HITMAN™

So, I got 2 and I just played the Miami racetrack level. It’s a bit overwhelming at first. It’s such a huge area! I followed the mission stories, as the game advised me to. That helped a lot, but it felt weird to be so on-rails in a game like this. I suppose it’s really just so you can familiarize yourself with the level, and then go hog wild once you basically know your way around.

The game’s got a great sense of humor. I loved the moment in Miami when you get a demonstration of military killbots from a war profiteer, and then you feed a photo of the dude into one of the robots and it shoots him.

I really like the ways the game encourages exploration and weird maneuvers. It’s very cool how you can unlock new starting locations and items and stuff as you go, so later runs at a level provide very different possibilities. I love that you can always pause and see a list of the level’s missions, so you can on-the-fly adjust and start pursuing a different mission when circumstances change.

Austin Walker said on the Waypoint podcast that this game’s final level is “ripped from the headlines” and shows that the developers have been “radicalized… in a good way.” This has me very intrigued.

one of the nice things about the hitman games is they’re about the satisfaction of sneaking into the fortresses of the rich and bringing justice to untouchable people, and these reboots are literally about a cabal of ceos that run the world

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Actually, that’s something that feels forced to me. That they’re rich assholes should be plenty enough, the whole cabal thing seems like a poor attempt to place you in morally more correct ground by saving the world instead of just being a, well, hitman.

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you’re not wrong but when people take a western game and immediately look for suffragettes to punch and upload to youtube I think maybe nerds aren’t responsible enough for the actual murder simulator to be morally ambigious and need to be beat over the head with the concept of jeff bezos being a war criminal or whatnot

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Yeah I want all of my killing games to be barely coy left-wing power fantasies at this point.

Even in Destiny I’m like wow they sure unthinkingly reproduced neocon ideology complete with sci-fi 9/11

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Right, the ambient ideology of violence in video games has always been childishly simple right-wing power fantasy. An adolescently simple left-wing power fantasy is an enormous step up in comparison.

At this point, if I’m going to be dropping dudes left and right, I feel I’d better be punching up and not down.

I think the main disagreement I have is that I’d rather stuff weren’t so heavy-handed in the first place; no one’s left-wing power fantasy is as much fun as Wolfenstein, so I’d really rather just have fewer power fantasies rather than trying to equalize the stupid

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A true stupid liberal power fantasy would be about going Manhunt on whiteys in gated communities because that’s where they live. Queer guerilla combat in Wisconsin, stringing up cops and stomping suits. When they make a game like that somebody PM me and I’ll fund it myself

Always pissed me off about Liberal Crime Squad - it tries to pretend it’s apolitical (???) when my impression is it’s obviously coming from a bootlick who couldn’t chin up out of his dogwhistle. Fucking Dwarf Fortress dweebs ought to have this follow them around. Especially since they live off handouts to tell one billion stories where goblins suck up all the resources on the earth and die.

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Hitman is in large part about glamorizing the lifestyle of the rich, so I’m dubious about how left-wing it is at all. Reminds me of when folks argued for a while that Modern Warfare was anti-war.

agreed – I don’t think either is really effective as a political work for how many ways they theoretically undermine themselves, I think people actually just mean to praise them for being reasonably aware of their real-world subject matter to the point where they can accurately reflect it and then make it seem more interesting or pointed than it is in reality, because even that is rare in big videogames

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Right, they’re sensitive enough to nuance that people with different politics can read their own preexisting position in them, much like people observe capitalism and war in real life and come out with different ideas about them.

Despite that, I think they both ultimately cut towards the right because the emotional emphasis is on the glory of wealth and warfare respectively, and glory has a way of absorbing and paradoxically getting strengthened by its negative aspects. The only way to make a left-wing piece on wealth is to center the poor, and on war is to center civilians.

My position isn’t really that Modern Warfare is “anti-war” so much as it’s gonzo. It’s as anti-war as Three Kings, say. Not Come And See.

I think this might actually work for The Guardian newspaper too lol

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Hahaha

ELUSIVE TARGET: MARINA HYDE

a tie-in too good for this world because only five people are in its target audience

uh yes Agent 47 this person is on our hit list because their bake off live blog was lazy and derivative

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rare melee weapon: Salman Rushdie’s Booker Prize

there’s a cheat code that lets you disguise yourself as Julian Barnes which works perfectly in every level

every interstitial cutscene is Rusbridger telling an unintelligible anecdote about Martin Amis

no one else has one of these huh

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you’re really on tonight

your cold is either much better or much worse

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while I’ve been bumpass sick I’ve just been replaying the original levels, unlocking some items. I only just now played miami and was able to suit only silent assassin it the first time. I really like when levels lock out starting equipment until a certain mastery level. I like that the race actually comes to an end too. and that the sniper assassin level is a 15 minute section of an ongoing wedding. that’s good that they seem to be moving in that direction more, the levels in 1 felt a little static until you came and moved things along. the marrakesh level was disappointing cause that protest never actually turns into a riot