Clive Barker's Jericho Demo

[oDDity]

I think there's more than a little nostalgia for a war with clear good guys and bad guys these days, so you can feel upstanding in doing the good work in kicking ass. Many of the wars since then have blurred the line of who was really the good guys on the moral high ground. So when people get an adolescent craving to shed blood, they'll feel better doing it in a WWII context than anything else. That's my theory.

 

Or to put it a bit more clearly, in these politically correct days, the only groups you can vilify with impunity are aliens, the undead, and the nazis.

[sparhawk]

Talking to war veterans, the US and the Brits were not alwyas they nice guys they claimed to be. War is always nasty. And to be honest, I was always wondering why the americans became so vile in such a short period. Now I know why. The heroic stories about the good and the bad side in WWII is just that. Stories. I don't deny that the Nazis did very bad thing, and somebody had to stop them. But that doesn't mean that the allies did it as, is often enough protrayed, out of the goodnes of their heart. They did it for their own selfish reasons and they didn't act the shining hero out of a story who comes to rescue the fair princess.

 

I'm still glad enough that they stopped the Nazi regime, no matter how they did it. I'm just not so naive to think that they did it for glory or good faith or whatever politicians usually tell you in such situations.

[STiFU]

But anyway, my point was, that you get sucked into the game's atmosphere very well and isn't that what a game should do disregarding of its general topic? I mean, if you don't like that you could just play Quake 3, but for long sessions I prefer games with more deepness.

 

A good comparison is the xbox to the PC version of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2. On the PC it's just a tactic shooter, with a mission briefing, some ingame radiomessages and that's it. On the Xbox version you got some really nice ingame cutscenes and some additive Helicopter-shooting action, that really made the game far more enjoyable. On the PC you didn't even know what exactly you were doing there... And please don't tell me now that I am evil, because I shot the same Mexicans twice, once on the Xbox and once on the PC! I just don't neglect wargames...

[oDDity]

Talking to war veterans, the US and the Brits were not alwyas they nice guys they claimed to be. War is always nasty. And to be honest, I was always wondering why the americans became so vile in such a short period. Now I know why. The heroic stories about the good and the bad side in WWII is just that. Stories. I don't deny that the Nazis did very bad thing, and somebody had to stop them. But that doesn't mean that the allies did it as, is often enough protrayed, out of the goodnes of their heart. They did it for their own selfish reasons and they didn't act the shining hero out of a story who comes to rescue the fair princess.

 

I'm still glad enough that they stopped the Nazi regime, no matter how they did it. I'm just not so naive to think that they did it for glory or good faith or whatever politicians usually tell you in such situations.

 

Well, there's always a debate debate to be had on the question of whether doing something 'good', but for the wrong reasons, is better than doing something 'bad', but for what you believe are the right reasons.

I'm sure some Nazis really thought that their goals were good and needed to be done. In that case it's wrong to call them 'bad' or 'evil'.

I don't think it's right to question the motives of the British though. They got nothing out of the war, England was in ruins and bankrupt after the war, just like the rest of Europe, and there was a depression and rationing for 10 years afterwards.

I don't know how you think they were trying to benefit by declaring war on Germany (they knew they had no chance to beat Germany when they declared war) and also, England was not being threatened by Germany.

The Americans on the other hand, did very well out of the war, and were the only country to end up richer than when it started, manly due to all the selling of supplies and lending of money they did to all sides.

Pure profiteering.

I think a perfect analogy of the American behaviour during the war, was that of a man walking through a park, seeing a women being gang raped, hearing her screaming for help, and saying 'well, it's not really my problem, I don't want to get involved, why should I risk myself to help you? - But here, I have this can of Mace spray, which I can sell you for a very reasonable price'

When, and only when, the men come to attack him, does he start fighting back, not because he wants to help the woman, but because he want to help himself.

And that's how to become the world's superpower (for the moment anyway).

