'Spec Ops: The Line' free on Humble Bundle for a limited time
35 replies, posted
https://www.pcgamer.com/spec-ops-the-line-is-free-on-the-humble-store/ Obligatory news post
Spec Ops: The Line is a hell of a game. On the surface it's a conventional third-person military shooter, but it goes places and does things that you don't very often run into in videogames. I will say no more! Except to say that it is currently free on the Humble Store.
It's free for another 22 hours as of posting this. Normally I wouldn't be one to raise this much awareness about HB doing a giveaway because of how frequent they do it, but Spec Ops is one of those games every gamer has to play at least once in their life so I thought the extra shout out would be worth it.
I love the smell of phosphorous in the morning.
Now if I can have a buddy to become a hero alongside me
yea that's an incredibly good deal lol. people seem divided on the actual gunplay aspect but whatever, i enjoyed it and the story is incredible. no excuse not to try it at this price, either.
If you've never played this, for the love of god get it and play it. Go in blind. Look up nothing. It's an incredible experience.
It's a generic shooter, but that's not the part you'll want. Please don't miss out on getting this game for free.
Spec Ops is probably the peak of games that say "hey, player. Fuck you for playing this."
Which is why I disliked it, honestly. I guess people will disagree with me but I think the fact it blames the player, themselves for [Walker's actions is a bit silly. Blaming the protagonist, sure, but the game seems to step out of its fictional narrative and somehow insinuate that the player is a monster for paying for a piece of entertainment-- something which Hotline Miami 2 also did and I outright hated it for. I don't believe every game should be "fun", but I think when the developer tries to cast aspersions towards their consumers just because they consume their works it's a shithead thing to do. You can't just brand people cunts for liking shit you made. At the end of the day the only thing that brands them a cunt is a situation you engineered from the start. If I write a book where every page says "If you keep reading, Bob will die." and then on the last page, Bob dies, I can't really call them the monster, because I, the writer, killed Bob.
My point is that the only thing that turns the player into a monster is a situation the developers concocted themselves. Surely the monster is the developer for engineering such fictional suffering? Regardless of whether or not you consume it, that work exists. It is always both occurring and not occurring because it is a linear narrative that has always been written. Even if I put the game down, the victims of the game's evils are going to suffer anyway, within the fictional universe they live in. As I type this, Charles Foster Kane is dropping his snowglobe a thousand times. Victor Frankenstein is succumbing to hypothermia a million times over. Cavor is forever being borne into the dark by Selenites, over and over. Regardless of whether or not you watch or read fiction, it will exist from the moment the pen has hit the page until it is completely lost to history.
idk what you're talking about here but the game's ending literally lets you dictate how it plays out by like 4 or 5 different endings to pick from. Yea there's some bad things that have to happen but the game does at least give you some freedom to decide how everything wraps up.
Howl brings two interesting points about literature and Spec Ops: The Line.
A novel, book, comic, etc., is a story already writen. With beginning, middle, and end. The actions of the characters, the evolution of the universe and every element contained within that book are already in motion, and you, the Reader, doens't have any ability whatsoever to change the outcome.
Spec Ops: The Line operates under a different logic, due to the agency in video games. When you play a game, the story is already there, albeit unfinished. You, the PLayer, has the ability or obligation to grab the controller and finish it. For example, Ocarina of Time and its world is programmed, but if the Player doesn't progress through the story, the world doesn't evolve and the characters never interact with eachother. This is what I think differentiates video games from other media: choice and free will. Spec Ops: The Line plays with this idea: You, the Player of FPS/TPS has this mentality of "I must complete every FPS game, because I'll be rewarded for my capacity of creative killing, surviving bullets and being the good guy. Every other shooter says this, thus, must be valid in this game".
Spec Ops TL took the basic idea of player agency and common expectations of the setting in a geographical sense (Middle East vs United State soldiers, or just watch any movie or video game after 2001, how the representation of that area changes, and the role of the US Army), then there's the best and worst point about the narrative, and as Howl says "My point is that the only thing that turns the player into a monster is a situation the developers concocted themselves."
