Zero Punctuation: Call of Duty: Black Ops

[gphjr14]

Yeah I thought it weird to kick this guy's ass put glass in his mouth punch him, then moments later he aids you through mission.

 

[RobCoxxy]

God lord, that virgin metaphor was disturbing.

But apt.

One of the funniest reviews done in a while. All true. I really wanted black ops to be "deniable stealth missions" but it did always end up with Americans blowing the fuck out of anyone to the left of GW Bush.

And the ending to the single player campaign actually made me stop touching my keyboard and mouse, recoil, cross my arms and say, in a monotone, acerbic voice:

"What?"

I mean seriously. The last fifteen seconds of the game are such a MASSIVE Yankee dick-suck it's unbelievable.

And considering these are "low-key" missions, how the fuck does a naval armada and a metric fucktonne of air support go unnoticed?

ARGH.

In other news, Zork was pretty fun.
And the Nova 6 gas-mask section was interesting, new for the series, but already done by Metro 2033

 

[JonahNYC]

Note to Yahtzee ? there are plenty of games about the United States getting invaded. Turning Point: Fall of Liberty sucked, while no one played the great real-time strategy game World in Conflict. Don?t worry. John ?Red Dawn? Milius is helping make Homefront ? pardon me while I dry heave.

 

[Towels]

Rather Cheeky of you, Yahtzee, portraying America as the awkward obsessive who mates with Great Britain and starts swinging with Russia/China. Well, at least that's what I got out of that, and Oh man, was that funny...

At least I know that Marvel vs Capcom 3 will have a retarded story no one will care about, but still be the best game of 2011. So calling it out on that is kinda like calling out a retarded kid for a double dribble, you just gotta let it slide. I am so hyped for this game; liquid hype bursts from my pores!

I can't wait for the Wesker/Captain America/Doctor Doom ending where the heroes realize their awesome utopian empire genetically made of Red, White, and Blue! (*Ahem* seriously, can't wait for some Tron/Zero action.)

 

[Soullegend]

Lots of creepy metaphors today. As for the next world war, North and South Koreas little spats might be a trigger, with the USA backing the South and China backing the North...
I really hope not but you never know...

what you mean - like the Korean War - been there, done that, got the balaclava

 

[masterkeyes2]

So am I the only one disturbed that there are people who actually wish for another world war? I mean, yeah American government has made some boneheaded decisions in the past but so have other nations right? I always find the focused hatred towards the world superpower somewhat odd. Why people get up and arms over this shit is beyond me.

 

[bloodrayne626]

So am I the only one disturbed that there are people who actually wish for another world war? I mean, yeah American government has made some boneheaded decisions in the past but so have other nations right? I always find the focused hatred towards the world superpower somewhat odd. Why people get up and arms over this shit is beyond me.

The problem is that when other nations go to war, it's usually not for the same reasons America uses to get involved in a war.

 

[loip9114]

aah god, that world war 3 thing made me laugh a lot. Very well thought and perhaps we should just do it. Everybody get out the guns .

 

[Thorinair]

So am I the only one disturbed that there are people who actually wish for another world war? I mean, yeah American government has made some boneheaded decisions in the past but so have other nations right? I always find the focused hatred towards the world superpower somewhat odd. Why people get up and arms over this shit is beyond me.

The problem is that when other nations go to war, it's usually not for the same reasons America uses to get involved in a war.

Again, not the citizens fault.

 

[masterkeyes2]

Have to agree with the post above, war has usually been waged by nations to gain or protect resources, land, and citizenship. It is a diplomatic method, albeit the weakest one. It's an awful thing but it isn't like the US alone is the only one who does it.

 

[Icarion (aka Stockholm)]

We Americans DO need another World War
My flamethrower has just been gathering dust since random street barbeques lost their appeal

Wait where do you live? Surely not in America!
OT:This was a good one, congratulations Yahtzee

 

[Cat Cloud]

Ugh. This is why I don't play shooters. And for all you complainers, Yahtzee will stop making fun of America in war in shooters when developers stop making retarded shooters that feature America.

And why do so many Americans on this forum seem to want war? As an American, I want to stay as far as possible away from one. Right now we have too many problems to deal with. We really don't need world war three. And I really don't want to have our country invaded... it seems like a lot of people are out of touch with reality when it comes to war and what it is really like. I blame video games

Good review as always.

 

[C2Ultima]

How did he not mention the terrible AI?

 

[Thorinair]

I think soldier play them because sometimes it's fun to blow off some steam in a fictional world. Sort of a catharsis thing.

