A few years ago i play so much military game and often play with NATO/US side because the technology of the weapon is more advanced than the “Opfor” side. Since i’m becoming aware with the NATO/US atrocity, i always play with the Enemy side.
There is one simulator game i played a lot back then called Falcon BMS which is a simulator game to fly an F-16 in the Korean War against the Mig and Sukhoi, after understanding about what the NATO/US does, i dont want to play as their side anymore.
Right now i play Arma but always on the Opfor side against the NATO. Fuck NATO and their Capitalism.
Yup. Even before turning to the left ideologically. Somewhere around CoD: Black Ops, I started to notice certain unsettling things - how my countrymen (Russia) were near damn universally the go-to baddies, even in otherwise unrelated stories. And how “brave American heroes” always defeated them, usually not by outsmarting or outplaying, but simply by “being better”.
the only good CoD campaign was the Soviet one in World at War. raising the Soviet flag over the Reichstag in first-person, just (chef’s kiss) brilliant
Indeed
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A lot of fiction loses its appeal if you take off the rose tinted glasses.
I think its because the humor is against our ideology and understanding. I always listening about stand up comedian joking about landlord, their hated job or anything in particular and i have a good chuckle because its feels too close to home.
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Shit is real hard to like once you know.
I thought Terry prachett was relatively based about social issues. Didn’t realise stuff like that was in the books.
FYI not read any, just heard about them.
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Yeah fair I get what you mean.
It’s difficult to enjoy. Sometimes I play as Amerika in Hearts of Iron IV or the mod for it Kaiserreich, but I always either push it communist or attempt to balkanize the hell out of myself and create a non-country lol. It’s cooler in Kaiserredux/Kaiserreich because you can set up a communist federation allied with a socialist black belt nation and an independent socialist Texas, stuff like that. Any type of playstyle that even mildly upholds Amerikan values… I’d rather just not.
Same with the Civilization games. I put them in some of my versus AI games just to feel the catharsis of liberating their cities, but I could never play them without feeling yucky.
Wow, i never played Hearts of Iron before, but everybody keep recommending me. Its really interesting scenario if the soviet keep expanding because so many country join and eventually beat the shit out of america. Gotta check it out.
I’m gonna be honest and say that I’m an absolutely impatient moron when it comes to the Paradox grand strategy games and I cheat like crazy… if you like military strategy and resource management, you’ll enjoy it w/o cheats. Personally I just like to liberate western Asia as tankie Iran 🇮🇷 ⚒️ and focus on the more roleplay elements than anything else
This is how I am when I play Civ 5 lol. There’s the imperialists (US, UK, France, Spain) and then there’s me (the Reaper Civ from Mass Effect that’s completely broken and not meant for human players) and I wipe the floor with them on even the highest difficulties with minimal effort
I would literally rather play as fucking Talibans against USA, west and their puppets. Also the only good and only Call of Duty I played is World at War, the rest is just what the fuck…
Play battlefield 2 project reality and you can play as the country the USA is attacking. Youll love it.
Finally something to play, how did I not hear of this before?
Currently playing through Fallout 4 and I’m actually super into it. Rebuilding a destroyed Turtle Island (or at least a small portion of it) into a new communist society is great, but there’s too much Amerikkkan nostalgia. One of the first main characters you meet is a Black man who wants to rebuild a militia that helps people and generally does good, but it’s called the fucking “Minutemen”, which is like…why would you call it that? Why pine for a time where people who looked like you (and me) were literal slaves? Mans even sports the colonial fit…c’mon man
Also nevermind the fact that the nuclear war that destroyed Amerikkka happen in fucking 2077, you’re telling me that absolutely nothing happened between the end of WWII till 2077? It was literally handwaved away during the intro. So no cold war? No overseas interventions to prevent the spread of communism? Everything was just fine, we had everything including nuclear powered cars (I won’t even get into how impossible that is but this is more about the politics than the science lmao) and it was just peace lmfao it’s like propaganda.
And no one moved past the ugly ass 50s aesthetic? You think humans would stay attached to that shit for 100+ years?
C’mon son
Pretty sure that whole “nothing happened” only started after Bethesda bought out the series. That’s also when they moved it to an alternative, US-centric universe (with the first man in space being American, for example). Back in original Fallout, it had a lengthy timeline of shit slowly grinding into hell, until the avarice of the increasingly jingoistic USA had caused a nuclear war.
