Gotta disagree with you on Saints Row 2, Jim. Jessica wasn't some innocent bystander who got caught in the crossfire, she masterminded having Carlos tortured to death and then called the boss to gloat about it. I'll admit that maiming Matt after he told you everything he knew was over the line, but Jessica had it coming.
That's essentially what irked me about Tito's review. I got the impression that the main reason he did not really like the game was because he didn't like playing a true villain. It's fine not liking it, but I don't feel it's a good point of scoring a game in a review as it's a purely personal preference. In other words, it is not actually a fault of the game, but he treats it as such because it conflicts with his personal wants; essentially throwing objectivity out the window. It's like a reviewer scoring Dark Souls poorly because he doesn't like being in the dark.
People who constantly misuse and abuse the farce that is Lugoscababib Discobiscuits in their vain attempt to sound politically and morally correct REALLY need to take a look at this Jimquistion (after they're subjected to the Lugoscababib Discobiscuits one for a good 20min.) because that's about the only gripe i have with the people who avoid GTA V. The hypocrisy does a good job of rustling my jimmies too. Oh so it's okay for Joel(The Last Of Us) to shove glass in some poor bastard's throat because he lost his little girl? Uh no, i don't think so, he's as morally reprehensible as Captain Walker(Spec Ops: The Line) and i think BOTH Games deserved to be played.
I'm all for Idealistic Power Fantasies (I'm an Introvert, people like me practically THRIVE off it.) but you can't ask for Games to be taken as a serious Medium but dismiss it or even fight it when they TRY to be serious and/or realistic.(Yes i'm still mad over Six Days in Fallujah, seriously who WOULDN'T?)
They're valid reasons to dislike a Game but they REALLY upset me, it's like hating Call Of Duty because you have to shoot a Gun. But i guess it's because no one likes to admit when they fuck up, how many people here can honestly accept that the shit you do in Saints Row 2 is incredibly evil? Yeah it was fun but i can already imagine the amount of people who'd try to justify say killing Jessica as requiem for not being paid, or even crippling Matt on the Stage. But THANK GOD for Jim, now i don't feel like the only man on Earth who genuinely enjoyed Kane & Lynch and isn't mentally/emotionally unstable.
So sick of the Escapist contributors using the common strawman argument to defend that review.
"Oh people are mad that the score was low, but the score wasn't low so the complaints are all childish and stupid"
No, people were not complaining about a low score. As you said, the score is not low. If it was just the score, people complaining about the review wouldn't be constantly quoting the written review itself.
They are complaining because he gives it a good score but spends the entire review whining that he had to play a bad guy and throughout the review says things that are not a matter of opinion but demonstrably wrong such as claiming that we are given no context for the Life Invader mission.
He claimed that we were not told what would happen (Lester tells you what you are going to do before the mission and what he plans to do with it) and he claims we are given no reason (Micheal straight up asks him why to which Lester starts rounding off reasons that HE feels justifies the attack, after the mission we are also given the real reason which is to manipulate the stock exchange) and no that's not a matter of opinion no more than it's a matter of opinion to claim in a review that the game features absolutely no vehicles.
That's just one section of the review, I could go on and on here. It's fine to defend it, but defend it on it's own merit, don't hide behind that "People just mad cus of scores" bs.
I really expected better from you jim. I honestly expected you to talk about the actual issue and not just use the same lazy strawman that the others on this site have been using.
This is another one of those times Jim defeats his own argument by going longer than he should. He doesn't like the characters or what they do and doesn't want them to succeed. Great. But then he goes and not only buys the game, but plays it. Thats like not liking a movie or any of the characters in it, but you saw it then bought the DVD.
I don't want to play GTAV...and guess what? I didn't buy it. Jim's thing seems to be he buys these games, knowing he wont like the characters, story, game play or themes. And then plays it while say "Oh man, I hate this game and do not wish to see it completed."
This is another one of those times Jim defeats his own argument by going longer than he should. He doesn't like the characters or what they do and doesn't want them to succeed. Great. But then he goes and not only buys the game, but plays it. Thats like not liking a movie or any of the characters in it, but you saw it then bought the DVD.
I don't want to play GTAV...and guess what? I didn't buy it. Jim's thing seems to be he buys these games, knowing he wont like the characters, story, game play or themes. And then plays it while say "Oh man, I hate this game and do not wish to see it completed."
He wasn't complaining about GTA 5. He says several times he likes playing the villian.
Watch the video before whining about it perhaps.
He said he hates the characters but that's what makes playing it all the more compelling. Maybe don't cast yourself as the authority on who is allowed to play which games.
My only "problem" with Greg's review was that I just couldn't understand where he was coming from. I read his review before purchasing the game and everything he was describing just made me say "Sooooooo how's that different than the standard GTA protagonist?" And having played the game now, I can officially confirm that feeling. I see no real difference between the protagonists in GTA 5 and the protagonists of other GTA games, with the exception of Trevor, but I'll get to that.
