It's a cry you may have come across: "Keep politics out of games!" Some are more guilty of being politically charged than others but there is just no need for personal political agendas to appear in works of art or in our brainless pastimes. Ultimately, we just want to sit down and play video games, not be preached to about how the right wing millionaires profiting off our hobby are all evil control freaks. Some games exist solely as vessels for political statements, like the latest Deus EX or FIFA 17 the Journey, but for most the politics are utterly unnecessary and should be taken out. Here's a list of the seven worst offenders.
1. DOOM (2016)
DOOM (2016)'s anti-hell agenda is disgusting. The game is little more than a gory anti-satanist campaign with its central hero, the all-American superhero with no personality Doomslayer, clearly driving a propaganda train akin to the 1930s Nazi party.
The demons' personal struggles are completely disregarded and despite them being welcomed by an outstanding member of the community, whom the Doomslayer murders in protest (like a fascist), they're persecuted by the 'hero'.
Olivia Pearce opens the gates and welcomes the demons of Hell with a kind heart only to get brutally murdered by the Doomslayer. This, however, isn't enough for the terrorist; he not only bans demons from Mars but also invades their home. A truly appalling narrative that adds nothing to a game that could've simply been a very fun arena shooter. Sad!
2. Papers, Please
When I first heard about the immigration office simulator I was teeming with excitement. I thought, "Finally, a game about doing a job and doing it well." I convinced myself I was in for a good old office simulator perfect for blowing off steam. Instead it was Steam that blew me off!
The game shamelessly flaunts political propaganda like "Aristrotzka is the best!" even though Aristrotzka isn't even a real place and never has been. It just sounds like a rubbish made up name for an Eastern European autocratic state and not a real place you might visit for a weekend like Croatia or Uzbekistan.
You get given a wife, son and uncle; further fueling the political tensions and nonsense this game desperately doesn't need. A gender specific partner and a gender specific child in this day and age are nothing if not begging for an endless argument. Having the uncle as an oppressive male influence on an unformed child is another obvious criticism of the Balkan culture that is just not welcome in an otherwise cheerful office sim.
3. Assassins/Assassin's/Assassins' Creed
You might expect an assassin's creed to read like "kill for a living, no remorse" or "no one's wanted dead for being innocent" but Ubisoft reckons it would be "nothing is true, everything is permitted." And that's not even the half of it. This should be a series about jumping off rooftops and diving into people's necks blade first, (and to be fair to poor old Ubi, to some extent it is) but it's laden with BS political agenda like the notion that the XBOX One camera constantly watching what you're up to is a breach of civil rights and your privacy. Boo hoo.
The game boasts two secret societies - the assassins and the templar, a very vague not entirely associated group and a very specific group based on a historical organisation. As obsessed with left-wing politics as it Ubisoft is, it obviously hands player control of the anarchist mess that are the assassins and tasks the player with ancient terrorism. Not to get political myself here but I expect no less from French Canadians. Oh, wait; that's not political, just bigoted. That's fine.
4. Democracy
There's so much more to democracy than just politics. Great shows like House of Cards and The Thick Of It have shown us just that. How great a game could democracy have been if it focused more on the mechanical than the ideological? Bribes and coercion, public image and the burying and digging up of compromising information, earning and returning favours, bending the rules to achieve a goal against all odds.
Instead we have a shallow game purely about policy, more concerned with "politics" than the democratic machine. Using sliders for all policy making was a nice but faint touch at hinting the great cogs and chains of parliaments and congresses. A game where your success is dependent on your politics and not your skill at convincing people that you know best, it's a poor and unrealistic attempt at a political simulator.
5. Shadow of Mordor
What started out as an amazing Lord of the Rings spin-off, soon descended into political hell. A game that should be about revenge and murder is instead completely enveloped in orc politics.
The orcs have a hierarchy of warlords directly affected by your actions, forcing you into the political machinations of the greenskins. See, the orcs are savages and should just be left to it really, but instead the player is expected to help some rise in the ranks while exterminating others; and all that to further their own agenda and schemes.
