Poll: Why is "No Russian" so bad?

[Daedalus1942]

me, being the "very good karma" gamer i am, played the level just fine without shooting any civilians

i only quit when they forced me to kill the cops...the hardworking keepers of peace...

they shoundnt have made police officers enemies in my opinion...thats why i dont like no russian

It's only as bad as you make it to be. You can just go through the whole level without shooting your gun, not kill anyone and just watch the slaughter. It was made for the player to hate the terrorists on a personal level, however i also do think that it was created to get more media attention then god.

Both of them are true, we all know it.

Plus you can, you know, skip the damned mission and the game warns you twice that its disturbing content.

How on Earth did you manage that? I tried doing that (out of curiousity) and they called me a coward, then killed me.

 

[Cmwissy]

Really? I guess that was the intent, to show how awful terrorism really is. However, the amazement wore off after the first three seconds of opened fire. I was more intent on making sure people were dead, like the stragglers on the floor.

That was just how you interpreted it.

it's supposed to be a subjective thing; it just... backfired.

 

[Sethzard]

It isn't people just overreact.

 

[Daedalus1942]

i was playing Mortal Kombat Deception the other day. i punched an old woman in the face and stole her koins. That game got very little flack (cept for Fatalities). The reason it was such an outrage is because they drew attention to it, to get more sales i guess. Also it was really unexpected of "the most anticipated game of the year".

"Most anticipated game of the year"... See? now that in itself really pisses me off. There are far superiour games being released and Modern Warfare 2 is literally them re-releasing Cod4 with a few very minor tweaks.

 

[USSR]

I don't know. I surprised people have made a huge deal out of this, but in Assassins Creed 2 when you..<spoiler=Small spoiler>Assassinate the pope..

..nobody says much.

 

[Darktau]

Funny thing is that there was a thread made going over why people could think no russian was good or bad.

 

[Joe Matsuda]

You can just go through the whole level without shooting your gun, not kill anyone

how?

what about the police?

the other terrorists couldnt kill them when it got to the part with the riot shields...or could they???

 

[Jamienra]

i was playing Mortal Kombat Deception the other day. i punched an old woman in the face and stole her koins. That game got very little flack (cept for Fatalities). The reason it was such an outrage is because they drew attention to it, to get more sales i guess. Also it was really unexpected of "the most anticipated game of the year".

"Most anticipated game of the year"... See? now that in itself really pisses me off. There are far superiour games being released and Modern Warfare 2 is literally them re-releasing Cod4 with a few very minor tweaks.

I agree. Thats why i used quotation marks.

 

[DoW Lowen]

I don't know. I surprised people have made a huge deal out of this, but in Assassins Creed 2 when you..<spoiler=Small spoiler>Assassinate the pope..

..nobody says much.

That never happened...

 

[Scumpernickle]

I don't think its that bad, its everyone claiming that children that play this level will become a Russian terrorist that mows down the innocent with huge machinge guns.

I don't like it because you walk through most of the level. Its frustrating.

 

[Daedalus1942]

i was playing Mortal Kombat Deception the other day. i punched an old woman in the face and stole her koins. That game got very little flack (cept for Fatalities). The reason it was such an outrage is because they drew attention to it, to get more sales i guess. Also it was really unexpected of "the most anticipated game of the year".

"Most anticipated game of the year"... See? now that in itself really pisses me off. There are far superiour games being released and Modern Warfare 2 is literally them re-releasing Cod4 with a few very minor tweaks.

I agree. Thats why i used quotation marks.

Demon's souls defecates all over Modern warfare 2, and then rips off Soap McTavish's head and proceeds to urinate down his neck.

 

[Lord Freya]

It's ridiculously gratuitous and has little importance to the plot, in the end. It's clear that Infinity Ward shoved it in there purely to generate controversy and publicity. That's why it's so offensive. It's all about context.

I completely disagree. If we didn't have the "No Russian" level then the war between America and Russia would have never happened, and therefore most of the last half of the game wouldn't have even happened.

also when I read about the level online before the game came out, I thought it sounded great and I loved the "message." But once I actually played the level I just had fun killing all the business men and women trying to crawl away. If IW had truly wanted shock value, there would have been children or babies. Probably not that you killed, but you see die.

 

[USSR]

That never happened...

<spoiler=Again>Well, I guess it's more of a yes and no.


You do kill him, via an assassination quick-kill. However, at the time both Ezio and the Pope (Borgia) possess a Piece of Eden. The Pope is immediately resurrected via his Piece of Eden, the Papal Staff, at which point stage one of the final boss fight begins.

Stage two of the fight leads you downstairs where Ezio and Borgia have one last fight, this time unarmed. At the end of the fistfight, Ezio tells Borgia he will not kill him, and Borgia is left alive.

So yes, you kill him the first time, but he resurrects, and no, you allow him to live the second time.

