PleasingFungus posted:

As someone who read the entire thing when it was first posted, Willie Tong's analysis of ISIS is exactly as good as, and on the same level as, SuperMechaGodzilla's analyses of contemporary cinema.

syscall girl posted:

I'd agree that it is similar to SMG in that it gives too much credit to the media creators but the point about westerner's tendencies to distance themselves from war and our inability to stomach the visceral poo poo ISIS gets up to is spot on.

The MSJ posted:

PleasingFungus posted:

As someone who read the entire thing when it was first posted, Willie Tong's analysis of ISIS is exactly as good as, and on the same level as, SuperMechaGodzilla's analyses of contemporary cinema.

zVxTeflon posted:

lol

PleasingFungus posted:

As someone who read the entire thing when it was first posted, Willie Tong's analysis of ISIS is exactly as good as, and on the same level as, SuperMechaGodzilla's analyses of contemporary cinema.

PleasingFungus posted:

As someone who read the entire thing when it was first posted, Willie Tong's analysis of ISIS is exactly as good as, and on the same level as, SuperMechaGodzilla's analyses of contemporary cinema.

WarpedNaba posted:

Who is this SuperMechaGodzilla and why should I laugh at his pathetic life?

Chamale posted:

Cinema Discusso poster who writes hilariously elaborate essays about the beautiful commentary on society and deep Zizekian themes found in masterpieces such as Michael Bay's Transformers series and the video game Duke Nukem Forever.

Chamale posted:

Cinema Discusso poster who writes hilariously elaborate essays about the beautiful commentary on society and deep Zizekian themes found in masterpieces such as Michael Bay's Transformers series and the video game Duke Nukem Forever.

SuperMechaGodzilla posted:

Duke 3D homaged/parodied 80s/early 90s action films by making the villains such ridiculous villain caricatures that Duke was an acceptable protagonist by comparison.

Roddy Piper and Snake Plissken are goddamn psychopaths in They Live and Escape from NY, but the point of the films is that society is so broken that these guys can thrive. It's a deliberate part of the films, presenting extreme cynicism (Snake ignores a rape-in-progress because he's that desensitized and amoral) with a smattering of dark humor (Snake's nickname apparently comes from his dick tattoo).

Duke 3D's pig cops were in a context where the Rodney King beating and the LA riots were still fresh in people's minds. Not only that, but the villains behind the pigs were basically rapists - the cheesy "mars needs women" premise getting a gruesome subversion with the Aliens-referencing outcome. Duke 3D didn't joke about the rape. It treated rape as a serious problem equivalent to racism and class warfare, to which Duke was a source of catharsis if not any actual social change. (Duke is was a parodic figure specifically because, despite being a working-class shmoe, he's so unenlightened that he's exclusively driven by basic urges to gently caress and kill.)

The women and civilians in Duke 3D were just "normal" people doing their jobs, even if they are strippers or whatever. In other words, they're us. They're the folks feeling oppressed by the government corruption and other social ills, who are crying out for a populist hero to save them. That Duke is ultimately an idiot gave the game a measure of honest-to-god complexity.

DNF treats these "normal" characters with relentless and utter contempt.

Any pretense that Duke was a working-class hero have been dropped, as now he's a apparently a billionaire in a solid-gold penthouse with a loving throne. The aliens no longer represent police corruption or the patriarchy, but rather, "foreign cultures" (see: the WMD joke). And, obviously, they joke about the rape now because the people being raped are no longer audience stand-ins, but rather a bunch of semi-conscious inhuman inferiors.

(What makes the Olsen twins so objectionable that they need to get taken down several pegs anyways? Besides that they're female, of course. Since when did they represent "wholesomeness" and why is wholesomeness the enemy now?)

The aliens are basically now equivalent to Duke. The line separating him from the baddies is altogether erased. He's not defending anything good, even accidentally, because instead of reacting against the status quo (however clumsily) Duke is the status quo now. And it's loving unbearable.

quote:

The gameplay is intrinsically tied up in the storyline.

In Duke Nukem 3D, the environments, NPC characters and overall production design are relatively 'realistic', which is contrasted with Duke's superhuman run-and-gun ability and total lack of psychological complexity to emphasize that, yes, this guy is a cartoon like Bugs Bunny - but also a transgressive and rebellious figure because of that cartoonishness. The gameplay in DN3D is a huge component of Duke's characterization.