A fantasy game about slaying orcs is instead a dreadful simulation of subterfuge and espionage weighed down with its overbearing political message nobody wants to frigging hear.
6. Metal Gear Solid
The only thing that can ruin sneaking around and fighting massive machines is, you've guessed it: politics! Hideo Kojima is a great mind and with a name like Hideo, he was obviously destined to make video games for a living and coin the phrase Hideo Games (which astonishingly he still hasn't done). Instead he decided that a name like Kojima (small island) lends itself better to a political preaching career but the sun does indeed set on old Hideo.
Each game features needless political discussions between characters that are nothing but mouthpieces for Kojima furthering his own agenda. In typically awkward Japanese fashion, the first game in the series was originally the third game in the timeline and eventually the sixth game in the timeline. Confusing chronology is just a political tool for Kojima who bangs on about how bad war is and how those who fight it are never really the ones with a vested interest in it and don't stand to gain a profit but all we really wanna do is pretend to be a cardboard box and leave nude magazines around to distract guards before he choke them to death; you can stop with the preaching already.
A series that gives you massive robots, stealth suits, half-naked female spies, eating snakes and ballooning goats, also decides that it needs to bear you down with 30 minute lectures about nuclear deterence and nationalism. Kojima could truly be one of the greatest game-makers in history if he could just let go of his political hang-ups.
7. Civilisation
Politics have ruined Civilisation. A game about our steady progression from a small nomadic people into the rulers of planet Earth divided into tribes-come-nations and fighting to be the dominant one RUINED by "diplomacy" and "politics". You can't go two turns without some nation or other saying "ooh, we dislike your warmongering, we're not gonna trade with you" or "ooh, look at you and your culture trying to infiltrate our country with your pop stars and whatnot." Sick of it. It's just music and dress sense and language and social habits, nothing to do with culture!
A splendid series of deep and interesting games ruined because someone decides to throw their own agenda in there. "War is bad" mechanics and "globalisation is the death of nationalistic competition" win conditions ruin the strategy game of the ages. This is where something completely apolitical like Red Alert or Age of the Empires excels and runs circle around the old Civ.
Politics has no place in Civilisation, it's needless and corrupts the otherwise spectacular experience. Wouldn't a world with no coffee shop debates about the morality of eating cuisine one has no genetic link to be much better?
Monday, 22 May 2017
Sunday, 7 May 2017
Northmark: Hour of the Wolf
Northmark: Hour of the Wolf is an adventure game with RPG elements and card-based combat, I think. It doesn't quite hit the mark at the start and it only goes South from there with a predictable story and unpredictable mechanics.
The game begins with a quick introduction to its core gameplay loop of clicking on things until something attacks you and you play kind-of-cards. Herein lies the problem: the kind-of-cards are kind of random. In my four hours playing Northmark I hadn't quite figured out how to determine how much damage my attacks would do. How it works, in theory, is that the player character has stat modifiers and the three hero cards have further stat modifiers determining attack and defense, each hero has hit points which determine how much damage you must do to kill them and once all your heroes are dead, you lose. You have two types of cards in your hand - buffs/debuffs and attacks. You play the attack cards which get added to your modifiers to cause damage to your opponent's heroes. All sounds pretty standard and straight forward but the numbers never quite added up for me.
So, here's an example: my character's attack mod is 2, hero's mod is 3 and I've used buffs worth of 5, which gives me a total attack bonus of 10. My opponent's defenses are 2+1+3, adding up to 6 and they have 20 hit points. In theory, a 6 attack should do 10 points of damage but instead it does 15. WHERE THE HELL DID THE EXTRA 5 COME FROM?! Another time a 5 attack with 2+4+4 does 3 damage to a 2+1+0 character. The thing you might notice missing from all this is consistency, something trading card games tend to rely on, allowing players to plan their moves effectively. Here instead, I found myself buffing up and hoping for the best. It's lucky really, that the combat never becomes a real challenge so this randomness doesn't become a source of frustration. The downside of course, is that the combat is altogether boring and the game relies on its narrative instead.
