Welcome to the Community Playthrough of Spec Ops: The Line: For Grownupshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD661k1UpvQ"The most exciting thing to happen in video game narrative for fucking years." - Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw
"One of the most subversive shooters yet made.” - Edge Magazine
“Set My Brain On Fire” - PC Gamer
"It's not often you see a survey with one right answer, but, Specs Ops is the right answer." - darleysamWhat the heck is Spec Ops: The Line?
Spec Ops: The Line is a game about a guy taking a much-needed vacation in Dubai.
Actually no, it isn't. But I've never played the game myself, so I'll just pull up this summary from Wikipedia:
In Spec Ops: The Line, the player controls Captain Martin Walker, who is sent into a post-catastrophe Dubai with an elite Delta Force team on a reconnaissance mission, where they find dead American soldiers. Upon the finding, Walker declares that the team's mission has changed, and that they will search Dubai for survivors.
OK. So why are we playing it now?
Because it was the most popular 'short game' pick in the SE++ Game Club poll we held last week. And I hear the story is pretty darned interesting!
Community playthrough?
Yes, this community playthrough is sort of like a book club. Each week, we'll be playing a segment of the game together. Because the SE++ Game Club is for adults and other people with busy schedules, we have divided the game into short sections for your convenience.
Where can I play it?
PC, PS3, Xbox 360, Mac, Linux... so just about everywhere, I guess! Here it is on
Amazon, and here it is on
Steam.So what do we talk about in this thread?
The idea is that as we play the game we'll talk about the parts we're playing through. Feel free to discuss and play further into the game than is outlined in the schedule, but if you do so, please keep the discussion in spoiler tags. For the first couple days of the week, you may want to put critical moments for that week in spoiler tags too, as many people may be playing through this game for the first time.
When does this nonsense start?
TODAY TODAY TODAY!
Do I need to sign up?
Naaah. :P This game will be short, so just dive right in.
THE SCHEDULE
This is a 2-week playthrough.
Week 1 (October 2 to October 8)
From the start to clearing The Gate
Week 2 (October 9 to October 15)
To the end!
Easy peasy.
What's next in store for the SE++ Game Club?
By popular vote, the next game will be Final Fantasy Tactics (either the original or the War of the Lions version). That playthrough begins on October 23, so snag a copy if you don't have it already!
Posts
Out of town for a wedding this weekend, I'll put up my thoughts once I clear the Gate.
Chicago Megagame group
Watch me struggle to learn streaming! Point and laugh!
These huge, ostentatious skyscrapers cut up through the sand like blades of glass feel imposing from afar. But when you're inside them and see them empty, full of sand and in complete disrepair, they feel pathetic and tragic.
It's easily one of the most striking settings I've found in a game in recent years.
Steam ID XBL: JohnnyChopsocky PSN:Stud_Beefpile WiiU:JohnnyChopsocky
That's an interesting game so far. It's definitely setting me up as one of the bad guys in this four-pronged (so far) conflict. I am just killing everyone. I did manage to not kill a civilian when she came running at me with her head down, because the palette on her clothes was different than the soldiers in that area, but I almost shot her!
I wonder how many people shot her.
Better tell my parents I finally made it.
Huh
What would have changed if I had let Largo take the shot and save Gould? Would information from his mouth about his people have made Walker approach that situation differently?
Cause I have some thoughts about a line of dialogue from that sequence
It does.
Finally, my Elder Scrolls habit of constantly waiting for someone to attack me first to determine if they're friendly or hostile will be a boon and not a detriment.
Let me tell you buddy.
But yeah in general I die fairly regular
That thought you have is exactly what Spec Ops is about
There's a moment I had near the end of the game that felt like the culmination of everything the game was trying to convey and it was so god damn brilliant
I can't wait to see how you react to it
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The concept that this game reminds me most of is a carnival hall of mirrors. Right at the title screen - showing an upside down flag, ruined architecture and a distorted anthem - the game tells you to expect twisted visions and perversions of comfortable concepts. You start the game, and for the first two or so hours you're seeing what you expected to see - serviceable (yet bland) gunplay, soldiers marching forward to help other soldiers, supreme moral authority to pull the trigger, and a sense that this isn't competing well with the CoDs and BlOps. To the massive credit of the dev team, the gunplay gets juuuuust to the edge of not worth repeating ad nauseum before the game starts telling the message it wants to tell, playing off of the expectations it had just spent the prior 5 chapters establishing.