Michael is basically a watered down Tommy Vercetti. He's a former bank robber who really doesn't want to do horrible things but he's got HUGE anger issues (just like Tommy) and those get him in trouble (again, just like Tommy). Each job he does is in order to pay back some debt that his temper has gotten him into and basically he's just trying not to get himself killed. At the end of the day he really does just want to kick back and try to work things out with his family and lead a "normal" life. I say he's a "watered down Tommy Vercetti" because Tommy wasn't looking to retire, he was a low-level grunt in the mob and was actively WANTING to become Mr. Big, the King Pin. He wanted to create a crime empire and once he did he had to maintain it.
Michael is basically a carbon-copy of CJ from San Andres, so I really don't see how his character is anything different from the norm.
Trevor, on the other hand, I can understand people having a problem with because he's just so over-the-top ridiculous. Still, when you take into account the things that Tommy Vercetti and CJ did, he doesn't really do anything "out of the ordinary" (at least in terms of his vilent outbursts) from anything we've seen thus far. He's a straight-shooter who doesn't bullshit people and expects not to be bullshitted himself. And if you try to bullshit him, he's more than happy to tell you about how pissed off that makes him. He's the head of his own meth/gun-running empire which gives him a position of authority and a "big boss" mentality, that's why he expects people to do what he tells them to. Greg's review of the game
And by "this" I mean screwing a biker's girlfriend and then killing said biker when he came around asking questions. Really, though, there's clear motivation for everything he does. He killed that biker because he was going to kill the entire gang anyways. The first few missions you play as him he makes it clear that 1: He hates The Lost (the biker gang) and 2: he's cleaning house. He goes around taking out all the competition to his meth and gun-running operations so that he is the only operation left in town. He takes out the bikers for the weapons and takes out the red-neck meth lab because they stole the Chinese meth contract from him. Seems like valid motivation for a methed-up meth dealer if you ask me.
And so that's the only thing I disagreed with Greg on. He said that the characters had no motivations for the crimes and horrible acts of violence the committed, but I have to disagree. To me all the characters have perfectly valid motivations for all their actions.
In short: I didn't disagree purely because of the number-score he gave the game...hell, I don't even pay attention to that. I just disagree with his assessment of the characters. Kinda like Jim's episode from last week, people not liking Bioshock Infinite because it's a violent game. Did people REALLY pick up GTA V expecting anything less than GTA-brand ultra-violence?
All that said, at this point I'd give the game a 2 out of 5 purely because I've been afflicted with a game-breaking bug that, according to the Rockstar website, I'm not the only one to have. Simply put: I can't get into the building I need to get into in order to start the last heist of the game because all the doors are completely sealed and won't open. And now my game is refusing to load all together, meaning my only choices are to hope that Rockstar comes out with a fix for it soon and that it not only fixes the issue but allows my game to load...or erase my game and start from the very beginning and hope that the glitch doesn't happen again. Neither of which are very appealing at this point.
+1 for Zorg. That said, I have a bone to pick with what you said about Saints Row 2...
<spoiler=Saints Row 2 spoilers>You were killing a guy's girlfriend because the guy's girlfriend tied one of your friends up to the back of a truck and had him dragged through the streets of the city, resulting in you having to mercy kill him because there was no chance of getting him to the hospital to save his life.
And quite frankly, she "deserved" it for (lack of a better word). Her act was far more vile than your character's retribution for that act, especially so considering that Carlos wasn't even a horrible person like most of the others in the game. In fact, what she did is probably the second most vile thing anyone in that game does to another person, being beat out only by Johnny Gat burying a man alive.
No. What the player character did because the Maero made a deal he didn't like was put nuclear waste in his tattoo ink. Pretty fucked up in its own right, enough that it would have made your point if you had stuck to accuracy instead of trying misrepresent why they kill his girlfriend.
Steve the Pocket said:
erttheking said:
It reminds me something my short story professor said. If a story makes you feel uncomfortable, it's doing its job right. Stories aren't always there to hold our hands, sometimes they're there to punch you in the gut.
If the torture scene in GTA V made you uncomfortable, then that's a good thing. They wanted to show torture as the horrible, ugly thing that it is and they wanted to show Trevor as an unrelenting psychopath that would enjoy doing it.
Except the point of making sandbox-game protagonists villains isn't to make the player hate them; it's to keep them more in tune with the sort of behavior players will already be indulging in, i.e. wanton violence and destruction. Once again, Rockstar seems to have epically missed the point of their own franchise.
