Charlie Brooker's review of CoD:MW3
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Shhh, Charlie Brooker is a hero and pretty much the best champion of games in the UK media.
Seriously, he writes one of the leading opinion columns in one of the biggest print broadsheets in the world and he decides to do 1000 words on VIDEO GAMES.
The content is almost immaterial - it's the kind of serious attention gaming needs and the guy does it with a lot of love for the hobby and culture.
Gameswipe needs to return.
And the box in the advert deffo contains a dog's severed head.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/23/gaming-makes-hollywood-look-embarrassing
Seriously, he writes one of the leading opinion columns in one of the biggest print broadsheets in the world and he decides to do 1000 words on VIDEO GAMES.
The content is almost immaterial - it's the kind of serious attention gaming needs and the guy does it with a lot of love for the hobby and culture.
Gameswipe needs to return.
And the box in the advert deffo contains a dog's severed head.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/may/23/gaming-makes-hollywood-look-embarrassing
I'm pretty sure this isn't meant to rag on games or offend 'gamers', as Charlie Broker is one himself. I think it's just a mick take of the gruff 'manly-men' stereotype of a lot of videogame characters. In fact, I'd always just assumed that the nickname 'Soap' was supposed to be a gay joke that just never gets brought up in the main story.
And not to mention is one of the biggest influences of Yahtzee and also a genuinely funny guy who loves video games. Check out his documentary on games http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/charlie-brookers-gameswipe/Josh12345 said:
And yeah maybe your right maybe this isn't the guys best piece of work but most of the time he is genuinely insightful and very fair.
You can't actually knock someone out for more than about 30 minutes at most (and that is really pushing it, 5 minutes is enough to seriously fuck someone up) without causing serious brain damage, or at least that is what I read on cracked, so you might as well kill him. I would rather die than become a vegetable.Krion_Vark said:
Any period of time spent unconscious from trauma seriously effects your mental stability. Hence why strokes/epilepsy/etc. can cripple/kill.the spud said:
There is no "safe" way to render someone unconscious. Hence why certain people can't have anaesthesia. (Chloroform can kill you instantly)
But the "silent kill"? (knife to the trachea) Not easy at all. Especially not against an aware opponent.
Its Charlie Brooker who can be summed up with his Gameswipe Tv show that was on the TV. Here he talks about violence in videogames......however he stands up for it. So you need to understand Charlie Brooker.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZABXAfIFByg&feature=related
Charlie is an offical gam reveiwer has been since 90s. He is a Gamer and also put across the perfect points.
Also dont you know!? Charlie Brooker is right about everything! There is a song about it so it must be right!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCvbFRoDBCg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZABXAfIFByg&feature=related
Charlie is an offical gam reveiwer has been since 90s. He is a Gamer and also put across the perfect points.
Also dont you know!? Charlie Brooker is right about everything! There is a song about it so it must be right!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCvbFRoDBCg
Let's be honest here: satire about the "manly macho video game man" is akin to nuking fish in a barrel.NinjaDeathSlap said:
And you thought "Soap" was a gay joke? My guess always was some prison shower reference. Either way: manly manlove was involved.
No, you couldn't. And neither could even the most elite soldiers like the SAS, who don't.Krion_Vark said:
Have you any idea how hard you have to hit someone in the head to knock them out Reliably and for a long time? Any concussion that lasts longer than 30 seconds is life threatening and the force needed to impart that is enough to fracture the skull and cause internal bleeding and STILL at any moment they could just get up and pull the pin on a grenade. There was a case before 9/11 of a crew-member on a cargo plane tried to overpower the pilots by walking up behind them and hitting them in the head with 8lbs steel mallet. He dealt incredible damage with blows that caused massive cranial fractures but failed to knock out either of the pilots or the engineer, in fact they were able to overpower him and they landed the plane. In 9/11 the hijackers used knives. It is NOT easy to knock someone out, impact is not enough. You must JAR the entire head, which is MUCH harder than pressing a knife into their neck while you are trying to be stealthy. I know that sounds horrible, but it's a horrible fact of war and conflict.
Have you ever tried to tie up and gag someone? Someone who is armed, a hardened soldier where one noise could blow your cover.
British Commandos in World War 2 tried the whole knocking out and gagging routine and it lead to absolutely disastrous missions as such methods never bloody well worked. And this was known, the likes of Colonel Fairburn and other contemporaries such as Sykes knew that you needed a knife and you needed to kill and they were eventually listened to. It wasn't a matter of the guards being found and untied but how hard and noisy it was to try to non-lethally and tie up and gag guards without them either:
-wriggling free (when they realise they aren't prepared to kill)
-Alerting before being restrained
-suffocating to death
-making too much noise post restraint
-escaping by getting their legs under them and literally hopping away
Realise, the captured soldiers could either move enough to kick around and make a racket, or were tied up and gagged so tightly they died from suffocation. Compressive asphyxia is very likely from something like being hog tied. Gags do NOT silence people, they only disrupt their speech, they can still blow air over their voice box to scream and yell garbled words, gags only silence people as much as they suffocate them. To totally silence someone... you must totally suffocate them.
