I can think of some obvious examples to start with, but my subtle but insidious nominee is Fable III. Fittingly for a pretentious grifter like Molyneux, the game requires you to raise a specific amount of gold or your kingdom is destroyed and you get a bad ending. The goalposts are moved by the game if you raise money in ways it doesn’t approve of, and it is simply impossible to reach the fundraising goal in any way that isn’t at least Enlightened Centrist levels of evil, the kind that lanyard-wearing neoliberals giggle about. That’s right, you need to be at least this evil or your kingdom is destroyed. So deep and really makes you think about the hard decisions that are made by the ruling class, doesn’t it? :zizek:

  • ssjmarx [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    1·
    3 years ago

    I love the Wargame series, and its sister series Steel Division manages to avoid a lot of the most common myths about the Soviet Union circa World War II, but god damn does Eugen Systems have serious brain worms.

    Here are the campaigns in Wargame: Red Dragon:

    • The South Korean dictatorship opens fire on a student protest, sparking a massive wave of unrest. This prompts North Korea to invade, and you play as the Americans who push back the Northerners and defend the dictatorship that was literally just massacring college students.
    • The Soviet Union invades China in response to China attacking Vietnam. You play as China, and lead a counterattack that captures Vladivostok, successfully defending the Khmer Rouge.
    • The time has come for Hong Kong to be handed over to China, but after Den Xiaoping makes a somewhat flippant remark to Margeret Thatcher, she decides that she doesn’t want to give up Hong Kong after all. You play as the Br*ts and fight to maintain control of your colonial holdings.
    • The Soviet Union of 1984 grows paranoid about an impending American/Japanese attack to take some disputed islands, and launches a preemptive invasion of mainland Japan.
    • The CPSU successfully coups Gorbachev right before he dissolves the Soviet Union. Despite the Soviet Union barely hanging on after the defection of several Eastern European republics, North Korea decides that this is the perfect chance for reunification, and kicks off the Second Korean War.

    Earlier games in the series posited a Soviet invasion of Germany across the Fulda Gap. It’s like someone made a list of every single thing that the Cold Warriors were wrong about and made fanfiction of them actually being right.