Bethesda cheapened it all, and basically removed the underlying themes of USian greed.
Ah, I see. That’s disappointing. I might actually go look up some of the original lore since I’m so interested
All I remember is Tel-Aviv getting nuked by Iran couple of decades before the “main event”.
i always have fun playing as the PAVN or NLF in rising storm 2
Anyone remember Command & Conquer: Generals? That game was racist as fuck and even though I was only on a very early, formative stage of the path to becoming M-L, it pissed me off so much. I would play mostly China and occasionally the GLA (generic Arab terrorists), but never as the US.
Sometimes in RPGs I’ll play lawful evil, though. I guess that counts as fascists?
And games like Heart of Iron where you can choose to diverge from a nation’s historical ideology, I’ll sometimes turn liberals/fascists communist, and sometimes turn them royalist or liberal or fascist, but I can never bring myself to diverge the USSR or the CPC from Communism. It feels profane.
I definitely can enjoy playing games as neocon/neolib/fascist/monarchist/lawful evil. Playing as the bad guys is fun. But if a game asks me to laugh with it while it mocks communism, or if I get the slightest whiff of the writers soapboxing liberal bullshit about capitalism vs communism, that ends the game for me unless I can actively undermine it.
Really looking foward to Victoria 3.
Anyone remember Command & Conquer: Generals?
Oh yes. Remember playing it as a kid and getting confused on the mission with US and Chinese militaries having a joint operation… In the middle of Russia. With no mention of actual Russian military or any involvement at all.
I remember, played it so much as a kid.
Generals and Generals Zero Hour are my favourite C&C games because of mechanics and a more familiar setting but the racism (now that I’m older and wiser) omg it makes them hard to play to the point I don’t really anymore.
I remember the original Civilization game on PC. You could be Stalin or Mao lmao. I would always be stalin, not for any political reasons, but because the Russians always started strong in that game.
I mean idc about politics for some games. Xcom 2, idgaf if the Brits or Americans are doing stuff, it’s against bad aliens and it’s a humanity effort. COD it depends, I still have fun but I have to mute the game and smoke up first to ignore the war crimes but the combat is fun, I play lots of Cod WaW so I can play the Soviet parts over and over
Some games include the hidden message behind it like the one simulator game i play back then, flying F16 in the korean war bombing factory and building. It feels fun for some, but for me, it feels like an imperialism simulator. I wish i can mod the F16 to become the plane of the North Korean.
Aliens are just an indigenous population we haven’t found yet. They are a stand in for an “evil” civilization. It’s no different than European depictions of Africans, Asians, or Turtle Islanders. Yes, it avoids explicit racism by making up a new race and locating them beyond the human frontier, but it’s the exact same playbook and it’s just as euro-centric.
Evil doesn’t exist. The Other is The Self.
Nah they’re aliens that invaded Earth, it’s just a game where you fight off the Alien government after they take over Earth
I understand the narrative. I’m saying that the narrative is literally the exact same form as the narratives Europeans have been telling for a millennium to justify their wars of adventure and imperialism. An evil civilization with no chance of redemption must die by our hands for their transgressions against the natural order of things. Their language, culture, and image are strange and unsettling. They value only killing, mindless expansion, and resource extraction.
The only way for a “war against aliens” narrative to be palatable for me would be if the aliens were capitalist imperialists and the player was engaged in a struggle for decolonization, but that would require either the entirety of Turtle Island and Australia to be portrayed as decolonized already, or it would need to address the parallels between fighting back the alien colonizers and fighting back the European colonizers at the same time.
…have you ever played XCOM? I’m not disagreeing with you on a general basis, I just don’t think you understand how non-applicable this is to the specific subject. It’s literally an invading force taking over Earth and the international community coming together to resist it.
What I’m trying to say is that the narrative structure of XCOM is paralleling European imperialism. The aliens are the Europeans, this “international community” is in the place of the people’s subjugated by Europe. And the problematic piece is that while the Americans fight against the alien imperialists, they are doing it from the position of Turtle Island and doing so with the moral force of “we belong here, you don’t”.
It’s hypocrisy on display. It’s the European telling on itself. It’s cheering for the subjugated while simultaneously reinforcing the right to subjugate.