We're soldiers marching forward to help other soldiers!...by shooting US soldiers.
The gunplay works yet isn't quite satisfying...and yet you keep playing, while your avatar continuously says that there's no choice but to press forward.
You start the game with the moral high ground...yet every chapter has you descending both physically and mentally.
This game isn't CoD...I felt better playing that game. It was fun. This is something different.
The mirrors start to get more and more warped. By the time you've cleared the Gate, you can hear something different in Walker. There's no more banter within the team. Your enemies don't refer to you by "Tango" or even "Threat", but "Murderer". And you stand in front of an even further descent, the charred corpses of victims behind you. The game tells you to obey. And most did.
As I said in the poll thread, this game goes dark, and the Gate is just the start. If you've made it this far, you're likely committed to see how it ends, for better or worse. Like Walker says, sometimes you really don't have a choice.
Chicago Megagame group
Watch me struggle to learn streaming! Point and laugh!
Very much looking forward to the back half where everything falls apart for Walker.
I'm glad one of Walker's sidekicks had the decency to suggest trying to negotiate, even if Walker himself didn't give a damn. He sure doesn't think much of shooting down hundreds of people for highly ambiguous reasons!
Holy shit this game. Just got to chapter 9, the Gate was certainly some shit. I mean, I knew what was going to happen and figured that knowledge would adequately steel me against everything. It really didn't.
I saved Gould, you don't get any intel from him so I don't imagine it changes anything. Maybe the interaction between Lugo and Adams afterwards is a little different?
I tell you one thing, it definitely makes you feel the weight of the decision that you make. Or at least I felt like it did.
Think you have another 60-90 minutes, depending on how frequently death happens
Chicago Megagame group
Watch me struggle to learn streaming! Point and laugh!
I binged this game over the last two days, because out of nowhere I was like "I want to play an interesting game and I own this"
I finished it last night and am still not sure exactly how I feel about it.
then I ended up not remembering to do that
sorry
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Actually, to be honest...initially I fired a shell in the trench on purpose, not thinking much of it other than that it was a target-rich environment (and knowing there's no way to not use the white phosphorous either way). But then I IMMEDIATELY realized that that was a terrible idea and reloaded from the checkpoint. But they make you do it anyway, of course.
Meanwhile, Walker continues to have absolutely no idea what his objective even is, except to Keep Moving Forward and Fix Everything Somehow.
The only thing about this game that made me smile, was that Nolan North clearly does other voices aside from Walker, so there were definitely times where Nolan North was yelling at Nolan North.
Okay full disclosure, I had to have a steak! play through the game while I watched because a) I suck at shooters and b) The FF12 playthrough has absolutely ruined me for camera controls, and Spec Ops does not have an option to invert the X axis. Constantly attempting to aim and having the camera go the opposite of the intended direction is a recipe for a very dead player character.
We got to The Gate and I had to call it off. I don't have the stomach to see this game through to the end. Steak summed the rest of the game up for me since he's played it before. Altogether it sounds like a game that I greatly respect for what it's trying to say and how it says it, but I have no desire to experience it.
I keep dying in the hotel because I run out of ammo and then I'm just making angry faces at a lot of people shooting me.
I do not blame you at all.
I will say, the game gets even better in hindsight. It's good as you experience it, but once you let it stew and reflect on just what they did, and how they chose to do it, and even when (mind you this is a game that came out right in the middle of all the Medal of Honors and Battlefields and Gears of Wars and Call of Duties, which makes it message and methods that much more impressive) it becomes extremely powerful.
Putting this in spoilers just in case people haven't had a chance to play through The Gate yet:
Then they make you walk through the result of what you ordered.
Again, extremely effective message and I respect the developers greatly. Waaaaaaaayyy too awful for me to continue playing.
Also going to spoil this, because I kind of talk about this scene and the rest of the game:
The Line doesn't have an us or a them. You start by fighting insurgents. Then you fight the soldiers you were sent to save. Then you fight the CIA, who backed the insurgency and the troops. You're playing a game in a genre where the central characters are indiscriminate killers, but the Bad Guys are always Bad.
Walker even acts as such, despite the increasing insanity of his actions. When you stop playing at The Gate because you don't want to kill all those people with WP, you are winning.
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