Battlefield 1 vs. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare--World War I vs. "Totally Not Halo"--who will win?

When Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare's trailer was released a few days back I was mildly interested but surprised they were about to take their franchise into territory for which, among other things:

1. Their base was not interested (people who want a space shooter are playing Destiny or Halo 5)
2. Breaks far away from the thematics of "what-if-quasi-realisitc warfare in past or near future" the series has been enmeshed in for the last decade
3. Is using an engine poorly suited to representing realistic space combat (they could fix this, but I've been playing CoD games long enough to doubt it will, plus one word: Ghosts)

People seem to be hating it. I'll probably still get it because I am on the venn diagram of gamers who like Destiny, Halo and CoD, but here's the video anyway:



It looks fun. Just not maybe like Call of Duty as I envision it. This looks like their answer to Titanfall 2 and Destiny (again). But look at all those dislikes! CoD hate runs strong every year.

Today EA and DICE revealed their new Battlefield title. Contrary to some expectations that it might be a reveal for a sequel to Battlefield 2142, the new edition in the series is titled "Battlefield 1" and it is about a war I've dearly wanted to see a game focus on for a long time now: The Great War, alias World War I. Look at this amazing trailer:



Battlefield 1 is suddenly a serious contender this year for "game I am most interested in," lemme tell you. I am impressed that Battlefield is sticking to its guns as the shooter focused on "more realistc" historical combat experiences, and treading new ground to boot. This is very exciting.

So this year we get to watch CoD take on a genre it's never scratched before (although Black Ops III certainly nails the cyberpunk warfare element well) and Battlefield 1 bring us a glorious Triple AAA release focused on The Great War. I'm interested in seeing if the former pulls it off in some manner, but for the latter? That's an actual attempt at something both fresh and interesting.

Maybe we'll see Ubisoft announce an Assassin's Creed: Verdun next! Could WWI be the next historical period to get over-saturated video game attention?

Ten signs you might be playing an Old School Shooter

Ten signs you might be playing an Old School Shooter:

#10. You often shoot allies because their texture resolution is almost indistinguishable from the bad guys

#9. Assuming you find an ally, they are usually already dying and live long enough to impart a few words of wisdom or direction to you before messily expiring. Bonus points if an alien pops out of them.

#8. Everyone builds fabulously expensive complexes filled with steam pipes that serve no discernible purpose other than to act as a launch point for an invasion (to or from, doesn't matter).

#7. Said complexes often contain numerous rooms that are clearly designed only to serve as murder holes and ambush points.

#6. Everyone...absolutely without exception...wants to kill you. There are never any janitors, engineers, or passers-by who aren't either interested in your death or about to turn into an alien and then kill you.

#5. You are more than halfway through the game and either have no idea precisely what the plot is or why you're where you are at.

#4. You're more than halfway through the game and have realized that there is no plot.

#3. Your life depends heavily on random canisters  chunks of meat, or convenient medi-kits lying around randomly.

#2. You never, ever carry enough ammo to take on a proper army, even though you are, and random ammo stashes are conveniently everywhere, no matter how unlikely or alien a world you are on.

#1. You regularly meet very large, tough opponents who can only be harmed by hitting a glowing six centimeter wide spot where they accidentally exposed their pulsing cyber-heart.

Spec Ops: The Line - War as Horror and Madness

I said I'd eventually get back to talking more about Spec Ops: The Line once I got a chance to play through it, and as I have now finished the campaign (on what is arguably the "happy" ending) I thought I'd do a  review/discussion. I'll talk spoiler-free parts first, then announce the spoiler-laden part afterwards.

First off, this game is effectively a tribute to the genre of war films that seek to portray war and conflict in general at its worst, the sort of military engagements that fly off the rails and descend into madness. This is the first game so far as I am aware to try this; it's taking a cue from Apocalypse Now, Hamburger Hill, Full Metal Jacket and other films which seek to portray war in as grimly realistic and shocking a light as possible. It's especially poignant in terms of how the Vietnam War has often been viewed, as Spec Ops: The Line seeks to present an unusual scenario where there is no good guy, no clear enemy, and a mass of confusion as to precisely what is going down. It uses this confusion to great effect to weave together a plot that only at the end starts to make any real sense.

