Yager's Spec Ops: The Line

[feelthedarkness]

I bought this after that great Bissell article. This is the first cover based shooter I've played since Gears of War 1, and I've definitely been enjoying it. With shorter, modern games I find they're a lot more fun on the harder difficulty levels. It helps build a sort of feedback to the sense of urgency their trying to builds. Also, I find I'm more likely to just dismiss something if I'm sleepwalking through it.

[youmeyou]

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The crowd scene gets mentioned all the time. I think it's absolutely one of the most important scenes in the game. I ended up smashing a dude in the face with my rifle butt, because it didn't occur to me to fire my rifle in the air and he wouldn't let me leave the area. Also I made the decision to try and shoot my way out of that 'kill the solder or the escapee' situation, and am curious to see what else could have come out of that situation.

I think the phosphorous scene was probably a testing fuck up. I'm surprised it didn't come up, or if the writer is trying to gloss over a cut corner. Personally, I didn't realize they were civilians. Well, I had a split second of doubt (why are all those soldiers standing clumped together) but I had already launched the volley. The game drew me into the blood lust/hi score-seeking fugue that often comes with ac130 associated gameplay and it was really really effective at making me think about what just went down. (In a way that Modern Warfare never tried to do) Now, this is obviously totally ruined if you recognized they were civilians. So I get why the scene wouldn't work for you if you realized they were civs and couldn't *not* fire on them. If anything the designers should have masked that better. There's no point in telegraphing it if you don't give the player the option to back out. Then again, it works better when you *almost* notice something is off but shoot anyway 'cus that's what's expected in a video game and the previously mentioned shooter bloodlust.

[Korax]

  On 7/24/2012 at 10:54 PM, youmeyou said:

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The crowd scene gets mentioned all the time. I think it's absolutely one of the most important scenes in the game. I ended up smashing a dude in the face with my rifle butt, because it didn't occur to me to fire my rifle in the air and he wouldn't let me leave the area. Also I made the decision to try and shoot my way out of that 'kill the solder or the escapee' situation, and am curious to see what else could have come out of that situation.

I just might not be paying enough attention, but I haven't heard anyone else talk about it at all. It's been baffling to me.

[youmeyou]

I think it's talked about more in podcasts which are more free to spoil content than online game reviews, as it's considered a spoiler to those who haven't played.

[youmeyou]

Just watched the campster critique of Spec Ops. Kind of interesting as it comes from the angle of wondering whether the writers of the game are actually criticizing the players for choosing to even buy the game in the first place. Which is pretty out there, needless to say.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=wlBrenhzMZI

[feelthedarkness]

I think the criticism is not so literally about their game, but the modern warfare military FPS glorification. I don't think they want people to avoid their game as much as ask people to look at their desires. When the Spec Ops bumper says "do you feel like a hero." They're not just talking about the character, but the player's motivation to be the war hero.

[youmeyou]

It's true, the writers aren't necessarily mocking you for buying their game. But if you take what they're admonishing you for to its logical conclusion you certainly wouldn't buy anything else from them, at least if it was a military styled FPS. Because the point has been made. The point is that current games that have you kill lots and lots of people in the service of storytelling offer a conflicted narrative that paints you as a "hero" who murders lots and lots of people.

Well then maybe the lead writer's next game is going to something totally different that will totally blow our minds. That's my optimistic viewpoint for today.

[OJR]

This game annoyed the hell out of me. It was often Not Fun.

It was also brilliant, and I'm glad I put my money on it. I have a hard time reconciling it though. So many aspects of the narrative and delivery are so beautifully and deliberately brutal and unpleasant it made me wonder if the slightly lacklustre gameplay wasn't completely intentional too. Maybe I'm giving them too much credit.

What really struck me was some of the little design choices that all seemed to be there to engineer a sense of frustrated despair. The checkpointing was generous, but always left you just before some hairy firefight. It seems to know you're going to die a lot, giving you a little more ammo each time you reload let you get a little bit further, but then you would still die. Then it pulls a Capcom and asks you politely lf you want to make it easier. That's such a backhanded feature, allowing you to continue deeper into the spiralling madness by admitting you're not good enough to keep going on Normal and take the cowards way out.

"Man. You aren't doing very well. We can make your morally dubious slaughter of your fellow countrymen easier for you if you'd like. That way you get to kill all of the mans and see the ending. Hooray for You."

[toblix]

Yeah, this is terrible. I could see that they were going somewhat off the beaten path, and there was some great stuff in there, but after three hours, I just couldn't be bothered playing through their bad shooter to see what they were going for. I got to a sequence where we were holed up in a yacht, and a bunch of enemies, including the classic heavy bullet sponge ones. I failed a million times, and when the dialogue came up saying I kept dying in the same place I got so pissed off I rage quitted and uninstalled the game. That difficulty dialogue should say "hey, we're not very good at making these games, and we find balancing difficulty and fun a challenge. Sorry about the heavily armoured guys that are never fun!"

[twmac]

Toblix, you are a wuss. Also you are missing at least two awesome narrative beats after that fire fight.

