Your video game hot take(s) thread
- Thread starter Dany_the_penguin
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I hate game theory so much. Not as much as cleaning price gaming or review tech usa, but I can't stand the guy either. Too much of a one-trick pony.
I honestly don't like any of the 3D Contra games. Even the supposed good ones. Shattered Soldier and Neo suffered a problem of high rank requirements to even get the true ending. And while Neo Contra is easier, it gets repetitive for me after playing the game once. Shattered Soldier is just ridiculously difficult. Contra 4 is the best game in the series.
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I love me some Dunkey, but it did not take me long to figure that out. It's why I stopped caring after Brotherhood.
Joel in TLOU didn't screw humanity because humanity was already screwed long before he killed doctor abby's dad man. There's little evidence killing Ellie would have made any fucking difference, mostly because they were already barking up the wrong tree(VACCINES DON'T STOP FUNGUS! THEY PROTECT AGAINEST VIRUSUS!) but also because the, what maybe a dozen med staff working in that hospital was gonna cut out her brain and...then what? Create a cure(which they'd already killed a number of other possible and gotten nothing out of) which they have no ability to properly synthesize, produce or distribute at any scale to be impactful. There's no bio-medical infrastructure, the roads are decaying and there's few working vehicles left, and that's before asking exactly how much cure they were going to conceivably get out of Ellies brain if they were somehow able to extra the maximum amount once they fucking killed her in her sleep(which she did not consent to, BTW) or how they planned to get it to anyone beyond their neck of the woods even if nobody kills them and takes it from them first. And it doesn't stop the already existing nests of infected all over the fucking place you guys have been neglecting to burn out with flamethrowers and torchs over the past 20 years....which doesn't require a fucking miracle cure, btw.
With that out of the way, the game up to that point makes it clear that zombies/fungus, even if removed, still leaves the fact that civilization has pretty much collapsed into barbarism. You have Quasi-Facist fortress cities where the guards execute people trying to leave because reasons(Boston), cities overrun by bandits that murder and rob everyone who tries to pass through(Pittsburgh), the fucking cannibals in Colorado(?). Get rid of the zombies and it doesn't do anything about the myriad groups of assholes who seem to make up 90% of living humans at this point. If a cure were going to save civilization/humanity, it would have to have been discovered years ago, before everything collapsed into the shitty world you see in the majority of the game.
With that out of the way, the game up to that point makes it clear that zombies/fungus, even if removed, still leaves the fact that civilization has pretty much collapsed into barbarism. You have Quasi-Facist fortress cities where the guards execute people trying to leave because reasons(Boston), cities overrun by bandits that murder and rob everyone who tries to pass through(Pittsburgh), the fucking cannibals in Colorado(?). Get rid of the zombies and it doesn't do anything about the myriad groups of assholes who seem to make up 90% of living humans at this point. If a cure were going to save civilization/humanity, it would have to have been discovered years ago, before everything collapsed into the shitty world you see in the majority of the game.
I find this gets seriously overanalyzed. You're dealing with a fictional zombie fungus of which the technicallities don't add up either. So if you're able to suspend your disbelief in that regard, you should be able to suspend it equally with the idea of a cure being created from the freak mutation in a girl's infected brain. And they killed a bunch of other people, but those people were infected and were going to die anyway, very quickly I might add. Somehow fans got it in their heads that there were more immune people who got killed in surgery due to this one tape they misunderstood, but those people were just "normal" infected; Ellie is the only immune case known.
And no, Ellie didn't give consent, but we all know she would've. Throughout the trip she even very quietly seems to gear up for it. Now obviously it's very questionable that they just prep her for surgery while she's conveniently out cold from almost drowning, but something tells me Joel would've done the same thing was she conscious and had given consent. Joel himself knows this is what she would've wanted when Marlene confronts him with it.
And I don't think Ellie's brain was supposed to provide all the cure juice for mankind, but more so the knowledge as to how Ellie's freak immunity functions and how they can replicate it.
You don't think the knowledge and presence of a cure to this globally devastating desease would restore enough faith that many cities and communities wouldn't try and pick themselves back up? The reason that civilization collapsed into barbarism and remains so is because most people have no hope that it's ever going to change, because eventually the infection or the fallout of the infection (bandits, cannabals, etc) will reach them. Take away the threat of the zombie fungus and you take away the main cause that stops civilization from mending itself. Ofcourse this wouldn't fix the world within a week's, month's, or even year's time, but it would be a crucial first step.
You'd have to get the word out with proof you have something, which is kind of hard when you're in a world without anything resembling long range communication, because of you know, the infected nests(?) and the bandits and lack of working transport and phones(or even a postal service). You might get the word out to a small area but without an actual cure or enough to actually make a difference(They have to make and distribute it, remember. They don't have pharma factories anymore), it's just another rumor.
And you haven't removed the zombie fungus at all. At best case, you've prevented further infection, which means they can just still fucking murder you(like what happens to joel/ellie if you fuck up in the infected bits of the game when they chomp deep into your neck) "Yay, I'm not infected but I'm still dead!". You still need to actually kill the damn infected you've got out there and burn the clusters(?) out. which nobody seems to be doing or even care about for any of this to really matter.
