Tag: shooters

A Trio of Overlooked Video Games Dealing with Corruption

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The dangers of Insider Threats

A promise was made a few weeks ago to make a post about corruption in three action/adventure games released on 2012. This will be that post. As for what I have on the schedule, expect a review about a gender-role flipped isekai manga over the weekend.

Max Payne 3, Sleeping Dogs, and Spec Ops: The Line are a trio of 2012 video games that all deal with corruption and were in several ways criminally underrated by gamers at the time. Three pretty niche series, even despite the graphical showing with something to say about each of their own themes plot-wise. We’re going to look over the plots of all three and what I believe are the reasons they were all overlooked even now.

For the first of these three: Max Payne 3

Aventura Brasileira

The nine-year difference between the unraveling of the second game sets this installment apart from the rest of the series by sending titular Max Payne to Sao Paulo instead of keeping him in the NYC tri-state area. And the game explains why he’s voluntarily exiled from the city. In flashback scenes, Max isn’t exactly done mulling over the plot of the previous two games, walking in on his family dying in the first game and seeing people he regarded as friends double-cross him in the second game. To be fair, none of them were expected to keep specific loyalties to him. His alliance with people like Alfred Woden and Vladimir Lem, as well as a love affair with assassin, Mona Sax, were all out of convenience.

They each answered to their own bosses, though the corruption angle was relatively muted in the first game. The only corrupt figure in the first game was fellow DEA Agent B.B., who was not only on the Aesir Corporation‘s payroll, but had also helped orchestrate the murder of DEA Agent Alex Balder. Which explains how this was an inside job, though this part seems more like an afterthought, all things considered. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around B.B.’s role, but I haven’t been able to reach any significant conclusions.

The face of a… winner?

For Max Payne 2, the interconnected web of conspiracies concerning Max himself unravel in the second half of the game, but are present from the beginning. Woden, being part of the Inner Circle, initially used Max’s services to remove the connections between Woden himself and Aesir’s president and CEO, Nicole Horne. For Woden, only he and Max were privy to the relationship and for Max, she ordered the death of Max’s wife and child, so the vendetta was fulfilled and everyone “won” in the end. As it turns out, Woden wasn’t the only one with a tentacle in another pie. Vlad had an affair with another detective, Valerie Winterson, who’d been ordered by Vlad to remove Mona Sax from the picture, further complicated by Mona’s relationship with Max. Imprisoning a contract killer is one thing, but when she’s dating your junior, it’s easy to see how things get complicated with this intricate test of allegiances. Needless to say, everyone failed. Winterson was gunned down by Max in an ultimatum, Woden, dying of cancer anyway, died trying to stop Vlad, and Vlad shot Mona in the back and later paid for it, thanks to Max.

Yet, none of that was why Max was in Sao Paulo in 2012. In the flashbacks, an altercation with a mob brat who fit right in on Jersey Shore led to the brat’s death and the comeuppance from his father. Max dealt with the mob before, going after key figures in the Punchinello Family, but the father of the brat Max killed in the bar necessitated a six-figure hit on Max. He could spend the rest of his life dodging mobsters or leave. Conveniently, a fellow beat cop who was in private security for the rich and famous in distinct parts of the world — including Brazil — entices him with an opportunity. The first one was to protect a divorced socialite onboard her yacht while traversing the Panama Canal–except that went to s[pill-popping]t when a far-right Colombian paramilitary stormed the yacht and massacred all the inhabitants. It’s worth noting that the pirates were tipped off about the incoming yacht in a plot to frame Max for the violence and plant dirty money onboard. Max can’t escape these inside job affairs, can he?

Fast-forward to the plot of the third game and lo and behold, the Mother of All Conspiracies puts Max and partner, Raul Passos, at the center of it all. Private security once again for the rich and famous of Sao Paulo, a trio of brothers of the Branco family, businessman Rodrigo Branco, politician Victor, and airhead socialite Marcelo, pay the duo to protect them and their family including Rodrigo’s trophy wife Fabiana. Things go wrong when armed gangsters from the Comando Sombra gang storm the penthouse and take Fabiana hostage. This is resolved quickly and to celebrate, these idiots helicopter into a nightclub in Sao Paulo. That time, Fabiana is taken and held for ransom. Most of the family is recovered, but the ultimate mission from Rodrigo is to get his wife back. The first lead takes them to a football stadium in Sao Paulo where the duo bring three million reais to the CS, only to be interrupted by a right-wing paramilitary group known as the Cracha Preto (Black Badge).

Three million short and no closer to finding Fabiana, the next lead takes Max and Passos several kilometers up the Tiete River. A seafaring compound for drug smuggling operations by the CS, they were merely holding the woman in transport until the pair gun their way through the CS, but let her slip through their fingers again. At this point, come the next performance review, Senhor Branco was speaking with the commander of the 55th Battalion of the “elite” Special Forces Unit (Unidade de Forcas Especiais) of the Brazilian Military Police. Passos and Max convince Rodrigo to let them continue their efforts, but the Cracha Preto crashes into the offices of the Fabricas Branco and shoots everything from the office chairs up. Once again, Max is confronted by a painful failure. He was able to secure the building but not fast enough to keep Rodrigo from danger where he was assassinated in the chaos on the main floor. Complicating things further, a bomb is planted in the office to erase the evidence of the murder of a specific individual. Not that Max walks away from the wreckage empty-handed, with a dying paramilitary confessing that they were said to be after Max and that Fabiana was taken to the Nova Esperança favela.

The Max we all know and love

Max upgrades to his baldheaded beardy look and investigates personally running into trouble not five minutes into his impromptu investigation. Another cop from Sao Paulo PD, named Wilson da Silva, is also on the case and conveniently bumps into Max, giving him the details on the people holding Fabiana in custody. This heavily armed slum gives Max a proper Brazilian welcome with lead trinkets which he does in typical fashion reciprocating in kind. By the time he makes his way up to the Emperor’s Palace, the man he’d been chasing since the penthouse crash, Serrano, has not just Fabiana, but her sister, Giovanna, and Marcelo in custody. Clearly, they weren’t happy that Max was a grade-A f[gunshots]k up in a world of f[rocket launcher]k downs and sought to buy Fabiana’s safety personally. This effort goes nowhere, and Serrano kills Fabiana in cold blood. Another tense negotiation ended with an antagonist’s bullet broken up by a bigger dog barking and slobbering into enemy territory. The UFE make the rounds in a trademark raid on the favela looking for fresh meat to sell on the black market.

This isn’t an exaggeration either—the police in Brazil do carry out raids at the heart of the favelas to curtail organized crime, usually in a bloody and performative manner, though of course not all of them are this corrupt. The instance shown in the game sees the UFE pull out all the stops and fearing that he might be next, Serrano and the CS abandon ship. Giovanna and Marcelo are escorted elsewhere to be killed, and Max is left to fight through these makeshift infantrymen to the ground level. It’d be one thing if the UFE were there to arrest only the gang members, but innocent civilians are being carted off and handed to, you guessed it, the Cracha Preto for a hefty sum of money.

Max eventually finds Giovanna and Marcelo in time to save only Giovanna as Marcelo had been set on fire in a tower of tires, known as a “microwave oven.” He avenges Marcelo and has to escort Giovanna to safety through a public bus stop. Actually successful for once, but Max is essentially left behind while Passos, who was phoned up beforehand, helicopters the mother of his love child out of there. Da Silva returns to inform Max that he’d been a plaything from pretty much the beginning—not just by the Brancos but also allegedly from the Panama job.