 

[Daedalus1942]

I don't know. I surprised people have made a huge deal out of this, but in Assassins Creed 2 when you..<spoiler=Small spoiler>Assassinate the pope..

..nobody says much.

That never happened...

Urm... yes it did. It's the final freaking mission! But he didn't do it for religious reasons, he did it to gain acess to the vault.

 

[Supreme Unleaded]

You can just go through the whole level without shooting your gun, not kill anyone

how?

what about the police?

the other terrorists couldnt kill them when it got to the part with the riot shields...or could they???

me, being the "very good karma" gamer i am, played the level just fine without shooting any civilians

i only quit when they forced me to kill the cops...the hardworking keepers of peace...

they shoundnt have made police officers enemies in my opinion...thats why i dont like no russian

It's only as bad as you make it to be. You can just go through the whole level without shooting your gun, not kill anyone and just watch the slaughter. It was made for the player to hate the terrorists on a personal level, however i also do think that it was created to get more media attention then god.

Both of them are true, we all know it.

Plus you can, you know, skip the damned mission and the game warns you twice that its disturbing content.

How on Earth did you manage that? I tried doing that (out of curiousity) and they called me a coward, then killed me.

Oh, um, i kinda just assumed that you shot back when bullets started flying at you, okay, you have to kill the police to get throught the mission, but you don't have to kill the civi's. Sorry bought not thinking about that. I'll edit it out.

 

[Therumancer]

It's because of the ridiculous paranoia regarding terrorism and the GWOT.

In GTA you're just a common criminal doing stuff you see in the movies. But 9/11 was real,Madrid was real,London was real, Bombay was real. Troops are in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I guess an analogy would be if you made a game where you play a guy overthrowing a government in a communist revolution during the 1950s.

That and 24/7 cable news cycles need something to briefly mention and get old people and puritans shocked about.

Well, I think it's largely political. Understand right now that we're on a major censorship kick, not just in the US but overseas as well. Anything that can be used by the goverment to excuse getting their fingers into the right to censor free speech is being embraced. If this incident can be turned into a big deal, it adds fuel to the flame for the goverment being given the power to protect the people from such offensive material. This, cries of racism over RE5, etc... all part of a general trend, enough hits over a wide enough area and eventually the political establishment figures people will be lining up screaming "take our freedom, please!"

Understand that back during the free trade riots, Rockstar released the game "State Of Emergency" which was unashamedly based on those events. Nobody really batted much of an eye, what criticisms that were made were fairly low key, and arguably that was probably in worse taste overall than the MW2 thing is. It's just that there wasn't a large scale political crusade on the subject.


Also understand that the MW2 thing hits a couple of sensitive issues. The terrorist aspects are of course one of them, but the other is of course what it says about the "peace at any price" movement some people are pushing. Right now one of the big issues being pushed is that it's wrong to target civilians, despite the fact that we're increasingly learning that you can't really achieve anything without doing so. The moral standards established after World War II to try and prevent such slaughters from happening again (we're not talking about the Jews here either, that's a seperate issue) rapidly failing in the face of reality.

Right now people freak out at cynics like me when I talk about the need for attacking cultures themselves and such. Some are simply worried that by portraying civilians being killed or "sacrificed" for the greater good in games and such it's going to gradually lead to exactly the kind of mentality that I espouse, not now, but down the road.

See, people talk about how the guy your playing is NOT a Terrorist but is a CIA operative infiltrating terrorists, doing bad things as part of his cover. Even if you don't kill anyone in the sequence, you STILL have a bunch of civilians being sacrificed for the greater good. So there is not only the terrorist aspect, but also the aspect of civilians being portayed as expendable before bigger goals.

You start by showing good people being sacrificed, and then later you figure if we're paying this "price" in games, it becomes more palatable if the protaganist in a game down the line say decides to fight in a realistic if immoral fashion and starts killing off enemy civilians, and uses terrorism and realistic gueriella warfare to destabilize the infrastructure of the bad guys.

Oh granted, none of this is exactly "new" to an extent. I mean just about everything I mention has already appeared in a game somewhere. Heck, back on the NES/SNES there was a game called "Platoon" (loosely based on the movie) where you wound up basically killing off civilians armed with farm tools hiding in tunnels under their village. Of course the game was badly broken and chances are you'd die horribly, but the spirit of the thing was obvious and it was attempting to portray 'nam in a pseudo-realistic light since that is what it was like at times.

Like what I'm saying or not, this is simply how I see things, and how the politics behind all of this seem to be. MW 2's scene has managed to basically stomp on two nerves right at the time there is a political crusade going on. Of course I suspect that was part of the idea since it generated MASSIVE hype for the game.

 

[Rshady]

I think those using the violence GTA etc as a comparison are missing the point. The context in which the No Russian level is set makes it a much more harrowing experience then other games. I don't think it should have caused so much controversy though. I feel the whole thing was handled very well and the game makes it very clear that what happens within the level isn't condonable.

