Son Of General Retro Discussion

OK, I've a question: When so many games are still so f#cking awful at writing and portraying thoughtful consensual sex scenes, why would anyone want to play a game where the unique selling point is a rape or implied rape scene? And it won't matter what other innovations to gaming get included, they will not be discussed nearly as much.

Really. The last time I can think of a game getting positively praised for its portrayal of sex by the press was Katawa Shoujo (yes, its a worksafe link) in January, and a large part of that was because it was anticipated it would be so bad for so many reasons (ie its an eroge game, its made by fans on 4chan, and all the high school girls have a physical handicap) that when it wasn't it was treated as perhaps more praiseworthy than it should have been. That the game was actually thought provoking was never enough to get it as much press as it did.

Its rare that good games can get that kind of attention simply for being good, and its why so many of them end up flying under the radar when mediocre but controversial fodder gets column inches and sell well (compare Beyond Good and Evil, Shadow of The Colossus and Guardian Heroes with Mortal Kombat, GTA1 and Carmaggedon).

Where sex is concerned in the industry it needs to learn to crawl before it can walk, and learn to walk before it can run. It really seems as simple as that.

Tomb Raider as a series has the baggage of being originally sold with The First Western Videogame Sex Symbol, and it is trying to run, with baggage, like a drunk, through an airport and security are screaming at it and they're about to fire the tasers if it doesn't stop.

(I badly need to lay off the metaphors for a bit :rolleyes:)

Having read over some comments from E3 and looked at the video this is in, it's completely being blown out of proportion.

Unless of course that's not the scene in question and there is in fact an orgy in there somewhere.

But I seriously doubt it.

Bouncing boobs in DOA and arse shots in Bayonetta will push girls away from games a lot more than this. As I was saying, it's being blown totally out of proportion. The guy even gets his head blown off for his stupidity.

Skip to 2:18

o1s1n wrote: »

Bouncing boobs in DOA and arse shots in Bayonetta will push girls away from games a lot more than this. As I was saying, it's being blown totally out of proportion. The guy even gets his head blown off for his stupidity.

Skip to 2:18

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkBZ6kKeoTI

So... they're sticking in a slice of exploitation movie in as a cut scene?

Well in that cause I suppose the only reason I have to object is how badly written the "I was nearly raped"/"I just shot a man"/"What would daddy tell me as a pep talk in his ludicrously gravely voice?" combo was handled to handwave the nightmare fuel away.

Its the laziest elements of Hollywood film making and acting screen writing passed off as a game, a character and a plot. Nothing about Lara is treated like a woman, except when her sexuality is something that can be used for a kind of "women in refrigerators" tension.

Hell, they could at least have tried to be slightly subversive and used her mother as her rock instead of the absurd cliche dad.

Little girls shouldn't grow up wanting to be like their mum, right? :rolleyes: FFS

EnterNow wrote: »

Nothing but a quiet week for the papers, I'm sure one of the Kardashians will buy a new dog or something soon & everyone will forget about this. Move along.

One of them is going into Corrie now

Cheers for the swift reply Johnny, hope the thesis is going smoothly. I hated mine.

This needs a summary for the sake of TL;DR.

"I also partially agree and partially respectfully disagree. I have no hope for this. Duke Nukem Forever 2."

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

By the same logic, though, Irreversible or (to pick a more mainstream example) Girl With the Dragon Tattoo have no right existing on a HMV shelf next to, say, something with a disturbingly misogynistic-streak like Transformers.

Hmm. OK fair point, but in my head the shelf that mattered wasn't the market place one (controlling the markets is a whole world of other arguments), but the one I keep the games I own on. The sort of one's that reflect my choices and I invite myself to be judged on.

(I'm unfamiliar with Irreversible but I enjoyed the Millennium series)

Yes, most games do not handle sex well. It would be hugely unfortunate if all developers shied away from it because of the idiocy of others, though.

True, but that said there are good reasons for both taking risks and shying away - the size of the knowledge base and reference for what has previously worked and what hasn't for a start.

