Zero Punctuation: Spec Ops: The Line

[him over there]

"You hardly kill any foreigners"

Aren't Americans foreigners to Yahtzee? Or does he think that word means "dark people"?

I think he was speaking from the perspective of the protagonist.

 

[The Artificially Prolonged]

Jam apocalypse? I'm sold, to Amazon!

On topic

It seems I might have to consider getting this game now. All the games adverts had painted it as another mediocre shooter.

 

[Darth_Payn]

The moment Yahtzee first wheeled out the farting noises gag, I paused the video and said "This episode shall end with deep, serious analysis, and then another fart noise"

And lo was it so.

Yeah, I totally lost it after that last fart! I knew Yahtzee's serious sounding conclusion had to be leading up to something.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Oh so it's another dull grey brown... wait you kill Americans in this one? SOLD!!
.
.
.
.
I'm kidding, don't hurt me.

HA! I knew you damn maple leafs had it in for us!
It's time we settled this once and for all!
http://www.9wsyr.com/media/lib/17/1/0/a/10a3a245-4515-4580-a805-a8a4eb8e5bea/Story.jpg

Oh that calls for epic theme music.

I've got the perfect song!
<youtube=IhnUgAaea4M>

I was thinking something more like this:

Well if you lot are going to take credit for what the British did, we'll take credit for BEATING you!
<youtube=50_iRIcxsz0>

British my ass!
Well whatever, we're still bigger than you.

Well We're more Bad Ass.
<youtube=mt84J7U75e0>

...
Ok I'm outta songs. You win.

 

[BrionJames]

Interesting...I may have to play this. I've been hoping for something a little bit more original in FPS' for a while. The fact that this coincides with what I've wanted is downright uncanny.

 

[Hero in a half shell]

Jesus Fuck! Someone in Australia better get out and check on Yahtzee
I think Spec Ops might have...

*puts on sunglasses*

...Rectum

Also JAM!

I hereby declare this your greatest pun yet. Well done, have an internet.

 

[SAMAS]

Wow.

I usually don't give a damn about modern FPS games, but this review actually makes me want to play it.

 

[GAunderrated]

I personally would like to congratulate Spec Ops: The Line for being one of the worse games I played ( more accurately tried to play) this year . first of all my gaming rig is by no means bad I play the witcher 2 on max settings (Ubersampling on) with a steady 40 -45 PFS . Spec Ops: The Line on the other hand ran at around 20 with all the setting turned down or off . but fine whatever I got it running on a laptop ( which is obviously much worse ) and it ran fine(ish) with an ok 24-27 FPS ?.. fine whatever its not the first time I run into a game with shity optimization.

So I start playing speck ops and the first thing I notice is the horrible mouse acceleration ..... and my god was it annoying. it doesn?t make the game unplayable but I certainly makes shooting small objects very difficult and since the game tries to make itself more exciting by making ammo scarce you often find yourself in a situation where you have to reload because your team too fucking stupid to get the last 3 or 4 guys on the map .(even after I told them to go do that )

Another thing I found was the weird disarray between the story and gameplay . the game does a good job showing the horrors of war and does everything it can to distance itself from the ?America fuck yeah ? attitude lots of recent game have been showing. but then It turns around and lets you shoot so many people you forget why you there in the first place .
Later about an hour into the game I found myself having to reduce the gamma to almost pitch black because the lighting and bloom effects were so bright I couldn?t see the 4 snipers sitting 50 feet above me . and at that point I said FUCK IT I love me a good story I play adventure games and RPG?s because I love the characters and the worlds they present but no fucking story is worth this poorly optimized mess where even the story seems to be diametrically opposed to the actual gameplay . yes war is horrible but I keep forgetting that after I just killed 300000 soldiers with my slow-motion bullet cam .

So fuck you Spec Ops: The Line .

I had the exact opposite results as you, I bought and installed the game after seeing the review, put everything on max (not a godly rig though),and it ran smooth as butter. Not a single frame rate drop at all. So id say the game is decently optimized but you seem to have a compatibility issue you can't figure out and its easy to blame it on the game.

The mouse acceleration was annoying.....for the first 10 minutes until I changed my mouse settings and solved that problem. Honestly to me it sounds like you are nit picking. Yes the AI partners arn't as sharp as human allies but for AI i've dealt with worse (RE5). Actually I liked the fact ammo was scarce. It made things more tense but not in a brutal sort of way but more of a challenging.