[sparhawk]

Yeah. From the records it seemed that the british politics acted decent enough. US definitely didn't, even though they tried to sell it as such. Really the same as they did now with the Iraq war. But I was mainly talking about the soldiers themselve. It is often protraryed as if the Nazis did all the evil wrok, while the allied sodliers fought the honest way which is not completely true. Also the majority of the german population was not really in favour of this regime, even though it is often presented as such. But of course, they didn't do much against it either, which definitley makes them guilty also.

[Nyarlathotep]

You might want to reconsider what "glorified" means.

You're right. I meant to say/should have said that it "amount to little more than glorified cutscenes," not, "almost always glorified cutscenes." My mistake.

[ZylonBane]

Close, but no. You're using it backwards. One could more accurately say that "a cutscene is glorified dialog". Or that "dialogue is almost always a half-assed cutscene".

Edited October 5, 2007 by ZylonBane

[Ombrenuit]

I think there's more than a little nostalgia for a war with clear good guys and bad guys these days, so you can feel upstanding in doing the good work in kicking ass. Many of the wars since then have blurred the line of who was really the good guys on the moral high ground. So when people get an adolescent craving to shed blood, they'll feel better doing it in a WWII context than anything else. That's my theory.

 

Yeah because the German and Japanese soldiers in that war were all evil, right?

[Domarius]

Well dur! That's what "everybody" thinks? Right?

 

[oDDity]

Yeah because the German and Japanese soldiers in that war were all evil, right?

 

Not on an individual basis, but it's certainly crystal clear who the good and bad sides were in WW2, and that's what he means. In recent wars it's not so clear, but then it's never clear what the true motivations of the US army (or rather, the politicians that tell it who to kill) are.

[demagogue]

While stumbling on Firefox just now I ran into this site (http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/wwii.html). At the end of the time line it has bullet points about the good and bad about each state in WWII, and it reminded me of this thread.

 

Yeah because the German and Japanese soldiers in that war were all evil, right?

 

I don't believe that. I do think that military units are especially impressionable to having a "culture" develop in them. I think once Pandora's Box was opened in the Japanese, Nazi, and Soviet treatment of Chinese, Jewish, E. European/Russian-dissident civilians, it sheltered a culture of impunity that grew on itself and encouraged solders to take their frustrations out on civilians, and shunted disagreeing soldiers to keep their mouths shut. But that's a different point.

 

Like Oddity said, my original point wasn't about specific persons (people are people; everyone has their own values, and that's the proper judge of a person), just the ideology of the sides they were on. Actually, it wasn't even about "sides" per se. It was a neutral observation that "history" makes it safe and convenient to hate Nazis and Japanese fascists with a clear conscious because Nazis and Japanese fascists don't exist (as part of the power structure) anymore ... So it's not in anyone's interest today to muddy the waters with equivocations about which side was really bad (whatever country you're from). We'll all just agree, for gaming purposes, it was the Axis; and even when we shoot "good" German / Japanese soldiers, we don't think the soldier is evil, just the cause he's been forced into fighting for. More recent wars don't have this advantage as clearly because it's not as convenient to come to this sort of "shared understanding", not e.g., when the 'bad guys' are still running a government.

 

I wasn't really trying to make commentary on any side or people in WWII ... just making a neutral observation about contemporary people's attitudes, and how that feeds back into why there's such a glut of WWII games coming out. I was trying to explain that.

Edited October 7, 2007 by demagogue

[oDDity]

It doesn't say much I didn't already know, but it's obvious to anyone who's every watched any war documentaries that the Japs were total fanatics and nurtured to be psychopaths.

Those facts and figures at the bottom of that page about the Japs are pretty startling.

I remember one other thread here when someone was talking about rape simulation computer games which are freely available in Japan.

Of course, we all know Stalin killed more people than the Nazis anyway, and was as bad as Hitler, whether there had been a war or not, but you can't blame people for allying with Russia in the circumstances. Russia did not show any sins of aggression before the war, but it gave them a great chance and they took it.