And here's why the game isn't notable: the one thing it truly relies on to carry it - the plot. It opens with the obvious plotting villain and then drags you through several stereotype-filled fantasy locations to arrive at the conclusion that the obvious plotting villain whom we've stayed away from for most of the game is a plotting villain. The only reason I still remembered the villain is because I was waiting for the obvious reveal. Now, that could be the point - fantasy plots often have an obvious evil guy paraded as not necessarily bad (Final Fantasy X is my favourite culprit). It could be a Trump reference (it's not, the game came out in August 2014). The problem is that it doesn't actually make any point, it just happens to be a bad plot. There are amusing aspects to the story: there's a bit where you run into a bar owner that looks just like a vendor in another city and the game points that out to you citing indie devs' limited funds; there is a bit where you get sent to rescue a young woman from barbarians only to find she actually conquered them. Those and the general light-hearted nature of the game make it bearable but not wholly enjoyable,
Northmark: Hour of the Wolf is playing Texas Hold 'Em with a mixture of Yu-Gi Oh! and Pokemon cards against Adam Sandler, Michael McIntyre and a random nerd/10
The game begins with a quick introduction to its core gameplay loop of clicking on things until something attacks you and you play kind-of-cards. Herein lies the problem: the kind-of-cards are kind of random. In my four hours playing Northmark I hadn't quite figured out how to determine how much damage my attacks would do. How it works, in theory, is that the player character has stat modifiers and the three hero cards have further stat modifiers determining attack and defense, each hero has hit points which determine how much damage you must do to kill them and once all your heroes are dead, you lose. You have two types of cards in your hand - buffs/debuffs and attacks. You play the attack cards which get added to your modifiers to cause damage to your opponent's heroes. All sounds pretty standard and straight forward but the numbers never quite added up for me.
So, here's an example: my character's attack mod is 2, hero's mod is 3 and I've used buffs worth of 5, which gives me a total attack bonus of 10. My opponent's defenses are 2+1+3, adding up to 6 and they have 20 hit points. In theory, a 6 attack should do 10 points of damage but instead it does 15. WHERE THE HELL DID THE EXTRA 5 COME FROM?! Another time a 5 attack with 2+4+4 does 3 damage to a 2+1+0 character. The thing you might notice missing from all this is consistency, something trading card games tend to rely on, allowing players to plan their moves effectively. Here instead, I found myself buffing up and hoping for the best. It's lucky really, that the combat never becomes a real challenge so this randomness doesn't become a source of frustration. The downside of course, is that the combat is altogether boring and the game relies on its narrative instead.
And here's why the game isn't notable: the one thing it truly relies on to carry it - the plot. It opens with the obvious plotting villain and then drags you through several stereotype-filled fantasy locations to arrive at the conclusion that the obvious plotting villain whom we've stayed away from for most of the game is a plotting villain. The only reason I still remembered the villain is because I was waiting for the obvious reveal. Now, that could be the point - fantasy plots often have an obvious evil guy paraded as not necessarily bad (Final Fantasy X is my favourite culprit). It could be a Trump reference (it's not, the game came out in August 2014). The problem is that it doesn't actually make any point, it just happens to be a bad plot. There are amusing aspects to the story: there's a bit where you run into a bar owner that looks just like a vendor in another city and the game points that out to you citing indie devs' limited funds; there is a bit where you get sent to rescue a young woman from barbarians only to find she actually conquered them. Those and the general light-hearted nature of the game make it bearable but not wholly enjoyable,
Northmark: Hour of the Wolf is playing Texas Hold 'Em with a mixture of Yu-Gi Oh! and Pokemon cards against Adam Sandler, Michael McIntyre and a random nerd/10
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