But that’s all a moot point as there are more pressing matters to attend to. Max learned and da Silva knew that the 55th was in bed with the Cracha Preto, but the level of corruption wasn’t well understood. Countries with troubled histories like Brazil can easily have their corruption written off as a legacy of authoritarianism or its military junta. But neither realized that they were involved in the organ trade until Max was set out to raid the condemned Imperial Palace Hotel. The paramilitaries were witnessed burning the dead in trash bags, the civilians carted off earlier were found and as we learn, Serrano was among those rounded up by the UFE. The movie Elite Squad (Portuguese: Tropa de Elite) shows how aggressive the Military Police can be in matters of gang crackdowns, but doesn’t accuse the BOPE of being corrupt themselves. Max Payne 3 does show the UFE’s corruption inside and out. The hotel was the belly of the beast that Max dealt with before moving onto the UFE HQ itself. Unveiling himself as the mastermind behind the grand conspiracy to rule Sao Paulo with an iron fist is none other than Victor himself.

If he’d been elected Mayor of Sao Paulo, he would’ve made things much worse

Remember when I said this was the Mother of All Conspiracies? No lies or hyperbole detected. The game ends with Victor facing a trial and being found hanged in his cell, either through suicide or through mob retaliation, seeing as he walking around the general prison population. For all its faults, this may be the one time lack of oversight or corruption did some good. I’m certain here in the U.S., an imprisoned government official would be placed in solitary for their own protection. In Mafia III, the Faster Baby DLC reveals at the end that white supremacist Sinclair Parish Sheriff William “Slim” Beaumont was put in solitary for a 15-year stint, serving 12 before he was shot dead on his front porch in 1989 under mysterious circumstances. The black community had reason enough to hate him, but I think he was killed by fellow white supremacists for turning on them. Officer Tenpenny said it best: “Homies for life? Street loyalty? That’s all bullshit, Carl.” It really do be your own people.

Takes a traitor to know a traitor

Now, why do I think MP3 was overlooked? If you look at the cutscenes of this game and put them side-by-side with those of the first two games, it’s a major departure from the graphic novel neo-noir style it worked with. It would’ve been welcomed by fans to see it ape a modern comic book style, but RockStar spearheading the game’s development, absent of Sam Lake and Remedy Entertainment made it look and feel less like Max Payne and more of a spiritual successor. The first game was released in July 2001 on a shoe-string budget and had to do so much with so little. The last game was released in late May 2012 and cost RockStar some hundred million dollars to produce with a swanky new engine that showed how aged and disheveled Max looked after two games playing shootdodge in New York and New Jersey. The assumption was that beautiful-looking games sold like hot cakes, but MP3 was more like Hydrox cookies. The progenitor of the sandwich cookie overshadowed by the more successful Oreo.

Still Max got his proper send off and with the passing of his voice actor James McCaffrey in 2023, the only thing in the series’ future is a remake of the first two games at an as-of-yet unannounced release date. I’d welcome a spiritual successor, though, instead of a half-baked Max Payne 4. And on that note:

Sleeping Dogs – 九龍嘅遺產

歡迎嚟到香港

A spiritual successor to the True Crime series, Sleeping Dogs follows Hong Kong-born San Francisco cop, Wei Shen, and his transfer to the Hong Kong Police Force. The British legacy of colonization comes through in this game with nearly every Hongkonger in the game having a very western/English given name. Jackie, Winston, Vincent, Peggy, Sonny—you might know people with these names IRL. Goes to show that in recent history, Hong Kong and its territories were more British than they were Chinese. Speaking of British, the superintendent of the HKPF, Thomas Pendrew, is one of the only white people to be seen for miles.

Snoozing Mutts begins with Wei and his informant partner, Naz Singh, making a deal with the Triads. After a cop walks in on the deal, one of the Triads cleaves him up, Wei and Naz parkour their way out of Dodge, but are cornered by the police. At this opportunity, HK Police conduct an AAR on Wei and reveal that he’s being placed as the newest member of the Hong Kong-based Sun On Yee, this world’s stand-in for the real-world Triad group, Sun Yee On. His mission is to get close to key figures and unveil their main boss, starting at the bottom.

After this brief, Wei is put into a cell where he runs into a childhood friend from the Old Prosperity Projects, Jackie Ma. A budding gangster and soon-to-be Triad himself, Jackie gets Wei close to Red Pole (read: Lieutenant) Winston Chu, a foulmouthed, tattooed gangster operating out of his mother’s restaurant. Like their western counterparts, East Asian organized crime groups also make use of slice of life crimes from extortion to protection rackets to money laundering, but unlike their western counterparts, they like to present themselves as protectors of their neighborhoods, more so the Yakuza do this than the Triads as I’ve noticed in most crime media from this part of the world, so Winston’s operations being in the back of his mother’s restaurant is not unheard of at all.

Per the initiation, Wei survives getting surrounded by Sun On Yee, before Winston’s rival Sammy “Dogeyes” Lin shows up to antagonize Winston’s faction, the Water Street Boys. I know better than to walk into a new place like I own it, but Dogeyes pulls up wheeling his giant balls onto Winston’s coffee table. How offended was Winston at this? He went to a local fair to turn the vendors over to Winston’s side. Small, but noticeable losses that smack Dogeyes in the income. But the real prize here lies in a ketamine dealer, Ming, whom Wei tries and fails to get into police custody. In front of an interrogation table for the second time, Wei’s cover holds up well enough for Pendrew to reveal to the interrogating officer that Wei’s no ordinary thug, but one of their own. And I see why Wei wouldn’t initially want the Inspector Teng on the case either. He’s already got one mouthbreather, Raymond Mak, on his shoulder, he doesn’t want another one, but the powers that be have Teng as a secondary to Raymond.

One of Hong Kong’s finest

For the police side of things, Ming is nothing but a middleman. The true prize for the Sun On Yee is distributor Popstar. To get to him takes some more class-A acting that sees Wei catch him in the middle of a handoff that ends with a killing. Once that goes to the HKPF, Popstar goes to prison and soon after Winston shows that there’s a brain directing the brawn. Is it really a coincidence that Popstar goes down right as this new guy shows up? Though Winston didn’t think this up in a vacuum with enforcers like Conroy Wu giving him the idea simply because Wei failed a vibe check at his introduction. Thankfully for Wei and the plot he’s a seasoned thespian who was able to spin Popstar’s incarceration as an opportunity for Ming to eventually double-cross Winston and the Water Street Boys… had Ming not just taken a brand new ventilation system to the cranium. And you don’t need an undercover cop to learn how cutthroat organized crime is. Nor even the drug trade, at least if you’ve been anywhere near a TV to see the failures of the opioid epidemic and the war on drugs in real time.

So, Wei’s spared death and continues to get closer and closer to key figures in the Sun On Yee, even suggesting brilliant ideas for Winston and co. And once Wei actually meets the Dragon Head of the Sun On Yee, David Wa-Lin “Uncle” Po, rather than admit that most of the ideas were his, he hands off credit to Winston. This is a glimpse into face culture in East Asia. Even if you, the underling, are competent and capable of wiggling your way out of danger, the boss a.k.a. your superior, is the most important representative of your group, clan, guild, etc. So, by showing Winston to be the most competent and an infallible genius, Uncle Po grants him his favor. Better yet for his mission, Wei has seen the Dragon Head, a key figure in the Triads for his undercover mission.

山主的新义安

That said, undercover police work alongside plain old policing doesn’t get Wei a lot of love from his handlers, at least not Raymond. With a growing history in the triads, Raymond may be the one who most wants Wei off the mission during certain checkpoints. Ratting, snitching, internal security risks; whatever you wanna call it, there’s tons of checkpoints where it can go wrong for Wei and yet, only once has it been shown that his position was close to compromise, and that was resolved rather quickly in the beginning, but Raymond isn’t convinced and wants to leave this to whatever specialized organized crime unit HKPF can muster. Unfortunately for Raymond and fortunately for a time, for Wei, this is shot down each time by Superintendent Pendrew even after Winston and his bride, Peggy Li, are gunned down at their own wedding.

