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Project Ludovico

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Good god, I knew Ghosts sucked but I never noticed it was this bad. Also, yes, Doggo is best character and we honestly should have had him as the MC. Not Generic McWhiteguy.
 
Yeah, that matches up with what I've heard about it. Get well soon, Athene, and I do think that this review worked out pretty well.

...Athene, do you do game reviews now? If so, do you take requests?
 
Athene said:
I've been meaning to do this game for a long time, but always got distracted away from it. Many of you that have known me for a long time, know that I loved Call of Duty. I got in on the ground floor, won a few tournaments for the first game and bought every single release.

Well, until after this game that is. I only bought Black Ops 3 after that but I've missed two entire games in what was once my favorite series. Why?

Because Call of Duty Ghosts is a shitty, racist love letter to fascism.

This is the kind of game Donald Trump would write, 140 characters at a time. Now, I'm going to be focusing on plot and setting elements here for the most part, but I assure you its also garbage as a game. Its poorly constructed and the seams show through at every turn. The Space and Underwater sections are completely the same. The tank combat is clearly some earlier vehicle sequence reskinned, which makes it floaty and unsatisfying. The set pieces contain continuity errors and no real connection. The game will just fade to black and then something new will be happening. It feels like half the game is on a cutting room floor somewhere, an Ubisoft executive going "FUCK IT, WE'RE SHIPPING. THESE PIGS IN HUMAN CLOTHING WILL BUY ANYTHING."
Its a bad game but its a worse piece of fiction. Its offensive in a way that was startling for the year it came out but sadly less so these days.

Ghosts is the story of the hardest men who ever harded and their hardening through hard. They're named after how invisible they were when covered by dust glued to them by blood, in a final battle written by a 15 year old. There are only 15 of them at their peak but they came up with all sorts of bullshit pseudo Spartan bullcrap traditions. They're supposed to be the ultimate badasses, but they're all just Ghost from MW2 only without the cool shit. You know, like the fact that he was very mysterious and voiced by the same dude as a popular dead character? Oh yeah, and there was only one of him. The Ghosts in this game are either genetic supermen or the same dude copy and pasted. They're cool by way of focus groups and marketing. They likely excrete Axe body spray instead of sweat and their Camelbaks are filled with a slurry of Mtn Dew and Doritos. Their iPod playlist is nothing but the complete discography of Limp Bizkit. I can only assume every square inch of their body we don't see is covered in Ed Hardy tattoos.

But every hard man needs someone to make hard decisions against. In this game, its anyone south of the border. It takes the bold step of reimaging Central and South Americans as blood thirsty orcs. Well, Orcs sans the characterization. All we know is they want to kill every single American in existence. Why? Checkmate Liberals, that's why. They're coming here to take your specific job, by killing you. Pour a Keystone Light on the curb for the 27+ million Americans they killed. For no reason except they were Americans.

Well, we did kind of put an orbital weapons platform capable of mass genocide into orbit. Sure it violates like, all the treaties and laws and shit about this kind of thing, but hey come on. We're America! We were forced to as the Federation "devoured" everything south of the border, like the ravenous Uruk-Raza they are! Its not our fault they took control of it and bombed us poor, peaceful Americans and invaded.

Luckily, we built a huge wall, the biggest wall, to protect America! Sure they have like,a navy. And an airforce. And a space program. And like, literally anything on the modern battlefield that makes a huge wall pointless. But when you have an Orc problem, you have to build a Helms Deep or Minis Tirith to keep them out and this huge, oppressive wall has kept America safe for 10 years.

Unfortunately for the land of Lee Greenwood songs and throwing Old Milwaukee at NFL players on TV taking a knee, these brown people have gotten themselves a secret weapon: A white person. In fact the sole point of contact we have for the Federation is a potato faced Irish-American. I imagine there were 7 marketing meetings debating whether to try to cast Mark Wahlburg to play him. Thanks to him, the Brown Menace stands a chance at last.

Rorke is the former commander of the Ghosts, lost in action 15 years prior when they were sent in after the Venezuelan government ordered all Americans in the country killed. He was captured and exposed to, sigh, ancient Aztec Mind Control techniques. This turned him into a loyal agent of the Federation. Or something. He seems to be in charge of them because aside from one general in the backstory we never see any of them.