And again, assuming you've burned every last infected, you've still got a massive bandit problem to deal with(as well as xenophobic groups) which is going to take fare more to deal with, like actual military's power and such. If people have no hope, it's because everyone's isolated, there's no supply lines worth speaking of, very little trade, no government beyond the loyal city-state, bandits/hostile groups are unchecked and, yes, the infected.
And all of this was because of events that happened 20 years ago when society dropped the ball when the fungus virus first appeared out of fucking nowhere and destroyed everything, something that can't be recovered at this point and has to be rebuilt from more or less scratch(or what few bits remain in repair).
The series wants to play it gritty and realistic. Fine, then you have to live with that and accept that your "Everyone is fucked" tone kinda means "Everyone is fucked". That's partially why I feel the fireflies are full of shit to begin with because nothing in the games really seems to support the idea they can make a cure or that it'll really make a difference. It's this vain hope everyone holds onto. Ellie is mad a Joel for taking away her chance, but she has no way of knowing if it would have made a difference and she wouldn't have died for nothing. She has every right to be mad at him for doing it for selfish reason, but her fungi immune brain not the presumed savior of mankind.
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The first game doesn't deal much with people or organizations that have access to long range communication, but it is there. The military seems to have plenty, with individual officers stationed on the border of Boston being able to call in when they find Joel, Ellie, and Tess attempting to leave the quarantine zone. The second game shows plenty of means of communication and transport, and while there's some contrivances, the majority feels inline with the first game.
Yeah, but that best case is pretty good actually. Stopping the spread is already a huge win, considering all the early stage zombies you come across indicating people are still getting infected on a massive scale. Sure, people would still get killed by zombies, but they wouldn't get turned into zombies. You're taking away an enormous chunk of the casualities, taking into account the people who get turned and the people who'd get killed by those turned.
I'm not saying the world would get fixed up in a jiffy, it would take decades to get to a level where things might be 30% less shit. But that slow crawl toward a less shit world is better than the world staying as is or getting even worse.
But taking this back to Joel, if he had actually told Ellie the truth (and not killed that doctor and Marlene) I'd be more inclined to be on his side. Ultimately it's thematically less about the impact this'll have on the world, and more about the impact this has on their relationship, and on Ellie herself. It's that lie that makes his actions so sinister. This sense that he's claiming her for himself through this lie. This all then gets flushed down the toilet though by the sequel, so eh, who really cares anymore.
This...actually does wonders for the notion that the sequel is the better written game. Long in the tooth for sure, but 2’s biggest gap in logic is far more rudimentary than all of that.
I'm about to do a souls series replay (never actually played the upgraded remake version of DS1 that came out a couple years ago) and this reminded me of all the talk about adding an easy mode to Sekiro which were happening a couple years ago.
And after thinking about it a bit, I guess my "hot take" is that Sekiro is already at easy mode when you play it on your first playthrough. It gets upped to normal when you ring the bell, and then you unlock hard mode when you beat the game and are allowed to return the emperor's talisman back to him which makes enemies able to damage you if you don't actually parry (though if you beat the game once you should be already parrying everything anyways), and then very hard mode is when you ring the bell while having given away the talisman.
I don't know why people never analyzed all these difficulty settings that exist. Maybe they just never got to the point where you ring the bell? Either way, Sekiro has an easy mode, it's just not easy despite it being on easy mode. Making a game easier and having an easy mode are not the same thing. You can have an easy mode be hard as hell, as long as all other modes are even harder then that's still your easy mode though.
And after thinking about it a bit, I guess my "hot take" is that Sekiro is already at easy mode when you play it on your first playthrough. It gets upped to normal when you ring the bell, and then you unlock hard mode when you beat the game and are allowed to return the emperor's talisman back to him which makes enemies able to damage you if you don't actually parry (though if you beat the game once you should be already parrying everything anyways), and then very hard mode is when you ring the bell while having given away the talisman.
I don't know why people never analyzed all these difficulty settings that exist. Maybe they just never got to the point where you ring the bell? Either way, Sekiro has an easy mode, it's just not easy despite it being on easy mode. Making a game easier and having an easy mode are not the same thing. You can have an easy mode be hard as hell, as long as all other modes are even harder then that's still your easy mode though.
No it's a mode, you toggle it on and off if it's too hard for you at will. You can un-ring the bell and take back your talisman if it's too hard for you.
No, people complaining about there being no easy mode would want to ring the bell and make it easier, not harder.
I find everything about TLOUS universe boring and uninteresting. What's the point in being invested to terrible people doing terribly unnecessary things to each other only for the sake of cheap thrills, "dark and edgy", or for the sake of "art"? If that's the case, I might was well thrown in every fictional sociopathtic villain. The whole grizzled older guy/DILF combined with guiding a young girl/boy/kid/son or daughter figure in a dead world or apocalypse is nothing new and should not be treated as such or some grand revelation.