You, the Player, had a mission: Go and rescue Konrad. One of your partners says (excuse my bad memory) "Let's go, Walker. Ours was a rescue mission. Not looking to dismantle the Damned army" and Walker/You keep going. Why didn't you stopped playing after the killing of an innocent civilian?. Why didn't you stop when the WP went off? Simple: You had to keep going. Because every other game says: Kill, kill until every problem is solved, not only that, Walker/You keep justifying your actions all the way: more killing? justified. use of WP? Justified. Destroy the radio? Justified. You are able to actually win when you stop playing. Don't fulfill the game devs idea, stop the massacre and leave the story/game undone. But you kept going. Why? Because you wanted to feel like something you are not: a hero.
Its ok if you don't feel happy (the devs says this was one of the outcomes they wanted)
Sorry for the long post, I had to made an exposition about fear and Spec Ops: The Line for uni. You can also read Heart of Darkness for something along those lines, but you will need to understand the context a bit more to get the full picture and how the Protagonist of the novel fights against the unknown and puts his own Self against that darkness.
I can't quote you directly because of the way spoilers work on NP but you said "But you kept going. Why? Because you wanted to feel like something you are not: A hero."
Can I just say how fucking miserable and cynical I think it is for the devs to basically skewer players for the mere idea of being a hero in any circumstance? Because while I want to believe the game is just a critique of Brouagh Blokey Blasty Games I can't help but feel like it's also kind of cynical and says that any kind of vicarious cynicism through media that involves violence is always tainted, which I think is bullshit. I love Streets of Fire and Tom Cody blasts the fuck out of his enemies in that movie. Does that somehow make me a bad person for vicariously partaking in the thrill of rescuing Ellen Aim, because it comes on the back of a bunch of stacked bodies and spent brass?
My issue isn't necessarily that they made a game with Bad Stuff and Bad End it's that they seem to be making some kind of aspersion toward the player for wanting to continue. Nobody put a gun to their head and told them to make the fucking game, so if they really have an issue with players committing endless genocide in video games, why did they make a video game where you can commit genocide and at some points have to kill enemies in order to progress? It wants to have its cake and eat it, and I don't think that's fair when you're making a direct-to-the-player critique.
I'll contrast a scene from Hotline Miami 1 which I feel does the attitude better. In one level of Hotline Miami, you arrive at a phone exchange in order to fight the next boss. When you show up all the civilians inside have been utterly massacred and strewn across the walls, and the boss is waiting for you in the manager's office on the top floor, surrounded by carcasses. Later in the game, you take control of that same boss, and have to go through the level before the TRUE protagonist shows up. However the civilians aren't dead. They stand there, shocked and somewhat afraid of you, and attempt to move out of your path. Your first thought is to kill them, right? Yeah, well you don't have to. You can just walk past them. You only have to kill the manager, who is complicit in the conspiracy you've arrived to unearth.
I think that moment is a lot more powerful in regards to making a point to the player about THEIR monstrosity over their protagonist's. the HM level doesn't MAKE you kill anyone to progress in it except two characters who are explicitly there to stop you from progressing, in-universe. It doesn't contrive a scenario bound entirely by the conventions of a game to make you continue. But, because you're conditioned to slaughter them because of hours of taking control of a sociopath who wants to commit atrocities rather than a more.. grey figure like Walker. The onus of evil is entirely on the player. It's like how in Deus Ex you can stab a kid to death and steal his candy bar. The evil is entirely on you, and it's wholly justified for the game to chew you out for it. But you're not given a choice in the matter of killing the basic enemies. Granted the riot response segment allows you to get away with not killing any of the civvies, but I feel the game mishandles the WP scenario and the general idea that You The Player is a Bad Man because you killed (or didn't?) all those enemy combatants (or whatever they might have been) is just foolish and ignores the .fact the devs gave you, really, no way to not do that.