 

[Daedalus1942]

You can just go through the whole level without shooting your gun, not kill anyone

how?

what about the police?

the other terrorists couldnt kill them when it got to the part with the riot shields...or could they???

me, being the "very good karma" gamer i am, played the level just fine without shooting any civilians

i only quit when they forced me to kill the cops...the hardworking keepers of peace...

they shoundnt have made police officers enemies in my opinion...thats why i dont like no russian

It's only as bad as you make it to be. You can just go through the whole level without shooting your gun, not kill anyone and just watch the slaughter. It was made for the player to hate the terrorists on a personal level, however i also do think that it was created to get more media attention then god.

Both of them are true, we all know it.

Plus you can, you know, skip the damned mission and the game warns you twice that its disturbing content.

How on Earth did you manage that? I tried doing that (out of curiousity) and they called me a coward, then killed me.

Oh, um, i kinda just assumed that you shot back when bullets started flying at you, okay, you have to kill the police to get throught the mission, but you don't have to kill the civi's. Sorry bought not thinking about that. I'll edit it out.

I shot the cops, but when I wouldn't shoot any civillians, I was called a coward. Also what ticks me off, is the way that level ends. You could die like maybe a few metres away from the van and you have to restart the level, but if you reach the van the plot progresses and you can continue the game. Does the few metres really matter?
The outcomes remains the same.

 

[ReincarnatedFTP]

It's because of the ridiculous paranoia regarding terrorism and the GWOT.

In GTA you're just a common criminal doing stuff you see in the movies. But 9/11 was real,Madrid was real,London was real, Bombay was real. Troops are in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I guess an analogy would be if you made a game where you play a guy overthrowing a government in a communist revolution during the 1950s.

That and 24/7 cable news cycles need something to briefly mention and get old people and puritans shocked about.

Well, I think it's largely political. Understand right now that we're on a major censorship kick, not just in the US but overseas as well. Anything that can be used by the goverment to excuse getting their fingers into the right to censor free speech is being embraced. If this incident can be turned into a big deal, it adds fuel to the flame for the goverment being given the power to protect the people from such offensive material. This, cries of racism over RE5, etc... all part of a general trend, enough hits over a wide enough area and eventually the political establishment figures people will be lining up screaming "take our freedom, please!"

Understand that back during the free trade riots, Rockstar released the game "State Of Emergency" which was unashamedly based on those events. Nobody really batted much of an eye, what criticisms that were made were fairly low key, and arguably that was probably in worse taste overall than the MW2 thing is. It's just that there wasn't a large scale political crusade on the subject.


Also understand that the MW2 thing hits a couple of sensitive issues. The terrorist aspects are of course one of them, but the other is of course what it says about the "peace at any price" movement some people are pushing. Right now one of the big issues being pushed is that it's wrong to target civilians, despite the fact that we're increasingly learning that you can't really achieve anything without doing so. The moral standards established after World War II to try and prevent such slaughters from happening again (we're not talking about the Jews here either, that's a seperate issue) rapidly failing in the face of reality.

Right now people freak out at cynics like me when I talk about the need for attacking cultures themselves and such. Some are simply worried that by portraying civilians being killed or "sacrificed" for the greater good in games and such it's going to gradually lead to exactly the kind of mentality that I espouse, not now, but down the road.

See, people talk about how the guy your playing is NOT a Terrorist but is a CIA operative infiltrating terrorists, doing bad things as part of his cover. Even if you don't kill anyone in the sequence, you STILL have a bunch of civilians being sacrificed for the greater good. So there is not only the terrorist aspect, but also the aspect of civilians being portayed as expendable before bigger goals.

You start by showing good people being sacrificed, and then later you figure if we're paying this "price" in games, it becomes more palatable if the protaganist in a game down the line say decides to fight in a realistic if immoral fashion and starts killing off enemy civilians, and uses terrorism and realistic gueriella warfare to destabilize the infrastructure of the bad guys.

Oh granted, none of this is exactly "new" to an extent. I mean just about everything I mention has already appeared in a game somewhere. Heck, back on the NES/SNES there was a game called "Platoon" (loosely based on the movie) where you wound up basically killing off civilians armed with farm tools hiding in tunnels under their village. Of course the game was badly broken and chances are you'd die horribly, but the spirit of the thing was obvious and it was attempting to portray 'nam in a pseudo-realistic light since that is what it was like at times.

Like what I'm saying or not, this is simply how I see things, and how the politics behind all of this seem to be. MW 2's scene has managed to basically stomp on two nerves right at the time there is a political crusade going on. Of course I suspect that was part of the idea since it generated MASSIVE hype for the game.

Thanks for the insight.

And damn, I didn't now they made a game based on the Battle For Seattle.