As a video game it's a solid shooter with a compelling story. It's a rare blend of military shooters and the horror genre; one who enjoys Silent Hill or Amnesia is, ironically, about as likely to enjoy this game as any Call of Duty or Battlefield fans will. In fact, it is probably a safe assumption that the fan of horror games may enjoy SOtL more than the military shooter fans simply because that visceral level of enjoyment one gets from the horror genre is going to be a necessary requisite to really appreciate this game; if you're fondest memory of playing CoD is your TDK count and how much fun Nuketown is....Spec Ops might just drive you up the wall with its grim presentation.

The spoiler free summary of Spec Ops is like this: you control Captain Walker and his two allies, Adams and Lugo, sent to Dubai sometime after a calamitous disaster in which a great sandstorm engulfs the opulent city, and the entire city...skyscrapers and all....become entombed in the dunes. This is such an amazing disaster that it seems almost surreal (and for good reason, I later decided). As the three investigate, it becomes apparent something strange is going on. You're looking for American soldiers from the 33rd Batallion sent into to aid in the evactuation of civilians, and after the storm became too dangerous everyone fled, except for the 33rd. Walker and his two men are here to find out what happened.

At least, that's how it starts. Before too long you're dealing with rogue American soldiers, a CIA plot, hapless citizens trying to survive amidst all of this, and what appears to be a madman, Col. Konrad (not Conrad!) who has somehow gone rogue or traitor. A great deal of third-person cover-based shooting ensues.

Without spoiling any more than that, the game is worth playing if you like a meaningful story. It is probably the first time in a long while I've played a shooter like this where I was more interested in the story than the mechanics...and the mechanics, while solid, occasionally cause problems (as all third person shooters do in which one can accidentally get stuck to cover or do the wrong thing with the press of an incorrect button). I often died, and had to restart, to the point where the game would nag me to go to a lower difficulty level. I persevered, however, determined to finish it without defecting to an easy mode.

There is one complaint I can make: it has a multiplayer component and a co-op sort of  "spec ops" mode. They seem tacked on.....or at least, I suspect they are, because finding live players to play against is impossible (in the PC edition, at least). I have spent some time queued up to no avail. No worries for me, though. The meat of this game is in single player, and I have plenty of other multiplayer games in the buffet to sample from.

Although, having said that, if you interpret the multiplayer component as a representation of the madness of Dubai after the 33rd settles in....well, I doubt it really does that. Somebody had to be busy massacring civilians, hanging people all over the city, and I suspect that the multiplayer component doesn't really go into any of that. Nope; I'm pretty sure the multiplayer is here because someone in marketing said, "military shooters need multiplayer," and so the developer was required to meet this minimum standard.



From here on out there Be Spoilers!!!!

What Spec Ops The Line was trying to do, according to the original author (or so Wikipedia says) was to provide for an open interpretation of its story and message, but that he personally felt the game was a portrayal of Captain Walker's own personal purgatory. I like this interpretation because I myself thought it made sense (especially after the bloody sand "tower" hallucination scene) and thought of it around that point. This feels like Walker is paying very much for something, and some nepharite somewhere is pulling his strings. (Kult reference). In fact I'd say that Konrad himself was probably that Nepharite. But enough referencing esoteric horror RPGs....there's more than one way to interpret this game's tale.

What I find really interesting is that the guys at Extra Credits along with Tom Bissell and some other game writers and journalists in the industry have all taken it on themselves to interpret SOtL as a criticism of of the military shooter as a genre, by simultaneously empowering the player with all the tools one expects of such a game, yet using the story to show the consequences of the player's actions. This seems like a plausible but flawed premise; for one thing, if you play through it, you may notice (as I did) that there are several problems with assuming the game is really a critique of that genre or even you, as a player in that genre. Specifically:

You lack real agency in the story. You are most definitely experiencing the tale of Capt. Walker, albeit one filtered through his unstable mind. The very first time you get a hint of something being "wrong" with the protagonist it's just strange enough that for a second I thought the game was glitching on me. Gradually it gets more obvious that something is up, but the truth is, when you get to a difficult moral decision, you are never given a chance to do something "right" by any standard (until the very, very end, anyway). Each and every unpleasant decision is made with a measure of certainty, something Walker endorses, essentially. As such, what we're really experiencing is the sort of man, and the sort of mind, that comes out of the meat-grinder level of violence one experiences in this genre. So in that sense, it most definitely is deconstructionist, but not in a "game blames the player for enjoying it" sort of way.

No, I'd call it more of a, "We know not all of you play military shooters because you seek empowerment through violence in video games. Some of you want a real story, which deals with the realities of what's happening in the game. Some of you want to walk in another man's shoes....even if that man is very, very bad." It's the dark side of escapism.

