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Brothers in Arms: Inglorious Bast..I mean Furious 4
Skull2185
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So the next Brothers in Arms game will take a break from the srs bidness tale of the 101st, and take a somewhat less serious Tarantino route. The game will take place in an alternate WW2 reality where you play as a member of the "Furious 4", a group somewhat similar to The Basterds of Tarantino's film and your merry band of crazies are tasked with finding and killing Hitler.
The game will feature 4 player co-op naturally, and will apparently play like a mixture of Borderlands/Bulletstorm. There is an XP progression system, and you will be rewarded for killin natzees in interesting and creative ways. Here's a little intro to the 4 guys on the team:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0m5iCxM4Gg
I rolled my eyes when I first heard about this game, mainly because it was another WW2 Shooter, and the premise seemed like it would be too stupid. But I looked into it a little and it actually sounds like it could be pretty awesome.
Some Screens:
The game will feature 4 player co-op naturally, and will apparently play like a mixture of Borderlands/Bulletstorm. There is an XP progression system, and you will be rewarded for killin natzees in interesting and creative ways. Here's a little intro to the 4 guys on the team:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0m5iCxM4GgI rolled my eyes when I first heard about this game, mainly because it was another WW2 Shooter, and the premise seemed like it would be too stupid. But I looked into it a little and it actually sounds like it could be pretty awesome.
Some Screens:
Everyone has a price. Throw enough gold around and someone will risk disintegration.
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Once again, I'll be intentionally vague to avoid getting too wordy, but Inglourious Basterds does quite a few things that, whether or not they are subtle, are at least nuanced, interesting, and most importantly meaningful because of the context they're in. Aldo's appropriation of Native American themes for his Jewish squad suggests a rebranding of history by the victors, who take those they oppressed and turn them into symbols of resistance against oppression, even though the original resistance was against the appropriators. Furious 4 has a guy named "Chok" who runs around in Indian warpaint with a tomahawk. He doesn't look Jewish.
Inglourious Basterds is at its heart a story about the meaningless and excesses of violence (which is not to say that Tarantino is anti-violence or something like that, but again, I'm being brief...). The Basterds are entirely counterproductive in their efforts to assassinate Hitler, from the very beginning of the mission to the finale. That's not the sense I get from Furious 4.
The Basterds are an all Jewish squad (with the exception of Aldo, a borderline psychopath who sees himself as some sort of modern day Native American warrior, and an actual psychopath who is also a Nazi. Aldo's not Jewish, perhaps because an all-Jewish squad might have seemed like the sort of thing America would have been fine with OKing as long as an honest to god gentile was in charge, just like America finally acquiesced and allowed African-Americans to serve in fighter and bomber squadrons as long as they had white officers.) They're the opposite of an All-American wrecking crew: they're specifically a marginalized, oppressed group that has been chosen not because they're particularly good fighters (any commando is a good fighter) but because they've also got something against Hitler and the Nazis, personally. They brand their targets with swastikas to reinforce the idea that it is being a Nazi that is objectionable: there is no escaping from who you are, if who you are is something despicable. The Furious 4, meanwhile, are from Texas, from Montana, from Disney's Native American themed section of Disneyland, and from France (? We don't know much about Stitch). "Crockett" brands Nazis with a fucking Texas-shaped brand, which sends no message I can find other than "fuck you, I'm from America, and I'm from Texas, and Texas is better than you because it's fucking Texas."
Inglourious Basterds makes an effort to drive home the violence, which is something Tarantino is pretty good at doing in general (witness, for instance, any given 5 minutes in Reservoir Dogs). von Hammersmark's leg takes massive amounts of punishment and the viewer feels all of it; we wince even when a Nazi gets a swastika carved into them, and so on. Furious 4... well... let's just say it doesn't appear to have the most sophisticated take on violence.
Inglourious Basterds played up the contrast between the Nazis and the Allies by making the Nazis (as they often were in real life) creepily cultured, articulate, understanding, and erudite. Christoph Waltz's performance is rightly taken to be a masterpiece because from the very beginning, when he is undertaking a monstrous action and proclaiming (repeatedly) how amazing he is at hunting down Jews, to the very end, Landa is perhaps the most alluring, sophisticated character in the movie. He speaks many languages, he's competent and efficient, and he's just generally slick as hell (a theme that's echoed in the pretty-boy star of Stolz der Nation and highlighted by comically making Goebbels out to be the one "bad" or "dirty" Nazi). Furious 4, in the space of a minute in their reveal trailer, makes the Nazis stupendously inept (the Furious 4 plunk down 4 steins of beer for them because somehow nobody noticed their entrance), shocks one of them in the crotch, and ends with a double poop joke at the expense of a Nazi commander. What's the message there? Nazis are hilarious screwups who can't get it together and who are always caught with their pants down? Right...
In any case, like I said, I'm trying to keep this short and sweet, so, for the tl;dr version, the writers at Gearbox behind this game are doing what I would have thought was pretty much impossible, which is to treat World War II (and much more importantly, all of the related issues, like the fucking Holocaust) in a way that I find disgusting/ignorant. Keep in mind I have a massive tolerance for idiocy in videogames, because I rarely play them for the quality of the writing. Something has to to be worse than bad to get on my nerves: it has to be actively destructive of the idea of thoughtful, intelligent examinations of serious topics. Inglourious Basterds, like all of Tarantino's work, has a lot going on, and one of its strengths is that, like all of his movies, it can be appreciated on a sort of visceral level without ever bothering to think about any of the shit that's in there (you don't even have to know that Inglorious Bastards was a movie, for instance).
