Ambient_Malice said:
Loonyyy said:
Goyer wasn't the only writer on The Dark Knight.
True. But my understanding is that Goyer was the key writer during Nolan collaborations. He wrote most of Man of Steel, for example.
Yeah, and Man of Steel is a far more questionable achievement. Don't get me wrong, the guy has done things I liked, but his work with Nolan isn't a mark of his quality. It's a tad misleading to use The Dark Knight to shore up his cred, when he's working with Nolan, who is a far greater director and writer.
Black Ops goes out of its way to push the message that Mason will be betrayed by the American government, just as Reznov was betrayed by Russia. "When all that you are, all that you have done, is buried beneath the lies and the deceit of corrupt men." People calling Black Ops "jingoistic" miss the entire point of the two games.
Except Mason isn't betrayed by the American government. All we know of Mason's aims was that he was a (Presumably loyal) soldier. Weaver and Hudson were also helping the US. By torturing him, they're helping avert the end of the world. Yeah, it is jingoistic. You can justify torturing your own people if you think that it's justified by the ends.
And again:
Vietnam
Killing Castro (Yeah, it's a double. It's still childish).
Most of our bad guys are Russians. Basically Bolsheveik commies from the cold war
(The video was a happy accident)
Mason's actions are justifiable. Hudson's actions are. The US governments are. That's not a black op. Iran Contra was a black op. That's what I mean: They promise the conflict of black ops, deniable operations, conducted without sanctions. They can include arms dealings and drug dealings, and the killing of innocents. And they go with, Murica saves the world from the damn communists in the Cold War. That's your jingo. It doesn't even try to hint at the cost to the people involved, or at the potential darkness lurking in them, like say, Modern Warfare did.
The only character who conveys any of that is Reznov, and he's the one who actually betrayed you, seeing as iirc, he manipulated your brain washing for his revenge.
Oh, and Nova 6 is a pointless contrivance MacGuffin superweapon, and has no real justification for it's includance, especially as the plot already deals with Nuclear weapons.
What do I even care if Reznov was a hallucination? How does that make it better?
Because "mind fuck"?
It's not a mind fuck. I'm not terribly shocked or undone by it. All it does is precludes his involvement from then on out. Which is disappointing, because he's a cool character. If they want to pull such a big card, they should do it for a reason, or I'm going to call it a cheap ploy, and say again: Why should I care? Because, I don't. The game didn't, and couldn't make me care, because David Goyer doesn't understand why I would care about that.
"Reznov is dead, or is he dead, there was no body, is he who he says he is." When Reznov briefly appears in Black Ops II, he miraculously appears on a horse to save Mason from dying in the desert. Is this Reznov real or just the numbers screwing with Mason's brain?
Reznov is dead. He's far too old, and there are many hints that he died. After the first game, I know he's dead, so seeing him in the second just says that the US armed forces are stupid enough to employ a delusional, still brainwashed, Australian spy, and they haven't picked up on his accent.
You could ask the same thing of stories like Fight Club. Reznov already had a game dedicated to him. Black Ops is more of a deconstruction.
Hahahahaha. No. Why would you compare Goyer to Palahniuk? Tyler Durden is Jack's ideal man, and through this, his false idealisation of a retrograde masculine identity as his solution to his ennui with a boring, consumerist existance, is criticized, and eventually revealed as nothing more than a violent, and pathetic backlash that leaves him in the same chains.
Whereas Reznov is a hallucination brought on by brainwashing, to encourage Mason to his final goal, revenge on the guys who screwed Reznov, and killed his friend.
There is no deconstruction, because in the game, unlike say, The Sixth Sense, it's simple to cheat, and the game never gives you any reason to think Reznov is real. Most of your NPCs do very little if you're playing the game normally, the only difference between key ones and the rest is that the key ones don't die, and the others are replaced by respawns.
You must have been really mad when Alec Trevelyan survived being apparently shot in the head in GoldenEye.
You can have a reasonable conversation, or none at all.
I said that there's not a payoff. In the first game, he's suggested to have died in a heroic sacrifice. That was a powerful moment. A moment I actually liked in the game, although you're doing a good job of souring me on it after the fact. Then, in the second game, he comes up again, with fairly little explanation of what happened. It undercuts a genuinely good moment, where a genuinely likeable character was seen to have died, and instead of making it a special moment when he returns, it forgets to capitalize on it. That's why it doesn't payoff. It also undercuts the permanancy of death, and lowers the stakes. That wouldn't matter if it's in the service of a dramatic payoff, but it misses it. It's just a failed bit of writing, Goyer missing something really fucking obvious about reintroducing the character, and assuming that the metagame hints at his survival are a dramatic payoff. No. No it is not.
