Non-Americans Can Like Homefront, Too

Kenko

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thaluikhain said:
Kenko said:
thaluikhain said:
megs1120 said:
Why are occupations only bad when they happen to us? I wonder if the Iraqis and Afghanis feel the way this game is supposed to make us feel.
Ah, but they were liberated, not conquered big difference. If they had been conquered, the wouldn't have put Taliban supporters back in charge in Afghanistan, and not passed laws so that men can starve their wives to death if they resist being raped.
The US isnt "Liberating" them. Its occupying them. Big difference.
*Facepalms himself for not getting it.*
 

TheXRatedDodo

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JerrytheBullfrog said:
Shamanic Rhythm said:
angry_flashlight said:
OT: Can we please stop having the USA invaded?
This. Seriously, this whole USA getting invaded premise is nothing more than a juvenile fantasy. It's like all these games are being written by the kind of nutcase rednecks who keep their guns loaded because they're forever thinking that the foreign horde is just over the next hill. The actual logistics of invading a country as large and well-defended as America are something that none of these hacks ever bother to really consider, yet they still act as if they have a right to proclaim their subject material as 'serious'.

Also the idea that people in Chechnya or Afghanistan will sympathise with the plight of America being invaded is going to keep me in stitches all day. I think this guy missed his calling in life, he should have been a comedian.
Who the hell pissed in your cheerios? Nobody's saying that the next foreign horde is over the hill. Watch some interviews about the game, the staff hardly comes off as "nutcase rednecks."

Learn to read, dude. He's not saying that people in Chechnya or Afghanistan will sympathize with the poor americans. He's saying that the idea of wanting to defend your family and the place you sleep at night is pretty universal, no matter if you're American, Mexican, Afghan, or whatever.

If a group of Americans tried to make a game about a bunch of Chechnyans or Afghans or whoever defending their homelands you can bet your ass that people would be blasting them for being so insensitive or for getting cultural things wrong.

People make what they're comfortable with, what they know. Americans make games starring Americans. Japanese make games starring Japanese. Russians make games starring Russians. There are just a lot of American game developers.

WHAT IS HARD ABOUT THIS?
You wouldn't see this kind of media coming from a British studio or a Russian studio or an Afghani studio MOST LIKELY.
No, it is not hard to sympathise with the idea of what is normal has been twisted in some way and now you must live with it, blah blah. It is hard for the rest of the world to sympathise with the fact it's always America getting invaded by the fucking Russians or the Koreans or THE TURRRRRISTS or whatever faceless mass you are using for purposes of the story.

If that is the best American Speculative Literature can come out with, then this worries me deeply.
British stuff seems very much more content to wonder about airships and moustaches and superheroes that are actually just gentlemen that smoketh a tobacco pipe and the combination of all that into some sort of alternative timeline musical extravaganza full of Whimsy and Charm and such things.
I say that with the deepest and (hopefully) most obvious of self-aware irony here, being a Brit that knows and understands that is not how Britain works, but I'm pretty sure most Brits really like the IDEA of such whimsy (which is why it works in our speculative, fictitious literature.)
 

Thaluikhain

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Kenko said:
thaluikhain said:
Kenko said:
thaluikhain said:
megs1120 said:
Why are occupations only bad when they happen to us? I wonder if the Iraqis and Afghanis feel the way this game is supposed to make us feel.
Ah, but they were liberated, not conquered big difference. If they had been conquered, the wouldn't have put Taliban supporters back in charge in Afghanistan, and not passed laws so that men can starve their wives to death if they resist being raped.
The US isnt "Liberating" them. Its occupying them. Big difference.
*Facepalms himself for not getting it.*
Well, to be fair, that's one of the problems with sarcasm or parody on the net, hard to tell if it's not one of those nutters who've already said it for real.
 

Dogstile

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Shamanic Rhythm said:
angry_flashlight said:
OT: Can we please stop having the USA invaded?
This. Seriously, this whole USA getting invaded premise is nothing more than a juvenile fantasy.
I've said it before and I will continue to say it

ITS A GAME

Just pretend korea got help from aliens if it makes you feel better, but its getting ridiculous that everyone is shooting this game down because "America is invincible! Totally!".
 

UnravThreads

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llagrok said:
You didn't convey your point effectively since your analogy is fit around "don't judge a game by its premise". The setting and premise for a game is completely different from the cover. Games have covers.
Covers have blurbs, right?
 

CheckD3

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When I first saw this game at Blockbuster I thought it would be just a shitty game, but after hearing about it a bit, seeing an article in a magazine, I thought, okay, this is interesting. The way the dude in the article explained it, I'm actually kinda excited for the game. Will I buy it launch day? Nope

Will I consider getting it on sale or getting Gamefly to be able to play it, or renting it at Blockbuster (since I will soon be unemployed probably), yeah, I'll definatly give it more time than I thought when I first heard of the game.

I feel like this game would benefit from DLC packs (assuming the game does well, or even if it doesn't) where you take charge of other civilians in other parts of the globe. I understand choosing America, while there are other counties out there, who would target a smaller European country when they could sell it mainly to us Americans (no offense to anyone who lives in any other country, I have no beef with anyone).

It's a good idea, and maybe I'm biased being American, but that's just me. The game still looks better than advertised, and hell, I will admit that making us an actual regular person who's untrained rather than a special ops soldier is not only a fresh idea, but also gives a strong hope for a strong story. I still am waiting for a game to use it's visuals to start diluting into something else, people's minds changing and morphing their view of the world from one to another. Seeing a dark, destroyed town at the beggining, and as they think they're solving problems the sky's brighten and building appear normal, until they realize that they've done shit and their happy world takes a dark turn, darker than they could imagine, and the ending infuses this into red, anger, blurry vision, skewed controls, ect.