 

[thepyrethatburns]

That said, yes we have gone after other countries, and generally speaking they have been militarily crushed even if we have failed to complete our objectives. We had reasons to go after Saddam for decades before we invaded, we agreed with the rest of the world community to let him go for a while after "Desert Storm" and see if he got hist act together. He did not. People were asking why we didn't finish that clown off for a long time before "The War On Terror" only to whine when we actually did it. People simply have short memories. Yugoslavia was nessicary to prevent a Genocide. We generally have good reasons for going where we do, even if things don't pay off. The US generally does not engage in wars of conquest unlike some other dominant world powers out there, yes there are some incidents argued by those with anti-American sentiments but no rule is absolute.

The U.S. probably should have but that doesn't justify going back and finishing the job through another war.

Take a look at Amnesty International's report on Yugoslavia. The U.S. (to say nothing of NATO) killed more people than Milosevic was ACCUSED of doing. Accusations which were never brought to trial because, after a few years, Milosevic conveniently died in custody. Given that the ICJ later found that the genocide charges were overblown. In fact, most of the violence committed by Serbia against Albanians came as a result of the bombings.

And, as Wikileaks has shown us, that's only the stuff that the U.S. and NATO haven't been able to cover up.

U.S. reasons as of late are not the noble ones reported by CNN, FOX, or the other major networks. Increasingly, they have been the result of Presidents who wished to divert civilian attention away from domestic issues or wish to "make their mark on the world".

As I've pointed out before, in numerous posts, I believe that in a real war the only way to win is to target the civilians along with the military. We won World War II by turning the Nazis into a tiny fringe when they were once a huge international movement. We did this by killing massive numbers of civilians, bombing factores, farms, hospitals, and everything else.

Osama Bin Laden agrees with you. Thusly 9/11.

As far as the US dropping bombs goes, it's pretty much how you do business. Nobody has bombed the US because nobody has ever been in a position to.

And there is the problem. The U.S. engages in these wars because, up until 9/11, noone had been able to strike back. Perhaps the next one won't be just a 747 but it'll be atomic in nature.

And don't say it couldn't happen. ABC news "smuggled" in uranium (not weapons grade but still radioactive) as part of a story to show how easy it would be to smuggle it in. Both times, the crate was inspected by customs and passed through.

The longer the U.S. takes the attitude of "it's pretty much how you do business" (what a PMC way to put that), the more people who have lost families and would do ANYTHING to strike back are created plus other countries/organizations will increasingly take the same attitude.

Truthfully I don't think having bombs dropped on us would do anything to change the face of war, or affect how we would fight from that point onwards.

I think you'd be surprised at how people's attitudes change when they've been on the receiving end. If the U.S. starts having a major terrorist incident on their home soil every time a President decides to declare a war, popular opinion about conducting war in a "business as usual" manner would change drasticly.

And, if the U.S. were the victims of the same type of air assault that they inflict on other countries, it wouldn't be surprising to see such things taken entirely out of entertainment media. Remember how the World Trade Center was removed from video games/movies/TV following 9/11?

 

[thepyrethatburns]

Just because you do something in a game doesn't mean you want to do the thing in real life. It's kind of the point.

Hell I don't understand why soldiers play FPS. Well at least if they have seen combat. I think it would make them remember getting ACTUALLY shot at and make them highly uncomfortable.

There was a gaming website called Gone Gold run by a former cop who was shot and crippled in the line of duty. He wrote a piece at one point about how gamers like to talk about realism in games and how, having been through a shooting, he knew that no video game will ever be able to duplicate the realism of being in that situation.

For people who have been soldiers, the stuff in videogames has as much realism as the average Rambo movie. For the most part, it doesn't really affect them BECAUSE they know what it's really like to be in a war situation. While there are some who are disturbed by it due to PTSD and some who do get offended by it (usually when it is glamorized), most just see it as the non-realistic entertainment media it is.

 

[Therumancer]

That said, yes we have gone after other countries, and generally speaking they have been militarily crushed even if we have failed to complete our objectives. We had reasons to go after Saddam for decades before we invaded, we agreed with the rest of the world community to let him go for a while after "Desert Storm" and see if he got hist act together. He did not. People were asking why we didn't finish that clown off for a long time before "The War On Terror" only to whine when we actually did it. People simply have short memories. Yugoslavia was nessicary to prevent a Genocide. We generally have good reasons for going where we do, even if things don't pay off. The US generally does not engage in wars of conquest unlike some other dominant world powers out there, yes there are some incidents argued by those with anti-American sentiments but no rule is absolute.