Alec Trevalyan is apparently shot in the head at the start of Goldeneye, he's not overly developed as a character, and most of his work in that film is in his reincarnation as a villain. That comparison makes absolutely no sense, and it's frankly insulting. But it's the second one that demonstrates how you analyse media, and the flaws in that approach.
The game beats you over the head with how unjust and evil America is. The game literally opens with a small child being burnt alive by American greed. How is Black Ops 2 even vaguely jingoistic?
Because the game still places you on the side of the Americans, fighting to ensure their survival, and their survival as a global superpower. It positions the Chinese and the impoverished as the enemy. It rewrites the Afghanistan conflict to present the Mujahadeen as traitors working for more of our villains, when our Americans are really interlopers in a conflict which is far more important to the Mujahadeen than it is to them.
And at the end of the game, you've won, and secured victory for America. Even if the drones were wrong, it's just a misstep for America. It doesn't question the underlying premise.
Like you said, this imagery is just edge. It's just playing at being critical of America. They have no intention of making substantive criticism, because the game is still made for Americans, who are presumed to not want that. Let me be blunt: This is not the way that the world sees America. China and Russia see the US very differently than this, and so do America's Allies. This is treating America with kid gloves. The bad guys in these games deserve to die, or their countries deserve to lose. But America does not. The game has no qualms about being about American heroes, saving America, even when it means triumphing over the more deserving.
Cordis Die don't need Lynch, aka "Karma". They just wanted to prevent you having access to her skills. They weren't going to just murder her because Cordis Die are the GOOD GUYS, or at least they think they are.
But they do. If Farid dies, a Cordis Die operative murders Lynch.
So why not earlier?
The game makes a big thing about Lynch, even gives you two opportunities to get her, and it still doesn't have a good use for her, and it still opens up more holes in the story.
And you didn't address my main point: The effect the choice system has on the narrative. It really, really is not an improvement. It opens up holes like this, it doesn't present two sides when you look at the endings, and it's basically a bit of window dressing. Lynch is bad writing.
The player is given some agency over whether Menendez is a cold blooded murderer. How is this bad?
That's very bad! God, that's one of the stupidest moments in the game. It's not cold blooded murder. Cordis Die is at war. Even if you accept that they're good guys (Which would render the Americans the bad guys, and reinforces the jingoism of the game, where America wins, even if they're bad, and this is presented without a negative tone, even having a victory lap of Menendez raging impotently in his cell), they're at war with the US, and this is a military officer, on duty, and he is escaping to further his cause. THERE IS NO REASON FOR HIM NOT TO KILL THE ADMIRAL. IT'S A SOUND MILITARY DECISION.
It's even more sound than killing Lynch, which is perfectly reasonable. Cordis Die is fighting for 2 BILLION of the world's poorest. Lynch is a well off hacker, who is a threat to their existance.
It also just muddies the waters more on Menendez. The game can't make up it's mind on him, and the ambiguity doesn't serve to illustrate a point "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter", but to make our story nonsensical.
It's also just a really silly choice, because it's in the player's best interest to not kill the Admiral. The game doesn't give enough coverage to Cordis Die and Menendez for this to be a choice, and the endings reflect the focus on the Americans.
I'm frankly shocked that you don't get this.
There's also the fact the CIA murderer his father because he was an inconvenience to them. Menendez is the product of American greed. Every step of the way, he was further radicalised by Americans doing evil shit to him and his people.
His father was a drug kingpin. That's what I'm getting at. There are a bunch of different angles to look at Menendez from.
Justifiable:
-The Contras make him hate America (Oh look, an actual Black Op, run by Mr North, which was an atrocity).
-His sister is burned by an American
Not really justifiable.
-He and his father make the world a worse place by becoming drug kingpins and gangsters
-His father is killed.
-His sister is killed, in an attempt to kill him.
And then his uprising as Cordis Die, which is anti-capitalist, and anti dictatorship, and pro the people. Which doesn't really align so well with the rest.
The game doesn't present a clear story for him. Are we meant to be angry that his sister was killed? It was his fault. But we see plenty of rage from him for that. Are we meant to be angry about global injustice? Because the game has us restore the unjust status quo.