Again, it's at least fresher than Call of Duty 59: America's conquering of the moon (and Britain helps too)
 

fulano

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Meh. If I lived in a bubble and was extremely ptimistic (maybe bordering on naive?), then yes, I'd most likely enjoy the game if it had good mechanics (which it most likely has). I'm none of those things though.
 

thePyro_13

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Yay we get to watch america get invaded by a generic evil super power again. I know a lot of Americans eat that kind of crap up, but common, its still generic and lame.

Also, wtf. How did north korea annex china? Fucking china? Im pretty sure it would make more sense for china to annex Korea.


How about a game where korea or china become the defacto super power and america takes the role of evil north korea or russia. Now that would be interesting.
 

BabyRaptor

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Shamanic Rhythm said:
Also the idea that people in Chechnya or Afghanistan will sympathise with the plight of America being invaded is going to keep me in stitches all day. I think this guy missed his calling in life, he should have been a comedian.
This. I've been over there...They don't like us much, other than for the few minutes we're handing them food or restoring their power.

But reality is for squares, right?
 

tsb247

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Leftnt Sharpe said:
Why is it always America that gets invaded by the Russians/Chinese and now North Koreans? Europe getting invaded is a far more plausible scenario, what with us all living practically next door to Vladimir Psycho's Russia and all.
I guess game developers figured we had all seen enough of Europe with that FLOOD of WWII games that came out from 1999 to 2003. That's just my theory anyway.
 

mikespoff

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Sounds like a very interesting take on the combat FPS genre. I look forward to seeing more of this game.
 

Oilerfan92

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Honestly, being Canadian, were really kinda America lite. Were patriotic, but not as aggressive with it. So I can somewhat relate however I'm supposed to.

And I mean. We have fast food places, Home Depots and Cofee shops, so it's not like I'll wander aroung going "Mercifal heavens. These buildings, thtey scrape the very sky itself". Or "Good gracious. You mean different vendors can establish themselves in this place to hark their wares ? And you call it a... Mall ? Mercifal heavens. This is too much".
 

Aries_Split

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I love how the big thing here is that everyone's complaining about the game for xyz, and then going on to describe a completely different game.

That's like going to someone's house, and going "I don't understand why you painted it brown, I'm sick of brown, you should've painted it red, you *boring insult*.

I mean, yeah, browns not exciting, but hey, it's not your fucking house, is it?
 

Giftmacher

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Sounds like it could be an interesting premise to me, and really does it matter that the US is invaded in a bit of far fetched fiction? Surely the point is (y)our, part of the free world has unwelcome visitors and you have to take a stand to defend it?

Had this been a historical game where the invaders were British I doubt anyone would mind, so what's up with a modern equivalent? Seems to me the intent behind choosing a modern day setting is to make the struggle feel more personal by placing it in a setting most people are familiar with...

Admittedly I'm a Brit but they could have set the game in the UK and I'd not have cared, then again that probably wouldn't have had such a broad cultural relevance. After all, US media (Film/Games/TV/internet) is far reaching, and as such I can relate to an invasion of US almost as easily as my home town; it's that familiar to me. Coupled with the larger audience in the US from the outset and it makes more sense to choose the US as a battleground. In many ways you're just seeing the USA as a proxy for the western world, which is hardly that unreasonable and it may even be a positive thing.

-Gift.
 

Harrowdown

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HankMan said:
I do! I'm probably gunna get this game anyway. But the premise IS pretty retarded. Forgoing the idea that North Korea could EVER come up with a working EMP, HOW the hell are they even going to GET HERE? Let alone find enough troops to occupy HALF the United States?
The premise of this game is no less retarded than the premise of any other game. Gears of War is about beasties from under the ground rising against humanity. Mass Effect is about humanity finding ancient space stations and fighting robots from beyond the galaxy. Fallout's premise is that technology went forward in huge bounds over a period of more than a hundred years, yet American culture stood perfectly still. If a game can expect us to believe that Louis Armstrong and company dominated the music scene for more than a century and still have a rockin' premise, then the notion that North Korea could become a political and military superpower in the next 15 years is really not that retarded, particularly not when proposed in the context of speculative fiction.
 

Darkhill

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The thing that gets me is that, in order to reinvent itself as an actually functional country, let alone one capable of organizing and mounting a successful invasion of the United States, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea would have to really 'clean up its act' so to speak. Kim Jong Il's son would have to be a truly great leader to acheive this. The governance itself would have to completely overhauled, trade with the outside world will need to be pursued and sustained, treaties and compromises with other nations need to be established. In general, the same old tyranny and isolation has to be abandoned. Like how China thrives through trade on capatalist markets, moving further and further away from true communism, evolving into a more reasonable and connected member of the global community.

This raises the issue that the Koreans might not really be the villians in the story. In order to be in that position, they have to have done a hell of a lot things right. Vice-versa for the Americans. To have fallen so hard, what does that say about the American leadership? Yes, it's given that a lot of the problems resulted from natural disaster, but in that case, if the catastrophes really broke the United States power base, the ensuing administration can't be very benevolent.

The problem then, is the display of wanton evilness and cartoonish tyranny during the occupation. We can understand military heavy handedness in a counter-insurgency period, like what we've seen in Afghanistan and Iraq over the last decade, but it seems as though the Koreans will carry on just as they always have, even though that's anachronistic given what would have to happen for the situation to be possible in the first place.