GTA IV isn’t a game I particularly like. It’s awkward and janky and veers wildly in tone. It was a weird middle child of a game where it wanted to both be quirky crime sandbox and serious Scorsese esque mob drama. Which is why Saints Row 2 is the ubermensch of that genre as it 100% knew what it was.
But Niko Bellic is not just my favorite character in GTA but arguably all of having and this scene is the apotheosis as to why;
Like every other video game protagonist he is supremely gifted at the application of force. But you get the distinct he doesn’t want to be. He’s got other things going for him. But he’s been to Hell on Earth, and met the devil while he was there. Unthinkable cruelty doesn’t phase him as he’s already seen inconceivable cruelty. The sort of thing that makes you cry out “Monster” because it’s difficult to imagine other humans are even capable of this.
And I so adore that. He’s such a three dimensional character with not just hopes and dreams but secrets he’ll keep even from the player for a time.
GTA 4 is a pretty serious game, it has some silly radio and TV content but that’s about it, it’s brevity for what can be some depressing story content. The quirky crime sandbox is better suited for The Ballad Of Gay Tony, which is more positive in tone than 4 and The Lost And The Damned. I’m amazed at how excellent of a character Niko Bellic is, he has a deep backstory that is mostly explored through exposition yet that’s where much of the character motivation is and it’s not shallow at all, it feels like he’s talking about real Eastern European history despite the country he’s from never being named. It’s something that could easily be shallow, and this character along with Arthur Morgan are why the Housers are some of the best writers in the game industry. I hope GTA 6 has good writing, GTA 5 is better than 4 gameplay wise but its story isn’t.
I want there to be another Bully game, but I’m not sure where they’d even start with that. It has kind of a weird setting if looked deeper into, it’s like the 50s with arcade machines. Nearly everything has that style then suddenly goth Zoe is walking around. A modern sequel might make the uncanny valley it has more visible. I dunno.
Like, sure, okay, communism has resulted in famines that have killed millions of people, and since most communist states were also run by authoritarian dictators, there were many deaths from that as well, but the enshrinement of capitalism and the destruction that has occurred in the name of capitalist interests easily topples the numbers that communism has.
Take for example, food scarcity and starvation. This exists in the modern day because of capitalism and this desire to gain a profit from the sale of food. It is also why so much food ends up getting thrown out, because despite so much of it still being good, it cannot be sold beyond its use by date, and so it ends up in the garbage. Farmers often want to donate their crops that don’t have value, but can’t, because even if they want to give it away, they need to pay for the transport costs.
Then there is every single coup and war that has started thanks to capitalist interests including perhaps one of the most notable ones, World War II.
Now World War II isn’t solely the fault of capitalism. Fascist Germany did not wage war in Poland thanks to capitalism, but it was the Wall Street crash of 1929 that tanked the world economy (and we can blame capitalism for that moment of history) that resulted in extreme economic pain for Germany on top of what they were already dealing with thanks to their defeat in World War I. That additional economic pain is what allowed the world’s most notorious fascist to rise to power. He used the economic woes of Germany as a springboard and turned an already suffering and angry state against those who were not suffering as much as they were, most notably, the Jewish, and much of their wealth they had managed to hold onto during the world economy crash was stolen by the Germans in the lead up to the holocaust.
Right now I’d say the death toll from capitalism is far higher than communism. Which is not me saying that communism is fantastic, because it isn’t, but capitalism has resulted in far more deaths over a longer period of time.
I can be cynical, so I tend to view it as “people killing people over what ever reason they can find.”
Arguments over religion have caused as much calamity as economic practices. That does not make religions bad, it just means their followers are human, and humans can be horrible people.
I wouldn’t say capitalism or communism killed people. They are just ideas. People see ideas through their perspective, and use it to justify their actions. People may have killed in the name of such ideas, but they likely would have perverted any concepts to justify death.
Many defenders of capitalism and communism will say “we have not seen them in their true pure form, just twisted forms of them.”
All my school debts are paid. We have financial aid here, along with scholarships. I paid a minimum payment a month for 10 years and just paid it off a couple years ago. 5 years ago the government also pardoned a bunch of people’s school debt if they met a certain criteria, the government also paid adults to go back to school in certain fields. I am glad I do not have to worry about this problem.
Tbh pretty much all human conflicts are over geography. God, country, home, family- that’s for the propagandists and poets. The actual reason is almost without exception to seize strategically important areas or to increase a power’s sphere of influence over one.