I can get it if he's using Cordis Die as personal revenge. That makes sense. I can get it if he really is a messiah for the working poor and underpriviliged. But the game doesn't go with either, and it doesn't explore the conflict.
I think you might be missing the point. Black Ops is a brilliant story precisely because it doesn't indulge itself in Advanced Warfare-esque moralistic boo-hooing about the fact you are the bad guys. You are puppets of an evil empire. Reznov tried to warn you.
Rubbish. It doesn't have the guts to say that you're playing the bad guys, because the game is still meant to sell to Americans. The edginess is just there to appease a post-Dark Knight world. The game has no qualms about misrepresenting Afghanistan, Vietnam, and not exploring the Contras, or actual Black Ops. It's hedging it's bets.
Reznov tried to warn us? Reznov, who betrayed our trust, brainwashed us for his own personal revenge (He's far more like Menendez than Mason), and who had no way of seeing Cordis Die coming? Please. If you scatter enough faeces around, you might find two pieces of corn, but that doesn't make it a cob.
All that matters in Blops is that you, the American hero, kill everything in front of you, no matter who they are, on the way to your goal.
I quote Raul himself in his declaration of war:
Opulence is sinful, and we all pay for it. Los Angeles was the flagship of their absurd materialism, so I destroyed it. They thought I wanted to kill the president. Madame Presidentè, I could have buried you a million times over... No... I wanted you to see it, to feel what it's like. Today, two billion people exist in abject misery, tyrannized by war. Madame Presidentè, your war machines are no more. Your military is crippled. You cannot stop us now. Cordis Die, rise, and strike when they are down. Strike now, and strike deep!
See, I can get behind that. That's one of the better things in the game. And I can respect Cordis Die. But the game still has you poised to crush them. Ultimate victory means Cordis Die is utterly defeated. That is the consequence of the "great" choices system in the game. Cordis Die is far more empathetic to a moral person than the US is. Yet winning the game is about beating them. The game even pulls a gloating victory lap. At no point does it suggest we should feel bad about this. It suggests that we should feel good about it.
Part of a good film or game is managing tone through camera work, music, colour, to convey additional meaning, to frame the events. The game at no point uses these to convey any statement about what is happening.
Like Bane, Goyer crafted Raul as something of a false messiah. But in Black Ops 2, Raul is genuine in his crusade to end the tyranny of American injustice over the world.
You and I define genius very differently. I grow tired of villains who's every action is writer fiat, who exist in a plot which is entirely contrivance, and who's victory has no real relation to the events of the plot.
For instance, should you kill him, a video comes up and the people burn down the White House. Why this shouldn't happen if he lives? Goodness knows. Hell, it might even make a decent point, that he's a bad guy, and deserves to be taken down, but Cordis Die were right, and the US deserves to pay. But instead, it's a punishment for not getting the game right, for acting out of raw vengeance, like Menendez himself. That would be where framing comes in. Look at how Menendez plays in his first section, pulsing anger, hacking people to bits.
There are some good bits. That bit of dialogue you highlighted is one of them. Unfortunately, their presence just makes the game more confused, because the game's winstates, explicitly condemn them.
Black Ops gives us illegal assassination attempts, a main character who is deeply insane and manipulated by the brainwashing of a fanatical anti-Nazi nutcase, Reznov. Mason killed JFK. I suppose the fact you can be tricked into killing Mason in Black Ops 2 is some sort of karmatic justice.
Come on. We get what, a mission to kill Castro (Moar jingoism), killing a drug kingpin (Which is entirely morally justifiable), and a character who has a mental illness (Which is a caricature) which is convenient to the plot.
We get Russians destroying the world in the first one, and in the second one, we have the US curb stomping the poor while staring down China. And again, the gameplay is just even more OTT explosion porn.
It goes nowhere near actual Black Ops. How many times do I have to say this? It's really disrespectful to ignore what I'm writing so that you can argue around me.
Again. The elephant in the room. IRAN CONTRA.
Oliver North was military adviser for Black Ops 2, not Black Ops 1.
I am aware of this. Hell, the reason I knew of his involvement was Treyarch and Activision putting him in trailers, which, as a fan of the game series, I was following. If that doesn't demonstrate the fucked up perspective at play, I don't know what will. They paid this man to advise on their game. Everyone should be disgusted by that. If the aim was really this anti-American imperialism story, why did they hire the criminal American imperialist to help on it?