Given that it became evident that this was a tale about a protagonist who was not a good guy, even if he thought he was, I found that I most definitely did enjoy it. I applaud those who feel horrible after being forced to choose between saving Cooper and civilians (only to have Cooper die anyway), or those of you appalled at the fact that Walker didn't hesitate to use the white phosphorous (as in, we had no choice other than to consent to his madness). And for the record, while I am firmly anti-war in Real Life and in fact feel that its abandonment as a weapon is necessary (and find the distinction between humane and inhumane weapons to be sort of missing the point of true disarmament), the truth is: in the context of the game it's use against such a seemingly overwhelming force was portrayed as necessary....in Walker's eyes. So the game does a fine job of getting you to see the rationalization of need that Walker has already reached. If you project too much of yourself into the game's character, then I could see how it might be disturbing. For myself....I tend to look at this sort of experience as more of a ride in someone else's nightmares, so I found it less disturbing and more intriguing to see how Walker and the others dealt with the choice...especially once they realized the unintended consequences.

I mean, what other choice did they have? There before them was the enemy, the 33rd Batallion, and there next to them was a quick and dirty way of annihilating a majority of their enemy. Presumably there was no way around the enemy...and after they had been shot at for half the day, it seemed like walking down and talking to them wasn't really an option, right? A truly sane man might have backed up and moved away....sought out some other route. Or even, you know, evacuated the city on foot and tried to go for help. But this is Walker; he wasn't just there to investigate the matter and then bug out. He was there to confront his old pal Konrad, no matter what it took.

Anyway, I could keep going on about the interesting bits in this game, but it's really better to experience it for yourself. Likewise, I could keep speculating about possible meanings to it, but I really like the author's personal interpretation the best, it fits so well. With any luck, Spec Ops: The Line will do well enough that we see more like it in the future. There aren't enough grizzly, realistic "war is hell" games out there, and it's nice to play something that hadn't scrubbed itself of all the unsightly bits. CoD doesn't even hold a candle with its "No Russian" level or its gas-warfare cuts scenes--seriously; those are quaint little "shock value" efforts compared to what Spec Ops accomplishes. Hell, you could get through that CoD level without firing a shot at the civilians. Not here.



You know what, though? This is why the multiplayer was a bad idea in Spec Ops: The Line. When all is said and done, I appreciated what this game delivered....but I don't want to keep doing it, over and over and over. I think I'll stick to Call of Duty for my military shooter multiplayer; it's just a bit cleaner and doesn't remind me of anything..well...bad.

The Shooter Report

When I'm not working my ass off, playing dad, running tabletop on Wednesdays and the occasional Saturday, reading, cooking, or cleaning, I am enjoying the time honored tradition of gunning down virtual foes in digital land.  So here are a few more games I tried recently that are worth talking about (or warning you about...). As always, I remind you that I am not always playing these games for very long (especially if the initial experience was horrendous) so my comments will be based on the actual length of time spent in the game.

Bulletrun

Not sure what to make of this. I played it a bit, and noticed that it felt like a competent shooter which tried hard to emulate the control scheme and even the feel of Call of Duty. It's basically a shooter title portrayed as a lethal gameshow event of the future, where glamorous gun-stars blow each other up then get resurrected to come back into the fray; it only has two play modes, one of which was team deathmatch and the other I don't know because I couldn't find a game. On my brief play through I noticed the following features/issues:

1. The match lasted a long time. It was basically a "whoever has the most kills wins after 15 minutes" type of approach and frankly felt excessive.

2. Quick match making was troublesome....I tried several times to get into a game, any game, before it finally took.

3. Starter characters have almost zero customization; the game's cash shop is built around making you look prettier, although you can earn cash to unlock stuff. One full game was just short of enough cash to unlock one interesting trait; at 15 minutes a pop, it was clear that doing it the free way would be tedious. I didn't stick around long enough to see if the game supported the "pay to win" concept, a deal-breaker by far (looking at you, APB).

   My fifteen minute play through suggested there's potential here, but not enough to recommend this game over other F2P shooters, especially Blacklight: Retribution which is a very solid and enjoyable game, and even though Blacklight has a cash shop I still haven't figured out how it benefits me, too much fun playing it.