But with storytelling as bad as we get in this game, who's to say? The entire destruction of the middle east is handled in a sentence. "When the great energy-producing deserts were destroyed, the world powers that depended on them collapsed" over a graphic of the middle east literally exploding. How? WHY? We know there was some sort of Tel Aviv war but what the fuck happened? Has my 7th grade fan fiction come to pass?! Dallas gets mentioned offhand as being overrun and all its civilians killed by the Federation and never mentioned again. What? What's the overall picture of this war? Mass Drivers destroyed Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Houston, and Miami. Las Vegas has been reclaimed by the desert somehow but what's the rest of the country like? Is there an economy? We've been at war for a fucking decade at this point, how do we still have nice shit? Sure we only have a single carrier, but we're deploying A-10 drones have assault space shuttles. The game can't decide how fucked things are. There's guns held together by zip ties one moment and the next we're airdropping a tank battalion in a single go. If our fleets are so badly fucked we can't even escort a carrier, why aren't they just ranging up the coast and invading from the north? Can Mexicans just not resist throwing themselves at border walls in their minds? What's the situation with the entire rest of the god damn world? Is China just watching this shit and going "Whatevs."? Is this a Pan Pacific Powerplay?! Is Africa just going "Well thank god we're not in this one!".

None of that matters to the game though. The core concept is that there are brown people trying to destroy America. I keep mentioning this but it's their sole trait. They want to destroy America and kill all Americans. This game is so steeped in racist dog whistles that when you put the game in your console, every German Shepherd in 50 square miles loses their shit. Brown people are bad, white people are good. There's only one PoC in the Ghosts and he gets axed before the game discards its first gimmick. The rest of the time, its the heroic whites defeating the evil Spanish speaking Orcs.

It goes beyond accidental or residual racism here. This feels completely intentional. We don't even have a supervillain like Makarov or a political movement like Ultranationalist to point at. Its brown people out to steal your job, by way of murdering you and your entire family. They will stop at nothing There is no logical or political reason for their actions. It is simply because they are, as a people, evil. With recent events, the game is even more damning because its playing on the same ignorant fears that got Trump elected. Rapists, murderers and drug dealers so the rhetoric goes. Calfs the size of Cantaloupes from all the drugs they're bringing in to kill white people. Ann Coulter has floated death squads as a response to amnest. At least twice! Her job is to say stupid bullshit to rile people up sure, but she does it by saying whatever hateful shit people want to hear. This is a game that plays on the fear of an America that might someday be the underdog, brought low by the perfidy of these brown folks. The Federation has to steal US scraps to make advancements despite being more technologically advanced. They have America on the ropes until its time to be easily defeated by the genetic supermen that are the Walker Family.

So lets talk about the characters. There are three main protagonists: Elias Walker, a founding member of the Ghosts, his son Hesh and his presumably deaf mute son Logan. You play as Logan, who is only technically a character. He doesn't say anything to anyone ever despite the plot directly concerning him, since this game religiously sticks to the original formula while trying to copy the more involved plotlines of Black Ops. My personal theory is that they adopted a time displaced early model terminator. One of the rubber faced ones that can't talk. Either that or a UGCV that has gained sentience. He has zero presence in a game where he's supposed to be the main character. He doesn't even communicate in hand signals. He must have worked out a code based on blinks.

Anyway, Elias has been putting his bland sons through ten years of tests and bullshit. When they finally pass them, then they are ready to become Ghosts. The Federation is almost entirely defeated a month later.

Hmm? Oh yeah, they completely buzzsaw their way through with apparent ease. Apparently they could have at any point hit all of the Federations key facilities to cripple them, but didn't. I guess Elias wanted his boys to be the ones to do it. Has to leave something for his boys to do. Whatever the case,and creepy implications aside, the Federation is your classic right wing fiction enemy: Strong but only when their enemy is being lead by the weak. Once Elias is....seemingly running the entire US military, they don't stand a chance. He's so willful after all.

Oh and they have a puppers. The puppers is the best part but the devs only had them for two segments of the game and they worked hard to make sure you never got to fight with them again. Luckily since this game came out, I got Diamond Dog, who is just, the best fucking dog. Pose with your Dog because Shit Just Got Real.

