Nobody expects the Templar Inquisition, or that the next edition of the Dragon Age franchise will savor the fans' palates considering how Bioware has disappointed many of them twice in a row now.
Hear that game publishers whose only purpose is to maximize shares and profits by cutting costs and marginalizing creativity! Responsible gamers like us are everywhere and know your dirty tricks! No way you'd get more than 20 million in sales for an iteration of the same exact same game released three years ago, since that would clearly fail!
@Polybren Now that I've pondered a bit more about the whole "being in his own personal purgatory" thing, I believe it to be a valid explanation of the story IF you choose not to "wake up" and go berserk on your rescuers, still thinking you're taking on the traitorous 33rd "The Damned" before responding to their command on the radio as "Welcome to Dubai, gentlemen" which is the exact same thing you tell your squadmates when they first arrived at the ruined metropolis, in the similar calm and collected tone as well.
I truly appreciate that Spec Ops The Line set out to have the gamers experience something more profound than the run-of-the-programming FPS's saturating the market but the lack of authenticity in such a war game at some point made me feel like all those exotic set pieces and environment to set up the storyline were all a big fluff to masquerade its self-important, lofty messages about how "real-life" war sucks. For example, (spoilers) the US somehow abandons an entire decorated battalion and declares it renegade, which leads to the little dictatorship in Dubai and all hell breaks loose. This simply wouldn't happen, and same goes for a small group of three mere operatives not even big enough to form a basic squad going in and wiping the crap out of everything that moves just so the game can tell you how much of a vicious and immoral bastard you are through out the whole thing. Spec Ops still makes the mistake of trying to satisfy shooter needs by having the action shooter cliches of one single guy or squad being in an impossible situation and still kicking all the baddies' asses all because of incompetence from the higher-ups. And the result for me at least, is you don't feel too much like a vulnerable soldier in a battlefield of grey choices and difficult dilemmas like Apocalypse Now, but only something of that nature superimposed upon an average third person shooter
@Polybren I thought it was a humorous case of the writers having their game and its characters be self-aware. One of the loading screens even says "This is a video game, why should you care?"
@Quivox Video games are to fill a void for people with familial problems or psychological issues? I thought you just play them to have fun like you would watch a movie or pay for a sports event.
Fact is, humans like to indulge in some form of mental stimulation from time to time, only to criticize themselves or hear from others afterwards about how they wasted energy and precious time on idle activities, but that just makes us judgmental and hypocritical (and we all are at some point), but not quite "evil." Playing video games, or enjoying any form of entertainment, would seem like a waste of time to people who don't share your particular taste, or just work too much for their own good, though I don't know anyone rational who dislikes video games would call it a "filthy taboo", those that do tend to despise modern technology in general. Even Jack Thompson the video game crusader only actively targets the uncensored violence and so on.
Besides, rebuilding a repository for Japanese animated pornographic materials is a whole different league from videogaming, don't you think :D?
A woman's sex appeal overthrew governments, fell empires, and nowadays, helps sell games by the millions, so unless feminists are trying to be men, these "sexist" qualities weren't ever meant to be weaknesses
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