I wonder how much time and money it takes to look this cool in Bulletrun

Team Fortress 2

I don't even know what to say about this anymore. I loaded it up (again) to check out the co-op experience recently added (Mann vs. Machine or whatever). The game inevitably throws me into the tutorial mode (maybe I need to skip that sucker) and in doing so I am reminded that TF2 is a game about spazzy super-fast characters, insta-kills, general insanity and a total lack of cohesion in the classic old-school style. Uninstall, scrub brain, move on, enjoy videos about characters without playing. This is the third or fourth time I've tried to play TF2 and I can't get ten minutes in before I question why it is so popular. I guess I know, but it's just not my cup of tea: TF2 is in the same genre as Nexuiz, Unreal Tournament, Quake Arena and other older-era shooters where characters move ridiculously fast, cover is something you duck behind while mouse-strafing faster than a jackrabbit, and there are no chest high walls because the dude who's crouching is also dying. In other words: a game that appeals to a very specific segment of PC shooter fans who don't grokk realism or an attempt at such in favor of characters who can mouse spin faster than a normal human could ever manage without passing out.

I mean, I could be wrong....but it doesn't matter, something about TF2 just rubs me the wrong way.



Counter Strike: Global Offensive

I've only played beta so far, but the game unlocks...tomorrow, I think (writing this Monday night). I decided to get in on the newest iteration. I've played the old version, and it's sort of lacking in this day and age, though I can see within its crusty shell the bits and pieces of a game that would have been far more interesting five or ten years ago (had I been more into shooters back then....bear in mind, my engagement with this sort of game is a fairly new phenomenon, a sort of liberating assertion that youth is not the sole requisite for enjoyment of games in which you play a murderhobo with a shotgun).

Anyway, the beta is kinda cool, but the maps so far seem a bit small compared to what I'm used to in other games, although it does keep the focus tight. They have a bot mode which is always commendable, though I noticed that the difficulty ratchets up from "retarded" to "lethal every time" with virtually no step in between. Also, the bot mode seems sort of hollow and just less interesting than regular competitive mode with live players. This is in contrast to some other bot modes I've enjoyed, such as Black Ops or Gears of War 3, where bots seem just fine and (usually) act smarter than your fellow man, so I would suggest there's more of an issue with the way they are programmed in the game than with bots in general. But I plan to play more pvp directly once it goes live. For the pre-order price ($13.49) it was hard to resist.

UPDATE: since I wrote this CSGO went live and I've been playing it a lot more....it's matches are pretty quick. About the worst thing I could say is, "some of these guys are damned good," but given the lengthy history of this game that's no surprise. I do have two observations after playing a bit: is it just me or do the terrorists always lose? And, sorry to those allies who died thanks to my twitchy gunfire! I'll get better, I promise.

This game does have its claws in me, and I like that I can play it in short bursts and feel satisfied. The maps are, as I mentioned earlier, very "tight" so the angles of approach and accompanying strategies become apparent for each one after only a few playthroughs.

Max Payne 3

I'll get this out of the way right off: I liked the multiplayer so much in Max Payne 3 I went ahead and bought the season pass. This is highly unusual of me (last and only time I did this was with Gears of War 3). It's that fun. Not everyone would agree.....the vast majority of players in the new player zone  might disagree and some of the people I spoke with seemed downright frustrated. I had two suggestions for them:

1. try the softlock mode if they weren't already (hard lock is for the mouse/keyboard people, I think)

2. Get a controller. This game is clearly optimized for controllers and might be accused of being a proper console port, but I'd say that Rockstar did that in a good way.

So I haven't even played the single player campaign yet and I can't get enough of the multiplayer in this game. It's third-person perspective, you get a random mook of various nationalities and ethnicities, and you shoot the hell out of all sorts of exotic locales (with many more available in the DLC). It's wonky, it's got a variety of additional play modes I am looking forward to exploring. Most importantly, after two games in the noob zone I felt so bad for everyone I was ganking (averaging an impressive KTD ratio the likes of which I've never seen before) that I moved myself over to the full regular game experience because it wasn't fun blowing away all the noobs with their enigmatic control schemes on the keyboard tripping them up.

Once I was in the regular area with experienced players I felt more comfortable; these were people who "got it" and although I saw accusations of hacks flying around, the people so accused were clearly not hacking, because I wasted them plenty and often....I think our entitlement gamer culture can't handle the idea that they might simply not be very good at something; "I  can't be bad at this, no! It must be the other guy is cheating. Yeah, that's it." Mhmm. (exception: boosters in MW3; those guys suck)

I'll report more on this game soon enough. It's addictive fun, and maybe I'll even get to see the single player experience at some point. It's definitely moving into my "continue to play" corral.