This removes an obstacle and puts Wei in Winston’s seat in the Sun On Yee, however, I look back on this mission and can’t see it as nothing but an inside job itself. In the mission, Winston asks Wei to bring the chairman his favorite wine. On his way back, gunshots go off inside, and the enemy isn’t dressed like a typical Triad gangster this time. The caterers are the ones who initiate the attack on the wedding, and they don’t discriminate. Once Winston and Peggy are dead, it’s free game. Uncle Po is wounded and recovering in the hospital on life support, and right after this, you go after the two people responsible for the hit: Johnny Ratface and Dogeyes, both of whom get their vengeance from Mrs. Chu, Winston’s mother.

Never mess with a mother’s babies

Now, I say it’s an inside job because of how it’s all set up. The Wiki says that Dogeyes orchestrated it and with Triad resources that’s easy to see, though if I’m allowed to put out a feeler for a bit, I question whether this was thought up independently or whether it came from another source. I’ll touch on this later, but for now, Winston’s death puts Wei in his shoes and Raymond’s lost faith in this entire endeavor. Pendrew still allows him to operate with carte-blanche but runs into conflict with Wei himself when he suggests that he should abandon the people who got him to his position in the first place. He doesn’t and Pendrew winds up double-crossing him at multiple points, notably at Uncle Po’s funeral. And it’s not like things get easier with Dogeyes turned into char siu. The next obstacle comes in the form of Big Smile Lee. He’d been trying to become the next chairman with Uncle Po incapacitated but another, Two Chin Tsao, so called because he could eat all of mainland China and still die of starvation, is suggested by Red Pole Broken Nose Jiang. A risk for the whole of the Sun On Yee? Sure, but it was Jiang’s suggestion that Two Guts Two Chin take the helm, though his past as a heroin addict has weakened his resolve to the point where most other Triads think him unfit to rule, even Jiang who might’ve simply made him a placeholder/seat-warmer of sorts. You later reaffirm his tetraphobia in his own house with a fellow Triad called Old Salty Crab.

Think of him as your mischievous uncle

The last leg of the game is where Big Smile Lee’s faction takes center stage as the main antagonists. His personal enforcer Mr. Tong kills Jackie and tries to kill Wei after Lee learns that Wei was undercover. A fierce final mission and battle sees Lee’s enforcers, Tong and Ponytail, dead and Lee himself thrown into an ice chipper face first. For all that he’s done, he should’ve gotten in feet first, but carrying an enemy into a deadly trap seems more like Like a Dragon shenanigans if Kazuma or Ichiban were different people.

Feels a bit useless though, knowing that Pendrew’s “hard work” is gonna get him promoted to Interpol. By this point, both Wei and Raymond know of Pendrew’s corruption but can’t touch him due to his status until Jiang, who also knows Wei is a cop, delivers a USB with video evidence of Pendrew murdering Uncle Po. Furthermore, the discussion between the two reveals that his corruption goes back decades with the two collaborating to reach their respective positions. The course of the game was where dispute erupted between them and Uncle Po gets one last callout before his funeral gets arranged. This is the evidence Wei uses to lock Pendrew up in the same prison housing most of the Triads put away by Wei. Most likely, general population where, like Victor Branco in Max Payne 3, he won’t get any protection. It doesn’t look like Hong Kong’s penal system is as draconian as its mainland counterparts, but with this many Triads inside, it’s gonna hurt.

So let’s look at why Sleeping Dogs is underrated. This review by Yahtzee Croshaw of Zero Punctuation/Fully Ramblomatic fame should get the point across, but to get it down to brass tacks: it was left to cult status. Praise for the star cast, voice acting, game design, world-building, and set pieces. Even Cantonese speakers who’ve played it could tell that a lot of care was put into the game’s use of English, Cantonese, and Honglish. A bit better than Zenless Zone Zero’s use of Cantonese during the Waifei Peninsula arc, which is a fictionalized stand-in for Hong Kong. It was still a cool easter egg though…

But to go back to the ZP review of Sleeping Dogs, setting aside the accusations of GTA clone, the main crux of the game is that Wei is supposed to be caught between two loyalties. Too much of a Triad for the HKPF and too much of a cop for the Triads, but he maintains his loyalty beginning to end. Not really atypical, real-life undercover police stick with their law enforcement agencies of employment even after the mission is completed, and continue to work for the police until eventual retirement, assuming that’s not their last case. This is a time-honored tradition IRL and in media. Off the top of my head, there’s two examples, real and fictional, of an undercover cop leaving the force.

In the co-op game, A Way Out, Vincent Moretti, is revealed to actually be an FBI agent who spearheads an elaborate operation to take down a drug dealer who’s since made a home in Mexico. After he’s killed, in his ending, he reveals himself to partner, Leo Caruso, and attempts to arrest him, but Leo dies after a gun battle. The ending sees him with his wife and infant daughter (whom they’ve been struggling to conceive for years) as he announces his retirement from law enforcement altogether. In real life, British cop Neil Woods spent 14 years undercover, rubbing elbows with the worst of the worst Britain ever had to offer. The experience took him to dark places and motivated him to write two books criticizing the heavy-handed approach to the war on drugs in Britain and America.

The real culprit for Sleeping Dogs’ status has to do with poor sales. The game cost the developers at United Front Games $30 million and when pushed out the door by Square Enix, they expected a better sales goal and a potential franchise, but with Sleeping Dogs being a spiritual successor to the True Crime series, this claim is one I have to call into question. Not to mention bigger releases from established franchises were releasing that year and the following year from the Tomb Raider reboot to Halo 4 to the announcement of Grand Theft Auto V to be released in September 2013. It still did well enough to earn its place as a great selling game in Britain and America, but not enough for Square whose real crown jewel was the Final Fantasy franchise. Thankfully, the Definitive Edition was released in 2014 complete with all the DLC and expansion packs, showing that even after United Front’s closure in 2016, the publisher still had faith in the game, which is more than can be said of the last game we’re looking at.

Spec Ops: The Line – Still a Hero, Son?

A real hero wouldn’t do even an eighth of what goes on in this game

Delisted and buried, Spec Ops: The Line may qualify for lost media if it wasn’t for all the gameplay videos released, the video analyses, and the ROMs that remain the only way to access the game these days. Even that’s difficult without a stable internet connection. While drafting up this post, I’ve had it quit on me multiple times until I did it through a mobile hotspot on my phone. Side note: it may be due to the location, but I’m positive that if my rig was in a bigger city with more traffic and therefore more customers on a livelier server, it would take considerably less time to download. RPCS3 is a bit finicky in some areas, but if it works well enough to let me play Mortal Kombat 9, flaws notwithstanding, then anything is possible.

Spec Ops: The Line follows on a time-honored tradition of adapting Joseph Konrad’s 1899 novella Heart of Darkness. A fictional tale of a sailor’s journey through Leopold II’s Congo Free State, it’s a harsh criticism of the Belgian king’s personal territory on the journey to find Kurtz, an ivory trader who’s taken a godlike role among the unsuspecting native tribes. Something that was given a glimpse of in, interestingly, Red Dead Redemption.

Trusting Dutch was a ruinous decision, but not the worst fate to befall American Indians, all things considered.

The tale ends with Kurtz meeting his end at the unnamed protagonist’s hands, something that’s consistent across nearly all media depicting the story, such as 1979’s Apocalypse Now where Captain Willard navigates the Mekong River with a Navy PT boat on a mission to find and kill rogue Special Forces Colonel Kurtz. Being in the Army now, this falls out of line with real-world military protocol. That high up and last assigned to a specialized unit, Kurtz would’ve been arrested and interrogated and likely would’ve faced a court-martial for desertion and treason, seeing as, like the character he’s based on, he also became a madman calling himself God among the native Vietnamese. He also meets his end by the protagonist’s hands.

