Blogging the experience of gameplayhttps://www.gamelog.cl/gamers/GamerPage.php?idgamer=987https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3711Alright so this is the last time I'm going to spend playing this game. One, because it just feels awkward and clumsy and seems done more for shock value than anything. And second, because it's boring as all heck, and I don't like boring games. SO after you get through the main portion of the game, you get a montage of pictures from the shootings. You see the two shooters lying in pools of blood after killing themselves, and then tons of pictures of people crying and holding each other. This is very sweet and touches on the impact, emotionally, this event had on people. But it seems unethical and distasteful to trivialize these students' lives to start the game by making them all dumb caricatures, and then try and make an impact by showing the real humans and their emotions. It's a conflicting message, and changes the tone of the entire game. If the creator wanted to make the game have a heavy impact, then they should have used the actual names of the people in the school that died, and the names of other students in the school as well. That way, you understand instantly the emotions connected with it. Otherwise, if you're going to trivialize the events initially with stereotypes, then don't try and gain the player's sympathy with the montage. It's hypocritical, and sort of insulting. After that, the hell that is this game continues, literally, as you find yourself walking around in hell. You've lost all your guns except your pistol, and you lost all your bombs and items. And you run around the same way you run around the school, fighting demons this time. ow, here's an issue I have with this game: If I would have spent more time killing more people in the school, I'm assuming I would have been rewarded with better stats in this Hell level. My attack and defense would probably be higher, and this would make it easier. How is that right? What kind of message is this sending? That doing more bad things in real life rewards you in the long run? That's backwards. If they really wanted to try and make a statement (after failing so many times previously) in the game, they would have made you go to Heaven for not killing anybody in the school and surrendering your weapons and getting taken into custody. And the more people you killed, the harder Hell would be. That is something that makes sense to me. This game makes no sense to me. If you're going to try and make a statement, make it clearly and make sure you are being consistent. Otherwise, don't try, or you come off looking like an idiot.Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:20:20 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3711&iddiary=6984https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3711After the ridiculous amount of time it took to get past that first section of the game, I'm on to the action part. It plays out like pokemon, but with kids and guns in a school setting. And you're killing humans rather than capturing pets. This game does itself no favors by making the students completely void of any sort of expression or personality, other than dumb overused stereotypes. For instance, in one of my fights in the cafeteria, I ran into a 4 person squad: Openly Gay Man Black Boy Church Boy Jock Type If the creators wanted to take a stab at describing the shooters in a more sophisticated manner, and looking at their background and exploring them as characters, that's fine. But to make the other characters you kill so bland and unimaginative, it seems almost hypocritical. Why should the player care about these shooters if they just refer to other people as generic stereotypes. But then again, maybe that's the intent. Maybe the creator of the game is trying to vilify the shooters even more, by looking at these victims through their eyes. Maybe the shooters didn't care about these people, and did just view them as stereotypes. So maybe that's how it should be portrayed. Either way, it seems like pissing people off was the main purpose of most of this game. So in a sense, for whatever reason they did it, it probably worked. I don't know if pissing people off and purposely pushing buttons is a good enough reason to make a game like this. It doesn't seem completely ethical to me. Yes, they 100% have a right to make the game, and I feel like the creators are trying to make a point with this game. But it needs to be well thought-out and clever, and actually prove a point. Not just put people in roles they aren't comfortable with and bring back memories of this terrible incident. It doesn't help that the combat is boring, the character building is unexplained, and the characters are dull. It's not a fun game, and it seems to be purposefully insensitive just to elicit a response. And that's not what makes a good game.Mon, 09 Mar 2009 23:36:14 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3711&iddiary=6948https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3711I started up this game today, and I'd like to preface this by saying the following: I hate RPGs. I find them boring, I hate all the reading involved, and I don't like all the little character tuning and such you have to do. It's far too much work for me to enjoy playing the game. One thing I actually enjoy about the game is the idea of looking at how these two kids lived their life. For example, the kind of music they listened to (yes, I hear that MIDI Nirvana constantly in the background), their thoughts on society (a comment about some bourgeois painting in his household), and basically how the felt about what they were doing. It's a stark contrast to all the guesses we hear about these kids being depressed and unstable. From the game, they seem to be misled, but far from depressed or unstable. They seem happy to be doing what they are planning, and clearly think it's the right thing. From an ethical standpoint, this actually makes the game feel much less shameful when playing. If the creator would have made the text very down and violent, and had the characters come off as low lifes and talks about how life sucks and school sucks and made them completely unlikeable as characters, it would have been harder to control them. Because they act like, frankly, giddy school kids who get to do something they think is exciting, it takes away some of the awfulness about the situations. It's almost as if they didn't know better. My biggest issue so far is the fact that I've been playing this game for 40 minutes and can't get past planting the bomb in the cafeteria. Whenever i try to come out, I end up getting suctioned into a hall monitor and having to restart. It's incredibly frustrating, and some better gameplay would make this game much more entertaining. I'm going to keep trying to get past this and see how I do.Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:49:09 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3711&iddiary=6946https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3599Entry #3 Just for the nostalgia value, I decided to try and get as many Wanted stars as possible without cheating to start off my play session. This is something my friends and I did years ago when the game first came out. We’d take turns just trying to wreak as much havoc as possible, and then survive as long as possible. Needless to say, it requires a lot of shooting and a lot of exploding. Now I did not make it to 6 stars ever, as I’m a bit out of practice and my guy still has low shooting stats. I got to 5 stars once, and 4 all the other times. Like I said, it’s been awhile for me, and I was never amazing at it to begin with. But for some reason, while I feel conflicted about things like killing a hooker to take her money, this kind of competition doesn’t faze me at all. After thinking about it, I believe I know why. Buying the services of a hooker and then killing her in cold blood feels much more personal, like a real thing that people could do, and have done. It’s a one-on-one crime purely for the sake of using somebody. By going on the huge shooting sprees and trying to get as many stars as possible, it feels like a video game again. Things like that don’t happen in real life. You never see a guy with a machine gun standing there, shooting everybody in sight, blowing up cop cars with grenades, and instantly switching to a RPG launcher and shooting down a helicopter. And it just continues happening. That isn’t a sequence of events that our brain can comprehend as right or wrong, because we’ve never experienced anything like it. It’s like somebody throwing out the number 873 quadrillion. We understand what’s going on, but we can’t fully wrap our head around its impact because we have no real experience with it. Whereas killing the prostitute after using her just to save $50 or $60, that’s something that everyone understands. This is why I have trouble with some of the smaller conflicts in games like this. Because I view things so personally, and I know that, morally, it’s just utterly and completely wrong to do. But something like blowing up 20 cars in a row with one grenade just seems too unrealistic to me, so I detach my emotions and morals from it.Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:02:33 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3599&iddiary=6738https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3599Entry #2 Alright, so my game picked up at Mission #12. I know I didn’t detail the other missions, but I wanted to address the other issues. You’re now doing missions with the cops who originally picked you up at the beginning of the game. In this one, the main cop (who sounds a lot like Samuel L. Jackson, but I’m not sure it’s his voice…I’ll have that for next update) tells you and your buddy to get a “little something something” off of a train that’s making an unscheduled stop. He also reminds you to stop killing well-respected officers “please.” Now, this would be another issue in the game. How can such a crooked cop try and call another cop “well-respected” when he might be one of the least-honorable men on the force. It just seems out of place, and it goes against what I consider to be morally right. If you’re going to be crooked, be crooked. Just don’t show-off how great other cops are like you care about the integrity and image of the force. So you get to the train, and find out that another gang got there before you. So you kill them off, and then hop on the back of the train as it continues on its way, throwing boxes of drugs off the back and (somehow magically) into your buddy’s car who is driving behind you. After your buddy takes as many boxes as he can, the cops come, and you have a 3-star wanted level. Basically you need to drive away from or shoot all the cops. And this is where the possibly-Samuel L Jackson cop comes into play again. He has to know that cops will be there to try and stop the drug trafficking. Which means there will be cops who are in the line of fire (most likely). Meaning that most of them will die. But that’s OK, since they aren’t the “well-respected” ones? Or is it justified for his own gain? What about his orders for Carl isn’t hypocritical? Would I change the game though? Not one bit. But this is clearly a much weaker story than Vice City or GTA:IV.Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:02:20 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3599&iddiary=6737https://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3599Entry #1 The game opens with you, the player, in the role of Carl, a young black male who returns to his hometown on the west coast after finding out from his brother that their mother died. Carl had been gone for five years. He gets pulled over by the cops on his way home from the airport. They clearly are familiar with Carl, and make references in the ensuing car ride to past drug use and past gang activity. Carl though, swears he is clean now and is out of that business. Immediately, I wanted to root for Carl. And not just because that’s the character I’m playing with, but because he is down after his mother’s death, he claims to have overcome some demons from the past, and he’s harassed by the cops the second he gets into town. He comes off as a young guy in a bad situation who finally started to turn things around, but still can’t get any breaks. But having played this game before (by the way, how terrible do the character models look now? I always thought they looked really good. But they look awful. Everybody has exaggerated movements and webbed fingers…we’ve come a long way) I know that I will start killing with Carl very soon, and getting right back into the thick of those illegal things he supposedly quit. And this is why I can’t feel bad for Carl anymore. He’s clearly distraught over his mother’s death in the beginning of the game. They take time to show you that he is sad and confused. So to turn around and start killing other senselessly seems a bit hypocritical of him. Why would he want somebody to lose their mom after going through the pain of losing his? I want Carl to succeed, and I want him to feel good about what he’s doing, but you can’t justify any murders if you want Carl to still feel like a victim. This is where Kantianism can be applied. If Carl (or the player) decides it’s wrong that his mother was killed (which we find out much later on), then it’s wrong for Carl himself to kill anybody. Whereas if Carl decided it was OK to kill all the gang members/civilians/cops he kills, then he can’t be so upset over his mother being killed, because the rule needs to be applied to everyone, not just himself. But then again, this game would be pretty boring if you couldn’t kill anybody because the main character you controlled was a strict believer in Kantianism.Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:02:05 CDThttps://www.gamelog.cl/logs/LogPage.php?Log_Id=3599&iddiary=6736