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What are controversial gaming opinions you have?

I only played Aftermath, and remember it having cool ideas hamstrung by the fact the game itself was just shallow.
Every enemy could be easily dealt with with grenades, right up until every enemy got rocket launchers.

And the voice acting. Christ, it was awful.

The Biomass was a cool idea and implemented in a very interesting way, though.
 
Sega needs to publicly apologize for about 50% of the Sonic games released after 2000. And Archie Comics should have publicly threatened to sue them for infringement with Sonic and Sally's perpetual will-they-won't-they romance, if for no other reason than to shame the hell out of them for a pitifully uninventive plotline.

The Russian players whining about the unpleasant but accurate depiction of their nation in COH 2 should have gotten an update by Relic that displayed "IN MEMORY OF THE TENS OF MILLIONS KILLED BY COMMUNISM"* every time they started the game. And a tutorial where your task was to invade Poland in the present day which they were required to complete before accessing multiplayer or other campaigns.

Fallout: New Vegas's weapon/armor degradation mechanic was a brilliant addition and should have been an option for Survival mode in Fallout 4 and beyond.

Old people saying that Pokemon Go is the stupidest game ever should be forced to play E.T. for the Atari 2600 until they flip the score counter.

Terraria is an overblown fishbowl game with an insane amount of bling to distract you from the perpetual monster swarms and wall-negating bosses.

Everyone who worked on the first Mass Effect's level 'design' should have been forced to hand write "I will not design games more repetitive than a low-budget 1990's edutainment title" 1000 times before they were allowed to work on the sequel.

*Not military casualties during war. Civilians. In peacetime. With estimates of up to 100 million when you add other nations similarly governed.
 
Dark-Star said:
Sega needs to publicly apologize for about 50% of the Sonic games released after 2000. And Archie Comics should have publicly threatened to sue them for infringement with Sonic and Sally's perpetual will-they-won't-they romance, if for no other reason than to shame the hell out of them for a pitifully uninventive plotline.

The Russian players whining about the unpleasant but accurate depiction of their nation in COH 2 should have gotten an update by Relic that displayed "IN MEMORY OF THE TENS OF MILLIONS KILLED BY COMMUNISM"* every time they started the game. And a tutorial where your task was to invade Poland in the present day which they were required to complete before accessing multiplayer or other campaigns.

Fallout: New Vegas's weapon/armor degradation mechanic was a brilliant addition and should have been an option for Survival mode in Fallout 4 and beyond.

Old people saying that Pokemon Go is the stupidest game ever should be forced to play E.T. for the Atari 2600 until they flip the score counter.

Terraria is an overblown fishbowl game with an insane amount of bling to distract you from the perpetual monster swarms and wall-negating bosses.

Everyone who worked on the first Mass Effect's level 'design' should have been forced to hand write "I will not design games more repetitive than a low-budget 1990's edutainment title" 1000 times before they were allowed to work on the sequel.

*Not military casualties during war. Civilians. In peacetime. With estimates of up to 100 million when you add other nations similarly governed.
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First of all, I want to make a correction. The USSR killed tens of millions, not Communism. Because Communism never ended up coming into existence in the first place, they failed at achieving it and basically stopped seriously trying almost immediately. What actually happened had almost nothing to do with the actual ideology.

And now to the actual disgusting point, how dare you like equipment degradation mechanics you absolute maniac
 
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Most people who play the Dark Souls games are straight-up villains.

Think about it. On your NG+ run through The Ringed City, you destroyed Filianore's egg so that you could get Gael's repeating crossbow...which you were never going to use. You were willing to go to the ends of the earth (literally, metaphorically, and metaphysically) to line your pockets with treasures and souls. You never cared who or what got in your way - you just bulldozed through it all for those precious shinies, making you an unstoppable force. You are every bit the creature of unrestrained greed that Patches accuses you of being.

So...the next time you wander the Ringed City, consider something different. Consider stopping before Filianore's church. Consider simply turning away, and leaving the princess to slumber.

The confontational tone and presumption of the reader's actions are a bit of artistic licence to make a point. Baby please don't hurt me.
 
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Dark-Star said:
The Russian players whining about the unpleasant but accurate depiction of their nation in COH 2 should have gotten an update by Relic that displayed "IN MEMORY OF THE TENS OF MILLIONS KILLED BY COMMUNISM"* every time they started the game. And a tutorial where your task was to invade Poland in the present day which they were required to complete before accessing multiplayer or other campaigns.

*Not military casualties during war. Civilians. In peacetime. With estimates of up to 100 million when you add other nations similarly governed.
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As opposed to the millions killed by capitalism?

I mean, don't get me wrong, tankies deserve derision at best, and Stalinism was a horrible form of government, but your proposed 'solution' just comes across as a pointless and juvenile attempt to 'own the libs reds,' as it were.
 
As I know nothing about Dark Souls, this just reminds me of how an LPer had his wife try out one of the games. She doesn't play video games at all.

One of the first things she did was kill some poor schlub named Oscar.