Come Spec Ops: The Line time and the story beats are the same as Francis Ford Coppola’s troubled movie, but this time it’s a small squad of Delta Force operatives on a mission to find and apprehend Lieutenant Colonel John Konrad, which is consistent with protocol. Kudos. Col. Konrad’s mission was to provide relief to the citizens of Dubai in the wake of a sandstorm but tragedy strikes in the form of another sandstorm and the situation looks like post-Katrina New Orleans but worse… and sandy. The colonel takes matters into his own hands and worsens an already bad situation.

Delta Force operatives Capt. Walker, Lt. Adams, and Sgt. Lugo go in to relieve the situation. Thing is, Konrad is clearly not alone, seeing as the 33rd Battalion known as the Damned Thirty-Third is still in the city, and it’s on Walker’s assumption that the whole unit is rogue and therefore, free game. They’re in the way of the mission and as fellow soldiers, they put up a fierce resistance on the way to Konrad. The course of the game sees Walker make difficult decision after difficult decision culminating in a prosecutable war crime. The white phosphorus weapon system is a controversial weapon used by the U.S. military during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It’s chemical compounds leave horrific burns on all parts of the body that it meets. Despite Lugo’s objections, Walker greenlights its use on a compound that was actually housing civilians.

It’s common for trauma victims to retreat to a fantasy of their own design

This salient point is both a turning point for the group and a stark critique of military operations in the region at the time that led to the Iraq War’s inconclusive outcome the year prior in 2011 and Afghanistan’s failure a decade later. I remember watching gameplay of the game ages ago and the shock and awe of the results of this weapon… f[military drums]k everyone who says that these games glorify war; this is a perfect argument against that. The rest of the game gets considerably more nightmarish.

Even the loading screen tips get progressively more hostile, with messages advising the player that continuing forward is the worst choice to make. I wouldn’t be surprised if halfway through someone booted up a different game or simply put the controller down and had a walk. The last half and final leg of the game sees Walker get to Kurtz’s compound where plot-twist, he was dead the entire time. The herculean task of saving and rebuilding Dubai from scratch was too much for the man. Tragedies, unhappy civilians, dwindling resources, unpredictable outcomes; what sets Kurtz apart from the movie and book was that he didn’t try to make himself King of the Emiratis. Maybe doing so would’ve seen the game marked for banishment from the region, especially at a time when Middle Eastern-American relations were being put to the test in Baghdad and Kabul, as part of the reason Six Days in Fallujah couldn’t release in 2007, so the corruption angle isn’t so much rogue field-grade officer sells out his men for a golden AK. More on the point of rogue battalion-sized element overstays their welcome with good intentions. Or, in layman’s terms, why the U.S. hasn’t been very good at building democratic nations abroad in recent memory. The only success stories come from Germany and Japan post-WWII. Everywhere else has been a bag of trail mix.

Walker and co. also go in with the best of intentions but well after the gut-punch of using a chemical weapon on civilians, his sanity takes such a heavy hit that the pieces that used to be his brain warp his surroundings substantially. All that time he thought Konrad was mocking him from comms, it was all in his head. Moral choices were even corrupted by his gradually disintegrating psyche as a means of rationalizing the hell he’s in, lying to himself that he’s doing good when he’s another evil come to molest what’s left of the city.

Side note: for all the good that not just the U.S. military achieves, leaders can make or break an experience and looking at Walker as a soldier myself, there’s multiple instances where further harm could’ve been prevented had he simply called the mission a failure and gone home. Hell, Adams is another officer with him, he could’ve done it too. But let’s not ignore the human element. The game is designed as a critical satire, sans laughter, of the modern military video game at the time and military operations back then. I have the luxury of criticizing Walker with all that’s been made available from the game and real life. I won’t say too much about my leadership in the Army yet, but the working strategy is to simply learn from leadership good and bad. Retired and current servicemembers definitely have similar stories if you spend some time in the appropriate spaces. See r/Army and r/USMC among others for more details.

Back to the game: Walker at last gets to Konrad whose corpse was under heavy watch presumably since the start of the game. He then has a mind battle with who he thought Konrad was supposed to be, facing criticism after criticism after heavy criticism. Max always felt worthless in Max Payne 2 and 3, but he knew what kind of guy he was in those games. Walker could be shown a mirror and not realize Satan was in it in his own uniform. And here the game has multiple endings.

A destroyer in a cape is just another aura farmer

In both pre-endings, Konrad picks up his gun and aims it at Walker. In one ending, Walker, also aiming his weapon, can shoot back to unlock the post-ending. In the other, he can accept his fate and let Konrad shoot him, which is meant to be interpreted as a suicide. The final shot is the city in ruins as the screen goes black. The post endings have three paths. Soldiers are sent to retrieve the now broken Walker and here you get a last response. One ending, Walker shoots the soldiers dead. He grabs a radio from one and repeats the same line that he uses in the beginning, “Gentlemen, welcome to Dubai,” seemingly living the last of his days among the wreckage. Another ending, open fire on the soldiers and accept this upscale suicide by soldiers. His last moments are an audible flashback to one of his prior missions within Delta Force. Credits roll. Third and arguably the most haunting ending, surrender your weapon and return to base or more likely the U.S. to face a trial for treason and, going back to white phosphorus, crimes against humanity, though the political landscape of the time would likely see that charge ignored if brought up at all. The driver of the Humvee asks how he got through this hell, to which Walker replies, “Who says I did?” and whether this ending is canon or not, a close look at the background shows that it repeats, a sign that with all that goes on in the game, the nightmare is only starting for Walker.

Now the corruption claim I make here depends on definition. It gets muddier in this game. On the one hand, none of the characters collaborated with any enemy forces, sold soldiers down river, or anything of the sort. On the other hand, no one is really innocent of anything. On the surface, there’s the Damned Thirty-Third occupying the city and Walker’s group firing on fellow soldiers, but scraping a layer back, Dubai getting slapped with apocalyptic conditions shows the destruction of the social order. Mob justice was dished out to perpetrators of otherwise slice of life crimes like theft and of egregious sins like full on rape and murder. There wasn’t a gray area when applying mob law. Killing a man’s family was on the same level as stealing drinking water. Konrad was a fool to think his unit could put its best foot forward here and restore order and Walker was a fool to keep his faith in his mission. There’s an option to fire on civilians after they beat Lugo to death, though at that point I don’t think acting or abstaining makes much of a difference anymore. The gates of hell were coming to you, not the other way around.

Some may see Spec Ops: The Line and question why this instead of something like L.A. Noire which has corruption pretty much from the first case, as The Professional has a lore video on how deep-seated the corruption is:

Channel: The Professional

I omitted that as I thought it was too easy to make a case for L.A. Noire. It’s hidden for a lot of players in the beginning and doesn’t show its face once you get to insurance inspector Jack Kelso. Cole Phelps is a good protagonist on his own and Extra Credits critiqued him and his world. Sings the praises of enforcing the law with an even hand yet several cases show how uneven the long arm of the law is applied. A white kid gets off with having weed in the glove compartment of his car; a child molester, one of two, reports his car vandalized by the very brat he tried to rape, with another child molester being let go because he wasn’t guilty of murdering a woman – the police have more on the husband in that case and could probably get a warrant for both him and the rapist, the former for domestic violence and the latter for obvious reasons. Even Phelps and his partner on the ad vice desk, Roy Earle, accept a tip from a shady looking guy for a price, and the head of the whole weed distribution ring isn’t even personally charged with much. And some of this is well before Kelso gets a more important role. A look at the corruption of the LAPD in L.A. Noire would necessitate its own blog post. So look at Spec Ops: The Line as having a different kind of corruption, borne from good intentions with complicated answers to difficult issues. No one was gonna walk away from that blood-free.