I'm getting off track though. The Walkers are somehow the most interesting characters in the game and that's never a good sign. Rorke is a terrible villain. He's not threatening at all, he doesn't even look cool. He looks like he should be at a PTA meeting complaining about ethnic food being served in the school rather than the ultimate badass villain. He has you helpless and at his mercy no less than five times but keeps zipping off like Cobra Commander, going "NEXT TIME LOGAN, WE SHALL MEET AGAIN!" The script writes itself into so many corners, the writer must get trapped in corn mazes until spring. The game has him just show up again after his death to drag you away to make you work for the federation. He's going to turn you into a blank, voiceless killing machine that follows whatever order he's given.

That's Elias' job buddy.

The rest of the Ghosts are so dull that I can't even make up sarcastic monikers. It would just be 'The white one, the other white one, the white one who does computers and the last white one". They're only identifiable by their names floating above them and I guess maybe the position of their ghost masks. You will long for the rich characterization of Roach from MW2. They never actually act like real human beings and their vaunted stealth skills are never actually shown. Most battles in the game are 3 stealth kills followed by hundreds of men being gunned down by automatic weapons fire. They showcase the same level of stealth as a Gorilla on PCP chasing a bull through a china shop. They've allegedly kept all of America safe by being so badass but they're really just particularly bulletproof thugs. The game adorably expects you to care as they get offed one by one. "NO, NOT THE ONE WHO HAS A RIFLE" they imagine you screaming, "YOU'LL PAY FOR THIS VENEZUELA!"

This is really running long because I've been sick as hell and I'm putting myself through the ringer here. My anger here is real though, because its a legitimately unsettling game. The racism is too real, too obvious and too intentional. Its a game that seems designed to stoke animosity. It feels like the kind of game they advertised in PC gamer in 2002 to take advantage of American jingoism and anti-Muslim attitudes. They don't even let them have an evil villain of their own, they bring in a white guy. The plot is a shitheap of contrived circumstances, dick waving and jingoism. The only character of note is the god damn dog, who is a very good boy. The characterization is shallow and pathetic. Its thrown together to make an arbitrary sales goal of releasing a game a year. Its a game about stealth specialists called Ghosts, that doesn't contain much in the way of stealth or Ghosting. I almost expect the notes to be "When the Ghosts aren't in the room, the other characters should ask 'Where's the Ghosts?'"

Also, Logan died on the way back to his home planet.
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Gamespot: 8/10!
 
I'm going to have to disagree. Ghosts is an awful game in just about every single aspect, uniquely so among the series, but I find it questionable to declare it racist and fascist given that the its developers has has given the exact same treatment to white people throughout the series. The list of evil things Russians have been depicted to do is endless, and I daresay is worse and more graphic (gassing an American child via bomb, gunning down hundreds of white civilians, etc).

The last time they've bothered writing some type of political commentary was Modern Warfare a decade ago. For everything past that, the story is merely the justification for unusual scenarios and locations for levels, with villains being mindlessly evil bastards who can do blatantly impossible things who exist solely to be killed by you. They're games written to be dumb 80's action movies.

Ghosts is this formula, but applied to the idea of America being invaded, combined with wanting to make it seem so dark, super serious, and edgy. In retrospect, it does look really, really awful, but it came out before the election was even swinging. It honestly just seems like the same textbook Call of Duty writing that they've been doing for the past ten years, and that Ghosts is no more of commentary on America's relationship with Latin America than the Modern Warfare series is a commentary on current Russia expansionism, than Advanced Warfare as a commentary on PMCs, and Infinite Warfare is on space exploration. They of course deal with these subjects, but only the barest minimum to explain why exactly you're shooting these people. It's all superficial. These games have been pushed out like twice a year with more or less the same story. Quite frankly, trying to intentionally create a commentary would be too much effort for them at this point, even if they really cared to.
 
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"Ghosts can't be racist because CoD itself is racist all the time" isn't exactly the best defense of the series.
 
AKuz said:
"Ghosts can't be racist because CoD itself is racist all the time" isn't exactly the best defense of the series.
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I'm not defending the series. It's shit. If you want to use that argument, then go ahead, but I'm disputing the idea that Ghosts is somehow unique in this, that it was all good before this game came out. No, it's always been the same shit every time.
 
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I never played Cod Goats, but Ghost Recon Wildlands had a slightly subtler but no less disturbing stench of fascist jingoism permeating the entire game.
 
Admittedly Infinite Warfare had the people on Mars be somehow worst versions of the Draka. But all things considered, it's hard to ignore that Ghosts really comes across as Racist. Particularly once the aztec ritual was involved.
 
