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
its crazy to me to act like the guys who made a game during the iraq war where you invade a country geographically located in iraq that actually turns out to have wmds and that insanely masturbatory ac-130 level just stumbled into making critical games about america and war while the guys who intentionally put subtext along those lines in their games are somehow the jingoist thoughtless ones. maybe the problem is that call of duty is a black box where you can read whatever you want into it
the last one I played all the way through was WW2 and that’s sorta like my last marvel movie being “Age of Ultron” . I think Pops Ghostly has more gameplay in it
that one was spectacularly bad in a like what the fuck are you doing kind of way with the ghost cowboy and whatnot but then the epic way it trivializes the Holocaust officially drove me insane
ive never really been a fan of call of duty, ive always looked down on it, and like if you really wanna double down on those smug feelings of ‘this is the worst shit ever’ then call of duty ww2 is the game for you (its the only one ive played besides looking at sweaty meloni for 15 minutes)
I never hear anyone talk about this so i am going to explain the problem with cod ww2’s portrayal of the holocaust actually. This was made by a 3rd, even more incompetent group of developers.
So your main character is haunted by his ghost cowboy brother because he like let him die during a hunting trip because child main character COULDN’T TAKE THE SHOT and the way this character arc is resolved is by you going to a concentration camp to look for your Jewish friend, who has been captured. For some reason, they base the next series of events on a real guy who was infinitely more heroic than anything portrayed in the game:
On their first day in Stalag IX-A, January 27, 1945—as Germany’s defeat was clearly approaching—Commandant Siegmann ordered Edmonds to tell only the Jewish-American soldiers to present themselves at the next morning’s assembly so they could be separated from the other prisoners.
Instead, Edmonds ordered all 1,275 POWs to assemble outside their barracks. The German commandant rushed up to Edmonds in a fury, placed his pistol against Edmonds’s head and demanded that he identify the Jewish soldiers under his command. Instead, Edmonds responded, “We are all Jews here,” and told the commandant that if he wanted to shoot the Jews he would have to shoot all of the prisoners. He then warned the commandant that if he harmed any of Edmonds’ men, the commandant would be prosecuted for war crimes after the conflict ended—since the Geneva Conventions required prisoners to give only their name, rank, and serial number; religion was not required. The commandant backed down. Edmonds’ actions are credited with saving up to 300 Jewish-American soldiers from possible death.
So what happens in the game? Oh uh your squadmate tells a Nazi FUCK YOU and then they shoot some other Jewish soldiers, and your main character’s traumatic childhood is resolved by you shooting a Nazi war criminal before he can execute your friend while ghost cowboy’s voice tells you to take the shot. The guy you’re shooting is based on a real Nazi, who in reality was recruited by the Allies irl to fight the Soviets and never had to face any consequences for running a concentration camp. They made a game where the Holocaust is a platform to resolve your personal trauma and it bastardizes the story of a real guy who actually did something to save some people. Really nice.
Some Call of Duty moments that live in my memory forever:
MW2’s No Russian, just the absolute most vile level in a shooter, all shock value no redeeming qualities.
Honestly just all of MW2, it’s a really obnoxiously evil game and on top of that it doubles down on killing the protagonist every few chapters which is cringe and stupid.
BO2’s blowing up Menendez’s disabled sister with a grenade, shown as a “whoopsie we thought he was in the room too!” moment. This is at least depicted as unequivocally evil and unforgivable and also you get a fun sequence as Menendez where you run around in rage mode gibbing americans with a shotgun.
Ghosts explaining how your buddy turned against America as “he was converted through jungle tortures and toxins by those Brazilian savages”
Advanced Warfare “there’s a great junior high just down the road”. You don’t say, Kevin Spacey?
Infinite Warfare having a moment right before the plot kicks off where Brian Bloom’s self-insert openly fantasizes about how cool it would be if the military just ran the world, shortly before the antagonist with flimsy motivations shows up and orbital bombards the city.
Infinite Warfare’s ending level where each character has to die in increasingly contrived ways to fulfill the mission
MW:Remake’s level where you’re a literal child being chased around by a burly Russian man threatening to rape you
MW:Remake rewriting history so the highway of Death was perpetrated by the Russians
All of the most shockingly negative things about Call of Duty that I remember come from Infinity Ward and specifically Brian Bloom, the hackfraud that he is.
Modern Warfare 1 was the only time I was ever at all interested in the series and I thought it was very smartly done in a way that was obviously fragile and could easily have fallen off afterwards. I honestly thought this was a more common experience
Fucked up that you mentioned infinite warfare but not the hilariously tawdry final level where solemn music plays the entire time as your entire supporting cast sacrifices themselves one after another in increasingly violent ways so you can finish the game by killing yourself as well
When the original mw3 came out my dad ran upstairs to get me because he wanted to show me the cutscene where you play as the child on vacation in Paris when the biological weapon goes off and obliterates you lmfao. He was so excited.
Whats really funny is the COD campaigns are incredibly expensive to make and take multiple AAA studios but have to be in the game in order to players to feel the titles have value, even if a fraction of them actually play and complete the campaign.