I think the biggest break in this for me is the fact the game has traditional PVP multiplayer. That sounds like a baby complaint but honestly if you're going to try and make such a harsh message I really expect you to put your entire fucking back into it, otherwise all you're going to do is break your message and look hypocritical. I know the rebuttal to this is a publisher mandate for the multiplayer but they honestly could have made the multiplayer click more with the setting than just Rooty Tooty Point And Shooty.
I last played the game in full shortly after release so I think I'm going to give it another run and reassess my thoughts. Like I say my issue isn't that Walker is bad, or that the ending is miserable, it's just that the devs seem to step out of the frame and go "You did this, Player!". Like, fuck, am I responsible for Willard going upriver in Apocalypse Now, all of a sudden? Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness are both the reference-points for SOTL and I'll say right now that AN (and the Redux) is one of my favourite movies, and I have no qualms with it whatsoever because it doesn't have the same sort of issue of feeling like it's casting shade at the viewer just for continuing the movie.
I think their attempt at mixing HOD/AN with a meta game-plot is what killed this, really. If they'd had a game where you weren't REQUIRED to kill enemies but nothing stopped you if you wanted to, then I'd have found it pretty good. Downright brilliant, infact. the early Silent Hills did this where for the most part you can just walk past every bastard you see, but because you're a game player you have this innate desire to twat the shit out of everyone.
I could make so many comparisons but I think I'll stop here because my post is huge enough.
"My point is that the only thing that turns the player into a monster is a situation the developers concocted themselves."
I see this a lot in discussions of Spec Ops; people are self inserting as Walker. Why? Why do you feel the need to self insert as the main character? Spec Ops is not your story, it is Walker's. Do you need to self insert as Charles Foster Kane or Victor Frankenstein to appreciate their stories? What about Lara Croft or Jill Valentine? Yet when it comes to Spec Ops most people do not seem capable of distancing themselves from Walker as a character. You the player and Walker the protagonist are two separate entities. At the beginning of the game it even explicitly lists you (well, your account name) as a "special guest" like you are just another spectator to this story. This is NOT the Call of Duty series where you are expected to self insert as the player character and experience their world through their eyes. Spec Ops is a third person shooter so you never see the world through Walker's eyes. Never. You're only watching it through a perfectly framed camera slightly over his shoulder. You are literally the ultimate spectator to his story. The devs gave you the perfect ring side view of Walker's descent into madness.
It is true you are controlling Walker's actions to a limited degree, but not what he is thinking, not his decisions. The few choices you the player are given are false choices. Nothing you the player does matters (until the very end and epilogue, where you can choose Walker's fate). Walker's story would happen regardless of your involvement as a player. Much like Lara Croft's or Victor Frankenstein's stories occur regardless of your actions or inactions. You are playing as Walker, but you are not Walker.
Take the White Phosphorus scene. It is not the player making the justifications, it is Walker himself making a decision. You the player are NOT given a choice. You are simply carrying out Walker's decisions. Walker chose to use white phosphorus, not you. You are the player, and you have no agency in this story. Walker wanted to be a hero. His choices ultimately made him a villain. But you're just the player. Its not your story.
To quoth that one damned loading screen,
"The US Military does not condone the killing of unarmed combatants. But this isn't real, so why should you care?"
Because unlike Citizen Kane and Frankenstein, Spec Ops is a video game. You are, to the game, the protagonist. I know the credits say you're a special guest but that's frankly bollocks, because as far as the game is concerned I am Walker. You CAN actually do a protagonist-player divide and it's been done pretty well in games like the original Max Payne (his narration and the nightmare sequences do make it plenty clear that Max is just retelling the story to the player, and that there are things he isn't telling them.)