The strippers in DN3D are just women who strip. They didn't shriek innuendos at you at all. They didn't declare themselves stupid in scripted sequences. They did their jobs in exchange for money. Again, the interactive world was 'realistic' (for a 1996 game) and Duke was the cartoon avenging force who flew down to Earth to right the wrongs. Kinda.

(People have noted that in Duke II, Duke is a full-fledged celebrity. But that's part of the 80s action parody - Duke is simultaneously an everyman and a celebrity, a blue-collar Joe and a relentless killing machine. But in the grand scheme of things, he's far more populist hero than elitist billionaire. Think of the Ghostbusters - beloved by the public despite being impoverished, uncouth and totally reckless. Duke is a similar underdog. The aliens in Duke II interrupt his TV appearance and steal his moment in the spotlight, because Duke just can't catch a break!)

BeanTaco hit it right on the head: Duke in DNF is clearly an entirely different character, to the point of being essentially the opposite character. He's an impostor.

With the 2-weapon thing and the slower movement, Fake-Duke is 'realistic'* while the world is cartoonishly exaggerated. Women are literally subhuman cock-hungry idiots and not just perceived that way by a flawed protagonist. The president is a liberal pantywaist caricature who (allegedly) gets his comeuppance when Fake-Duke "proves" that the world does need another George W. Bush. Y'know, someone who's motivated by sheer literal prejudice - we don't need no evidence of WMDs. Those alien Iraqis are obviously going to rape our (white) women because, naturally, that's what they do.

It bears repeating that the "normal" people in these games represent you, the Duke's Bro. Those moronic groupies sucking Fake-Duke's cock and getting raped are you.


Fig. 1: Your Face Here.

These NPCs are so ridiculously idiotic and annoying that Duke actually appears rational, levelheaded and intelligent by comparison. The first hour or so of the game is spent with Fake-Duke just walking around gawking at the absurdity around him, because he's normal now. DNF is almost evangelical about this. If you're not like Duke, the game says, you're a loving moron and a bitch.

Even DNF's cover shows Duke, from the perspective of a kneeling person, holding his gun like a cock. The game's box is telling you to suck Duke's dick. I guess it's truth-in-advertising.


Fig. 2: John Romero's about to make you his bitch.

Of course, that's not the real Duke. Duke fought the pigs, not his fellow man. Plus, the point of DN3D and earlier games, to an extent, is that no-one can be Duke. He's an amoral force of nature. He's a superhuman wish-fulfillment character. He's a cartoon.


*The DNF health system, bizarrely, goes in the opposite direction, replacing reasonably plausible sci-fi health pickups with the purely fantastic 'ego' system. So while Duke3D is a mortal (every)man who transcends his situation through impossible skills and bravado, Fake Duke is immortal despite lacking much remarkable talent or courage.

quote:

While this is true, DNF's main thrust is just to insult its audience constantly. It's fairly unambiguous about this from the start, with the irritating and awful Duke fans. Then the game directly equates the protagonist to George W. Bush and makes him a closet racist. I doubt that the people responsible are sincerely pro-Iraq-War republicans, so what's the joke? Is it that Duke is stupid and evil, even though the game stacks the deck and proves him absolutely and immediately correct? Is it that DNF itself is intrinsically stupid and evil? That's much more likely.

Keep in mind that this is tied into the theme of Duke's 'relevance'. "Is he just a relic?" The intended controversy over Fake-Duke's neoconservatism is directly tied to the questionable existence of DNF itself. The game declares outright that it has one purpose: to serve as a refreshing blast of oldschool "political incorrectness", which we need in today's world because of... spineless democrats, evil brown people and "vapid cunts"?

That's not to say that the people responsible are raging tea-partiers. I actually strongly doubt it, as they were probably just attempting to be 'edgy' and self-satirical. "Ha-ha Duke3D was really neoconservative and racist wasn't he?" (Again though, this stacks the deck. Were Roddy Piper, Ash from Evil Dead and all the other characters that inspired Duke neoconservatives? Nope. They were, for the most part, libertarians at worst - and most of them are morally ambiguous antiheroes besides. Duke3D, after all, hates authority and his two main character traits are his love of guns and pornography. The creators are satirizing aspects of the character that never actually existed.)

