It’s always the same thing. Russia bad, Middle-East bad, China bad. USA saves the world.
I like playing Ace Combat because the nations and geopolitics are made-up so it doesn’t feel like you are sitting down and watching U.S. military propaganda for 10 straight hours.
Replaying the original trilogy recently reminded me how much of the aesthetic choices in the games were informed by the gulf and Iraq wars. The Marines are supposedly meant to be composed of all humanity but they all look, act, and sound like American soldiers in the second Iraq invasion.
There are stark differences between Halo:CE and every subsequent game. It went from Cortana being able to fight multiple Covenant ships using the Pillar of Autumn and the Covenant being a wacky alien coalition to "oh yeah this is a war of extermination and we're being wiped out and only the fascist ubermensch we created to crush democracy can save us." Also, I really did not like how Cortana's avatar changed from femme androgenous to milf with dumptruck ass over the course of the series. Please do not try to fuck the space ship.
who the fuck is scraeming "DO NOT TRY TO FUCK THE SPACE SHIP" at my house. show yourself, coward. i will never not try to fuck the space ship
At least in the first game, the Marines are mostly inspired by Aliens though. Coincidentally it's also the only game in the series which began development before 9/11.
The Marines of 2 and 3 still retained their scifi action figureness, in Reach the human soldiers just look like DOD concepts for the American military in 15 years
Yeah but in what other game will Donna from That 70s Show give you a shotgun
Adding to this there's been a nice resurgence of FPS games that follow similar game design tropes as "classic" FPS games such as the OG DOOM, Blood, Quake ETC.
Dusk is fantastic, one of the best FPS games I've played in recent memory. Amid Evil is solid. Ion Fury is good.
...but REALISM bro.
What do you mean COD is political?
It's just a GAME bro.
Politics - keep that shit out of my games, I just want to GAME bro.
I've always thought of Call of Duty as a Michael Bay style game; mindless military propaganda with lots of explosions.
They're fun on a surface level, but they're also perpetuating the military industrial complex. I'm sure they have helped immensely with boosting the amount of youth enlisting.
Insurgency: Sandstorm was going to be YPG/J vs ISIS but they toned it down to not piss of Turkey or something. Still, it stands out that you're playing as (presumably Kurdish, since you can play as a woman on the "Security Forces" side) local security forces instead of the US or something.
Yeah that was a great decision because it really suppressed the racism you would hear from players in the original Insurgency.
Those are fuckin good games too.
TV: cops and lawyers are good bro I swear
Movies/Video Games: AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!!!
I know why I play none of those shit-ass games.
It's actually very easy to find other good games, even shooters. Just stop shoveling garbage into your mouth.
Yeah I remember hearing how cod put a US war crime in modern warfare but replaced the US with with Russia. I can’t tell if it’s straight up propaganda or if they’re just that stupid. I usually just stick to multiplayer and play with friends it could be pretty fun most times
There's so many other types of games out now you can easily avoid them. They're not even as culturally dominant now as they were in the 2000s,
If you like multiplayer you can play as the PLA against the USMC in Battlefield 4.
Warzone is the only shooter i've played that wasn't Left 4 Dead 2 or tf2 and since COD is just so ubiquitous and blatant it's quite easy for me to build some head canon about the insanity on display.
But yeah I haven't played story mode which might be a whole other level of brainworms
I really liked Spec Ops: The Line too and Metal Gear Solid of course has good politics but it's more of a stealth game than a shooter.
MGS4 no kill no alert run on the second hardest difficulty gang
Who here has done it on The Boss Extreme difficulty?
MGS 4 was based because you could ally with the militia and the rebels and together fight against the PMCs
Ace combat still carries weight for the aircraft manufacturers though. There's no reason for an F-35 to handle that much better than an F-16 in game except to give you warm fuzzies when the US military buys hundreds more of them despite pilot complaints.
This is very true, but you can also play a cool Eastern Bloc plane like MiG-29 or Sukhoi Su-30
I find it fascinating that it uses real planes in a fictional world
True but the US manufactured planes at the same ingame currency price point are always just a little better for some reason.
I can only see that being true for 5, and maybe 6. The former because every plane is locked to one SP Weapon, and the later because of the lack of overall plane choice.
In 4 the best plane for any given mission is the Su-47, because it's SP weapon choices are the UGBL and the QAAM, both the best A2G and A2A weapons in the game.
In 5 because of how each plane is locked to one SP weapon (and the xp bar on the planes), you're really only picking planes based on that more than anything else. So anything with the XMAA (QAAM got giga nerfed from 4 to 5, and XLAA planes have worse ammo capacity), LASM, and UGBL are the only planes that are worthwhile.
In Zero imho the best general purpose plane is the Su-37 because of it's 16 XLAA count, and has access to the FAEB. You can also easily get it in your first playthrough.
Point being that in Ace Combat you just don't use certain planes for their stats, you use them for the sp weapon they have access to.