Now see this is clever, but that's also flawed. They could have added more hints to you literally trundling along behind Walker. Honestly I would've shat myself if there was a perspective change where you did see from Walker's eyes, and the player was represented by a film camera on a dolly, or something like that. It sounds cheesy but it would be so surrealist and weird that it would've turned the game from "failed promise" to "utterly amazing" in my eyes with just a little change like that. Just something to actually say that you aren't Walker beyond a single credit which was likely an afterthought.
Honestly I like the sentiment of that but in the context of the game I would've told the developers to fuck off if I'd seen that.
First off: Sorry if the spoiler'd part sounded like a personal attack against you, Howl. I went a little overboard with the "position" or narrative they game devs tried to create on SPTL.
Now, I think the game has a great fault, and is what you are saying: it doesn’t make sense and the devs sound like pretentious guys. SPOL and the action of Walker doesn’t make sense. Its irrational. The rule of the SPOL lies entirely on the suspension of disbelief of the Player. Take for example the Walkie-Talkie segment in Konrad flashback: Lugo and Adams both look at Walker with an uneasy expression: They aren't comfortable, not even sure of their Commander's health. This should resonate with the Player at the WP segment. After that moment, the Player can say “Hey, Walker did something akin to a Super Terrorist. I’m sure Lugo or Adams will stop me” Lugo tried, but Adams stepped in and discussed against his teammate, then Walker justified the killing by blaming Konrad. Your teammates didn't discussed the illogical reasoning of Walker. I’m sure you noticed the faults and plot holes of the game (like the one I said), and that is why you are so right in your critiques.
Trying to attack the notion of violence as a tool to solve problems ain’t easy. SPOL tries to use this idea and bring it to the limit: WP as the solution for the camp, and as you said “the devs didn’t gave you another way”. You can try and advance with gunfire and reach the civilian camp, but the game keeps pumping unlimited number of Damned 33rd to stop you, then run out of ammo and die. Forced to retry, and go with the WP route. Hell, I tried waiting on the last segment. I knew "Hey, this IS that" moment when I first played it, decided to wait a little... The game stood still until I gave the command to fire. The reflection of Walker in the screen was mine. A guy trying to do his best, but forced by the game logic to commit an atrocity.
The Street of Fire and blastin’ enemies is something different to the context of video games, and a movie I'm not familiar with, but I think we can say the violence experienced there is visual and out of your control. No agency over Tom Hardy or to kill 'em all, you can watch free of guilt the killing of everyone, and feel something good after the scene ends (catharsis? Maybe I’m using the word wrong). A videogame as SPOL goes the other way around: You are Tom Hardy, but experience the aftermath of the killing: Blood on the floor, empty bullet casings, dead bodies and so on. The WP segment hits hard because you walk through the Damned 33rd and civilians bodies, some even alive. It gives you full responsibility for that action, albeit in a cheat-y, misguided way.
Biker chapter 2 or 3 if I remember correctly. The message is clear: You can kill them all (the game hints this at you when you play as Jacket the first time and see the bodies that you have the choice to do so). But, if you didn’t that means you saw beyond, and even took a glance to Biker as a “different” character than Jacket, with his own agenda and free of the grasp of the 50 Blessings (even if, mechanically, they are the same). Intended by the devs? Maybe yes. Something similar happened to me on Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (saw an email of a father with problems to feed his daughter, I didn't stole his credit card because I thought "he needs it more than I do"), unintended by the devs, but felt by me, and experienced on a different level.
Back to SPOL. The game is good at giving you false choices, ala TellTale TWD: You can shot the rope and save the Water Stealer and leave the Soldier die, or try to save both. At the end, no one survives. This notion fills the game with a sense of hopelessness, and I think that’s what the devs wanted in the first place: Nothing makes sense in this world, and no matter how much you try to solve the issues with violence, you aren’t able to do so. But the Player will keep trying because he is: A) Playing a shooter with all the mechanics involving guns, and guns can solve all problems. B) Players are conditioned to try and get the best outcome of the scenarios, unless there’s a dev-imposed reason, in other words, “you can’t do that because we say so”. This is what kills the game for a ton of people, such as you, or other fellas I've read in different websites: Its forced. The entire game relies on the notion of the Player absorbing everything and criticizing it under the video-game-fps-kill-logic we have been experiencing since..Modern Warfare 2? Or another big shooter of the 2000-2010. You took a time and examined the faults, caught them, now you can say "the game fails".
