DDL on 4/7/2012 at 07:37
Quote Posted by Phatose
the plot is "KILL EVERYTHING. LOL, SUCKS TO BE YOU."
Um..isn't that being pretty much utterly faithful to the source material?
"In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war."
I don't think anyone, ever, has expected a 40K game to be a "tightly-plotted, yet finely nuanced treatise on the nature of what it means to be human" or anything. It's pretty much "BIG ARMOUR! BIG GUNS! GRAAAAAAAA!"
Plus it's an over the shoulder TPS with a melee system: it's basically "gears of 40K", just entertaining, excessively-violent fluff. And shitty netcode, apparently. How much more sophisticated can discussion about a game like that
get?
Also, for what it's worth, nobody said the tits in the game were even a
problem: the only person who actually commented on the in-game tits was dethtoll, and that was to point out that unlike the tits in everything else 40K-esque (apparently), in this game they WEREN'T a problem.
(also, please correct me if I'm misinterpreting you here, dethtoll)
Fafhrd on 4/7/2012 at 07:50
And Space Marine has quick evades, stuns, executions, fury mode, grenades, three ranged weapons slots with seven possible weapons, and a fourth ranged slot with two possible weapons, as well as three potential melee weapons (four if you count the starting combat knife), which all have different combat effects.
But you want to be reductive and ignore all that and say combat is pressing X and pressing Y. Which is exactly what Batman's combat boils down to, too.
june gloom on 4/7/2012 at 08:03
ITT we learn that female portrayals in media and the (un)fairness thereof take a backseat to combos being simplistic which is fucking awful and everyone should be enraged about it
and i'm the one who gets told i'm ruining ttlg -- what's to ruin?
Phatose on 4/7/2012 at 08:09
Count the buttons.
You've got, what, exactly? Combat knife, which is A/AB/AAB/AAAB. Axe....A/AB/AAB/AAAAB. Thunder hammer which is....A/AB/AAB/AAAAB.....
Oh, but also the bolter pistol. Which you aim and shoot. And the storm bolter.....which you.....aim and shoot. And the plasma cannon..........which you.......aim and shoot.
And no, batman doesn't boil down to 2 buttons. If you'd like to argue that, I'll give you punch and counter and put you up against an armored foe........and you're kind of fucked, aren't you?
But no, I don't want to be reductive. The game's goddamned help system did that.
It actually had a "See combos" screen that included 2 fucking buttons.
2 buttons.
How many of those weapons requires another button? For that matter, how many required an actual strategy change?
Hell, fuck batman. Compare it to darksiders, which came free, before I got this game.
It's shallow.
Phatose on 4/7/2012 at 08:30
Quote Posted by dethtoll
ITT we learn that female portrayals in media and the (un)fairness thereof take a backseat to combos being simplistic which is fucking awful and everyone should be enraged about it
and i'm the one who gets told i'm ruining ttlg -- what's to ruin?
Dethtoll.........
You are complaining about the size of the tits on the battle nuns. The battle nuns who only exist because that particular arm of the "Imperium of Man" banned that arm from having anyone from a dick from fighting for them. And since any branch that isn't completely banned from penis-equipped fighters uses men instead.....
We've hit "Holy Shit" sexism long before we got to tit size. Like...where the imperium was the "Imperium of Man", ruled by a man/god, where all the best fighters were the man/god's sons. 12 fuckers, and not a daughter among them.
So either we are a video-game forum, and we expect this shit because video games are largely made by people with penises, and we talk about mechanics of those games in which case 2 button combo systems are bullshit.
Or we're not, in which case we've got a lot of shit to go through before we hit tit size.
Which is it?
DDL on 4/7/2012 at 09:12
Now that could be an interesting discussion. Does taking largely derivative tropes (the emperor is basically a hyperviolent space jesus, the imperium is a mix of roman, nazi and spanish inquisition figures) that are fundamentally sexist but nevertheless well-established...count as sexism? Is a fictional universe that depicts female warriors as having giant armoured tits better or worse than one that simply does not depict female warriors AT ALL (because lol @ women fighting)?
I mean, my general argument was that it's not a terribly sexist universe because EVERYONE is fucked in 40K (plus humans make up, after all, a minor percentage of the total universe, so unless we're going to start talking about how hydralisks get all the good jobs because biovores are expected to stay at home and raise the spore mines, we're already dealing with a minor part of a huge breadth of fiction, albeit the minor part that is easiest to identify with), and that if we were to discuss sexist overtones in the 40K universe, reducing it to "giant tits Y/N?" is a horrendously shallow approach that benefits nobody.
I largely considered things like the "Imperium of man" to be more or less equivalent to "Imperium of mankind", rather that "Imperium of males", and that most of the archetypes used (roman legions, spanish inquisition, etc) are overwhelmingly male by nature: adjusting them to be less inherently sexist would potentially be jarring enough to bring the whole thing into question. Have an army of giant armoured supermen, and nobody bats an eyelid. Make some of them female and suddenly everyone has an opinion on how they're depicted.