Gaming did it at least twice in the HD era before 2013 with Enslaved and Nier. Funny how critics were praising the former to high heaven, only to forget about it when the next best thing comes along. Ironic, because to only time critics bring that game up is in relation to DmC (2013). Another game done by Ninja Theory that had a way worse story (which most critics seem to love only to bash the OG series and its characters) than Enslaved. Enslaved actually tried and I like its story. Gameplay is another issue though, but that's getting off topic. Most of these plunkers only over-hype these types of games claiming a false sense of maturity or too insecure to share the things they like to non-gamers. Trying to impress those that hate or look down on the medium and would not bother otherwise.
Newsflash, Joel is not the worst father/father figure in gaming history, but he's certainly ain't the best nor in my top spot. You know something is wrong when an assassin like Travis Touchdown or a sociopathic man-child like Kratos became better fathers than Joel. Dante is a better father than Joel, and he don't even have kids. Asura, Adam Hunter, Harry Mason, Mike Haggar, and Sebastain Castellanos are the best daddies in gaming.
Gaming did it at least twice in the HD era before 2013 with Enslaved and Nier. Funny how critics were praising the former to high heaven, only to forget about it when the next best thing comes along. Ironic, because to only time critics bring that game up is in relation to DmC (2013). Another game done by Ninja Theory that had a way worse story (which most critics seem to love only to bash the OG series and its characters) than Enslaved. Enslaved actually tried and I like its story. Gameplay is another issue though, but that's getting off topic. Most of these plunkers only over-hype these types of games claiming a false sense of maturity or too insecure to share the things they like to non-gamers. Trying to impress those that hate or look down on the medium and would not bother otherwise.
Newsflash, Joel is not the worst father/father figure in gaming history, but he's certainly ain't the best nor in my top spot. You know something is wrong when an assassin like Travis Touchdown or a sociopathic man-child like Kratos became better fathers than Joel. Dante is a better father than Joel, and he don't even have kids. Asura, Adam Hunter, Harry Mason, Mike Haggar, and Sebastain Castellanos are the best daddies in gaming.
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I think regarding Enslaved, is it just didn't get much exposure in the market. I always saw it as an obscure title about a chinese mythological story, given a scifi reskin, that I only vaguely knew about as it was referenced as the inspiration of DBZ, and that it had Andy Serkis doing the mocap. But...really nothing else. It just kind of came and went, so I can't really fault anyone for not referring to it as a good example of a father/daughter-esque story, as I suspect very few people heard of it, much less bought and played it.
TLOU had a lot more advertisement behind it, so it's going to naturally be the more talked about title.
Now, as far as the game, mechanically I hated it. It just felt too clunky, and annoying, and it was more frustrating than anything. Narratively, I thought it was fine. Like you said, it wasn't treading any new ground with the father/child in a post-apocalypse genre, but I thought it did it mostly ok. It gave the side characters some development, that you don't often see, even if they were only there for a single sequence and then forgotten. I stand by Joel's choice at the end, even though they try and frame it like he's a badguy for doing it, though that's mainly down to a discussion I read about how scientists would actually react to someone showing an immunity to a virulent plague, and let's just say, it's NOT what the Fireflies wanted to do.
Mostly though, I just found the game to be average overall. It was serviceable, with frustrating mechanics, and while I enjoyed the characters, I didn't connect with them enough to really feel too invested, and want to see more of them.
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I mean sure, but what they want notwithstanding, it defacto is the easy mode of the game, it's just a high difficulty easy mode.
For a mode to be easy it just has to be easier than the other modes the game has to offer, not "objectively" easy.
Hell, there is no such thing as "objectively easy", it's all subjective. You can find just as many people who claim these modes are just as difficult as they ought to be as you can find that claim they're too hard and hell I'm sure some folks feel they're too easy as well. I mean, I did 1-try a lot of bosses on my blind first run of Sekiro later in the game when I learned how it works, even the double ape fight, so I think it's fair to call the default mode the easy mode if it allows for such things with late-game bosses.
I only ever struggled with the Ms. Butterfly fight because I went to it from as soon as you gain access to the flaming estate so I was very low on health and damage and skills and on top of that I also didn't really understand how to play but after beating her eventually (took like 2 hours) I felt like I "got" the game and then nothing felt overly hard beyond that point. I think you're supposed to fight her after fighting the horse and spear guy but I did it in reverse so when I came upon him he felt SUPER easy and he also got down in 1 try.
Yeah Lady was my first real boss as well. It took at least a couple dozen tries but I ended up only using one gourd on my successful attempt, and she didn’t even get to use her illusions (no GnR pun). It is a bit tricky playing on a projector though, since even the fast processing/gaming mode has 67ms input lag. It feels like a different game on PC, but I haven’t made much progress on that version.
I bet you a tenner that if Enslaved had been an adaptation of Monkey, it would be better remembered.
Man, cocaine is a helluva drug. Broadly speaking “Monkey” was the English name for this redub of an old Japanese TV show about the Journey to the West. As you can see, it’s camp as fuck but it has a charming energy to it.