The U.S. probably should have but that doesn't justify going back and finishing the job through another war.

Take a look at Amnesty International's report on Yugoslavia. The U.S. (to say nothing of NATO) killed more people than Milosevic was ACCUSED of doing. Accusations which were never brought to trial because, after a few years, Milosevic conveniently died in custody. Given that the ICJ later found that the genocide charges were overblown. In fact, most of the violence committed by Serbia against Albanians came as a result of the bombings.

And, as Wikileaks has shown us, that's only the stuff that the U.S. and NATO haven't been able to cover up.

U.S. reasons as of late are not the noble ones reported by CNN, FOX, or the other major networks. Increasingly, they have been the result of Presidents who wished to divert civilian attention away from domestic issues or wish to "make their mark on the world".

As I've pointed out before, in numerous posts, I believe that in a real war the only way to win is to target the civilians along with the military. We won World War II by turning the Nazis into a tiny fringe when they were once a huge international movement. We did this by killing massive numbers of civilians, bombing factores, farms, hospitals, and everything else.

Osama Bin Laden agrees with you. Thusly 9/11.

As far as the US dropping bombs goes, it's pretty much how you do business. Nobody has bombed the US because nobody has ever been in a position to.

And there is the problem. The U.S. engages in these wars because, up until 9/11, noone had been able to strike back. Perhaps the next one won't be just a 747 but it'll be atomic in nature.

And don't say it couldn't happen. ABC news "smuggled" in uranium (not weapons grade but still radioactive) as part of a story to show how easy it would be to smuggle it in. Both times, the crate was inspected by customs and passed through.

The longer the U.S. takes the attitude of "it's pretty much how you do business" (what a PMC way to put that), the more people who have lost families and would do ANYTHING to strike back are created plus other countries/organizations will increasingly take the same attitude.

Truthfully I don't think having bombs dropped on us would do anything to change the face of war, or affect how we would fight from that point onwards.

I think you'd be surprised at how people's attitudes change when they've been on the receiving end. If the U.S. starts having a major terrorist incident on their home soil every time a President decides to declare a war, popular opinion about conducting war in a "business as usual" manner would change drasticly.

And, if the U.S. were the victims of the same type of air assault that they inflict on other countries, it wouldn't be surprising to see such things taken entirely out of entertainment media. Remember how the World Trade Center was removed from video games/movies/TV following 9/11?

Actually your wrong about a few things. For example the World Trade Center being removed was a temporary thing out of national mourning and also concern over that it would be mistreated if the general media started to dramatize it too soon. If you've been paying attention, nowadays, years after the fact, this is no longer the case. "Fringe" addressed the subject directly, by showing an alternate earth where the World Trade Center was never destroyed due to differant desicians, at first they lead you to believe they were better desicians as the world is slightly more advanced, but then you find out that other targets were hit instead (it's a minor spoiler, but I won't give it, besides it's off topic). The point here being that the taboo was temporary.

Without going into things point by point, our big disagreement is on how to solve problems. I do not consider "right and wrong" to be a matter of how many people die in a conflict. Especially seeing as your looking at the long term. If Yugoslavia had not seen US intervention how many people would have died in the long run? We'll never know, but the people who intervened believe that the greater good was served in the long term.

As far as breaking cultures and such goes, you are quite correct that Bin Ladin would agree with me from the other side. As far as the principles of war goes, he's not wrong, that's what a real war is about. Wars are to be avoided, but when they get going, you keep going until one side or the other breaks, half measures don't resolve anything.

Your points about other possible retaliation, including the possibility of atomic retaliation due to mising uranium, waste (to make R-bombs), and of course Iran's refinement facilities are one of the reasons why I am so gung-ho to go in their and pretty much break the entire culture through the region rather than focusing on specific nations and regimes.

See from my perspective, we've tried diplomacy and covert/underhanded measures for years, and the problem has just gotten worse. The issue isn't so much Islam, or any paticular nation, but the Muslim culture built up around Islam which exists in variations throughout the various nations. This is intentionally brief, rather than getting into specific examples.

A Muslim, and guys like Bin Ladin ultimatly see things differantly. To them we're the "great western Satan" and need to be destroyed at all costs. To propogate global islam, in vengeance for wrongs committed against Islamics going back to the Crusades, and all kinds of reasons fit into this.

In the end both sides have their own perspective, both believe they are in the right, and in the end only one of them is going to prevail. There is no cosmic good vs. evil battle, or mustache twirling snively whiplash villain, like most wars it comes down to Us vs. Them, and the biggest group of bastards win and then get to write the history books about how great and moral they were.

