Then Starlight notices Twilight’s corpse… her unicorn corpse to be more prescise.
 
Alicorn Twilight: It would seem reports of my ascension were highly exaggerated.

@Joseph Raszagal
 
not saying it didn’t work. I actually liked the game. but the ending should have been like… you end up having to gun down your one surviving buddy, and then you find the guy you’ve been trying to save alive, and the game ends with a non-optional cutscene of putting your pistol to his head. (and the subplot of “actually he was evil all along” doesn’t happen.) all this “you’ve been evil all along and you could have just stopped playing” stuff didn’t really seem like what the game had been leading up to. like, “yeah, and?”

@redweasel  
Then we just disagree, yo. The fact that there was no choice in the game, much like a standard FPS where we’re the gun-crazy hero who saves the day and kills countless mooks, well, it just really worked for me. It felt like a really dark parody of every other game like that I’d ever played. Adding a choice in where it would allow me to be the better man and spare my foes would have either stalled or killed the narrative. I’ve been the asshole in other games and had fun with it without really thinking about it, mostly because it followed the narrative. Here, the narrative spoke that I was the asshole, exactly as I was in those other games, but looked closer at the how and why.
 
I liked that.
 
As for likening it to SJW bloggers, I can’t really see that. The whole point was that playing as the all-heroic war hero isn’t really applicable in an actual combat situation, particularly if the “hero’s” priorities are skewed towards their concept of being heroic. To me, that train of thought is similar to likening an SJW’s attempt at forcing someone to follow a certain standard - to - a war criminal’s attempt at forcing someone to concede to the idea that certain war crimes should be seen as noble. One side of that argument is by and far more morally questionable than the other and it’s not the SJW’s (no matter how irritating the argument).

@redweasel  
This!

@Joseph Raszagal
 
“spec ops: the line” shouldn’t have tried to make the player feel guilty for playing combat games, because there was no choice in the game. it was good at making people feel horrified at being trapped in an inescapable situation. that’s kind of why the ending fell flat for me, because they dropped the horror of inevitability, and tried to get all righteous about the main character, instead of continuing to erode their sense of free will. it was kind of like if “dead space” had been managed by sjw bloggers.
 
“look! all these zombies are people too! how could you kill fun loving people who just wanted to give you a hug!”
 
if you want to make someone feel guilty for blowing off heads, you can’t railroad them into doing so. if you do, your emotional impact deflates like a balloon as you throw away the disturbing part of the game for a non-sequitur.

@Lawful Girly  
Yes, but in Undertale you can play either way (technically three ways, but whatever). Spec Ops exists solely to criticize the genre.
 
There is no perfect route. There isn’t even a middle ground. Every ending is a downer ending meant to emphasize the real world implications that could result from trying to be a ’Murica Saves the Day! style “hero”.
 
It’s what the developers were going for and it’s something that I really think works.
 
Besides, I still don’t see the point in trying to compare the moral quandaries occurring in a war game grounded in our very real world with those of a fictional role-playing game landscape. They both possess the potential to damn the player for living vicariously through a vicious hero who mows down everything in their path, but the point of Spec Ops was pretty political while Undertale’s was more of a general moral compass (kind of a “is it right to kill anyone at all just to become stronger?” sort of thing).
 
I like both games for what they are and don’t really see a need to change either.

@Joseph Raszagal  
But…no. It’s the same.
 
Since I can probably speak free from fear of worrying about spoilers now, I will. Chara represents the “average” RPG player, mindlessly grinding on monsters to feel the “joy of a number going up”, and Flowey even calls out the people who watch alternate endings on Youtube because they feel bad about doing it. “Experience points” and “levels” are brutally deconstructed. The only way to be a real hero there is, in effect, not to play an RPG the way it’s “meant” to be played.

@Poptard  
To be fair, it’s a great detail. The very first thing you see upon entering what ends up essentially being Hell.
 
@Lawful Girly  
The thing is, that’s not really the point. Undertale can flow down either path, celebrating the hero or demonizing the villain.
 
Spec Ops demonizes the entire genre of games that it’s initially pretending to be. If it went the Undertale route, the outcome wouldn’t carry the same weight.

@redweasel
 
Oh, I did still play it, because I need to hurt myself.
 
It’s just a detail that I noticed at the start and didn’t connect the dots until the end.

@Poptard  

you bought a $60 game and didn’t play it?

@Background Pony #9FA7  
Bingo. Now, if it were more like Undertale where you could choose NOT to be a horrible person, or if it were explicit about it from the get-go, that would make it worthwhile. As it stands, you have no reason to stop, any more than you would watching a movie. I doubt they want you to refund or not buy their, what, $60 game.

@Poptard
 
It ruins the point by always being on rails.

This was one of the few games that made me feel nervous and uncomfortable.

Welcome to hell @voodoo91. We’ve been waiting for you.

@voodoo91
 
Going into it assuming you’re playing a generic military shooter is exactly what the developers are hoping for. Welcome to Dubai!

Huh, and here I avoided this game as another mindless shooter. Seeing these quotes kinda makes me want to play it now

@Poptard  
Holy shit, they had this planned from the beginning!
 
I didn’t even realize it. What a great game!

@Lawful Girly
 
To be fair, the game did warn you.  
What was the first thing you saw when beginning a new campaign?
 

 
A stop sign.
 
There’s always the option to stop playing the game, which is so out of the box most people won’t consider it. But look where thinking inside the box leads you.
 
Overall, sometimes you want a game to be an action-fest, and sometimes you want to be intellectually stimulated. Either way, I feel like I got my money’s worth here.

@Jarkes  
I do realize that when i watch top upvoted images it’s 90% porn, meaning that’s what people come here for. I mean i am cool with that. I do come here for porn and occasionally find awesome non porn pictures that usually are getting lost in the tons of porn.

@Andreas98  
I am, too, but…nah. “These games suck. You suck.” Not that deep, even if it is admittedly good at being a fakeout.

@Joseph Raszagal  
I found it pretty deep. (Tho it might just be because i’m a starry-eyed games-are-art hippie.)

@Jarkes  
Few who have to be corrected would care.

@Jarkes  
Closer to 11%, but, details.

@RoyalFlank
 
“porn website”
 
You do realize that maybe 5% of the total images of this site have the “explicit” tag, right?

@Lawful Girly  
It’s largely why I like Spec Ops. I just see it as a slam against nationalistic military wank games, not all other games involving take-thats towards the player. In those games, there likely would be an option to simply “not do the horrible thing”, but here that’s entirely the point.
 
It starts out legitimately feeling like just another “America saves the day!” FPS. Then some bad stuff happens, but hey, it still seems like you’re playing as the good guys. Then it gets a little worse and, man, did I really have to do that? Then something absolutely awful happens… and the rest of the game plays out as one enormous “Screw You: [Insert Player Here]”. As far as attacking standard FPS games, I love it.
 
Outside of its own premise though… I still can’t see why some seem to view it as the absolute deepest game ever made. ‘Cause I’ll admit, it’s not that.