[toblix]

  On 9/2/2012 at 3:19 PM, twmac said:

Toblix, you are a wuss. Also you are missing at least two awesome narrative beats after that fire fight.

I'm sorry. I've reinstalled the game, and will try to complete it.

[feelthedarkness]

That fight around the desert stranded boats is probably one of the 2 most difficult sections, and I was stuck on that for a while. When I finally got through it the first time I was all wired and did something I immediately regretted, and it sort of hit how smart it was. Also, the walls are positioned the wrong way for the enemies approach which works to make it more stressful.

[toblix]

Not surprisingly, after starting up the game I breezed through that section like a two-dollar pistol on a Saturday night. I really like that Steam lets me rage-uninstall and reinstall with such ease!

[toblix]

twmac, thanks for making me give it another go. After that particular sequence, I quickly finished the game, and won't have to remember it as one of those games I probably should've finished.

Though I never really loved the game for its game play, I really appreciate for once playing a horribly violent game that acknowledges what it is. There are some games I'm really looking forward to that are bound to be violent as well, like The Last of Us. I hope they'll put some meaningful context around the brutality as well.

I can already tell this next thing won't make much sense, but I'll try: One thought I've had is that, unlike other mediums, games have to be developed with a strong, costly focus on any game play mechanics it'll include or depict. For example, this game, and its development focus and resources, have all been dedicated to making a first-person shooter; its levels, graphics, animations, sound, weapons, controls and more are all really focused on making an actual shooter game, ostensibly in order to be able to comment on other shooter games. Traditionally, because games tend to be interactive, you wouldn't be able to make the same statement without this big investment in all of this, which might be part of the point, I don't know. As predicted, this turned out to become a rambling thing, but it just fascinates me, looking at the credits, all the work that went into this comment. Also, was everyone who worked on the game on the same page? Did the people who made the animation of me shooting a guy in the knee and then in the head do it as a comment on interactive violence, or just as a sweet takedown? What about the animators who make the same animations for Call of Duty?

[twmac]

No problem, I just remember getting to exactly the same point and almost quitting and then getting through that section and being hit by some pretty awesome and brutal moments that actually had me reacting in the same fashion as the last Episode of The Walking Dead game.

Yeah, I do wonder if everyone was on the same page, in the case of the takedowns they get more and more brutal as you progress. Did the guy doing that know why they wanted them to be depicted that way?

Also, I wrote a review for the game, it is a little messy but hopefully conveys what I was trying to say.

[Frenetic Pony]

So I just bought this game off Amazon's (still current?) sale. This plus Bioshock 1+2 on steam for $20 was too good a deal. The story so far (about 2 and half hours in) is definitely going towards a more interesting twist (and turns) on the modern war type shooter. That and some of the levels are just gorgeous to look at.

But the big thing for me is that it's actually fun! I can hardly believe it, since for the most part I'm so utterly sick of games where I kill people that I check almost every day whether the SimCity beta has started and I'm in it. But somehow it does manage to be fun. Maybe it's because unlike Max Payne 3 enemies die in one or two shots, instead of being bullet sponges. Or maybe because I have to constantly pick up new weapons since there isn't unlimited ammo. Or maybe because I can't just sit behind one wall permanently while clearing out the current wave of bad guys thanks to them throwing grenades that don't suck. Either way,

[beanman101283]

This was definitely one of my favorite games this year. It wasn't perfect by any means. I thought they could have been more subversive with their achievements, the tacked on multiplayer was practically hypocritical (even though it was demanded by the publisher, not the dev studio or writers), and the tension between the main character and player is strained quite a bit at times. But I loved how it subverted people's expectations of modern military shooters. It felt like a game for people who play a lot of games.

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The white phosphorous scene is horrifying on its own, but it takes on more resonance when you've played Modern Warfare and think back to those AC130 scenes.

I'm tired of military bro-shoots, but I'll gladly play more that explore war and soldiers in a more mature way like Spec Ops attempted.

[toblix]

Here comes a criticial reading so critical you'll have to pay for it. I did it just because it felt weird and exciting.

[brkl]

It's succinct.

[JonCole]

I really don't know what to think of this one. I picked up Spec Ops during a Black Friday sale for $10 because I felt like I "should" to be part of this year's GOTY conversations (not like it'll win anything big, just that it might get spoilered in the process). I generally like the narrative things it does, though I'll concur with general disapproval of the loading screen bits.

I just didn't think the actual combat was that good. I'm really tired of games that create new control schemes counter to contemporaries - in other words, the non-Gears of War control scheme annoyed the hell out of me. Beyond that, I didn't really like how the cover was placed in several of the arenas, the most notable and memorable of which is a boat in the middle of the sand where you're getting assaulted. There's very little cover in that sequence and the enemies are hard-coded to bumrush you or try to flank constantly, which basically meant I felt more lucky than powerful when I finally got through it after a couple deaths. Also, there's a weird quality to some of the cover that makes you vulnerable unless the enemy shooting at you is practically perpendicular to your cover object. Really sloppy stuff that I was hoping to avoid by playing on the normal difficulty.