Is a universe derived from established (but sexist) tropes more, less or exactly as sexist as an equivalent universe created from whole cloth? I.e. is established archetypal sexism less offensive than de novo sexism? (I would say that it certainly IS less offensive, but I'm unsure as to whether this is a good thing or not)
Overall I think there could be a really interesting discussion in this, but we can stick to the merits of buttonmash combos if you prefer. ;)
faetal on 4/7/2012 at 09:18
Just to potentially throw a porcupine into the balloon pile, couldn't it be argued that any armoured regiment containing women, unless they were tailoring each suit of armour to its wearer, would need to to make the generic breast accommodation in the suits of armour big enough to accommodate the largest bust size? Those of a less buxom persuasion would presumably be able to have padding to keep it fitting ok.
Totally whimsical and obviously dodges the point that these aren't real people and it is obvious that the tits were designed to be oomlaters on purpose, but still, I thought I'd mention it.
henke on 4/7/2012 at 09:44
Quote Posted by Phatose
But fucking A. This is TTLG, and WH40K: Space Marine has much bigger problems then tits. Like the fact that the combo system is Button A 1 to 4 times then Button B. Like the fact that the plot is "KILL EVERYTHING. LOL, SUCKS TO BE YOU."
The plot was kinda barebones, but functional. And most shooting games that let you melee only has 1 melee attack, usually smacking the enemy in the face with the butt of your rifle, so I was pretty stoked to find out you
could do combos and string moves together at all. Not sure why you're getting so worked up about this. Did someone hype the melee combat up for you before you bought the game? I can see it being disappointing if you went in expecting some Batman-like combat.
Phatose on 4/7/2012 at 18:21
Quote Posted by henke
The plot was kinda barebones, but functional. And most shooting games that let you melee only has 1 melee attack, usually smacking the enemy in the face with the butt of your rifle, so I was pretty stoked to find out you
could do combos and string moves together at all. Not sure why you're getting so worked up about this. Did someone hype the melee combat up for you before you bought the game? I can see it being disappointing if you went in expecting some Batman-like combat.
I might have mentioned the pre-order bonus was Darksiders. War carries swords, axes, giant weapons, stomps craps, and has guns. And fights demons too. Large arsenal, huge world, lots of things to do, fighting demons.
So, yeah, someone hyped it up to me - the publisher. They gave me a game doing all the things I do in space marine as a bonus for ordering space marine - except it did them all better, and had exploration elements on top of it. And since it was a pre-order bonus I played it literally right before Space Marine dropped.
Makes for a pretty stark contrast.
Quote Posted by DDL
Now
that could be an interesting discussion. Does taking largely derivative tropes (the emperor is basically a hyperviolent space jesus, the imperium is a mix of roman, nazi and spanish inquisition figures) that are
fundamentally sexist but nevertheless well-established...count as sexism? Is a fictional universe that depicts female warriors as having giant armoured tits better or worse than one that simply does not depict female warriors AT ALL (because lol @ women fighting)?
I mean, my general argument was that it's not a terribly sexist universe because EVERYONE is fucked in 40K (plus humans make up, after all, a minor percentage of the total universe, so unless we're going to start talking about how hydralisks get all the good jobs because biovores are expected to stay at home and raise the spore mines, we're
already dealing with a minor part of a huge breadth of fiction, albeit the minor part that is easiest to identify with), and that if we were to discuss sexist overtones in the 40K universe, reducing it to "giant tits Y/N?" is a horrendously shallow approach that benefits nobody.
I largely considered things like the "Imperium of man" to be more or less equivalent to "Imperium of mankind", rather that "Imperium of males", and that most of the archetypes used (roman legions, spanish inquisition, etc) are overwhelmingly male by nature: adjusting them to be less inherently sexist would potentially be jarring enough to bring the whole thing into question. Have an army of giant armoured supermen, and nobody bats an eyelid. Make some of them female and suddenly everyone has an opinion on how they're depicted.
Is a universe derived from established (but sexist) tropes more, less or exactly as sexist as an equivalent universe created from whole cloth? I.e. is established archetypal sexism less offensive than de novo sexism? (I would say that it certainly IS less offensive, but I'm unsure as to whether this is a good thing or not)
Overall I think there could be a really interesting discussion in this, but we can stick to the merits of buttonmash combos if you prefer. ;)
I think we can probably discuss both buttonmash and structural sexism.
I'm not at all convinced you can really just say this is an established element, and yeah it's sexist but that's just the way it is. As a simple matter of practicality, if that's perfectly OK - then how can anything ever change? Functionally, you can continue to be sexist, while claiming it's tradition to be sexist. When you start doing that in fictional universe set in the future, it's real hard to claim it's just historical - since you're not even dealing with history. At the very least, you might want to explain why exactly every advancement made in gender equality in the 20th & 21st centuries vanished and we're back to the medieval way of doing things.
More problematically, it starts to seep into other elements where you're actually creating subtle new sexism. For example, the Imperial Guard is quite established as including females - yet, if you look at Dawn of War 1's expansions, you wouldn't know it. All the units are male - even though they shouldn't be. All the voicing is male - this is no doubt because it feels correct in the setting, even though it's absolutely incorrect in that universe.
henke on 4/7/2012 at 18:52
Umm... ok. Never played Darksiders.