Soldiers are trained to subdue sentries by killing because that is what you have to do to reliably silence a human being. That is the cold hard reality learned in War, from the trench raids of the First World War and the Commando raids of WW2 and repeatedly since then.
I don't know why Price and Co were in Sierra Leone but I doubt they were popping out for a pint of milk... or disposing of mime artists as the case of Hot Fuzz. I believe they are on a mission to prevent Billions of people being killed in a Nuclear War, if the necks of a few armed bandits are opposing such a noble cause as saving billions of lives... so give up and go home? We surrender? Lets negotiate with the terrorists? Nobility in cowardice?
And you should not cry for such bandits, the rebels of Sierra Leone have inflicted such evil horrors on their own neighbours, an epidemic of rape, with children being of especially high value. After they took the capital freetown and they left literal piles of bodies in the streets in their rampage.
But Charlie does have a point, that your mission is NOT emphasised. The game fails to give your missions a really emphatic and memorable purpose. It does not tell you who you are fighting, or really press home what for. All that is remembered is the tattling, bitchy fighting and drama. It's World War 3 yet it feels like Days of Our Lives. So all that is left is a Moustache Man stabbing another man to death, you don't REALLY know who or why or for what purpose. Why does he have to stab him? There is a reason but it fails because unless you read lots of history of commando raids you just wouldn't know.
I really liked him - I mean like - I mean... Jesus, I've subscribed to him on Twitter and he's REALLY gotten on my bloody nerves with his crap recently. And I subscribed because of his great shows like Screenwipe and gameswipe especially.Akyho said:
He's such a bullshitter on twitter, it's unbearable.
Maybe he doesn't realise the way he comes across on twitter and on his shows he restrains himself more but on twitter he is like your annoying friend who always sends you inane texts and goes on ridiculous rants where he seems to think he is so funny yet... well maybe his rants just don't work in typed unedited prose.
Hmm, I'm starting to think he's lost it. Or maybe he just need other people to bounce his work off to reign his worse excesses in.
You make a good point, context is often left at the wayside in favour of emphasis on action and combat, usually in a framework which glorifies such actions. The biggest issue video games face as a narrative medium is the need to give more 'bang for your buck' and not to bore the majority of the audience who I have no doubt carry relatively short attention spans. Of course, to do such a thing requires exposition to be reduced to the bare minimum. This is probably why almost all representations of Africa within video games appear derogatory, depicting it as simply a war torn shit hole, because video game story telling isn't allowed the room to breathe and actually tell a realised story amongst the macho gesturing and big explosions.Treblaine said:
As for the entire discussion of realistically despatching enemies silently, and via non lethal means; what is wrong with you people? Why do gamers persist with the application of real world rules to a wholly unrealistic virtual world.
Price is invulnerable is he not? Your character can survive injuries that would kill any normal man. I have lost count of the amount of times you are in a vehicle that is hit by a rocket in a Call of Duty, yet the player character survives. These events are not due to actual narrative elements of 'super soldiers' or god like super heroes like Price. They happen because they help to further the narrative and gameplay in a practical sense. It is because of this I would argue that if the writers at Infinity Ward wanted Price to use non-lethal takedowns, they would, and real life warfare be damned. The reason they don't is a choice as a story teller, which brings us back to the suggestion that these men work under some kind of utilitarian code of ethics. I repeat, it is not because being unconscious in the Call of Duty universe leads to strokes or epilepsy.
Yahtzee has admitted that Brooker is muchly an inspiration of his.The_root_of_all_evil said:
And then Brooker said that he loves Yahtzee and watches his show frequently, and more or less cited him as an influence for Gameswipe.
So I think in this case we'll call it idea sharing, rather than those passages of Zero Punctuation were lodged in his subconscious and he accidentally wrote them down instead of his planned, slightly-more-original opinions. ...not that this review is bad, or even wrong, I just genuinely think the two men have influenced each other so much that they basically write the same stuff now.
If this guy is the best the UK has, then I pity them. He's not funny, and he's not saying anything original. HAW HAW HAW SOLDIERS+MACHISMO=GAY isn't exactly a cutting edge observation; Shakespeare was making jokes at that expense several hundred years ago, and Achilles was crossdressing several thousand years ago.EvilPicnic said:
Orson Welles once said "People sleep peacably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on thier behalf". You wanna know why your average soldier comes across as a dick? Because he has been trained, and conditioned, to hurt people. Its their JOB. Your average person just doesn't understand how it changes someone.
