Zero Punctuation: Enemy Front & Valiant Hearts: The Great War

[Aardvaarkman]

Yahtzee,
What's with the hate toward Americans, Conservative Americans and Tea Partiers? It seems to be the fluff you add on many of your reviews. American Conservatives and Tea Partiers have never done any wrong to you or the nations you have a direct connection to. If anything We like both the UK and Australia and have nothing bad to say about either (other than not wanting to live there)and in the past have given far more than we have gotten back (ironically enough, the two little skirmishes featured in the games you reviewed.) .

I guess you missed the part where American "conservatives" screwed with the world economy, and other countries were dragged into insane wars with Iraq and Afghanistan under George Bush, and had many of their citizens killed in combat trying to help America?

Meanwhile, in the current situation, these so-called "conservatives" and Tea Partiers also threaten to undermine any kind of international diplomacy or security. America being a highly influential nation internationally, the dumbing-down of political discourse in the USA absolutely has negative repercussions for other countries.

 

[drschplatt]

It would be nice if Yahtzee would just stick to video games, which he seems to know a little bit about and leave politics alone which he has proved over and over again that he knows crap all about. I don't come here and ***** about Australian or British politics, I come here for video game news, not political ignorance and BS being spewed. Stick to something you know about.

 

[floppylobster]

He raises an interesting point. Given that we have so many war games out there, why ISN'T the First World War depicted more often?

Many reasons, but quite possibly because it so rarely depicted in film. And most video game makers seem content in ripping off various scenes from famous films as a basis for most of their levels.

 

[Dragonbums]

EDIT: Wrong thread please delete.

 

[Maurdekye]

Did anybody else hear seagulls? Because I heard seagulls.

 

[Bestival]

I see this thread ending badly.

He raises an interesting point. Given that we have so many war games out there, why ISN'T the First World War depicted more often?

I would imagine it's due to the trench warfare employed so much during that war being too difficult to turn into entertaining gameplay. There's one of 2 scenarios: you man a machine gun and simply mow down people as they come out of the trenches, or you're on the other side, running through the onslaught, praying a bullet doesn't rearrange your brains.

BlackAdder the Fourth: The Game.


It could work you know, sit in a trench bunker with 2 morons, coming up with insane schemes to get the fuck out of there.

 

[deathjavu]

really? you are blaming school shootings on gun control?

Gun control in America has been tried and every single time it has made gun violence in that area even worse. *cough*Chicago*cough* And you wonder why we oppose it?

[link:http://www.theonion.com/articles/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this,36131/]Somehow The Onion continues to have the most incisive news commentary of any news source, despite being a joke newspaper. [/link]

There is literally no debate on gun control in the US that can sidestep the fact that this just doesn't happen in other rich countries, and you have to go to somewhere in the middle of a war to find these levels of gun violence.

Clearly there's something that could (and is) being done in other rich countries that is not being done in the US. One such thing is relatively strict gun controls. Another thing is government provided or regulated healthcare. Take your pick, the US is clearly fucking up somehow.

I watched a stream of someone playing Valiant Hearts and was utterly expecting a complete bastard of a heart tugger as soon as they introduced a dog. Dogs as companions only ever make it into serious stories to die horribly.

And they were still relatively light and cutesy enough for long enough that the eventual sadness was a punch in the dick.

He raises an interesting point. Given that we have so many war games out there, why ISN'T the First World War depicted more often?

Many reasons, but quite possibly because it so rarely depicted in film. And most video game makers seem content in ripping off various scenes from famous films as a basis for most of their levels.

The film angle is an interesting one, but it just passes the question along- why is it not ever in films?

I think Yahtzee was approximately correct, it's mainly because WW1 lacks the moral simplicty of WW2. It's not heroic or admirable or honorable or anything else. Barely any land was conquered or lost, as the trench lines solidified into impassible barriers, so it wasn't even exciting. Hell, even the deathcount wasn't that impressive, as it was passed midway through by the 1918 flu epidemic (although the lowered hygiene standards and mass personnel movements of the war certainly made the flu epidemic worse).

WW1 just isn't an easy mark for a story because it lacks all the elements of simple stories. Even something as simple as how it came about devolves into a complex morass of treaties and alliances and historical grudges.

 

[Second World]

I would imagine it's due to the trench warfare employed so much during that war being too difficult to turn into entertaining gameplay. There's one of 2 scenarios: you man a machine gun and simply mow down people as they come out of the trenches, or you're on the other side, running through the onslaught, praying a bullet doesn't rearrange your brains.

Is it bad that I read this as; "hey, you could make a bullet hell shooter set in World War I, someone should totally do that"?

To be honest, with the heavy rise of reactionary AI, I'd be interested if the idea were picked up by a popular game studio. While most games nowadays have set enemy starting points coupled with densely cause-and-effect AI that respond to your location/actions (to make gameplay semi-similar to the atrocity of on-line play and "reality") or AI that's about as interesting as a pop-up book, I'd love to see a revival of challenging "puzzles and patterns" type games like Battletoads, Contra, and maybe Portal (for lack of a better Puzzler.)

Giving AI more difficult and complex patterns over the course of a game (thus rewarding completion rather than scavenger hunting) doesn't really happen anymore. Now, you basically coast through the same general difficulty (eventually resulting in dealing with more and more enemies,) and nothing other than graphics stands out during the experience.

If Demon/Dark Souls could achieve astonishing popularity as of late, I imagine that a shiny new take on Bullet Hell could gain surprising popularity (if it doesn't result in games that look and play like those out-dated "pilot a spaceship or plane as we scroll our way through heavy fire" games.) Putting a unique take on it in a popular war setting would probably pull in your typical first-person shooter nuts and gain popularity for the genre (if it's done by a big game studio and not just an indie group.)