The problem is when people like Gearbox start to riff on Tarantino without understanding what he's doing or where the stuff is coming from. Sometimes it's fairly blandly inoffensive, as in The Boondock Saints, where the worst that happens is that we get a movie with some fairly neat gunfights, some funny jokes, and a quirky performance from Willem Dafoe. Other times, we get the heaping pile of shit that Furious 4 looks like it's going to turn out to be.
It also doesn't help that I can tell you right now that they're just going to steal half of their game from Left 4 Dead and the other half from Team Fortress 2.
I agree with Honky, though.
Also, exploding a guy's head with a pick-axe has a certain entertainment value to it
So generic evil, German speaking Nazis it is then.
nazis are different to germans though, Theres a uniform, an organisation to focus your anger on. The bearded fellas are just that. It just annoys me because I'm a bearded Muslim and feel the way its handled is bad. Ignore me, I'm biased
I guess I'm just looking at it as a crazy, not trying to be serious, shooter.
@Gaslight: I guess this game is just a pit stop, or whatever. The devs still plan to continue the actual Brothers in Arms storyline.
There's the stuff that tycho wrote, coupled with the fact that they've always stayed true to the historical facts, or atleast as close as possible. They used real soldiers, with permission from the respective families. And now this. Yikes.
Edit: I just don't think they should have used the BIA title, especially given what its associated with in the past. The game itself ...... Interesting, I guess.
I wouldn't say I'm disinterested in it. I'm not a massive fan of 4 player coop (coordinating even 2 player coop is tough with the schedules that me and my friends are on these days) but Gearbox generally makes solid games and this might be tons of fun. We don't know much yet, really. I cringe inwardly every time I see anything about this game, though. It's more insensitive than an amputated limb is. The people behind this game's tone trigger actual contempt in me, and I'm generally immune to that sort of thing because I long ago gave up on humanity.
What bugs me, I think, is that they've gone through just the right amount of effort to make everything far, far more horrible than it has any right to be. Let's take Big Isy's "shooting generic bearded Islamic terrorists" game. I can forgive those because, hell, it's the lazy route. We don't like al Qaeda, we don't like the Taliban, they're basically, what, Muslim guys with beards, I guess, so why not make all the bad guys Islamic-esque guys with beards? Bang, you're done, call it a day, let's get lunch, FOX News will approve.
(As an aside, it's easy as hell to do this for a World War II game: don't even bother. Nazis (and Germans in general) are automatically bad guys, so just do whatever you want with the Americans, leave the Germans alone, and you're good to go.)
Furious 4 just actively fucks things up, and in the worst possible way, because they seem to be going for some sort of aesthetic/visceral impact with all this bullshit they've cribbed from Tarantino, but they've also not just discarded but actively contravened the sorts of things that Tarantino achieves with his style. It's just... it's like, well...
Watch this YouTube clip (it's hilarious)
Now imagine that someone does that unironically, like, actually making fun of the people who got cut to shreds on the beaches of Normandy, via all the various stylistic choices they make. And now imagine that instead of making fun of D-Day veterans, they're making fun of all of World War II, and particularly the Nazis and who/what they were. Unironically. By mistake. Because they're fucking idiots.
Just... jesus christ this game pisses me off.
Still, might be fun.
I understand how offensive it is to have the generic stereotype be the typical enemy especially when less than 0.0001% of generic bearded, Arabic speaking population in any way fits the bill for a video game enemy. But it isn't any different to saying that all Nazis of the time were german etc.
The tone of this game is pretty disgusting, and I'm usually game for anything. This just seems to trivialize the Nazis and what they did. They weren't comic relief, bumbling slap-stick punching bags. They very nearly knocked the planet off of it's moral center.
In fact, I'm not sure that they do; I certainly didn't feel any sympathy for the Nazis in the trailer, any more than I feel for zombies in the L4D trailer. In fact, the Nazis are more culpable than the zombies, because they're rational human beings. In any case, though, whether or not we sympathize with the Nazis isn't really the point: if Furious 4 made an intelligent statement on the point in one direction or another, that would be fine. What we have now is unadulterated, horrendous shit. It's not intellectually vacuous: it's actively, positively terrible.
My point is that the trailer doesn't show those particular Nazis doing anything horrible, for all we know they could be the kind of fellas who were secretly trying to bring it down from the inside. A little crazy sure, but then I'm flipping starving so roll with it
Just saying that a little more evil needs to be shown for me to accept they're the bad guys.
The problem I see is that it's going to be a situation where you are going to literally be rewarded for not just killing an enemy (be that nazi or otherwise). But being rewarded for killing in the most entertaining way possible with a bunch of stereotypes that really have more related to big game hunters than soldiers/mercs or whatever you call that group. You can even see this becoming an Army of Two situation again because you can guarantee some sort of banter or fist bump after killing. For me this would be fine if it wasn't based on a situation like an actual war where many peoples relatives fought and died in. But hey, chainsawing a nazi soldier in the head is obviously gonna sell more than generic WWII title.