I agree with your stance. SPOL is full of problems, and the context of the game is long-gone. But, as Heart of Darkness or I am Legend (book), you can experience something else, something noteworthy when you submerge yourself in the context, and let yourself be carried away by the experience. This doesn't mean they are free of critiques. Nothing is.
The Multiplayer I cannot speak too much: I didn’t play the online segment. The game trying to click more with the original idea of the game seems impossible: too many outcomes and Players doing something the devs cannot fully control. If someone can make fun in Company of Heroes: Fuck I grilled that guy, even with all the added “realism”, SPOL would have suffered an even greater blow to its reputation.
HOLY this is the longest post I've written here, sorry for the misspells and other errors.
I don't really have much to disagree with or challenge so I'm just gonna pick out some highlights to discuss.
if a game gets you to stop playing its a pretty bad game
See I have respect for games that force you to trudge back through the carnage moreso than I do games that don't. Hotline Miami is the prime example of this for me, but Max Payne 3 also did it too in some areas, and I'm probably forgetting about some other games that have shocked me with it. I know FONV regularly still stuns me when I trudge past all the Fiends I've stacked like sandbags.
I wrote a segment about it in the HM2 critique I'm working on:
Beneath all this frantic, fun slaughter lies an undercurrent of the real brutality of what you're doing. While it doesn't draw a definitive line in the sand, Hotline Miami clearly wants to draw your eye to the carnage you unleash. At the end of every level, the pulsing and hammering synth soundtrack crashes to a halt with a sound much akin to a cassette tape being rewound. In its place, the air is filled with a nearly-deafening drone. An empty, hollow whine that levels all remaining noise into a solid wall of sound, silencing the carnage that came before it.
It's like being out for a cardio run in the cold night air. You feel invigorated. Unstoppable. Unquenchable. You plough across tarmac, through grass verges, into the wildlands, and hurtle obstacles in your way with nothing to stop you. You are the master of speed.. and then you stop. The cold sinks in, and your sweatsoaked clothes start to cool. No longer does it feel like triumphant warmth. You just feel sodden. Cold and helpless. And it doesn't do this just to let the player unwind. Infact I'd say it's the opposite. It's there to make you feel hollow and unfulfilled. As soon as the last man drops all that chaos was for nothing. Utterly nothing. The player has to trudge back through the last few screens full of corpses, stepping through blood-puddles on the way to the main character's imported sports car. There's no release here, just a whole lot of tense buildup punctuated by coldness. An unsatisfying orgasm engendered by several minutes of foreplay.
That's primarily how the game tells the player what they're doing is wrong. Through an organic display of their cruelty. There's no convenient fade-out. No slam-cut to Jacket at home heating up Beanie Weenies in his microwave as he taps a spoon on the counter. No, you have to pick your way back to your car through the shitestorm you've unleashed. Some levels even mix this up by having additional enemies appear during these sequences. One level (Crackdown) even cuts this sequence short, by having a Miami Police Department SWAT team burst in and start apprehending the criminals you were there to kill, forcing you to evade them and make a mad dash back to your car.
It kills the player's escalation by slamming them back down to the ground.
I respect the WP aftermath a bit for that, because it doesn't just go "YOU KILLED CIVS" then never show that. But I was pretty disgusted by it because given a choice it's not something I'd have done, whether IRL in warfare or in the game. Lugo outright says they can't use WP because it's illegal, but Walker decides to do it anyway because ???
See moments like this are fantastic, because they're relatively organic rather than enforced by the plot. It's why I think the riot response sequence in SOTL is pretty unshakeable. You don't have to shoot the civilians, just fire in the air. If you don't shoot them, they actually appear later and call you a coward for not having the guts, which is probably Walker's disassociation.