Becoming the villain while still believing you’re a hero

Why was Spec Ops: The Line overlooked? Deliberate design choices played a role in its underperformance. Some critics couldn’t get through the stiff gameplay or are even critical of its story. The heavy themes are enough to turn off a casual and a far cry from seasoned CoD and BF veterans of the time. It deliberately made itself look ugly to tell players that the modern military craze had to stop at some point, though that point doesn’t really come across until CoD’s 2013 release of Ghosts. That game was hated for the way its campaign ended and come Infinite Warfare time, the sci-fi babble was a f[gun cock]k load of bulls[bang!]t. Battlefield 1 emphasizing the oft-ignored World War I was a step in the right direction, while CoD’s 2017 release went to World War II, its roots, and gave us a rare instance of the Holocaust in an interactive medium.

That said, the criticism, while wanted by the game’s designers, overlooks the message it was meant to convey. Modern military shooters were overrated by 2012, and even then, DICE and the combined developers of Sledgehammer, Infinity Ward, and Treyarch weren’t doing themselves any favors back then or even now with Black Ops 7 releasing later this year and Battlefield 6 releasing while I was drafting this post. But whatever, a series that fell asleep in 2002 came back a decade later to slap some sense into the gaming industry and died with the industry walking those slaps off with pride instead of shame.

Well, there you have it: Three games, all released in 2012, all overlooked back then and in some cases even now whether it broke off from a prior entry, it couldn’t make back its money, or its entire point was glossed over by a fickle crowd of gamers wanting the engagement they were used to. However, I’m not ascribing blame for looking these games over. For all the reviews and peeks I make on this blog, I can treasure my favorite pieces of media and lament that some of them don’t have as much audience love, but I still appreciate that they were given something of a green light and a chance to shine when they did, and no matter what happens to these games decades down the line, they’re all worth to committing to memory no matter what.

Spec Ops: The Line after 13 Years

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When do I start feeling like a hero?

The draft for the triple comparison between Max Payne 3, Sleeping Dogs, and Spec Ops: The Line has been finished, but before I publish that I first wanted to get my thoughts on the last of these three out of the way. Spec Ops: The Line, a 2012 third-person shooter whose stated-mission purpose was to examine the era of the “modern military shooter,” and knock it down a peg. Unfortunately for it in that regard, the message was very ignored as Call of Duty and surprise return Medal of Honor had both had their releases around the same time. Black Ops II on November 13 and Warfighter on October 5. When did Spec Ops release? June 26 that year. It was released at a time when these types of games were all the rage, wearing the skin of a similar game while also lambasting the Bush administration for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. By my estimate, it was successful at only one of those, but only because so many other media outlets talked about it as it was happening. For a laugh though, take a gander at this:

Channel: Bloomberg News

Right after the Russo-Ukrainian War went hot.

But I’m somersaulting over the howitzer — let’s rewind. The main inspiration behind Spec Ops: The Line aside from the U.S.’s concurrent foreign policy in West Asia and a criticism of the state of the modern military shoot ’em up was the novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and it’s very successful(ly troubled) film adaptation Apocalypse Now. The book was written to highlight the controversy of Leopold II outright owning and micromanaging his personal territory of the Congo in 1899 while the film took that, applied it to the Johnson and Nixon administration’s handling of the Vietnam War, very soon after the pullout and the fall of Saigon to the communists. Suffice it to say, not only was Spec Ops well within its own element by critiquing Bush and the war on terror, it follows a time-honored tradition of satirizing current events in a widely popular medium.

If it wasn’t obvious at the outset, there’s going to be spoilers. I’d encourage you to play the game for yourself, but after 13 years and a new generation of consoles and updates to operating systems, Yager Development hasn’t ported it to modern consoles and most digital storefronts have delisted it. It was a hassle for me to even find an emulated version and the one I have is beset with technical issues. None of them game-breaking, but if you’ve ever dealt with emulation before, you know that the game you emulate/pirate, etc. isn’t going to be the same game that would’ve been released years ago. An emulated game isn’t the same as one bought at GameStop or Best Buy. Alternatively, there’s searching endlessly online for a seventh-generation console and then ultimately a hard copy of the game, but as we progress further into digitization, hard copies will simultaneously be a thing of the past and a priceless collector’s item. Apologies for the rant. Now let’s get to Spec Ops.

The cover alone would’ve cost it sales if the gameplay didn’t after reviewers got their hands on it.

The game begins with Lieutenant Colonel John Konrad, commander of the 33rd Infantry Regiment authorizing a relief mission in Dubai after the city get’s blasted with wall-to-wall sandstorms. Trouble starts to sprout with the native Emiratis who take issue with the high and mighty US of A walking around as if they own the place. A peace deal/non-aggression pact is taken, but very soon broken by rogue actors among either the Emiratis or the Americans. Whatever the case, the ceasefire is short-lived and insurgents emerge to take back Dubai and handle it themselves. From what I know of history and geopolitics, this sounds eerily close to a similar problem that Somalia has been facing since the early 1990s, but far less complicated than Somalia’s entrenched clan system. Or more like post-Gaddafi Libya. For a brief overture, the United Arab Emirates, where Dubai is located, didn’t suffer as terribly as its North African brothers in the Arab Spring, so trouble in paradise is somewhat unheard of but still within the realm of possibility.

The 33rd Infantry gets swamped with each of these problems and Col. Konrad declares the mission a miserable failure. He could’ve abandoned ship at the first sign of trouble and allowed his men to go back home, but he knuckled down and kept them there. As a result, the soldiers have gone stir-crazy fighting an unknown enemy, and I have to stop here momentarily. I fully understand what the game is intending, but I’m not so certain the devs at Yager know what they’re talking about. In Heart of Darkness, the Belgians were very much an invasive species meddling in on Congolese affairs, but there wouldn’t be a war to fight in the territory until 1915, because when empires go to war, so too do the colonies. Load up, Taiwan and Korea, you’re taking Tsingtao because Tokyo said so.

For Apocalypse Now, the Vietnamese were an amalgamation of southern Vietnamese communists receiving aid from the North Vietnamese Army, China, Laotian and Khmer communist forces and the Soviet Union. There were also veteran guerrillas who fought the Japanese in WWII, so this is the ultimate conflict where the U.S. wouldn’t be able to tell friend from foe anymore. Come Iraq and Afghanistan… the same problem from Southeast Asia followed into West and South Asia, but looking at the leaders and the countries of the time, stability was the one thing neither country had. Afghanistan had nearly as many civil wars as Rome did in the 3rd century and wouldn’t really have a case for nationalism whatsoever. Iraq, on the other hand, had a tenuous government in the hands of a dictator with an iron fist who would suffer from his own consequences thrice in a row over the years. What I’m getting at is, the situation for Iraq and Afghanistan was a top-down problem. The Belgian Congo had a “government” not much better than Leopold’s personal property, but nothing was threatening the Belgians until 1914; Vietnam had a series of governments from themselves to the French to Japan to the French again until decolonization, so there wasn’t a question of who would lead from where once the guns stopped firing. For Iraq, the cradle of civilization had rough years after Saddam’s capture and execution, but was able to get back on its feet and keep ISIS from rising to prominence ever again. Afghanistan’s last stable government was when it was a kingdom, toppled by communists, invaded by the Soviets, and subject to civil wars in the 1990s that saw the Taliban rise, fall, and gradually rise once again after playing the long game. And it hasn’t really been the same ever since.