Who died and put you in charge of what the point of a villain protagonist is supposed to be? The point of making any protagonist is for the people writing the story to write the protagonist how they want the protagonist to be. If Rockstar wanted to write a protagonist that the player is supposed to grow to hate (and they certainly did want that, just take a look at Trevor), then they didn't miss the point of what their own game is supposed to be at all.
No, the only one who epically missed the point of Rockstar's franchise is you. The point is that it's their franchise, and if they want to make protagonists that players are meant to hate, then they can fucking do that because it's their franchise. So why don't you tone your arrogance down and stop trying to tell the developers of the franchise what the point of their franchise is? It is theirs, not yours, they can do with it as they please and you have no authority in the matter.
RJ 17 said:
Michael is basically a carbon-copy of CJ from San Andres, so I really don't see how his character is anything different from the norm.
Wooooooah nelly! I don't know about you but I find it hard to take every single Yahtzee opinion (or the opinion of any critic for that matter) as gospel and base ALL of my purchasing decisions around him.
*blinks* I never said I took Yahtzee's opinion as gospel. He and I have very different tastes in games. However, he's very detailed about the individual aspects of games, regardless of whether he likes those aspects or not. Those details are what I base my buying decisions off of.
I recommend you look up an old saying about assuming things before you make a "Woah nelly" comment again.
Games in which I have felt uncomfortable on account of my actions? Hmm...
I think in Naughty Bear, where you can destroy/murder/traumatize into suicidal insanity, the protagonist might actually just be insane, as the narrator is explained, in a loading screen, I think, as just a voice in Naughty's head that tells him to kill. That, and the other bears usually give you something akin to a reason to go after them. Not always ones warranting murder, like sending ninjas to kill you or raising the dead, but still.
In the Katamari games, you roll objects, living things, land masses, etc. into a ball to blast into space, able to do it over and over again for maximum scores, but that's probably taking things a tad too seriously.
my ultimate goal being to run about causing chaos to apparently run the nation into the ground and make it easier for good ol' USA to steal the massive oil supply. I actually felt kindof dirty on the last mission where you're racing Japan and Russia, I think, to get on with the stealing once the dictator has apparently been killed, but he was far more a villain than even the unarmed-civillian-shootiest Rico could be, I think. Rico elects to nuke the oil fields anyway so no one can send thousands of troops to fight and die over it, which felt like the nicest thing I'd been a part of all game.
I went into Jedi Academy having played Jedi Outcast some years before with little immediate recollection of all the killing I'd done as Kyle Katarn. As such, it came as something of a shock that being a jedi under Luke's tutelage was very much like being a mercenary out for revenge on a murderous dark jedi, in that all I really did was snuff out lives and destroy things. It felt different from the KOTOR games, I counted, swing by swing, my kills in the tusken raider mission; 71-ish sentient beings that were never coming home that day.
"Well done, Jayden, all the jawas are dead, (Even if they aren't, the game even assumes you're killing them, I guess) but at least we got that one little droid for ourselves!"
Perhaps there's more of an art to this than appears at first glance?
Take comfort in knowing that if more people still remembered it, it would be out of hatred. I should know. I'm one of those people who loves Dragon Age 2.
We're always going on about how we want videogames to be taken seriously as a medium, yet we reject games unless we're cast as the "good guy"? How is that mature?
Because in other mediums, no matter how depraved the on-screen behavior, you're an entirely passive observer and can easily detach yourself from the characters. With a game, you're actively taking part in it, helping the characters to carry out their horrible intentions, without your input none of it would be happening. It's a lot harder to detach yourself from what's happening.
Because when you're just messing around there's no context for it, all that's happening is just one set of pixels beating another set of pixels, it's completely abstract. But when it's done in the context of the story, you recognise the characters as being people (otherwise you wouldn't care much about the story in the first place), meaning it's no longer as abstract/distanced from you.
We're always going on about how we want videogames to be taken seriously as a medium, yet we reject games unless we're cast as the "good guy"? How is that mature?
GTA is not a series that has ever, and likely will never, appeal to me simply because I can't get past the idea of playing such disreputable characters. I will admit this may seem odd because when I play the board games Descent: Journeys in the Dark (first edition), Mansions of Madness, and Super Dungeon Explore, I am almost always (like 95% of the time) playing the role of the evil overlord, and in all of those games, the rules of the game make explicitly clear that my role is to absolutely murder the heroes. For anyone who plays these games with me in which I'm playing the evil overlord, I make it very clear, especially to new players, that this is the nature of the game and how I shall proceed about it, and I am very, very vicious in my role (I seriously do everything to absolutely _DESTROY_ the hero players). But, we all still have fun.
