Hacker Cinema
God of War
荡寇风云
2017 · Film · 128 min
Directed by Gordon Chan
During the 16th century, pirates rule the Chinese coastline, pillaging the small villages and terrorizing the citizens. When maverick leader Commander Yu enlists the help of a sharp young general, they devise a plan to defeat the pirates. A violent clash of wit and weapons will decide who will rule the land.
1 negative10 neutralfrom 11 commenters
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12 comments on Hacker News
Nah, expedition has enough of a game in it. Parry mechanic is pretty addictive, and gameplay is kinda fun. Exploration, too, is strictly gaming aspect, not cinematic.
God of war is plainly movie on rails compared to E33
Looking for the Nicolas Cage movie "Lord of War" on Google, around the time the game "God of War" came out: "Did you mean 'God of War'? Here are search results for this video game"...
I think that all this really depends upon the game. Some are indeed designed to be more complex, yet in a good way. And there is a bit of a difference between a printed manual, and a wiki. I find that wikis often have solutions you're supposed to hunt for, where as a printed manual may tell a "story" of the land, and just give more generic "how to play" hints.
In this context, I am very much mystified by "I played through game Y in 2.5 hours!". Uh, what?! I just paid for this game, and my goal isn't to run directly to some arbitrary finish line. I want to see things. Explore things. Learn the story that is presented around me.
And I'm not referring to side-quests, although those are fun too. I mean, I've been in some games where there is just "stuff" in the world around me, and you can explore and find random info.
I'm referencing games such as "The Last of Us" re: PS3/2013 version, where you could look at newspaper boxes and make out headlines, something that didn't make it with the same legibility into the PS4 remake. (Newspapers were still to be found in the PS4 remake, but a lot of places where there were papers in newsboxes had legible headlines in the PS3 version, and just blurred stuff in the PS4 version).
To run a max speed through a game with all sorts of side-info, is like watching a plot laden movie at 5x on mute. What a waste of money, and joy.
Another example is Horizon Zero Dawn, where there were all sorts of interesting recordings to be found, and just random info to be gleamed about "what happened", regardless of other main/sub plot info. Again, to fast forward "yay I did this in 2 hours!" is madness in the extreme to me.
My point in the above is, that any sort of wiki requirement for these games is a solid ruin. What a way to reduce fun, if everything about the game, and things such as "how this world came about" is just laid out in a wiki.
Yet at the same time, I don't want all puzzles to be so easily solvable. I don't want my hand held. Imagine playing God of War, with all puzzles solvable in 1 second. Why even bother?
I wonder, there is often talk of great 'apathy' today in youth. Games are a part of youth. An example is 'hide and go seek', which in the real world teaches one how to be sneaky, how to think as another trying to hunt you, how to be clever, and just how to play with others. This game is teaching you to hunt, and to escape when being hunted!
Video games of my youth taught me puzzles, were difficult, required fast reflexes, and by no means did I think better gear was the answer to issues I was having.
Now games are often one dimensional. People look for the solve online before even playing. People have issues and 1 minute later are looking for a work around. When I was a kid, maybe I could find help by phoning a friend, but talk about embarrassing!
Yet with puzzles comes satisfaction when there is a solve.
And with easy answers, comes an empty feeling.
So back to the wiki or not, I really think there should be no wikis, because the potential for lost joy is massive.
Last of Us and God of War tend to get a lot of recognition, but it depends on what you’re looking for. Like film, you have to be open to the experience.
I’m also fine with a game/movie about Jesus but my point isn’t so much that the figure is a sacred cow (Passion of the Christ proved there’s a lot of interest, amongst other media) but rather that /when/ he is depicted the depictions tend to run along the respectful side because it is the religion of others.
And it’s not about “faithful”. I’ve played the original games and obviously “Kratos” isn’t a historical Greek figure anyway, but the original games weren’t about /story/. They were hack and slash games with a bit of backdrop in the form of naked Greek women and ionic columns.
To me the problem is when you want to /act/ like you’re a story game with a big dramatic plot and worldbuilding, why bother using a mythology if you’re going to piss all over it and get it entirely wrong? It’s like doing a “Sesame Street” game and Big Bird has PTSD from wasting too many people in Vietnam and then shoots up a building. I really don’t have enough analogies for how much I hate the game’s story and plot… and characters. And setting.
But also, it’s a very good game despite that. It’s like playing a version of DOOM where you help out Hitler and everyone pretends Hitler is a decent guy and that Hitler is misunderstood. You’re playing DOOM, so that’s great but why am I wading through a pile of horseshit to do it?
By extension of that analogy, why should I have to wade through a hack writer’s truly awful fuckup of a story just to play the hacky and slashy bits people are buying the game God of War for. Why should I have to see dumb articles written about a dumb version of a story. Again, it’s like playing a game where Hitler is the good guy and then an article comes out “ways Hitler was misunderstood”. It’s such a fundamental fuckup of the reality it is astonishing to me.
(Sorry, I know being passionate is basically illegal here)
Ah yes, God of War, who are so unable to get any level of mythology correct their “Germanic” story is the equivalent of Jesus and a Chinese Emperor teaming up to defeat Hitler, who then reveals that he is simply a pawn of the Kellogg’s Cereal Company.
Does that sound confusing and nonsensical to you? It /should/. God of War gets all of the details wrong and then opines about its own stupidity. If they do God of War: Bible, Jesus will be swigging wine from a bottle in each hand, almost incoherently drunk until you eventually discover that secretly he’s being controlled by a dark spirit known as Charizard.
Not sure that anything so off the mark is capable of handling any real themes because it cannot handle being consistent with the story it pretends to care about.