Also, someone mentioned earlier in the thread that the checkpointing was generous, which I sincerely disagree with. The last combat sequence in chapter 15 was a really protracted one with at least four total firefights, each of which had an enemy with a two-shot kill weapon and a heavy in two firefights. I felt like I lost a half-hour to stupid deaths I couldn't really avoid, which is a pretty unforgivable sin in my book.

Anyways, I probably sound more frustrated with the game than I actually am, considering a lot of those gameplay problems became most evident in the late game when enemies had power weapons and multiple turrets. I think it's a game worth playing, though I'd really suggest getting it cheap ($5 on Amazon for PC right now) and playing on the easiest difficulty if you're really just interested in the narrative.

:tmeh:

[natetwoc]

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I really enjoyed my experience playing this game. With the phosphorous scene I didn't realize they were civilians till after so the scene had a pretty profound effect on my personal experience. Also the revelations made at the end I personally thought were effective.

[JonCole]

Spoiler tag doesn't exist for nothing, natetwoc.

[natetwoc]

  On 12/1/2012 at 10:01 PM, JonCole said:

Spoiler tag doesn't exist for nothing, natetwoc.

My bad thought I had seen unhidden stuff earlier.

[TychoCelchuuu]

You can still go back and edit the spoiler tag into your post.

I got this from the $5 Amazon sale and started it up last night. Next thing I knew it was 3:38 AM and I had just finished it. Wow! I enjoy shooters, including cover shooters, so the mechanics didn't bother me in the slightest, although I did find it too hard on the hardest difficulty so I had to knock it down to normal partway through the game if I wanted to not have to play every fight perfectly.

The art direction in this game is peerless. It has the ridiculous detail and over the top big budget bombasticity of a Call of Duty game, but it combines it with stupendous use of color, light, and most importantly angle to do something that most games do only in a rudimentary sense if they do it at all: it tells a story with the level design through the way the levels look and feel. Plenty of games do environmental storytelling with incidental parts of the environment - graffiti, corpses, scorch marks, whatever. That's always neat in the same way that detailed sets on a movie are neat, and Spec Ops does that pretty well. In fact, it does it excellently when it comes to the simple stuff, like when you find lots of corpses.

What Spec Ops does that very few games do at more than a very simple level, though, is that it also tells a story via the mood of the levels, particularly with the off kilter angles that so much of the game is tilted at. This felt like The Third Man in video game form when it came to all the slanting going on. It's not exactly masterclass level design to decide to make things tilted to convey a sense of strangeness and of something going wrong, but to do it right isn't trivial and in any case that is exactly the mood the game needed to convey and it's a great fit for the Dubai architecture.

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Everything about the story clicked for me except the twist at the end - I had a fleeting moment of "are those civilians" during the white phosphorous mortar scene but it was extremely effective because during that sequence I was clicking as fast as I could because I just wanted it to be over. I wanted to drop the rounds I needed to drop and then get the fuck out of there and just stop doing that. So at that point I was just willing to blow up what I needed to blow up, no questions asked. My problem with the twist at the end is that I'm not really sure why my two squadmates didn't sit me down at some point and say "you are talking to the air and clearly hallucinating, are you OK? Should we really be pushing onwards?" I'll have to replay the game to hear what they say and when they say it but on its face it just seems to strain credulity. Aside from that though I think the twist worked fine - I have to think about it more but especially in light of the stuff about Konrad's PTSD that you can find, I think thematically it worked very well. Actually, it reminded me of another twist from a game. I will have to spoil that game, and I can't tell you what game it is before I spoil it because knowing there's a twist is a spoiler already, so if you don't want the game to be spoiled then don't click my next spoiler, but I will tell you that it's a dumb game with a story you likely don't care about and even if you do care about it you've probably already played it. So: Spec Ops' twist reminded me of...

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Call of Duty: Black Ops, where it is revealed that you were hallucinating the Russian dude the entire time. Whereas Spec Ops' twist strains credulity but fits in thematically, and thus I think I can give it a pass, Black Ops' twist barely strains credulity (they went through such great pains to make it plausible that I saw it coming a mile away) but thematically it's pretty empty. I don't want to get into Black Ops analysis here but suffice to say that the game didn't really say anything interesting about your hallucination of the Russian dude that it couldn't have said without that whole twist.

Back to Spec Ops, then:

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That final scene, where you aim the pistol at yourself or at Konrad... wow. And that was a very pretty apartment too.

Overall I greatly enjoyed the experience, if "enjoyed" is the right word, and in the future I'm going to recommend it to anyone who will either enjoy or suffer through the gunplay. There's a lot more there than just commentary on video game violence and even if it said NOTHING interesting it would still be such a pretty game. Also, force Anti-Aliasing through your graphics card control panel. Makes the game look nicer.

[Badfinger]

It's somewhat ironic that the game had to be mechanically mediocre enough that I died often enough to see all the interesting loading screens towards the end.

By the way, and this is not a spoiler, there are multiple endings based on your decisions. If you got to the end of the game and didn't know that, the last autosave should be at a place where you can make the choices you need to see them. I highly recommend it.