Now, having said all that, while GTA is not my particular cup-of-tea, I do have to wonder about giving the game a 3/10 review score. If the only complaint Greg Tito had (by the way, I have not read his review; I'm just throwing questions out there for now) that justifies the 3/10 is that he did not like the characters being so despicable, then I would have to say that that feels like an unfair score to me. However, if there are significant demerits regarding the games design and construction, for example, poor controls, poorly written story, poor graphics, excessive bugs, poor gameplay, poor game mechanics, exceptionally bad sound, etc., then there is more reason to believe the 3/10 score, and the disreputable characters are simply the psychological icing on the cake that pushed his opinion further to the extreme to a 3/10 rather than something more like 5/10 or 6/10. Perhaps 4/10 would be a more appropriate score in the later case in an effort to give more proper meaning to the 1 -10 scale of game rating, with scores like 4/10, 5/10, and 6/10 having the meanings of slightly below average, average, and slightly above average, respectively, in quality.
I don't know the exact answer. I need to actually read his review; though, that my not clarify my own opinion much more since GTA is not the kind of game I find preferential to play.
It was 3.5 out of 5. Not Ten. Also, besides the characters (and some of the writing/themes of the game), Greg actually seemed to like GTA 5.
He just said that playing characters who to him seemed like just terrible people, in the end wore him down.
The difference between GTA 5 and other games where you play terrible people, like Spec OPS The Line, is hundreds of hours of being that evil person you don't like.
Some people seem to be forgetting what Jim first said in the video. If you don't like playing the game because you don't like the characters, that is a fair complaint.
Think about it. In the game if you do well at playing you're rewarded. And with story games, one of those rewards is seeing how well the characters do after you help them out. However, if you don't like the characters, then you are then made to help out people you don't like. Thus people you may even hate benefit from your efforts.
If that's how you feel about the game, then it's hard for it to be fun. Not many enjoy helping out people they don't like.
"Congratulations! That person you hate now has even more money and time to spend on being a prick!"
It's not about being the good guys or the bad guys, it's about if you can personally like the characters.
That comes down to the quality of writing, and personal taste.
For example, if you just list off the things The Joker has done without context, then most will end up thinking he is one of the most vile people on earth. People love the Joker, even though he is kind of just plain evil, because of the stories he is in, and the dialogue he is given.
I'd kill just to know who sent him Gay Furry Porn?
Not because I want it, but because I want to know why he'd do it. Do they love him so much they think he'll like it? Or do they hate him so much he'd be despised about it.
I was wondering about the age gate until the last 15 seconds, haha...
TROLOLOLOLOL
I will posit that it's interesting to play the bad guy. But I will also posit that the best baddies are those we can empathize, if not sympathize with. Conversely, it would also be fun to play over the top villains.
Not having ever gotten into GTA (never cared much for the stories), I can't speak to those games. However, I imagine a compelling story would allow me to get over the hump of playing an atrocious human being.
OT: Playing a bad guy can be cool as long as they're not stupid. Stupid bad guys are even worse than stupid good guys.
I hated GTA IV, almost as much as I hated GTA SA. I barf at the whole "gangsta" culture, and cant even like it when its ridiculed. Nico belic was just dull and the music was horrible. GTA Vice City is where it at.
I might give GTA V a try eventually, but I'm in no rush. Where is RDR 2 Rockstar? Where is it? Hm?! WHY ARENT YOU MAKING THAT?!
He wasn't complaining about GTA 5. He says several times he likes playing the villain.
Watch the video before whining about it perhaps.
He said he hates the characters but that's what makes playing it all the more compelling. Maybe don't cast yourself as the authority on who is allowed to play which games.
what he said was these people were villains that he not only didn't like, but didn't like what they were doing. Kane and Lynch for example. Didn't like the concept of shooting up innocents for the sake of it. However, by definition, playing the game requires you to participate in the story and that action. A subtle form culpability, by the way. Not in the Kane murdered someone therefore you are a murderer way, but in the idea that by buying the game and playing it, you can't distance yourself from saying you support it. Saying you don't like what the characters are doing WHILE doing it sounds weak.
"Oh I'm sorry, the game made me shoot you. If I had a choice, I wouldn't but its the plot so oh well."
That's my point. If you find the characters so repugnant that the very idea of them winning is sickening but then you play through the game, which requires you leading the characters to victory...well guess who doesn't get to claim neutrality?
Now if it was a gay furry porn between Starfox and Sly Cooper, or two pokemon (there are doujins for that), that would have been fantastic! Jim is a video game journalist after all, at least give him something he can proudly display with his E3 swag.
That's kinda a problem because this is a published graphic novel for sale that someone sent him and comics that contain copyrighted characters don't tend to be published for sale because of legalities.
Having recently bought Dungeon Keeper II and playing The Nameless Mod with the "evil" side (hilarious BTW), I can't agree more with you Jim. I like to play as the good guy as much as the next person, but when a game is completely made around playing the bad guy (not 2 different paths like most games like to do nowadays), I'm instantly hooked.
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