Personally, as I am Danish, this is still the religion of many people and it was ultimately a disgusting, juvenile, and false telling of the overall story.
I really hope they do God of War: Jesus and make him a homosexual drunkard who is only into communism and continually says he doesn’t believe in god.
It does make my blood boil, but basically in the same way that your blood would boil if a movie about “hackers” consistently showed them doing no actual hacking.
What you’re describing is auteurism. I think there is plenty of this in games already but you’re right it’s not as prevalent or mainstream as film directors.
If it were to get more prevalent, it might open the door for more original or unique AAA games. Giving a single person full control of the vision of a game almost certainly makes for more idiosyncratic games than the design-by-commitee approach many AAA games take today. Think more God of War (2018)s or Death Strandings and fewer Far Cry 7s.
But in my opinion auteurism is unfair to the rest of the team. AAA games are a joint effort, a director may have a singular vision but there are thousands of decisions made by the rest of the team (not to mention the labor it takes to execute that vision) that all coalesce into the final product.
You can try some puzzle games like Portal 2 - both single player and coop - good for puzzles and working with others. Talos Principal, Witness.
Sandbox/Building games like Minecraft, Terraria, Kerbal Space Program, Cities Skylines, Factorio are sort of 'up to you' to do what you want. It can allow for a lot of creativity.
There are story focused games if you want something like an interactive movie, while also exposing you to new ideas and sometimes cultures. Examples are God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Ghost of Tsushima, Uncharted series (good combination of story and puzzles), Detroit Become Human, Nier Automata.
You can also punish them by making them play the Dark Souls series.
Do note that some of these games are quite violent/gorey but I assume you'll have your own tolerance filters you can apply
I'm pretty sure that the origin of the novichok is the Soviet or Russian military.
HOWEVER
As I said, after the fall of the Soviet Union there was a free for all on Russian arms. It was chaos. This was even documented in the Nicholas Cage movie God of war.
I think it's fairly plausible that novichok was taken by Soviet military officers during that free for all and kept at home. Novichok is supposed to be stable for up to 50 years.
Skripal was interesting coz he blew the covers of about 100 GRU agents and was part of a spy swap. There is cover in having 100 people with motives.
Putin just after the poisoning was demanding (somewhat desperately I thought) that the UK send him evidence. I thought that was telling. It suggested he was just as keen to get to the bottom of it.
I'm not trying to be rude, but I honestly believe a lot of the complaints people make about how useless Google's search results seem overblown. I use Google all the time, sometimes for obscure results, often for technical stuff, and the worst I've ever had to do is look past the first page, but often the first page suffices.
Google showing results for director's commentary of God of War when someone searches "Lord of War director's commentary" is arguably not a failure on Google's part if more people do search for the game than the movie, regardless of the incorrect title.
That said, I completely agree with the theses of TFA. SEO is a cancer.
Lately I’ve been finding that I enjoy very story-centric games more and more. I loved Night in the Woods, Detroit: Become Human, Red Dead Redemption, Life is Strange, God of War and others for their story telling ability. I still play other games and am a big fan of FROM SOFT games (although they have incredible storytelling in their own way), but the story-heavy games suck me in like no TV series or movie ever has. I think it’s a mixture of interactivity and simply being longer than a movie that makes it easier to connect with and care about characters.
As an aside, I almost hated Celeste. I’d given up on it and uninstalled it, but was prompted to try again by a YouTube comment (of all things) and when I did, a few screens after where I stopped, it got good. Incredibly unbelievably good. I’m glad I gave it another chance!
I'd say the following points need to be made about "gaming" because the perception does not reflect reality when you play a videogame:
- the classical "neurotic player who doesn't like distractions and spends hours on VoIP getting angry at the game" is the reflection of a lot of the people who get into real-time multiplayer in MMORPGs or now games like Fortnite. This isn't quite how it stands for a lot of games, genuine one-and-done experiences like God of War or going back a bit to the Wii didn't have this continuous "one more" feedback or ridiculous length of content (3 hours a night raiding is tiresome and stressing for some people)
- The fighting game community has the oddity of gathering in large tournaments, building community on them and treating their games with immense discipline in learning to the point where others complain the barrier of entry to being "good" is too high. More than any other genre, fighters offer real-life experiences. E-sports is picking up on this*.
- Something to consider when determining the "why" of prolonged play is also the community or social aspect of the game. I play a lot of videogames, I admit, and one of the things that makes me commit a lot of hours into a game is when I can talk about it, talk to people in it, build a common interest and execute it. I live in a country where I speak my second language more than my first and hopping online to play in English is definitely some strong escapism. This is my experience, but so many people get online these days for the strong community tools (Discord, subreddits). It's primarily this aspect that makes me question any attempt to compare it to gambling/watching sports/binge watching movies or what have you. Gaming is built on a huge internet infrastructure because social features build long-time users.
I totally appreciate the definition of gaming disorder being sacrificing other healthy parts of life to continue feeding your need to play videogames but maybe this made sense if everyone was still playing the Super Nintendo (and even then we mocked it) but the world, and maybe it's just because enough huge corporations threw enough money at marketing to make it happen, has managed to genuinely change real-life because of videogames. This is far too dismissive.
Other posters mention this and I'd probably say that they refused to consult people in the game development industry/competitive gaming organizations/prominent players because they'd like to poison the well by assuming they'd never admit they have a problem (Although I suppose that might have to do with EA and the like refusing to have ethical debate instead of filtering us through an endless marketing machine, taking notes from Hollywood)
Side note: First post on HN after long time browsing. Feel free to rip this apart.