It makes no judgments, draws no conclusions, and seeks to create no internal framework beyond finding an organized way to convey all of the facts in their logical order. The game’s approach to its material even resembles that of a history. It is the stream of reality being corralled and condensed in real-time, converted from a torrential rush of unrelated personal, public and political fragments into something that approaches a cohesive whole, such that the their interrelated truths become apparent, the cracks between them are sealed, and a coherent world is born before my eyes. Except its approach is even more than that. The sheer density of data is thrilling, like I’m being entertained by a cyborg historian that is searching for, collating and presenting the huge amount of raw data that collectively describes the game’s history. Most impressive were the cutscenes between levels, which are told from the point of view of several orbital satellites transmitting the voices, blueprints, photographs, surveillance footage, chat windows, and battle plans that comprise the game’s plot. It is this kind of generosity that informs the best of the game’s content. It was surprising to see how much care was put into the game’s interstitial levels where they might have been cutscenes in other games, if not skipped entirely, here they were fully rendered little set pieces. The voice acting, map design, texturing and cutscenes all pop off the screen and out of the speakers in a way that goes beyond mere simulacrum and approaches holographic memory. It should be noted that even though the cutscene is ridiculous in how uninformative it is, the production values are exquisite, which is something that holds true for the rest of the game. I suppose it all worked out, but not too well or I wouldn’t have been sitting there playing the sequel. The most I could get out of it was that some guys wanted to kill some other guys, but then a third group of guys got involved and things turned out in some particular way. It was all pretty abstract: people’s faces float by, yelled something, some credits were displayed. The game proper began with a long and unskippable cutscene that recapped the action of the last game. I’d read so much about No Russian - the airport, the civilians, the massacre - and was curious to see how the game would go about convincing me to go along with the whole thing, perhaps hoping that it had found meaning in the situation, that the developers used their years of craft to take it from digital transgression to something more substantial, that the endless piles of corpses would come to mean so much more than their basic elements of applied blood decals and simulated aggression.īut there was some unknown quantity of gameplay to get through first. Is it possible to say no to this kind of question? Did people go to vaudeville geek shows, only go, “excuse me!? He’s going to hammer a nail into his head? I, sir, would like my money back!” Did grindhouse cinema turn away any of its core audience with these kinds of spine-tingling warnings? Has this kind of warning ever been served as anything more than an appetizer, something to get an audience salivating? Are there people who play a military FPS who aren’t interested in seeing some shit? I’m going to make a blanket statement: if you are interested in pseudo-realistic morally-justified murder for fun, then you are also probably the kind of person who is always in the mood for seeing some “real shit,” in which real is defined as something so unreal that it actually is real. ARE YOU OKAY WITH BEING CONTROVERSED OR OFFENDED? Y/N. WARNING: THIS GAME CONTAINS A MISSION THAT MAY BE CONSIDERED CONTROVERSIAL OR OFFENSIVE. The first moment in the game (beyond the publisher’s, developer’s, graphics card’s, 3rd party software’s and the game itself’s splash screens) is a disclaimer about controversial content, something like
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