I’m more than a little torn on this. On the one hand, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban weren’t an unknown enemy, but on the other, they blended in so well with civilian populations that the U.S. handling it personally was why there were accusations and even admissions of war crimes against an unarmed populace, but then again I don’t recall stories of soldiers rounding up civilians in concentration camp-style living conditions. Not from this conflict at least—the Philippines in 1900 surely but nothing from the Middle East in living memory. And no, Abu Ghraib doesn’t count because no one with the right mind was okay with that. All the soldiers involved have been shamed and disgraced. Say what you will about Bush-era foreign policy but for the love of God, don’t lie about it. Especially now, that we pulled out of Iraq during Obama’s first term.

Sorry about all the tangents, when it comes to myths surrounding the war on terror, I can’t help it.

The entire thing is incredibly complicated, so I look at criticism with an electron microscope. To get back to the meat of this review: 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta (SFOD-D), colloquially known as Delta Force sends a squad of soldiers, Capt. Martin Walker, Lt. Alphonso Adams, and Sgt. John Lugo to extract Col. Konrad and assess the physical and mental readiness of the Damned 33rd. They learn that the Emiratis may have been incensed to rise up thanks to meddling from Langley, and allow me this tangent. Every time I hear about the CIA, I get the urge to have sloppy drunken sex with a loaded shotgun. I’ve come to loathe the use of the CIA as a plot device for a lot what goes on in the world. True or not, it’s gotten lazy as hell, and I’m pretty sure it births new myths or perpetuates existing myths, some of which can be dispelled by the CIA themselves, but I doubt they’re allowed to do so, in case the public meddling is ruining an ongoing project.

Certainly would explain their Cold War behavior, eh?

Anyway, CIA perpetuates conflict in the UAE between the Army and the rebelling Emiratis and either neither the soldiers nor rebels are none the wiser or the “rogue” unit knows what’s up, but can’t get it through to the rebelling Emiratis because of high tensions. Meanwhile, these Delta Force operators have declared the unit rogue, their commander MIA, but still have faith that the mission can go on (it can’t), and over the course of the game, things keep getting worse and worse. The culmination of all of this cascades into one of the most disturbing moments in this game. More disturbing than the doctor harvesting organs from the Comando Sombra in Max Payne 3… or the doctor harvesting organs for the 18K in Sleeping Dogs… hmmm…

In Sleeping Dogs’ case, the police missions tend to be optional, but if you want super cop Wei Shen, then get to tagging and bagging!

They screwed up with the chargrill and have to make do with 70% of a burned meal. You know the trope of the traumatic experience being handwaved away with a hasty generalization? Like the one creepypasta where trauma victims, most commonly rape victims, retreat to a fantasy where they’re not being raped, heavily repressing the memory for as long as possible, at times for life? Well, that’s precisely what happens to Capt. Walker in this moment. This virtuous Special Forces officer who makes no mistakes and does nothing wrong f[gunshots]ks up once… colossally so, and admittedly should face a court-martial for the incident. In an admittedly weak defense, all three men weren’t in the right mind to make a sound decision, but to counter that, a period of R&R would be granted so that they could go and investigate the situation properly. For all that’s been going on in the plot so far, even the most bad ass Special Forces soldier would need to rest and Walker (because the plot wants it) doesn’t even rest for a second; and depending on your mindset, this is either a two-cent excuse for shock value or a magnificent pants-pull. Admittedly, I lean more pants-pull-wards, but this was well after the game was out and before my time in the Army. Now I’m towards the middle because I can see how someone would think this was cheap.

And the rest of the mission is almost never the same. The mental games and break from reality, Walker’s gradual descent into mental hell (complete with hallucinations of actual hell); the game stops pretending you’re the protagonist and downright calls you a monster for continuing to play. On the one hand, this can seem manipulative especially towards the end when you finally confront “Konrad,” but on the other hand, it takes “follow the objective marker” and kicks it into high gear. It reminds me of the Milgram experiment where participants were deceived into dutifully obeying atrocious directions. That experiment was one of several used to explain how the Nazis and German society could be complicit in crimes against humanity… though slightly undercut that the penalty was execution, even for the last-ditch militia propped up by Hitler himself, the Volkssturm.

Towards the end, you finally reach Konrad’s HQ, only to learn that he’s been dead the whole time and the voice in Walker’s ear was an auditory hallucination. That circles back to what I said earlier about traumatic experiences being hyper-repressed by the victim/survivor. “I’m not wrong! The world is wrong!!” Yeah, the devs didn’t want anyone to enjoy this, and this may have been where players kept yelling at Walker to abandon ship and declare the mission a failure. Being in the Army, I was doing that at the first sign of trouble, that being when a CIA agent was torturing a junior officer about three chapters in.

The series finale of the TV Show M*A*S*H revealed that the character Hawkeye blames himself for the death of an infant when a Korean woman smothers it, playing it off as a chicken all along. Walker did the same thing, passing off the deaths of civilians on Konrad.

Now there’s two endings in the penultimate chapter: 1. Let the apparition of Konrad gun you down, or 2. Shoot first and proceed to the final chapter which has three endings. Soldiers come to retrieve you and there are three responses: 1. Shoot them all dead and continue to live in the ruins of Dubai as a mad man; 2. Shoot and commit suicide by soldier because you’ve seen enough and this is the closest you’ll get to answering for your sins; 3. Surrender and let the soldiers take you back presumably for questioning and a court-martial. The last of these would see a mental health specialist determine Walker’s mental condition. If able to stand trial, that’s a burial plot 60 feet under Fort Leavenworth. If not, then wherever the line is drawn depends on whether Walker disobeyed orders and took charge of an authorized mission playing vigilante. He did and he did, which would be grounds for conduct unbecoming, though probably means something along the lines of a discharge of either general under honorable conditions or other than honorable discharge if evidence comes up short. As for the use of weapons on civilians, dishonorable. War crimes tribunal. 600 feet under the prison, let the casket melt. To further elaborate on the apparition of Konrad, him shooting you (or you shooting yourself) is an admission that the mission was an even worse failure than what Konrad tried to do by intervening, but shooting the apparition is an insistence that Walker was in the right all along and that every end justified the means, even the deaths of soldiers and civilians. No matter the outcome, Walker’s mind is essentially mashed potatoes. He might have been able to wave it off as Konrad’s doing, but after the shocking moment, the hallucinations, and the search for a golden nugget in a world of s[avalanche]t, there was no way.

Do I recommend the game then? Like I said, it was a struggle to find it as it’s since been delisted from digital stores, leaving emulation as the only way to experience it firsthand. And I don’t recommend it for the gameplay. It’s purposely clunky and cumbersome as an overall critique on the genre at the time but learning that neither CoD nor BF nor even Medal of Honor, belching its last before indefinite hiatus, took that lesson particularly to heart. Or rather the first two put their battlefields elsewhere while, as said before, MoH, went to sleep for the time being.

Also keep in mind that it was a critique on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which began under Bush Jr., continued under Obama (who by many accounts droned more people than his predecessor and successor), kept on under Trump’s first and officially ended under Biden, though to clarify, Obama saw the end of Iraq and Biden saw the pullout of Afghanistan. Being 13 years away from the release of the game and long after both conflicts have concluded, the message of the game has certainly aged. It’s not like a WWI-based game where warfare changed, but wars didn’t. The war on terror isn’t the same as a war against a nation where POWs are expected to be repatriated at the end. Knowing how Iraq ended, if the message was to end the wars or at least get out of Afghanistan at the time, it kind of falls flat with how complicated the whole ordeal was. Unless the message was, don’t make it America’s mess, we don’t need to keep seeing to it personally, there’s better ways to go about this, then fair enough, we didn’t need to commit as many to either conflict as we actually did. But would we still be Americans if we didn’t watch the tower fall in person?