Yes, you can break the rules but for what purpose? Why would the game break the rules to spare child-raping bandits from being killed? Because that is what those "rebels" in Sierra Leone do, they are responsible for an epidemic of child rape. They are extraordinarily violent thugs. This is a WAR GAME, it is supposed to be visceral, violent and intense. It is not a game like Uncharted which is supposed to be a fun treasure hunt with bloodless combat. It is World War bloody Three!PleasantKenobi said:
Price and 141 are Commandos and the combat knife is the defining weapon of the commando, look at the SAS's badge insignia, the original modern specials forces:
It's a dagger. Not a bayonet. Not a utility knife. But a double edged dagger. They have one purpose, for stealthily killing enemy soldiers by slitting their throat. This is the reality and mythos of a game where you play a commando.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairbairn-Sykes_Knife
Commandos don't knock-out their opponents, they don't show any restraint, their approach is unrelenting ferocity. They hit so hard and fast to overwhelm superior numbers. Bonking them on the head and tying them up is a risk they only take for targets they NEED to take alive and as shown with Vasilyev's son is not that easy even with several people working together.
Price is made invulnerable for a purpose of gameplay design, because AI for finding cover is significantly worse than the AI for aiming a gun the result is the game would become infuriatingly hard and you'd have so many random restarts with your NPC ally getting killed all the time. He can be killed in the stealth sections where you blow his cover. Your own health is very low and the rebounding health is a necessity to give you a sense of vulnerability to fire yet not constantly have to search for or use health-kits.
Non-lethal takedowns are implausible. They are for adventure romps like Indiana Jones or Uncharted which are trying to be lighthearted and already pushing plausibility with the treasure hunting and supernatural. The relationships between characters depend on there not being too much violence that would change the tone too much.
It think it is an unreasonable pressure to put on developers to say "well if your character could at the edge of plausibility knock them out then they should" that is censorship. That is in opposition to their artistic vision. Their vision is a hyper-real (that is, "beyond real") depiction of Special Forces and the brutality of war, a key element of that is silently killing with a knife.
Why use guns when they could use tranquilliser darts? Why use grenades when you could use sleeping-gas-bombs? Should the raid on the submarine go more like this:
PS, since it's so popular to complain about Africa ever being shown in a negative light:
Change one word
Think about it. How many games have been set in Europe which show it as a war-torn shithole? All the WWII games, and most recently MW3 that shows Berlin being ripped apart. When did any WWII game stop to show the nice friendly people of Holland or let you stop and visit their pen museums? Most games depict most places in a negative light. Because that creates imperative for narrative and progress.
There are no "Berlin tourism simulator" game but there is a simulator of Tourism in Africa, showing how nice and lovely it is:
So in terms of positive depictions of places in games:
Africa: 1 - Rest of the world: 0
People don't think what they think about Africa or Europe based on video games or movies, they base it on what they hear in the news. Reality. There ARE horrible wars and economic depression in so many parts of Africa while Germany is swimming in money and are actually in trouble for spending too much money at the moment! All you ever hear about in European news is money money money. Africa it is all poverty and war or how "for once this part for now is not at war".
Still on the discussion on non-lethal takedowns: I can't help but get the impression that you are disagreeing with me despite singing from the same sheet.Treblaine said:
My argument, to clarify:
Realism is a bullshit excuse for 'why things happen in video games'. I am agreeing that the primary reason Price doesn't 'bonk' people over the head to subdue them is a narrative choice on the part of the writers. It presents Prices job as a violent one, it suggests that warfare isn't pretty etc etc. I dislike the discussion of video games searching for any semblance of realism beyond the superficial and aesthetic. Almost all video game gameplay, in its very essence, is unrealistic.
As for the misrepresentation of particular parts of the world; I do not bring up Africa some attempt to involve myself in what you identify as a popular debate or stance on the subject. It is because untill you reminded me of 'Africa' the game, I was under the imprerssion that all it served as in video game narratives was a war torn backdrop.
You make a good point about the depiction of Europe in war games, one that is hard to dispute. I use the term Africa to not only refer to the continent and its countries, but its peoples and cultures. It isn't just the environment which creates representations of social or national identity, it is the people too. Africa is rarely drawn upon for positive cultural reference. Europe, and the west, have plenty of video games to pick from in which, despite a conflict usually forming the central narrative hook, the environment and people are portrayed in all kinds of different ways.
And to risk steering an already off topic conversation even further I have to point out, for the sake of clarity,that I of course note that Africa is not the only under or misrepresented area of the world. It just seems the most apparent in recent years. I guess thigns like this aren't dissimilar to the large ammount of critical and academic material dealing with the negative representation of 'the Orien't and 'the Arab' in twentieth century cinema.
I absolutely adore Mr. Brooker and his trollish way of being right all the time.
Newswipe, Gameswipe, etc were class (to coin a British phrase) and I say a little prayer each time I go to bed that he will do more.
Newswipe, Gameswipe, etc were class (to coin a British phrase) and I say a little prayer each time I go to bed that he will do more.
While that was certainly pretty funny, I don't think it was a very accurate portrayal of MW3.
Although... his points about over compensating on the machismo due to gaming itself being kinda nerdy were interesting.
Although... his points about over compensating on the machismo due to gaming itself being kinda nerdy were interesting.