Alien imperialists don’t exist. It’s a trope for justifying the actions of Europeans who spent the last millennium justifying mass murder because “the other” is evil and dangerous. And the reason we have to use aliens is because there’s no longer any new fronteir for the European project that contains indigenous populations to villify. So we make up indigenous populations of space aliens and then tell stories about how evil they are. So long as we believe that such narratives map to some sort of real moral framework, we are doomed.
No, it does not sound like you have played the game.
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You do not fight from Turtle Island exclusively. You can choose any continent to base out of, and mechanically speaking? I’d argue Africa’s bonus is the best and North America’s is the worst.
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I understand your comparison of the narrative, but the problem is that, as stated prior, the entire international community is at play here. Your team is often composed of nationalities spanning the globe. The commander, who you play, is nameless, faceless, and this is intended to reflect upon who you are as a person, which could be anybody. It is not outside the imagination to have a queer black woman as a commander as a result, because it is whoever picks the controls up.
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It may not cover past atrocities, but I don’t think it’s fair to suggest that as a fault rather than something that’s just completely out of bounds. Sort of like how making a major point about the unjustness of the French colonization of Algeria during a movie about rebelling in Vichy France just seems…tonally jarring at best. Outside of an ironic jab at the fact that what has been visited upon others is now being visited upon them, it still doesn’t justify Nazism’s grasp and the Holocaust as it occurred in France. Vichy France is what fueled French decolonization, but within the scope of the movie? It’s just not there unless you’re ready for four hours of context to do it justice, and I hate to say this, but not even in a society where we are all communists are you going to find people that are going to entertain that in something meant to pass the time. It’s just a more in-depth discussion for another time, and trust me, this sort of media does inspire it and that’s a good thing.
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On that note, this is actually a common trope in scifi; that is, the inversion of the colonizer to the colonized. It started with the very first piece of media to cover alien invasion: “The War of the Worlds” by H. G. Wells. What XCOM lacks in comparison is a critique of colonialism and imperialism (or even a reference, but see the last point), but it does a very good indirect job of showing why humanity must unite beyond borders in such a world-shaking case (unlike what is occurring facing COVID and climate change; aka it is liberal idealism at heart, but that doesn’t change the point). For instance, paying uneven attention or only attention to short term gains leads to countries leaving the council, thus lowering support for your efforts and an actual material loss of resources toward the liberation of Earth. This works out in a fairly streamlined fashion due to it being a strategy game; you require advantages and there are easy to understand numbers tied to the mechanics and decisions to simulate these advantages. It has caused at least one (but likely more) instances of self-reflection on the question of “Why the hell aren’t we cooperating on a global scale?”
I overall feel you are thinking too narrowly about the genre of alien invasion. You’re not wrong on any count in some discussions, but my point is that this is not one of those discussions. You are missing the nuance of a detailed take-down of the game’s shortcomings, because you’re painting broad stroke criticisms without tackling actual aspects of the game itself. This is why I asked if you had played the game and am coming to the conclusion that you have not.
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Using the Russian or Chinese planes in Ace Combat 7 even though the Raptor is arguably better gang.
If you play simulator game like DCS, i often win against NATO fighter jet using Mig-29/Su-27 on 2v2. The key is always on the who see first and evasive strategies
I’ll see if I can apply this to AC7 vs mode 👍
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Battlefield > cod (at least both sides are nazis in bf5)
Play battlefield 2 project reality and you can play as the country the USA is attacking. Youll love it.
fun playing as china in bf4
Luckily in Arma Reforger the Soviet Union has the fully auto AK74 so not only is it the based team to play but also they fuck shit up. Burst M16 for children with noodle arms.
I tried going back to Black Ops, the campaign starts off with an informant telling you were Castro is (you play as CIA trying to kill Castro but even in the game they can’t manage it) but the guy points to a map and says “He’ll be at this plantation… my plantation.” So your informant, the guy you’re supposed to relate to and feel sorry for, is some rich plantation owner that got screwed over by communism.
I do still like to play Ghost Recon Wildlands though, it’s a pretty brainless game with a bunch of busy work but it activates the neurons in my monkey brain. You actually work with a communist rebel group in Bolivia (until halfway through the game when they betray you for no reason because ebil comomism) but when the game starts one of your AI teammates says “I don’t think we should be working for these guys, their ideology tends to put more bodies in the ground”. Thank you for your input, US soldier in South America.