The story and gameplay meld quite well together in my opinion. I knew the objective because I listened to the characters and what was going on. Not once in playing the game for 2 hours straight did I not know what was going on or what I was doing. Maybe playing other shooter games with crap story's have made you block it out but if you let the game drag you in, it can be an intense, sad, and gripping experience. Yeah phosphorous is very blinding and that was the point. It is a very inconvenient and powerful element. You don't need to tweak your settings for every little thing the game throws at you to try and cheat your way through.

 

[Dalisclock]

Sounds quite cynical and depressing.

I'm intrigued.

However, I will say Yahtzee is wrong in one respect. Dubai is awesome. It's the one place in the middle east I want to go back to.

 

[Ariseishirou]

This is pretty much exactly what I thought of it. I was expecting another "America, fuck yeah" game with a multiplayer focus - then I saw pretty much all of the reviews state that the MP is perfunctory and mediocre but campaign is rich and has lots of replay value. And I was like: wow, it must be opposite day! I'll give that a try!

Yep, it's pretty much true. The story is awesome. And the second my roommate gets done with it I'mma beat it again and make different choices this time.

 

[TheDrunkNinja]

Waiting for the fart at the end... Waiting for the fart at the end...

... Theeeeeere it is...

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Spoiler: *snip*

Oh so it's another dull grey brown... wait you kill Americans in this one? SOLD!!
.
.
.
.
I'm kidding, don't hurt me.

HA! I knew you damn maple leafs had it in for us!
It's time we settled this once and for all!
http://www.9wsyr.com/media/lib/17/1/0/a/10a3a245-4515-4580-a805-a8a4eb8e5bea/Story.jpg

Oh that calls for epic theme music.

I've got the perfect song!
<youtube=IhnUgAaea4M>

I was thinking something more like this:

Well if you lot are going to take credit for what the British did, we'll take credit for BEATING you!
<youtube=50_iRIcxsz0>

British my ass!
Well whatever, we're still bigger than you.

Well We're more Bad Ass.
<youtube=mt84J7U75e0>

...
Ok I'm outta songs. You win.

Ah, so you ARE from Quebec.

wait for it...

Actually no, but I see what you did there.

 

[him over there]

Any money next week's Extra Punctuation is about if the fact that games must be inherently engaging to be successful means that it undermines any tragedy in the story. That having interactivity destroys narrative because it isn't empathy but actual suffering because of having to interact and play out your conflict.If the fact it's impossible to feel guilt because whatever is creating it is mandatory and forced onto you.

 

[DarkhoIlow]

I actually didn't expect a recommendation from this one to be fairly honest.

A bit grim video,but I took it well and didn't laugh at it much(which I guess it's normal?).

 

[DementedSheep]

Huh...I never even bothered watching a trailer for this game. I assumed it would be another generic ?America, fuck yeah!? shooter. I guess I?ll check it out after all.

 

[orangeapples]

It isn't often that Yahtzee says that the story to a first person shooter was good. The only reason FPS gameplay is getting bland is because we've all gotten used to FPS gameplay. No sense in reinventing the wheel. Now the area that many FPS can be improved is the story.

 

[Darth_Payn]

Game's a pile of wank and failure; boring story that fucks around in circles for half the game, terrible graphics, player decisions that aren't explained until much later, after you've been forced to decide with no idea at all what it is or why you're doing it, and bland, samey, unoriginal and utterly sleep inducing gun play.

Game: "Murder everyone or turn the game off -- those are your two options."

Player: "Okay..."

Game: "Oh my god! How could you! You killed all those people! Don't you just feel the emotion weight on your soul."

...

And I thought that was what all today's "brown-shooters" did. I hate it when games actively hate you for playing them. I get there needs to be challenge in the game and obstacles to overcome, but to be called an awful person for it just makes no sense! I'm just gonna leave this here:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YouBastard

 

[FallenMessiah88]

"The turning point alone comes when Walker and the player unwittingly do a bad thing". That sentence alone made me want to pause the video and go out and buy this game.

 

[MagmaMan]

Not sure what "Jam" is going to be about other then "an apocalypse... with JAM in it!" but what teh *bleep*, I'll look into it. I'd also look into this game but I can't say it sounds appealing to me, I know how bad this stuff can be I don't need a depressing game to tell me about it. Now to return to staring at the calender waiting eagerly for the day Fall of Cybertron comes out.