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Showing posts from April, 2018

How a Triple-A Game Forces the Player to Stare into the Heart of Madness

Spec Ops: The Line was released in 2012, developed by Yager and published by 2K Games, that huge publisher you probably already know of (Oh come on, don't say you've never heard of BioShock , XCOM , Borderlands , or  Civilization ). Despite strong praise for its single-player campaign, the game never really got big. Heck, I'm one to talk, only playing this game 6 years down the line. Some reviews took points off for it's lackluster multiplayer, which frankly, is the stupidest thing you can say as a reviewer. I strongly believe that this game was not designed for multiplayer — hell, it wouldn't be crazy to say that it shouldn't have even had a multiplayer. This is a game whose campaign stands so strongly on its own, that any multiplayer would take away from its central theme: how detached modern shooters are from the atrocity that is war. The hopelessly buggy and poorly implemented multiplayer mode has you shooting faces off other players who're trying to o