(UPDATE: Finally got to try the single player. Another story-driven hit for Rockstar, I'll have to devote a future blog just to talking about this game. Interesting stuff.)

Follow up on the Other Games

Still keeping up with Mass Effect 3's multiplayer, if only because I'd like to unlock everything, and it's still actually fun. The moment it goes from "fun" to "grind" I'll be closing it out, though.

I played a bit more Gotham City Imposters. Was startled to find myself in a game with a couple level 600 dudes. How does that even happen? These were extremely good players. If the game starts to fall into that pit, as they often do, of games dominated by a handful of elites to the detriment of less experienced players then I may eventually give up. We'll see. Is it even possible to get level 600 under ordinary circumstances in that game? How many hours would that take? If one reasonably advances about 3 levels an hour, which seems about right for my game experience so far, then to reach level 600 would require 200 hours of play time invested in the game.

I would get very, very sick of fake Batmen and punky Joker-wannabees after about hour 60, I think.

Not quite related, but I decided to clear out Rage to make some room on the hard-drive. I think I was about 1/2 of the way through the campaign, but despite some very comfortable shooter elements, I'll be honest: playing through Quake 4 again recently, and anticipating the Doom 3 HD BFG edition has only reminded me of id's old greatness, and Rage falls short. They should have left the car combat parts out and gone for classic id formula, instead of making it a crude faux-sandbox/Fallout wannabe with some fun but hollow drive-y bits. Or, they could have made it a real sandbox game. If Rage had actually been like Fallout 3 or GTA IV, instead of a pretedn cardboard mockup of the same, it would have done a lot better, I think.

Finally there is the aforementioned Blacklight: Retribution. I'm only playing an occasional game here or there, but I remain impressed at this free to play title. Still haven't figured out what their motivation is to get me to buy stuff with money. Still haven't seen direct evidence that it's got a pay-to-win element. If I keep playing, I may eventually buy stuff just to support them, because the game is very smartly designed and provides a very solid experience so far. Not a match yet that wasn't interesting or enjoyable.

The Shooter Experience - Camazotz on Violence in Videogames

So this is the week Valve decided to grab me by the pantcuffs and shake me up and down (willingly, I admit!) and in exchange my Steam Library expands like a swollen beached whale baking in the sun. I thought I'd share this interesting article originally linked through Penny Arcade Report (source article is from Grantland here). I've been reading Tom Bissell's articles on Grantland since I discovered him a while back...in fact, he's the reason I decided to pick up Max Payne 3, a game I otherwise assumed was not "my thing," based on the fact that his review/discussion of it made the game sound far more compelling and interesting than I would have otherwise expected.

So Tom talks about the phenomenon of Spec Ops: The Line in relationship to shooters, and the gamers who play them, as a whole. It makes for some interesting reading, although I begin to suspect that Tom himself is a rather empathic and perhaps unusually sensitive guy, because a number of "discomfort" buttons for him appear to be set much higher than they are for me. I always grow concerned with any article in which the author suggests, implies or otherwise muses about whether or not Call of Duty, to take his example, is making the world a worse place. From the view of a pacifist and a social reformist who seeks to squelch all images and depictions of violence (be they fictitious or real) I might imagine a case could be made, but I wonder if a psychologist might consider the same argument? Could one demonstrate that playing (or making) a game which depicts gun violence without consequence to the player be a bad thing?

I love these games myself, and I regard myself as something of a pacifist in the sense that I seek to do no harm to others, refuse to own guns (not a popular stance with the in-laws, who belong to a long line of hunters), and prefer that personal protection be limited when possible to tasers. In recent years my position changed, a bit, and I purchased a compound bow thinking I could relearn archery (a skill I had as a teen) but its languished in storage ever since. In case you wonder if this is a family thing, it really isn't. While my parents weren't hunters (and generally disliked hunters who tried to hunt illegally on our land) they weren't unwilling to own guns and we had a rifle or two. My uncle had an arsenal. It wasn't a "learned trait" as such....my dislike of weapons came later, from knowing too many people in too many situations where a firearm added to the mix of volatile personalities spelled trouble.

My wife, by contrast, generally doesn't care for the same shooters I do, but she grew up her whole life owning and shooting weapons of a myriad varieties (she likes to go elk hunting annually with a muzzle-loader, for example). Her sense of gun responsibility is engrained. The mystique of weapons is lessened for her, too; they are a pragmatic thing which must be kept, maintained and treated a certain way.