Villains indeed.
 
Dark-Star said:
Sega needs to publicly apologize for about 50% of the Sonic games released after 2000. And Archie Comics should have publicly threatened to sue them for infringement with Sonic and Sally's perpetual will-they-won't-they romance, if for no other reason than to shame the hell out of them for a pitifully uninventive plotline.

The Russian players whining about the unpleasant but accurate depiction of their nation in COH 2 should have gotten an update by Relic that displayed "IN MEMORY OF THE TENS OF MILLIONS KILLED BY COMMUNISM"* every time they started the game. And a tutorial where your task was to invade Poland in the present day which they were required to complete before accessing multiplayer or other campaigns.

Fallout: New Vegas's weapon/armor degradation mechanic was a brilliant addition and should have been an option for Survival mode in Fallout 4 and beyond.

Old people saying that Pokemon Go is the stupidest game ever should be forced to play E.T. for the Atari 2600 until they flip the score counter.

Terraria is an overblown fishbowl game with an insane amount of bling to distract you from the perpetual monster swarms and wall-negating bosses.

Everyone who worked on the first Mass Effect's level 'design' should have been forced to hand write "I will not design games more repetitive than a low-budget 1990's edutainment title" 1000 times before they were allowed to work on the sequel.

*Not military casualties during war. Civilians. In peacetime. With estimates of up to 100 million when you add other nations similarly governed.
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"Unpleasant but accurate"

Revs Sherman
Let me tell you something impossible sounding..... Enemy at the Gates is not an accurate depiction of the Eastern Front in WW2 (or the Great Patriotic War, whatever you want to call it). In fact, 90% of the depictions in media you see of the Eastern Front are just flat out wrong. Company of Heroes 2 somehow manages to take a horrific regime and over-demonize it while accidentally whitewashing Nazi Germany in the process, merely by following the tried and true tropes of bad WW2 history, which is to be expected from a game series that at best presents a pop-history view of the war, and at worst actively propagates misconceptions and myths about it.

How so? Well, to start off with, let's think about the previous game in the franchise, Company of Heroes, and how the series in general portrays the Nazis. In its expansion Opposing Fronts, you can play as a member of the Panzer Elite, that is, the Panzer Lehr division of the Wehrmacht. However, unlike the Soviets, which are shown as a monstrous regime that murders their own soldiers constantly, which is then stated to be the only reason anyone fights, the Nazi soldiers are shown as sympathetic characters merely fighting for their homeland. This is, to put it bluntly, a revisionist view of the German Army during WW2, an army in which the vast majority of men were committed fascists, and which committed a simply obscene number of heinous war crimes on both the Western and Eastern Fronts of WW2. Instead of presenting this horrific abomination as such, the developers chose to present a sanitized version, yet, when it came time to set a game on the Eastern Front, not only did they not give the Soviets the same sympathetic treatment, they failed to actually portray German atrocities outside of one mission where you liberate Majdanek. This is really important, because German atrocities on the Eastern Front were absolutely horrific, and in many ways motivated fierce Soviet resistance, especially by bands of partisans, and underlie that the Nazis wanted to depopulate the Soviet Union. Generalplan Ost was a very real thing, and a failure to portray German war crimes on the Eastern Front while emphasizing Soviet ones as the very centerpiece of your campaign sends a very bad message, which is that the Soviet conduct was equivalent or worse. For reference, according to Timothy Snyder, Hitler's regime legitimately killed more people than Stalin's regime in a shorter time frame (source: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2011/01/27/hitler-vs-stalin-who-was-worse/):
Article:
All in all, the Germans deliberately killed about 11 million noncombatants, a figure that rises to more than 12 million if foreseeable deaths from deportation, hunger, and sentences in concentration camps are included. For the Soviets during the Stalin period, the analogous figures are approximately six million and nine million. These figures are of course subject to revision, but it is very unlikely that the consensus will change again as radically as it has since the opening of Eastern European archives in the 1990s. Since the Germans killed chiefly in lands that later fell behind the Iron Curtain, access to Eastern European sources has been almost as important to our new understanding of Nazi Germany as it has been to research on the Soviet Union itself. (The Nazi regime killed approximately 165,000 German Jews.)

None of this is to suggest that the Soviets were angels, indeed, 9 million people is an absolutely horrific number, or that the Germans are not obvious bad guys, with you liberating a concentration camp, but it is only the beginning of the issues Company of Heroes 2 has with historical accuracy.