But more importantly, sex scenes do not equate to rape or implied rape scenes. That they both involve sexuality is the only tangental overlap, but ultimately they're as different as love and war crimes.

I partially agree, partially respectfully disagree.

I agree that marketing should not play up 'shock tactics'. I'm currently ****-deep in a thesis that partially examines the whole Asia Extreme phenomenon of the early 2000s, which I've just written a paragraph on how such marketing distorted the nature of what were, in essence, extremely intelligent and subversive films. It's a simplification, and a morally questionable one.

But like Asia Extreme, we shouldn't let the marketing idiocy of those folks at Edios (or Squenix, or whoever it is now) distort what actually may be justifiable challenging content. It's why I filter out marketing newspeak wherever possible, because I like to judge the work on its actual merits rather than what a marketer says.

And, from a purely cynical point of view, they actually have done their job well. They have commuters reading about their game months before release.

Ah. Game theory. The marketers conditions for success are different from the films' creators. Oversimplification of Battle Royale as a modern day Lord of the Flies bloodbath sells more units that discussing any underlying meanings of what the novel and film were trying to discuss.

The marketers can justify it simply: "Even if we lie, but they buy it and like what we sold it to them as, so long as we sell more of it, our outcome justified our approach. Aligning our interests to those of the original creators' is counter productive. Our goal is to sell units, ensuring we do not fail at that should be our only concern."

Or "marketers will lie because they know if they don't make as much money as they can they will be replaced with a better money making liar."

I think I'm seeing your point here.

Simply, we do not know the exact manner in which Tomb Raider's rape scene will play out. It could be a disaster. It could be a rare example of a big budget franchise game actually challenging and provoking (remember the genuinely surprising 'No Russian' sequence in the otherwise moronic MW2?). And we can't judge based on what the Metro-Herald or the Squenix marketing manager have to say: all we can do is judge and analyse from a more objective basis when we see the full story for ourselves.

Hmm. There's one problem however.

The new Tomb Raider game's creators had to have known that by including the scene, the marketers will be all over it - nothing they could create for a Tomb Raider could be a better marketing hook, even if they tried.

So as I see it their fingerprints all over this, it was planned to be precisely like this, for their target audience to see it like this.

This is where its different to that Tartan Asian Extreme stuff, because here this is the intended message, directed at both the target audiences (notoriety loving gaming/tabloid media, and buyers of games). There's nothing lost in translation and no evidence that the game is any deeper than it actually appears.

I can see why you try and filter out the marketing (I avoided the pre-Prometheus stuff myself for similar reasons), but I can't hear about this and not think "This is representative, it has to be; this couldn't have been included in the final game without the creators knowing it'd establish this tone and level of controversy".

And it appears incredibly shallow, a clumsy mix of the worst of Hollywood's writing for women, mindless cliche and exploitation. Its not advancement, its regression if anything, and its meant to be portrayed as such.

(Engaging in STOP TYPING mode.... now! :pac:)

Andrew76 wrote: »

Very good film but

the rape scene in it is difficult viewing imo. I was warned beforehand about it so decided to watch it alone rather than with the wife. She decided to watch it at a later date and found it very uncomfortable. So I guess it was treated realistically in that sense

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I agree 100 percent, good film but

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Zoo of Son of General Retro Discussion :pac:

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

Apparently a series of uber-threads were seriously stressing out the database, so they had to install the measure just to relieve the stress. I think it's the really, really big threads that were effecting it, but this is just to be safe.

Boards are slowly moving away from vBulletin, as far as I know, so it might be relaxed at some point in the future.

I guess it's good housekeeping to keep the threads in check(especially with such a monster forum as boards.ie).

I think vBulletin is pretty darn good once you don't use it as stock and update it to a more recent release. The only issue is of course the cost as it's not free like a lot of other options.
They (boards) could do with fixing a few small niggles like the full screen youtube problem that a lot of people have.

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"General Retro Discussion: GTI Edition" ?

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