America after winning a war, confident that the ideas died with the men…

Yahtzee Croshaw reviewed the game at the time and may have put it more succinctly as an outsider of sorts to American boondoggles in the sand. Now that all of that is done, to look at three 2012 releases and how well they tackle corruption.

Channel: The Escapist

Call of Duty’s Troubles

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There are many

Normally, my blog posts tend to shed light on the obscure, the niche, the hardly known or talked about entertainment products that probably have only two “articles” dedicated to them, and by articles I mean something along the lines of a vague Wikipedia article or a social media post. This time, I want to talk about something that grabs headlines every holiday season and has done so reliably since around 2007.

What brought about a post like this? Well, in another episode of Piracy is the Best Policy, I emulated the PC version of Call of Duty: Black Ops for old times’ sake. I played it and its sequels yonks ago on console and I kept going back to gameplay of the mission where US Navy and Marines patrol the Mekong in the dead of night to the Rolling Stones so I thought I’d hype myself up. During gameplay, I realized a lot of things that caught my eye having briefly been a part of US Army basic training. Wrong uniforms, anachronistic weaponry, and confusion of the military branches were some of the worst headscratchers, but looking at the plot it reminded me of this article and subsequent video by WatchMojo.com about confusing video game plotlines.

https://www.watchmojo.com/articles/top-10-confusing-video-game-plots

https://www.watchmojo.com/video/id/13961

Disclaimer: the video and article are both from mid 2015 and Black Ops was saved for an Honorable Mention, but all things considered, I think it still holds up even if the game specifically isn’t mentioned. So for a recap, the plot of Black Ops is that Marine officer and CIA Operative Alex Mason is being interrogated by unknown entities in the late 1960s about his extensive service record in the clandestine government office.

His prime objective in Black Ops is to thwart an incoming Soviet threat, but due to Soviet mind games involving a mysterious sequence of numbers, he gets turned around each time. Faulty intelligence in Vietnam, a failed assassination in Cuba (one of hundreds), brainwashing programs in a Russian prison, and a series of mounting catastrophes approaching the US motivate the CIA’s actions throughout the 1960s.

From that description alone, you’d get the impression that the espionage angle is front and center, but one thing the CoD franchise didn’t realize until the 2020 reboot was that there’s more to espionage than donning a uniform. Studying the target areas, polyglotism, and mirroring the customs and cultures of an area all go to that, but what Black Ops lacked was any use of gadgets. Concealed cameras, hidden compartments, hidden weapons, and other such gizmos were all a part of an operative’s arsenal and unless they were going to a warzone, operatives were casually dressed. You only ever get that in the first mission of the game. The rest of the time, it’s an Olympic swimming pool of action and adrenaline.

Not the first time something like this would be used as a slight against CoD. Modern Warfare 2 walked through a controversy concerning the “No Russian” mission.

A jumping the shark moment in the series, some argued that violence was hitting too close to home — keep in mind, that the annoyances of post-9/11 aviation and air safety were fresh. 9/11 internet memes would be years away. Others claimed that CoD could’ve and should’ve done better to shock the public if they were going for a gut punch. Speaking of which, the terrorist attack on London in Modern Warfare 3 was also seen by some as one of several ridiculous moments in that game.

To my knowledge, the plot of Black Ops II didn’t have many controversies from the media or the audience, but there was one from Zero Punctuation, notably about most of the good guys being white Americans in contrast to the predominantly Latino villains. Personally, this criticism holds some water, but not a lot. Admittedly, there’d be more mileage in the decision to interrogate a terrorist on an aircraft carrier while said terrorist hacks into the ship’s computer and turns its weapons on civilian targets. It’s also worth noting that this terrorist was personally connected to the protagonist Navy SEAL David Mason, Alex Mason’s son. My knowledge is limited on this, but since he surrendered to the Navy here, shouldn’t the NCIS have performed an investigation on him or something? I know in the campaign he asks for David personally, but why would the Navy honor that request? Seems like a lapse in judgment, developer ignorance, or both.

Well, all was well and good for CoD until the release of 2013’s Ghosts after which everyone who held a grudge against the franchise lobbied their complaints to any passerby who’d listen. The games after that would focus on a futuristic element until massive backlash to 2016’s Infinite Warfare, coupled with a “gun to head” marketing tactic of tacking a MW remaster to the reviled game caused Activision-Blizzard to focus on 2017’s World War II roots in a callback to the franchise’s beginnings in the early 2000s.

Was this a good move? Well, Black Ops 4 the following year would make it seem like a one off until Modern Warfare was fully rebooted in 2019 while Black Ops Cold War put more emphasis on the espionage in juxtaposition with the standard military campaign. Matter of fact, the lack of juxtaposition was a valid criticism Zero Punctuation had against Black Ops in 2010. You know a game is nuts when an earlier game has more stealth missions than the game built around clandestine operations.

As I was playing my pirated version of Black Ops, I kept finding all the stuff that would turn off anyone who’s served in the military or even military historians, the uniforms and anachronistic weapons being one of them. Also the overloaded action as noted by Yahtzee Croshaw led me to an old video on the CoD franchise and one pivotal moment in the franchise’s history came from the development side.

In the middle of the development of Modern Warfare 2009, Infinity Ward founders Jason West and Vincent Zampella were booted for conflicts of interest and insubordination. These vague accusations have never been elaborated on as of this writing, but according to the video, Activision-Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick reneged on a promise to divvy up the revenue generated by Modern Warfare 2, leading to a mass resignation soon after.

In the end, West and Zampella settled the matter out of court in 2012 for an undisclosed amount of money. Whether this had a direct influence on the series for the next decade until Modern Warfare 2019, I can’t say with confidence, but indirectly it opened the door to industry-wide wage theft and abuse in this medium. Coincidentally, the controversy surrounding the working conditions at Team Bondi, the Australian developer of L.A. Noire, were made public by former employees, including those who never saw the game through to its end, and what is known of the fallout between Infinity Ward and Activision was enhanced by the studio-wide mismanagement of Team Bondi, and their subsequent bankruptcy. All the punishing work to make one game, nothing to show for it, and worst of all it didn’t live up to its hype, forever designating it to cult classic status.

Team Bondi and L.A. Noire is an extreme example, but it’s nowhere near unheard of. Any old Google search will reveal a plethora of games that were victims of meddling from publishers, tyrannical studio heads, unreasonable hours, or anything else known to hinder development, even to the point of cancellation. Former Escapist Magazine journalist Jim Sterling has multiple videos detailing the industry-wide abuses, and they’ve made Bobby Kotick a feature on their show, The Jimquisition.

Being relatively late to the CoD scene, I wouldn’t have known about this otherwise but most fans didn’t pay much attention to the legal troubles or several canceled video games due in part or in whole because of the Infinity Ward fallout, but it’s worth noting the narrative differences between them and the devs of Modern Warfare 3, Sledgehammer Games. Across the trilogy, the spectacle of the games crosses over into cartoonish levels of action to the point where it might as well be a parody, like In the Army Now pretending to be Saving Private Ryan but wound up like The Hurt Locker. If you don’t know, the veteran and military communities hate The Hurt Locker for many reasons.

For what it’s worth, CoD is at least trying to refine its story campaign even if the hardcore demographic is stuck in multiplayer scoring killstreaks with death machine or UAVs, but personally I think the Modern Warfare and Black Ops reboots are doing a good job with the juxtaposition. It remains to be seen if Modern Warfare III can continue that trend. If so, great. If not, then the best we’ve got is the upcoming Six Days in Fallujah which as of writing is in early access. And one day I’ll play all of these, ideally after buying them and installing them on a disk drive larger than two terabytes.