So when I read Tom Bissell's interesting musings about the nature of virtual gun violence and whether it is dangerous or therapeutic, as well as the treatise on Spec Ops: The Line as to how the message of this game (which I haven't played yet but hope to soon now that I own it) is to prompt the player to question both why he is seeking his entertainment in the form of a violent video game tale and what he gets out of it, as well as the actual morally disturbed protagonist of the game itself, I have to also wonder whether Tom's views on this game (as well as of those who designed it) aren't sometimes missing the point of the whole "military shooter" genre. Like Tom said, when he plays it he does so to "let steam in" where others like to "blow off steam." I guess that depends on what the "steam" is here.

I think Tom missed the point of the metaphor....blowing off steam in this case probably does mean the same thing for many other gamers that Tom's personal sense of the experience means for him. The steam is a metaphor for reality, where we lack power, we suffer for boundaries and limits, we are all mortal and we all have physical and mental boundaries beyond which we hope never to get pushed. The game is a symbol for everything that is unattainable in life, wrapped in a clever simulation that models some aspect of the world around us in just convincingly enough of a fashion that we can put ourselves there, in an environment where for a short time the real world is remade in the image of the id. Even with games trying to "model" reality through hits and kills we still respawn or resume from the last checkpoint and try, try again. It's a feature I'd like in real life, to be honest.....the act of shooting 800 bad guys pales in comparison to the chance to redo things until done right.

There's also a natural tendency to disconnect between fake violence and real violence. Actual studies have been done in which an audience of test subjects viewed specific scenes from movies vs. actual footage of real injuries or death (and damned if I can't find a decent link, sorry). The net result was that people had a palpable reaction to the known quantity of real violence....but considerably less of a reaction to the fake violence. I sometimes wonder if horror movies that are especially disturbing or effective in their FX aren't latching on to some element of the uncanny valley, albeit from a grotesque angle.

Admittedly, there are plenty of studies suggesting that videogame violence desensitizes people to real violence. I am not entirely clear on how accurate these studies are; one could argue that if, indeed, we had a nation of gamers growing up desensitized to violence (and it's entirely possible, I suppose) then wouldn't one expect to see more crime and violence in real life, as people became more prone to commit violent acts to which they felt fewer personal and social pressures to refrain from? It doesn't appear that way, and a study of national crime statistics over several decades (see Wiki here for some interesting info on this phenomenon) suggests that there has in fact been a sharp decline since the mid 90's. That at the very least suggests that there's no obvious connection between violent video games and violence (unless one were to try and postulate that crime statistics would be even lower than they already are if video games weren't around, but I digress). Hell, you could probably make a postulation that desensitization to violence has a correlation with dropping crime rates if you wanted to (not that it would likely be correct, but that's how the internet media likes to work).

Anyway, I think the phenomenon as a whole is more complicated than any single party wants to admit. I suspect desensitization caused by games has a stronger correlation with a shift in reduced empathy and asocial behavior that the internet serves as a tool for. The violence of shooter games has little to do with the inherent beast of man and more to do with the fact that we once were a more violent breed of beast, that centuries of acculturation has at last stripped us down to the point where violence is absent, and allowing us an easy, harmless and effortless means of exploring that dark side of human nature is perhaps a good thing. Until we as a society can start breeding or genetically altering for passivity, we're not going to see it go away. As is so often pointed out, most violence happens in places where video games are never seen, where poverty and desperation is rampant. It's always visible and shocking when it happens down the street from us, and highly visible (because that's how our newsmedia rolls) but the truth is that there are many regions of the world where violence is a normal, everyday occurence. And those places are not getting it from Call of Duty. Fear of the fictional is a trivialization of the problems extant in reality. I don't think that's what Tom Bissell was aiming for, but I do think it's worth framing a proper perspective on the issues he (and Spec Ops: The Line) try to pose.

I'll follow up soon once I get a chance to sink my teeth (har har) into Spec Ops: The Line. Maybe next week? We'll see!

Black Ops still rules. This was the CoD that finally won me over to the genre

Rage

Okay, I think I am officially stoked for this game. It looks good enough that it might just replace Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas as my two favorite CRPGs....

I may preorder it. It's due out October 4th, and the missus also wants a copy. That gives us roughly a month to enjoy it before B Day!