ooooooooooooooh

Seriously though, I thought GTA’s tone was feeling a decade out of date even in 2013. It just stinks of the late 90s and early 2000s, specifically of early South Park

  • peppersky [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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    4 hours ago

    These games have always sucked. I don’t know in what possible world I would possibly want to play a videogame and listen and watch fake ads. Not to mention what terribly uninterested these games are in the cities they are actually set in besides their bare physical construction.

    The only reason to ever play these games is to drive around on a motorcycle, which is arguably pretty damn fun.

  • MaoTheLawn [any, any]@hexbear.net
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    5 hours ago

    You could say it’s unnecessary, but Gay bars at the time of release, and to an extent even to this day have this shit written on them, often as a reclamation of the term. Same goes for f*g - queer is now just part of the lingo, when it was a slur before. It’s ‘in your face’, it’s provocative, and I’ve seen people of such groups take pictures with those exact signs as a ‘haha, that’s us, we’re f-gs/tr-nnies, fuck what ya heard’ sort of thing.

    Of course, there are different flavours of queer bar, some are much softer and strive for more of a safe space feel, but there are certainly a lot that lean more into being sleazy, punky, and even intimidating.

    Perhaps I’m being too generous. I could accept that I am.

  • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    10 hours ago

    This may piss off a lot of freeze-gamer but I’ll say it anyway: I’ve been put off by the GTA series ever since the early 3D one (yes, there was a 2D original game too) that had the chud-chortling mechanic of running over sex workers to get money back. Like “Postal,” it was misanthropic edgy shit for its own sake and I haven’t bothered to check back in decades later.

    Later Saints Row games were at least funny and weird and that helped.

    • doublepepperoni [none/use name]@hexbear.netOP
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      3 hours ago

      Play Red Dead Redemption 2. It abandons the edgy satire and what Grimbeard would call “smelly boy humour” that Rockstar made their calling card previously

      Even Red Dead Redemption 1 still leans into that GTA tone

    • Redcuban1959 [any]@hexbear.net
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      6 hours ago

      In GTA 2 theres a mission for the Russian Mob (who are mostly a parody of Slav and Soviet stuff, they even have a place called Crimea lol) that you kidnap random people and watch them get shot only to be served as hot dog.

      Which makes no fucking sense even for a non-sense game like GTA 2. In the PS1 port they changed so you attack rival gang members instead of random civilians.

      • Redcuban1959 [any]@hexbear.net
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        6 hours ago

        Theres an ad in GTA SA or 4 about how the only way to change the world is by voting, and it mocks people who refuse to vote in the US. Really fucking cringe lib mindset.

        I think 4 had a better story than all other GTAs, it sucks that Niko’s gay friend is a steriotypical 2000’s gay man, but kinda cool that Niko and Roman defends him bc they are friends, but there are no more interactions beside him being there at Roman’s wedding.

      • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        10 hours ago

        That’s the vibe I got when I tried it, especially when I had some of my chuddier friends-of-friends at social gatherings running people over while letting out empty chuckles for HOURS.

          • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            10 hours ago

            It’s especially clear if you listen to the in-game radio stations, it’s just like South Park.

            Isn’t that one of the most celebrated features that got expanded upon more and more over time? It used to be just “ironic” music if I remember correctly, like opera.

            • SkingradGuard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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              10 hours ago

              It used to be just “ironic” music if I remember correctly, like opera.

              Yeah it does, it also has current-year hits, classics etc., but it also has in-universe advertisements and like, fake talkshow type things. It is very on the nose when it comes to these two things.

              • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                10 hours ago

                Yeah it does, it also has current-year hits, classics etc., but it also has in-universe advertisements and like, fake talkshow type things. It is very on the nose when it comes to these two things.

                I’m glad I have been staying away because a bunch of “haha caring about things is stupid check out this farcical version of a hysterial and triggered person being emotional for your amusement!” Howard Sternesque shit would only make GTA even worse for me.

                • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
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                  5 hours ago

                  IIRC for GTA5 it was all satire aimed at mid 2000s Fox, both the trashy reality TV side of it and Fox News. I’m not gonna say it doesn’t revel too much in the spectacle of just taking something that’s already awful and dialing it up a bit, but it’s more in the style of the Onion where most of the bits are taking the mask off an institution or trend and having it honestly portray itself as what it is (like the Fox News expy literally having the tagline “confirming your prejudices” or an American Idol expy literally just being assholes reveling in cruelty) than South Park style nihilism - it has a point to make and that’s that American culture is reactionary and repulsively self-centered and consumerist, even as it is itself reveling in being trashy slop.

                  You’ve got to remember, everything after GTA3 was written in the context of the Bush era and none of it was written after gamergate: it has the sort of incoherent dirtbag quasi-left contemporary counter culture stance of recognizing the US as bloodthirsty, pointlessly cruel, and deeply unserious but also not having any sort of framework for understanding or addressing that and being entirely too libertine and chauvinist on top of that. It’s kind of alien to anything we have now, because that whole counter culture basically got wiped out by gamergate crystalizing the chauvinist libertines into open fascists baying for blood and forcing everyone else to stop tacitly tolerating them.

        • arianyanners 🏳️‍⚧️🇧🇩@lemmygrad.ml
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          8 hours ago

          chuddier friends-of-friends at social gatherings running people over while letting out empty chuckles for HOURS.

          I never understood the “fun” of running people harmless pedestrians over in games with vehicles on them and laughing about it. Are these people kids or smth?

          • doublepepperoni [none/use name]@hexbear.netOP
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            3 hours ago

            GTA’s solution to make regularly recreating those ISIS truck attacks on busy sidewalks feel less morbid is making sure every NPC comes across as incredibly vapid, stupid and repulsive

            All the stuff the NPCs blurt out makes them sound like awful, shallow people

            It all gets a bit tiring after a while

          • LocalOaf [they/them]@hexbear.net
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            8 hours ago

            Running over bad guys in Halo is very fun, and it’s ludonarratively appropriate since they’re either genocidal aliens or red/blue bad guys that are also trying to run you over in multiplayer

            • that’s true, but i was talking about running over civilians/pedestrians that are minding their own business in games like GTA. i just don’t get what’s so fun about that.

              maybe i should’ve clarified this.

                • Roonerino [they/them]@hexbear.net
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                  55 minutes ago

                  As a child, I spent hours just camping the top of the GTA4 subway stairs so I could sprint into people and watch them fall down while shouting profanities. The way the ragdolls had weight and would try (often successfully) to catch their fall when shoved around was so good, I don’t think even GTA5 was as good.

              • LocalOaf [they/them]@hexbear.net
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                7 hours ago

                Ah. Yeah, that never appealed to me either. I’m the kind of dork that tries to obey all the traffic laws in GTA like games though. At least in LA Noire driving like an asshole is appropriate since you play as a the-pigs

                • I’m the kind of dork that tries to obey all the traffic laws in GTA like games though.

                  I remember trying to do that in good 'ol Vice City, only for pedestrian-driving vehicles/cars to ignore them and speed on through (sometimes even hitting my vehicle/car in the process). The funniest part is I didn’t even aggravate them or had cheats on, yet they still did it anyway. :^)

          • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            9 hours ago

            Me neither.

            Similarly, “Postal” was such a disgusting pile of misanthropic shit that I never ceased to be baffled that the series is somehow considered a classic among freeze-gamer.

            I enjoy Civvie 11’s Youtube videos but even after seeing pretty much all of the non-Postal ones, I still find his Postal playthroughs unwatchable.