Athene said:
It feels like half the game is on a cutting room floor somewhere, an Ubisoft executive going "FUCK IT, WE'RE SHIPPING. THESE PIGS IN HUMAN CLOTHING WILL BUY ANYTHING."
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+so many geek points for the Kill La Kill reference. :)
Athene said:
We were forced to as the Federation "devoured" everything south of the border, like the ravenous Uruk-Raza they are!
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I started giggling here. 'Uruk-Raza'? XD
Athene said:
He was captured and exposed to, sigh, ancient Aztec Mind Control techniques.
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Athene said:
This game is so steeped in racist dog whistles that when you put the game in your console, every German Shepherd in 50 square miles loses their shit.
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Annnnd I lost it right here. :lol:rofl:
Athene said:
Once Elias is....seemingly running the entire US military, they don't stand a chance. He's so willful after all.
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So harrrrrrrd.
Athene said:
He's going to turn you into a blank, voiceless killing machine that follows whatever order he's given.
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Wait, isn't he already a-
CompassJimbo said:
Good god, I knew Ghosts sucked but I never noticed it was this bad. Also, yes, Doggo is best character and we honestly should have had him as the MC. Not Generic McWhiteguy.
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Call of Doggo: Modern Woofare.
 
Athene said:
The rest of the Ghosts are so dull that I can't even make up sarcastic monikers. It would just be 'The white one, the other white one, the white one who does computers and the last white one".
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What about Private The Black friend so I can't be racis- dammit he's dead.
 
I remember writing a (much worse) essay on CoD: Ghosts for uni back when Trump was just a contender in the Republican race. I should have been meaner.
 
Numby said:
I'm going to have to disagree. Ghosts is an awful game in just about every single aspect, uniquely so among the series, but I find it questionable to declare it racist and fascist given that the its developers has has given the exact same treatment to white people throughout the series. The list of evil things Russians have been depicted to do is endless, and I daresay is worse and more graphic (gassing an American child via bomb, gunning down hundreds of white civilians, etc).

The last time they've bothered writing some type of political commentary was Modern Warfare a decade ago. For everything past that, the story is merely the justification for unusual scenarios and locations for levels, with villains being mindlessly evil bastards who can do blatantly impossible things who exist solely to be killed by you. They're games written to be dumb 80's action movies.

Ghosts is this formula, but applied to the idea of America being invaded, combined with wanting to make it seem so dark, super serious, and edgy. In retrospect, it does look really, really awful, but it came out before the election was even swinging. It honestly just seems like the same textbook Call of Duty writing that they've been doing for the past ten years, and that Ghosts is no more of commentary on America's relationship with Latin America than the Modern Warfare series is a commentary on current Russia expansionism, than Advanced Warfare as a commentary on PMCs, and Infinite Warfare is on space exploration. They of course deal with these subjects, but only the barest minimum to explain why exactly you're shooting these people. It's all superficial. These games have been pushed out like twice a year with more or less the same story. Quite frankly, trying to intentionally create a commentary would be too much effort for them at this point, even if they really cared to.
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Expansionist ultranationalist Russian terrorist doesn't seem so out there given the Russian playbook for the last twenty years. Nationalist expansionism has kinda been their thing for awhile now.
 
Athene said:
Anyway, Elias has been putting his bland sons through ten years of tests and bullshit. When they finally pass them, then they are ready to become Ghosts. The Federation is almost entirely defeated a month later.
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Maybe Elias Walker is related to another certain Walker who was also a bland generically white special forces protagonist whose talents included 'murdering thousands of soldiers and even more civilians.'

Ghosts being a sequel to Spec Ops: the Line, including the protagonist inheriting his father's susceptibility to mental illness, and like, all of the 'war' stuff being bullshit or interpreted in a way to justify the fact that he's gone on a fascist murder spree would make the game about 55,000% better. Rorke isn't actually a villain. He's still working with the US government and was called in as an advisor because the government of Mexico is completely at the end of its rope and desperate enough to request foreign military aid at the terrorist blowing up all their shit for no reason screaming about how they're committing genocide on white America.

The reason he keeps vamoosing out is because he's trying to talk you down from becoming CoD Hitler but doesn't want to kill you because you're just sick and need treatment.

The end of the game is a happy ending as Logan is taken away by Rorke to get the treatment and therapy he needs.
 
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