However, it doesn't ultimately matter if DNF is sincerely oblivious or is deliberately being terrible as a gently caress-you on anyone "dumb enough" to pay for it. DNF is fundamentally asking sensible people to reject it and every message it conveys. Like when they insult Halo's regenerating health while simultaneously using that exact system - that's not a contradiction. They're simply admitting, intentionally or not, that they've made a bad game. Again, the political themes are directly tied to the gameplay mechanics (or lack thereof).

There's really nothing in the game worth embracing, where DN3D had a valuable amount of juvenile-but-valid anti-authoritarianism and commentary on action hero tropes and how they relate to interactive fiction. While you do play as Duke in DN3D, his constant interjections prevent total 'immersion', leaving the women - surprisingly enough - the more relatable, human characters.

No-one in DNF appears relatable, leaving its Duke-shaped void the closest thing to a human experience they could muster.

Wulfolme posted:

the vagina is really the bottleneck to a lot of ways that life could be more efficient

mr.capps posted:

SMG is a treasure. Sure it is one of those Indiana Jones "melt your face off" treasures, but, drat it, he is a treasure.

SaltyJesus posted:

And SMG is 100% correct on all counts of why DNF sucked. (Besides the poo poo gameplay and content which are hardly worth repeating.)

Fister Roboto posted:

Koos Group posted:

According to you, the vast majority of audiences are wrong, nearly all the time. Your readings, being political, are useless if they never acknowledge this. By isolating yourself, you're infinitely free to make whatever crap up you want, and also infinitely impotent.

You'll say that this doesn't matter, since your readings are True, but if your readings are attacked, you'll be quick to point out that they arise from personal experiences, and when yours don't make a drat ounce of sense, it's because they're particular to you. You are a hypocrite, and no man I respect.

I do believe that movies can have a good or bad effect on the people that watch them. For instance, the Triumph of the Will had the good effect of making Germans proud of their heritage. In contrast, The Dark Knight (2008) had the bad effect of making Jeb Lund show us both sides of his twisted personality.

Blue Footed Booby posted:

Oh my god whenever this thread has any discussion at all it just turns to poo poo.

massive spider posted:

I regret posting an SMG quote because I forgot they send every thread into paroxysm

cock hero flux posted:

at one point I thought that SMG was making funny posts and even if I didn't really think they were all that funny I could at least appreciate that effort was going into humor

then, with creeping horror, it began to dawn on me that he was serious

quote:

"You can kill us, set us on fire, skin us, beat us and rape us, but you can never stop Duke Nukem Forever. You can drown us in lovely games with emo mutes that trapse around not having sex with anything or even being ballsy enough to saw anything or flood us with generic suit wearing gimps that fight partially inflated trash bags on mars and we will never stop. Duke Nukem Forever is coming. Mortal men may not craft him, gods might not live long enough to play him, the very universe itself may fold under his might, but he will come and there will not be a toilet big enough to park his bricks in.

You can all dance around in your ignorance, your pithy idea that mere financial mechanisms of mere men can stop him. That simply because nobody is there to craft the one true creator, the he cannot rise from his own rest is reason to assume he will never return is pure lunacy. Duke Nukem Forever is Forever. He is before, he is after and he is during, forever. Mock all you want, you could never really grasp the idea of what forever is, let along what duke himself is and you never will.

Phyzzle posted:

I thought he was serious until I noticed this post analyzing Star Wars: Phantom Menace as a critique of Christianity.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3514675&userid=118075&perpage=40&pagenumber=4#post426421574

Which is all well and good, but there's no serious reading of Ben Hur that would blame his enslavement on being "uppitty". He was enslaved because he jilted his gay lover. Seriously.

Narciss posted:

Holy crap... so I'm playing Byzantium, working my way through North Africa, when I spot this:



Is there a Goon on the EU4 dev team?

Lunchmeat Larry posted:

Those who can post post good. Those who cannot ...... quote.

Nuclear War posted:

I'm sure its been posted, but could someone link me to the quote about the guy who keeps fixing the airconditioner or something because his wife keeps messing it up and complains about the temperature because he'd rather fix it than her being cold?

Mans posted:

The best part about DNF was that some people got so fired up for what was clearly going to be a lovely game (hell, even some mods jumped into the hype train) that they basically banned all discussion that wasn't 100% praise for the upcoming Best Game Ever.

Phlegmish posted:

It's Narciss. Good troll, though.