Now, onto the actual portrayal of the Soviet Union and Red Amy in CoH2. I'll mostly be referring only to the most obvious inaccuracies or exaggerations in the campaign of course, and I almost certainly will miss quite a bit here. Let's start with the game's opening, which after the framing device, drops you into the battle of Stalingrad..... and immediately gets an sigh from me by practically re-litigating a scene from Enemy at the Gates mixed with CoD1, in a painful confluence of cliches. First of all, the portrayal of Soviet troops in Stalingrad as lacking rifles is flat out wrong, a portrayal more typical of the WW1 Imperial Army than the Red Army at Stalingrad (also conspicuously lacking PPSh-41s and DP-28s), as by late 1942 pretty much all of the Red Army's supply issues which had cropped up during Barbarossa (and these were almost always in heavy equipment or electronics, not small arms) had been resolved. Then, in the next cutscene, we get to see Soviet troops charge into enemy gunfire, then retreat only to be mowed down by a blocking detachment literally so close that the MG should be suppressing the Germans. This runs into one very obvious problem, this never happened. Blocking detachments were stationed at the river not at the frontlines, and they in turn did not actually open fire on anyone coming their way. Their job wasn't "murder everyone who made a tactical retreat" but "turn people back towards the frontlines", and furthermore, very few people were actually executed under Order No. 277, only around 1,200 in total iirc. Desertion was not a substantial issue at Stalingrad at all, and in general, troop morale was stupidly high, partially thanks to expert political indoctrination. The Soviets had far better ways of getting people to fight than killing everyone who ran, which would in turn have been not only impractical but just flat out ignored by commanders for very obvious reasons. After this shitshow, we get to see our protag shooting surrendering Germans, which was something that did occur at Stalingrad, but was very much discouraged by political officers and officers in general, who wanted to take as many prisoners as possible. Overall, this introduction is just one long stereotyping of the Stalingrad campaign.

The game then drops you into a scenario in the middle of 1941 with you conducting scorched earth tactics by...... burning civilians alive. Seriously what the fuck were they thinking here? Scorched earth does not mean "murder everyone in the area", no, that was standard German anti-partisan tactics, and this serves no narrative or strategic purpose whatsoever, it's just evil for evil's sake. Then we get to General Winter (a cliche I'm not going to touch right now), and then a reiteration that the Soviet troops were only fighting because their commanders would kill them otherwise, which is uh, not at all true, and actually insulting to the Soviet troops who fought and died so that their families and country would not be annihilated from the earth. This is now a mechanic, and a silly one as well (like is this seriously how people think the Soviets fought?). Then we get to the point where one of your men is executed for the crime of..... saving you, an act that would likely earn him a medal irl, in a pointless instant execution. The game after this is somewhat less ham-fisted, with our first actual glimpse at German warcrimes, only to be followed with a Polish mission that feels disingenuous in how obviously evil the Soviets are, because while they did fuck over nationalist resistance irl, this was mostly done by doing things like stopping an advance that the Poles thought would reach Warsaw, thereby allowing the uprising to be crushed, alongside stuff like crushing nationalists post-war, but that's the sort of thing that should go in narration, that the Soviets supported the Polish nationalists..... up until the Soviets were in charge of Poland. Finally, my last issue that I can remember with the storyline is that asinine thing about "millions dead for a photo" which equates all of WW2, which was a defensive war for the USSR, to being fought over for a photo op, which angers me to no end in its minimization of sheer gravitas of WW2 (that and the fact that no there was no race to Berlin lol, the Allies had already agreed on that beforehand).

The game also promotes a ton of other inaccurate myths about the Red Army during WW2, but I'm really tired, so suffice to say:

TL;DR: muh Asiatic hordes is not how you write an ostensibly serious and accurate WW2 game lol.

I'll edit this to add more detail tomorrow night if I can.

EDIT 1: If you want to get a basic outline of the Red Army during WW2 I highly recommend When Titans Clash by Glantz, and for Stalingrad I'd recommend Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich as a narrative history, being woven together out of primary sources for the most part.
 
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DestinyPlayer said:
First of all, I want to make a correction. The USSR killed tens of millions, not Communism. Because Communism never ended up coming into existence in the first place, they failed at achieving it and basically stopped seriously trying almost immediately. What actually happened had almost nothing to do with the actual ideology.

And now to the actual disgusting point, how dare you like equipment degradation mechanics you absolute maniac
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Something that I think is ambiguous in the original posts and depending on the reading the second post may or may not be spot-on:
  • Communism the society type was not achieved. You know, the one where millions of industrial proletarian people live without government and without money.
  • Communism the ideology was in control in USSR, and got stuck in socialism the society type on its path to communism-the-society-type. Eventually capitalism won the cold war and socialist states lost and became capitalist (or at least capitalist-ish) too.
(I need a Tetris soundtrack!)

So the blame is to be placed on one society type and one ideology, but the two don't share a name.
 
Dark-Star said:
*Not military casualties during war. Civilians. In peacetime. With estimates of up to 100 million when you add other nations similarly governed.
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Ah yes, the little black book of counting people the nazis killed in WWII as victims of communism because if they didn't want to die, they shouldn't have existed in Soviet Russia. Truly, a majestic source.
 
Hykal94 said:
Considering Oscar was on the roof with the Asylum Demon, I see no real reason to believe he tried to use you to evade the Demon.
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Why else let you out ? Out of the goodness of his heart ? 99% of the Asylum Undead aren`t exactly in a state where being imprisoned or not has any effect on them, and he didn`t like... check if we were not one of them.
 
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