I think the reason I just can't view it in an entirely positive light (It's a work that failed to say what it meant to, to me, and has a few stand-out moments but otherwise is never really in my mind) is just because it didn't manage to get its message across to me as clearly as it could have. As you can see from my confusion in this thread. Now, you might say that not everything will appeal or speak to everyone, and that's true, but considering I'm the target audience of this kind of WAR IS HECK stuff it's.. kind of a flaw.
Gotta say, I don't have too much to add to the conversation at this point, except for two parts:
"I think the reason I just can't view it in an entirely positive light (It's a work that failed to say what it meant to, to me, and has a few stand-out moments but otherwise is never really in my mind) is just because it didn't manage to get its message across to me as clearly as it could have. As you can see from my confusion in this thread. Now, you might say that not everything will appeal or speak to everyone, and that's true, but considering I'm the target audience of this kind of WAR IS HECK stuff it's.. kind of a flaw."
In theory, you should be the target audience, still the game failed to grasp you and touch your "core" so to speak. The idea of war is hell is universal, and the theme and topics of the game are intended to a military shooter/fps type of Player. Maybe it´s due to the possibility you outgrow that era of gaming, and saw it under a different out-of-time context, instead of the time it was launched. For me, I knew what was coming, so I enjoyed the experience without questioning it too much.
And HOLY SHITE, the segment "(the game hints this at you when you play as Jacket the first time and see the bodies that you have the choice to do so" I didn't fixed it on time, it was "The game hints moment as "you can recreate the massacre you saw before", you have the choice to do it, yet the game doesn't tell you about it. Its completely optional"
Hope your review of Hotline Miami goes well, Howl. Don't forget you have to cover Wrong Number, too!
Wrong Number is what I'm writing about-- I just cover the basics of HM1 and its messages in the themes & story section. The gameplay is where it gets really ugly, because Wrong Number really lost me when it came to the gameplay. But that's another story.
What's great for me is that I so rarely play shooters these days that I didn't even find the gameplay "average", I thought it was fun, so I got that as well as the plot.
Spec Ops: The Line is worth experiencing once and they're giving it away so why not.
The gameplay may be a generic third person shooter but honestly it's at least one of the more solid third person shooters out there even today, it feels mechanically polished and well animated to be satisfying
I also appreciate how the characters get more deranged as the game goes on. the executions get just more and more brutal.
I love how it goes over to every single aspect of the game too. Walker & crew's lines go from professional 'we are oscar mike tango down' military talk to 'fucking shit reload faster KILL THEM ALL'. Even down to stuff like healing and reloading animations changes halfway through the game.
Just downloaded and played though the whole story. Great story and I loved the choose your own path mechanic. The controls and shooting were a bit weird but overall a great game.
White Phosphorus....
Just came back from playing through the entire story.
4 hours well spent, it leaves you thinking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUH9QF6161o
I'm not sure if you're describing that as a positive or negative thing, but at the risk of looking generic in the marketing, having them have 0 hints on the true nature of the game really did make the unfolding of the premise a lot more surprising. People who probably got it first and wanted a fun Call of Duty/Gears of War experience got that and a lot more than they bargained for, and the ones who weren't interested in the first place then flocked in slowly with the usual slight spoiler of 'it becomes more complex' as it goes by once major gaming outlets and communities spread the word.
I can't say anything about this game that hasn't already been said. I don't like it, plain and simple. And my reasons for not liking it have been already said (and vehemently torn through) by someone else in this thread. I have strong feelings on Heroism and the game spits in your face and blames you without giving you any agency.
I will say, however, that Spec Ops' story isn't groundbreaking by any measure, I feel like a lot of people view it through rose tinted goggles and at the time of it's conception, people where clambering for a game with just the slightest hint of a good story.
Nowadays, I feel like we can, and have done, much better. It's not the 'greatest game story ever' by a long shot.
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