape of Bush era America was “torture, how can we justify it?” in every tv show, movie, video game, etc. The whole CoD franchise is just the lingering hangover of that. Sometimes something is just an uncritical expression of american sadism. You do not have to hand it to the video games funded by the DoD and literally written by a military industrial complex ghoul
“When we have a new product that has elements that we’re not sure how people will respond to, what do we do as a corporation?” he asked. “We market it as much as we can — we do all the things we can to essentially brainwash people into liking it before it actually comes out. I’d like to see the government doing this too.”
the director of codblops 2:
“I would like to see more collaboration with the military and game developers,”
So I read an explainer of what goes on in Black Ops III because I decided to move on from actually playing it, and okay, that’s better than I originally gave it credit for.
I was reading exiles the other day and couldn’t stop thinking about how tony bedard retired from writing extremely mid comic books so he could work exclusively on the new modern warfare trilogy
Keep thinking about Astro Boy Omega Factor lately (missing Treasure, GBA nostalgia, my copy of the game is on my desk for some reason) so I decided to play it on the 40XXV.
Fuck! I am either too old (entirely possible) or I maybe only ever beat the game on Easy back in the day (entirely likely). Died several times in the first level alone, and the weird beetle robot boss’s final phase, where it does the MK3 Sheeva jump over and over and you only have a second to jump and land a punch on it after dodging, kept pissing my off.
I know I beat this game back when…I think. Maybe I should charge my DS or something and see if my save is still on my cart.
i think i have always looked at video games as a whole bunch of different interesting speculative perspectives on ways one might go about playing with dollies
yeah i think the kind of like, inherent power fantasy of being the entity that pushes all of the events forward (because the player is the one Shooting The Hinges) always moves things toward that tacit approval…it’s kind of like truffaut’s thing of every war movie ending up pro-war at the end, except in this case it’s not just the cinematic spectacle of the whole thing but also the fact that the game doesn’t really happen (in blops case) unless the player participates
not to say these games can’t say interesting things accidentally but the affect-ual (is that a word? lmao) power of the way the games are presented usually overrides whatever interesting things are being said in them. it’s the same as the chiptune problem, except for imperialism! yay
Funnily enough my very strong impression at the time was that MW1 and 2 were the accidentally self-critical games and Blops was distinguished by being unadulterated back to front fascist jingoism but I haven’t played any of them recently enough to defend these assertions, and I’m not about to play them again to do it now. Just interesting that I seem to have had the polar opposite of the iguferon-tegiminis interpretation
MW2 is almost beat for best what tigress described with heroic soldiers being betrayed by the deep state or w/e lol. Tegiminis definitely thinks black ops is more critical of America than I do, I just don’t think that series goes out of its way to make America sound cool, which was my initial complaint, I didnt think the campaign was being described well… i do agree with him that the way black ops was being described sounds more like modern warfare … if you want to talk about taking cold war jingoism seriously MW2 has the US get invaded by Russia and you have to defend a literal burger restaurant from the slavic hordes in a level literally named after Red Dawn lol. I don’t think the treyarch games are woke or whatever by any stretch but at least in the Xbox 360 days they were less insanely offensive than the infinity ward games
I mean… yeah, exactly.
