Metal Gear Solid has you fighting against USA special forces. Ground Zeroes you kill soldiers guarding a base that's a stand in for Gitmo. Two I can think of off the top of my head. Honestly surprised these games didn't get flak for that.
Unfortunately these special forces are traitors who have the backing of a Soviet revivalist faction, Snake also directly kills members of this Soviet faction during Sons of Liberty.
Grand Theft Auto has a couple games with missions that revolve around breaking into military bases, killing loads of troops, and stealing a tank or a jet.
The whole series is pretty blatantly anti-American. GTAV is basically about how capitalism fucks all of its characters up and makes them terrible people, San Andreas spends a lot of time talking about how the CIA coopts and kneecaps liberation movements on behalf of capital, GTA4's main character fled the rise of capitalism in eastern europe only to find that America was exactly the same but with more cars and guns...
Interesting contrast, in Rockstar Studios you play as an overworked developer struggling to make ends meet.
There's a mission where you go walk through an old man's repossessed house and look for his personal belongings so he can have at least the dignity of his memories, even though he's now homeless as a result of losing his job. All the items and letters you pick up get a somber voiceover read and it's more meditative than most of the missions you get. Definitely meant to try and inspire sympathy in the old man's plight.
Anyways, you find out that his job was slave catcher and he was proud to be one. So when you go back to give him his things, Arthur instead insults him to his face and throws his recovered last personal possessions into a fire. Owned.
Game leaves it up to you to kill the slave catcher or walk away.
You get to murder all four kinds of US troops - Union, Confederate, KKK, and cops.
That game has totally incoherent politics, though. The protagonists are mostly mass murderers who have killed hundreds of people, but the game tries to sell this "found family doing what they have to in a harsh world" and it never gels because the last mission required you to murder like forty random dudes in some town.
eeeeeeeeeeeeh, I don't know about that. I don't understand how anyone can name one of their characters after Michael Townley. Also, I don't know if it's racist against italians, but one of the mobsters from the bay of pigs was called something very similar to Tomy Vercetti. It's not literally the same name, so this one might just be a coincidence.
All in all, politics in gta are a mixed bag. On one hand, they've criticized torture and private armies, so they're not completely braindead. But I wouldn't say the games have good politics, either. The writers are a bunch of rich libs. They care about lib shit, but that's it.
Oh, another thing I just remembered. As rich libs, the writers for the series have no respect or appreciation for, you now, normal people with real jobs. The whole thing loves nothing more than shitting on lazy and entitled millenials who need to stop bitching about not being able to find a job and should pull themselves by their bootstraps.
There's a character Floyd, who works at the port. He has a good union job, one of the highest paying jobs in the usa. Of course, a lib writer can't imagine a world where that's a good job to have. Trevor shits all over it, and he says his girlfriend has to suck someone's cock to get Floyd the job. Why would she bother if it was such a bad job? Also, Floyd's girlfriend, allegedly, doesn't love him and cheats on him all the time, while also willing to suck someone's cock to get Floyd a job? That doesn't make any sense either. I doubt writers intentionally wrote nonsense to show Trevor as a flawed character in this particular instance, I think their brainworms just affected the quality of their writing. The writing doesn't make any sense because the writer's opinions don't make any sense.
In contrast, in the FPS that the US army made, even though there are two teams (US vs "terrorists" I think) all the players on both teams always play as the US army and the game just switches the character model of the other team, so that no player will ever have to shoot a US army man.
So that kind of trick is a really cool way to make everyone's gameplay feel consistent every time. I remember Bloodline Champions/Battlerite using it to recolor models and flip the camera so everyone sees themselves as the same color/map side every match.
But lmfao that army shit is a real loser reason to use it.
Destroy All Humans has mission objectives that literally are typed on screen to just say "kill cops" and you get to fuck up 1950s America. You can also anal probe cops and suck their brains literally out of their ass and having been abused by cops, it makes me super happy to play.
Is it good? Really liking the remake of the first, I know they're gonna give the sequel the same treatment
In the payday games you kill hundreds and hundreds of cops, not quite the same but
Yeah but you're explicitly coded as at best an antihero in that game, it's a bit different. Cops in that game are mostly just incompetent - it's the private security/PMC guys who are the "real villains".
There's a running community joke that the cops are being made in 3d printers just off screen given how many you kill.
The Half Life games in general are classics and generally dope as hell. In HL1, ofc, you explicitly fight the US Army, and in HL2 (and Episodes 1 and 2) you lead a guerilla resistance against a fascist-allegory occupying force. I need to do a series replay soon
I assume a large amount of players think the Combine are a stand-in for Communism though
A large amount of people think that communism is a stand-in for fascism.
It doesn't help that HL2 is set in some dystopian, vaguely eastern European city, so yeah, it's safe to assume that.
Yeah, it's got the 1984 influences, the oppressive mass surveillance police state, food rations and identical jumpsuits
"This is what Marxists want" :kubrick-stare:
Wolfenstein: The New Order maybe?
EDIT: oops I guess it's Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus that is set in the US
never played that, but I though the wolfenstein games are about fighting literal nazis?
well in the game's timeline they take over the USA
but that's not that different from what the Combine did so...
In HL1 the Combine were just starting their invasion, these were US troops sent in to kill all the scientists and security guards in Black Mesa.
oh you're right, I was thinking of HL2 and had forgotten that. my mistake
I could be wrong but I partially blame the Half-Life series' popularity and success, especially Half-Life 2, for so many games that came after it to have carte blanche excuses to have rusty deserted urban ruins for their maps, over and over again, with higher and higher resolution and fidelity. Entire generations of entertainment hardware came and went mostly spent on rusty fences and the brown and grey aesthetic. :disgost:
In Fallout 2, the US Government remanant is the literal villain, and they're portrayed sympathetically (a.k.a. executing a civilian on camera. A bit of war crimes) since the Fallout 1 intro.
Edit: And other lib factions like the NCR are also portrayed as having a mountain of dirt behind them.
On a standard playthrough you will most likely kill the President of the United States of America.
If my ailing memory serves me correctly, the Marines you fought were pretty dumb, too, right?
Oh yeah, in the remake one reads out some latin in a facility and scoffs, saying "Foreigners..." And another marine is crushed by a hatch that gets blown off by the explosive he threw in a tunnel. They are not a bright bunch.
For video game AI they were terrifyingly smart and effective. They flanked aggressively, push your position aggressively, and would use grenades to force you out of cover. Their AI was unprecedented at the time and most games today don't tune their AI to be nearly as aggro and effective because it was so difficult to fight them.
I replayed a bit of Deus Ex recently. I had such good memories of it. Ya the game was ahead of its time in like '00 or something. But I couldn't get over how bad the voice acting was. And the unintentional right-wingness of everything, from the sunglasses, to the UN & FEMA conspiracy theories, to the promotion of "patriots". It was a different time, though, and QAnon wasn't a thing,so I'll give the developers a pass.
the voice acting is like one of the best parts of the game? I agree with everything else though, kinda. A conspiracy theory revolving around FEMA and a lab made plague does seem bad now, but I'm not sure I agree that part specifically feels right wing, nor the UN stuff. I always thought it was pretty clear that JC Denton's development as a character was from a nearly stereotypical action flick cop, a red blooded American patriot that buys into America's values, to taking part in a people's revolution. I did always get libertarian vibes from the writing fwiw