Like going back to the Crusades I’m sure your rank and file soldier may’ve been influenced by faith. But Pope Urban II was trying to strengthen his validity as the true Pope and also help out Emperor Komenos. Not out of Christian brotherhood but because Constantinople is a huge nexus for trade routes. Istanbul to this day is. Having smooth relations between the owners of those ports and the ones on the Italian peninsula is great for buisness. And if you can seize the port at Jaffa, now known as Tel Aviv? Call that situation a pot roast because it’s nothing but gravy, baby.
Generally speaking if something stupid and dangerous is happening it’s because somewhere, somehow some shadowy mfer is getting filthy rich off it.
That almost seems optimistic. At least, purposeful.
So much of that stuff happens out of wanton callousness or down right sadism, with little actual purpose other than cruelty.
That is why I do not pretend that economics, or religion, or geography are what drive people to cruelty. They can find a reason to justify their actions.
To a point I agree. But humanity is a pretty intrinsically cooperative species. So much so we turned our greatest apex predator rivals into our four legged best friends. If we were inherently sadistic there wouldn’t be a civilization in the first place.
But we’re also intrinsically tribal. Just look at how weird people get about the Horde and Alliance. Two made up teams in a world of pretend. It could not possibly be a more meaningless distinction. But people will square up over it because we’re pretty prone to in-group, out-group thinking.
Changing Aemonds agency in the situation, it would be the equivalent of Jaime accidentally pushing Bran lol like its ???
I’m a bit worried that the writers think writing a morally ambiguous conflict on both sides means having everything amount to a misunderstanding or accident lol and I’m unsure how to take that active choice their going w time and time again.
I’m excited all around yeah! For both the episode and season 2 which… is going to be SO LONG OF A WAIT I LIKE DON’T EVEN WANNA THINK ON THAT PART
Also on a totally unrelated note does anyone know why I bought Dragonflight and it wanted me to set up a subscription? I already have a subscription lol was just very odd
I know, they wanna keep Aemond morally grey. I told you he was gonna be where the new female gaze lands. He can’t be a full on monster, they are going to humanize him, just like they did to Sauron. I’m starting to gain some more controvercial opinions on this show and I don’t want to offend anyone so I will keep them to myself. The tone shifted after Viserys’s death and I don’t think I like this show much any more. With the pacing it’s making every episode doom and gloom and I have quit shows for less.
I may just go back to watching things i am interested in instead of watching what is currently popular in the forums. Sandman was one i started and I never finished that one, so I might go back to that one. Or The Peripheral looks really good.
It did the same thing to me last week when I bought Shadowlands. so it seems to be a weird bug. I just closed it and I it was fine.
Put in hidden tag cause spoilers, but that is going to absolutely wreck me.
Ah okay yeah I asked someone else too and they said they vaguely remember the glitch when they got DF so idk, I’m like weird when things have glitches and I’m like wait is mine messed up somehow now
I’m catching up on Real Housewives of Potomac atm, have you seen Euphoria?
Also if you have peacock and you’re into horror movies the new Halloween is on there and in theaters. I feel like its one of those franchises I have to see to the end like they’ve been making them since long before I was born and they still running from Michael? No I need to see this through.
A bird? I don’t have one of those, but there was one that was loose in my grandmother’s backyard in Palm Springs when I was a kid. No one knows who it belonged to but the neighborhood was all old Hollywood so probably some old
I haven’t seen Euphoria or Real Housewives. I’m not usually into that. I did watch the new Keeping up with the Karsashians on Disney+ Kourtney has always been a weirdo that I want to keep up with.
I wanted to go see Pearl with my best friend, we were supposed to go see it tomorrow but for some reason it’s not in the theatres anymore so we are going to see Amserdam instead. It sucks, Pearl looks like a really funny horror movie.
OH! actually my favorite show right now hands down is The Great. it’s hilarious.
I’m rewatching The Office, which is my comfort food show, and I am once again reminded how much I dislike the fact that the show evolved to letting Michael off the hook for the awful things he does
There was a brief period of about a decade where I believed we would be free of region locked media.
Boy, was I dumb.
The number of hoops I had to go through to buy a copy of some movies on Google when I was in Korea… and now almost everything I own via Kakao is inaccessible
I miss the days when it was easy to just change the region codes on my dvd player to play overseas dvds. I used to do that all the time to watch Ranma 1/2 and Chobits.
/salute to thepiratebay and limewire the true unsung heroes of the early 2000’s