The differane is that I'm a cynic and a realist, your more of an idealist. I believe that big problems take big solutions, and in reality big solutions always come at a terrible price. In the end the situation with The Middle East comes down to millions of deaths,
either they do it to us, or we do it to them. After decades there is a point where you have to acknowlege diplomacy is not going to work due to both groups being almost entirely out of context to each other.

As a result neither of us are going to convince the other of their point of view, and like most internet discussions we're going to have to agree to disagree. At the end of the day I'm a cynical militant, and you aren't. Right now, enough people agree with you more than they do me, as you can see by our current policies and overall strategy in dealing with problems.

 

[thepyrethatburns]

Without going into things point by point, our big disagreement is on how to solve problems. I do not consider "right and wrong" to be a matter of how many people die in a conflict.

Which is easy to say when it's not on your home soil. Someone detonates a thermonuclear bomb in the midwest and your tune'll change.

Especially seeing as your looking at the long term. If Yugoslavia had not seen US intervention how many people would have died in the long run? We'll never know, but the people who intervened believe that the greater good was served in the long term.

Fewer most likely. Despite the "wag the dog" reports of ethnic cleansing, there was very little of it before NATO started dropping bombs.

Your points about other possible retaliation, including the possibility of atomic retaliation due to mising uranium, waste (to make R-bombs), and of course Iran's refinement facilities are one of the reasons why I am so gung-ho to go in their and pretty much break the entire culture through the region rather than focusing on specific nations and regimes.

And that's why Iran and North Korea are so gung-ho to make a nuclear weapon. They see the U.S. being eager to knock off every country they can so they want to have the same deterrant that Russia and China have. Action-reaction here. The more you push them against the wall, the more desperate their measures are going to be.

See from my perspective, we've tried diplomacy and covert/underhanded measures for years, and the problem has just gotten worse. The issue isn't so much Islam, or any paticular nation, but the Muslim culture built up around Islam which exists in variations throughout the various nations. This is intentionally brief, rather than getting into specific examples.

And here's where we turn into Yahtzee when it comes to judging large swaths of people as a sort of hivemind.

Before the second Iraq war, Iran was heading towards a crossroads. The younger generation, many of whom had studied here and saw that we weren't "the Great White Satan", were getting tired of living in a theocracy. The older guard was losing their grip on their power as more and more people were demanding changes to their country which would bring them closer to a more democratic society.

Then Shock and Awe hit Iraq and the clock in Iran got turned back 20 years.

A Muslim, and guys like Bin Ladin ultimatly see things differantly. To them we're the "great western Satan" and need to be destroyed at all costs. To propogate global islam, in vengeance for wrongs committed against Islamics going back to the Crusades, and all kinds of reasons fit into this.

And where do you think they're getting their recruits? Why do you think anti-U.S. sentiment is on the rise? Most of the people in those regions don't care about Global Islam so much as they care that a U.S. bomb didn't leave enough of their loved ones to bury. Right now, the biggest recruitment image in Afghanistan and Pakistan is not an islamic one. It's the image of a U.S. soldier.

The differane is that I'm a cynic and a realist, your more of an idealist.

Cynic vs. idealist may be correct but realist? Not even close. You're taking the failed view that genocide is the best way to accomplish diplomatic goals.

I believe that big problems take big solutions, and in reality big solutions always come at a terrible price. In the end the situation with The Middle East comes down to millions of deaths, either they do it to us, or we do it to them.

Because this has worked so well for Palestine/Israel.

After decades there is a point where you have to acknowlege diplomacy is not going to work due to both groups being almost entirely out of context to each other.

Fine. You can be one of those people who, as Yahtzee said, can gather in the desert with your shiny toys and beat the stuffing out of each other.

As a result neither of us are going to convince the other of their point of view, and like most internet discussions we're going to have to agree to disagree. At the end of the day I'm a cynical militant, and you aren't.

Fair enough but I will say this. If you are this much of a cynical militant, I would hope that you have joined the military or, if underage, are planning to join the military when you are of age. If you truly believe in your solutions, then you should be willing to shoulder the risk and burden of implementing such solutions.

 

[Thorinair]

thepyrethatburns, you're done arguing with me? I'm... hurt...

 

[Neonit]

whats the point of arguing? its just a book example of usa logic. its ok to laugh at germans with their hitler. its ok to laugh at russians. its ok to laugh at muslims. but you laugh at usa-you are a f**** terrorist!!!