This week’s recommended channel is TrueUnderDawgGaming.

https://www.youtube.com/@TrueUnderDawgGaming/about

This channel is dedicated to news, lore, updates, and everything else concerning fighting games, most notably the Mortal Kombat franchise. With Mortal Kombat 1 releasing in the next month, TrueUnderDawgGaming and other such YouTubers have been keeping tabs on the upcoming characters for the game, making individual videos on the characters and their updated appearances as Ed Boon and NetherRealm Studios put the finishing touches on the game.

The channel’s runner is very familiar with the 3D Mortal Kombat era as well, with videos on select characters or even events from those games and showcasing move sets of characters from this era as well. Die hard MK fan? Fighting game enthusiast? Looking for fighting games to try out and learn about? Look no further than TrueUnderDawgGaming.

By the way, I have a surprise coming up. Between the time of this posting and next week’s topics, I’m going to post an update on a manga returning after August 21. Those of you who’ve been keeping up with the series may know what I’m talking about, but for those looking for a sneak peek, look to the post from July 28.

Under the Mayo and How NOT to Review Games

TiberiusLeave a comment

Hot takes taken to an absurd extreme

When it comes to video game reviewers and YouTubers, I bounce between creators for a time. One of the recommendations I made a few posts ago about Tactical Bacon Productions is one that I firmly believe is in his element enough to get the traffic he needs, even with YouTube jerking him and other YouTubers around with arbitrary strikes and claims due to a screw up that happened on their part. The channels I’ve been recommending for the month of February (and others to come in the future, especially at the end of this post), have been consistent to the best of their ability regarding content. They know what they’re talking about or what they’re doing and few of them have anything controversial surrounding them. The same can’t be said of the subject of today’s video: Under the Mayo.

I came across this channel while looking for content for God of War 4 last year and his controversial review on the game opened up Pandora’s box. Several other YouTubers had come to defend the new Norse era of God of War and call out Mayo for his contrarian viewpoints. And these viewpoints were very contrarian. The video below has a provocative title:

Controversy definitely sells and if it was just a hook to reel in viewers, I’d leave it alone. But viewpoints within the video sounded too ignorant, as if Mayo hadn’t payed any attention to the story of the previous games in the lead up to 2018. Gaming journalists tend to do that a fair amount with the countless number of know-nothings who’s exposure to the old God of War games is surface level or they just forgot. And to lend a straw to Mayo, this isn’t about him misunderstanding the difference between Greek Kratos and Norse Kratos. Hell, this post isn’t unique in what it has to say about him.

On YouTube and select Reddit posts, he’s taken hits for sounding like a hypocrite. Five minutes into a review he’ll praise an element of X and ten minutes in the same video he’ll critique it. Or he’ll highlight a feature of one game, wish for it to be taken out of an upcoming sequel if the game is successful enough and all of a sudden wish for it to come back; or conversely want something to be patched out and regret it when it has. You could argue that most people don’t always know what they want and that’s fair. Too much can be said about an indecisive populace making a generation-changing decision and that sentence alone probably gives you an idea from across the pond.

The point of divergence for Mayo comes in the harsh critique of most games in stark contrast to everything he has said about Doom and Doom: Eternal. Here’s where I admit that the rest of this post may jump into speculation. My exposure to Doom is also surface level, even though I played the original games on Steam and I have the 2016 DOOM on Xbox One that I haven’t touched in a while. I’ve got nothing against the franchise or id Software, my preferences lean more towards the action-adventure variety. I think Doom is an awesomely influential series that most games these days lend an oath of gratitude to, enough that first-person shooters needed a more appropriate genre name than just Doom clone that was the case for it in the 90s and beyond. That being said, if Doom went to court for something (and it probably did, video games that showcase or reference the Devil are gonna get theirs), Mayo is the type of guy that if he were an attorney, he’d drop everything and zoom on over to the courtroom with enough material to sway the jury after boring them to sleep for seven hours, and that’s because even the stenographer wants him to shut the hell up.

id Software’s flagship series has a permanent residence in his head and if his critics are to be believed, if Mayo hasn’t mentioned or shown footage of Doom or Doom: Eternal apropos of nothing, he’s liable to reference it in a review of another game. I’ve watched YouTubers take apart his God of War and Sifu reviews for the flip-flopping, backpedaling talking points, drawing on the conclusion that he says it without sincerity for contrarian’s sake.

Personally, I’ve ventured around this angle before on a few things I wasn’t all that serious about, but Mayo seems determined to die in a bunker with 60 years worth of provisions on his takes.

I hesitate to say that I’m 100% passionate about a singular thing these days, my tastes are subject to change and I could spend my money on things that actually help with survival, hobbies and pastimes coming second. Among Mayo’s critics, he’s come under fire as a hypocritical game reviewer with a singular thing on his mind. With what I know about his review style and what others have said, it seems as though he frames himself as the singular authority on what makes a good game based on only one game and that’s a bad lens to look through.

Speaking of God of War critiques, in GCN’s video on Everything Wrong with God of War 2018 in the style of CinemaSins, one of the criticisms lobbied was one I actually agreed with: games in this day and age need to let go of FromSoftware’s tenets and features of game design. Listing off a round of games that put style and substance front and center like Ninja Gaiden, Onimusha, God Hand, Devil May Cry and the original God of War series, the proof in the pudding there was that FromSoft’s Dark Souls franchise is not the be-all, end-all of game design. In a similar vein, Doom: Eternal isn’t close to revolutionary.

If I may get controversial for a bit, Doom 1993 was a phenomenal influence on the gaming industry. DOOM 2016 and Doom: Eternal are not special. Within the franchise and within the gaming industry, these FPS’s are always welcome to let players partake in the carnage they have to offer, but they don’t have anything new to offer that other games already have for better or worse. Fighting demons on Mars with high tech weaponry? Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Black Ops III all did it a year and change prior with sliding and jetpack mechanics for better and worse. Setting the story aside to focus on ramming a demon horn into said demon’s own throat? NetherRealm Mortal Kombat, Black Ops IV, and God of War either did one or both of these things before that.

For the record, I’m not saying that I think Call of Duty beats Doom; I’m saying that mechanically Doom doesn’t do much to make a difference anymore. The lack of weapon reloading gets back to the style of shooter that literally gave you a gun so you can blast away unimpeded, but beyond that Doom is just a more extreme, more based shooter. And you don’t need me to tell you this. Get the game or watch a Let’s Play and see demon limbs flood the next level in Viscera Cleanup Detail.

Don’t get the wrong idea from this. Everyone loves what they love and hates what they hate, but it’s never a good sign to go hard on one or the other, especially at the expense of the opposite. Mayo clearly has a boner for Doom et al, and he has the right to voice his opinions, but there’s better ways to do it. I don’t want to sound like the internet police and say being an asshole on the Internet is wrong when most people do it, ideally with little consequence to them in the real world (better pray no one knows where you live), but if you’re going to say something, have evidence, write down your thoughts, and if there’s a contradiction somewhere down the line, correct it and try again.

The last channel recommendation for the month of February 2023 is TheMythologyGuy.

https://www.youtube.com/@TheMythologyGuy1/featured

Since this post mentioned a product caked in mythology, it seemed fitting to mention a channel where that’s the specialty on display. TheMythologyGuy talks about various mythologies from Greece to Egypt to Japan to Norse just to name a few. Several of my favorite videos of his are about the mythical inaccuracies in the God of War games, followed close by movie reviews concerning other myths and franchises, notably that of the Percy Jackson variety. The link to his channel is up above and his about page will have links on where and how to support him.

This will be the last of the channel recommendations until April. Look forward to their return.