T w e n t y S i d e d
We need to become champions in two different “sports” so we can gain access to the Winner’s Club so we can get in to see Klegg Clayton so we can bug his computer so we can recover the tank we need for Project Dagger so we can you get the idea. In the last entry we covered the car race. This time we need to get through the arena fight game show, which is called…
Mutant Bash TV
The total non-bandit population of the wasteland is less than 200 people, and as far as we can see roughly zero percent of them own televisions. Who watches television in this world? Why does anyone bother? How can anyone sell televised advertising in a world with no companies, no brands, and no audience? Mutant Bash TV is a massive complex set with moving walls, traps, and elevators. How does anyone pay for such extravagance in a world where people wear rags and eat vermin? Given that mutants are a serious problem that threatens this tiny population, it must require a ridiculous portion of their GDP just to keep the lights on and the set stocked with live mutants.
I’m not bringing this up because I want the writer to fill in all of these supposed plot holes. It’s fine. This world is silly, and that’s okay. My problem is that all of the above questions are a natural setup for jokes, but the game never tries to tell any. This looks like another instance of The Missing Joke I talked about in the previous entry. It’s not wrong, it’s just a missed opportunity to have some fun. Again, all we need is some lampshading.
Promoter: Good show, kid. Makes me wish people owned televisions.
Old janitor that greets you in passing as you exit the arena: Don’t get too cocky kid. Killin’ those mutants isn’t half as hard as catching them and getting them dressed up for the show.
Guy who sells you stuff for the tokens you win in the arena: I wonder what people in the Old World killed on their TV shows. They didn’t have mutants. Musta been boring.
It doesn’t need to be laugh-out-loud funny. You just need to have the characters in on the joke so the world feels playful and intentionally silly rather than lazy and nonsensical.
Desdemonya Cold
Mutant Bash TV is hosted by Desdemonya Cold. Like Chaz, she gets a very long cutscene introduction that is just the same quasi-joke told over and over for 2 minutes. She’s an old woman with a quasi-French accent, who dresses like an old-timey prostitute and who gets off on murder. She’s got a languid delivery that doesn’t do her jokeless dialog any favors. Even if this was funny, this is the wrong style of comedy for this game.
The marketing sold this game as an irreverent and frantic adventure comedy like you’d find in a Saints Row title. Chaz feels like he’s going for slapstick screwball comedy like a Mel Brooks movie. This stuff with Desdemonya is basically camp, and veers very close to being abject art. These are actually three very different forms of comedy and they do not mix. You can’t take a scene from Ant Man, a scene from Spaceballs, and a scene from Pink Flamingos, and expect them to fit together into a coherent work. You need to pick a style of comedy and stick with it.
Anime has a certain degree of flexibility and gets away with quite a bit of tonal whiplash, but if you’re making a big-budget shooter aimed at western audiences then you need a firm grip on your intended tone and genre. More importantly, camp is a bad fit for Rage for the same reason it was a bad fit for Batman in 1997. Your average Rage fan probably doesn’t want to see their blood-soaked shooter turn campy any more than the core audience for My Big Fat Greek Wedding wants to see a poe-faced sequel where a Greek cop has to go rogue to kill the mobsters that murdered his wife. Genre boundaries exist for a reason.
Okay, I won’t claim that you can’t make camp work in the context of a AAA shooter. I’ll bet there’s someone out there who could pull it off. But I have to ask:
- Do you feel like a Master Ninja Level 100 Writer, ready to take on comedy HARD MODE by embracing a style of comedy that doesn’t suit the material or the audience?
- Is this really the proper tone for a game where the player embodies a military hardass working to protect their home and avenge their slain ?
Before you come up with a protagonist, before you build the world, before you design a single character concept, you need to figure out the tone of the work you’re trying to create. That decision impacts everything else, so it needs to be first.
Champion!
Once you’re a famous racer / mutant-basher, you can get in to see Klegg Clayton. And here we run into another situation that might be a reference or a coincidence:
In Fallout, the mayor / sheriff of the post-apocalyptic town wants to remove a criminal rival, but they don’t want to use direct violence without evidence. So the sheriff has the player go to the casino and speak to Gizmo to get the evidence.
In Rage 2, the mayor / sheriff of the post-apocalyptic town wants to remove a criminal rival, but they don’t want to use direct violence without evidence. So the sheriff has the player go to the casino and use a gizmoThe object is actually called this in dialog. on Clayton’s computer to get the evidence.
Is this deliberate? The trope is broad enough that it could be an accident, but if that’s the case then this is a weird coincidence. So maybe the writer did this reference on purpose? But if that’s the case, then the writer is being really subtle.
I don’t know. I thought it was odd. Tell me what you think in the comments.
In any case, Walker gets in to see Clayton and then puts a gizmo on his computer while Clayton is distracted with a phone callReally? The wasteland has a working mobile phone network? Okay..
As you leave, Clayton discovers you’re a spy and tries to kill you with (brace yourself here) waves of goons. In the resulting carnage you find the captured Authority tank required to make Project Dagger work.
We also learn that Clayton is working for our techno-Satan villain General Cross. Clayton gets away in the confusion.
We have one leader left to talk to, and then we’re headed for the finale. We’ll meet the final leader next week.
Footnotes:
[1] The object is actually called this in dialog.
[2] Really? The wasteland has a working mobile phone network? Okay.
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Camp Batman worked pretty well in the 1960s…
And somewhat more recently in the Batman: the Brave and the Bold animated series. It all comes down to execution.
The trick with camp I think is you can’t call attention to it for look how ‘whacky’ we’re being, looking at the two Batman examples. Everyone takes the ‘hero disposal deathtrap’ levers (clearly labelled) seriously.
That’s what killed the recent Dark Shadows movie for me. The 60s original was incredibly cheesy, and the people in it knew it, but they still committed to the melodrama and sold it. The remake seem determined to remind the audience that they were in on the joke, and that ruined it.
I hated the talk shows where the host goes “eh? eh?” after every joke, to clue you in that it was a joke and you were supposed to have laughed. If the joke doesn’t land, move on. Lampshading camp too much feels like they’re trying too hard. Like they tell a joke, and then look at the camera, “DID YOU GET IT? THIS IS FUNNY!” It needs to be used sparingly, like when something happens that seems out of character for the world, and the actor briefly breaks the 4th wall to look at the camera to subtly ask the audience “you seeing this too?” But if you do that all the time, it breaks the flow.
Yeah, Shamus’s inclusion of Batman as a example of a place where camp can’t work was probably a mistake. In the context of turning from Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns to Tim Burton’s Batman and then to the Joel Schumacher versions, yes. The choice of camp was absolutely a mistake there as Frank Miller and Tim Burton have led you to expect a very particular kind of Batman. But camp can and does work quite well in other Batman stories.
Shamus is exactly right though that camp humor can’t really work with you then going and gunning down two dozen people.
And it especially can’t work when you’ve been doing other humor styles beforehand.
I wouldn’t classify it as a mistake in its entirety. The link points specifically at one of the Schumacher films; the problem is that many of our minds (mine included) immediately went to the Adam West series when we saw ‘camp’ and ‘Batman’ near each other. I think adding ‘for Joel Schumacher’ or ‘in 1997’ probably resolves the issue.
Good suggestion!
Batman Forever was campy, and also good. It might be rather lightweight, but still quite fun. Batman and Robin was where they took the camp too far and, well, it’s among the worst movies ever made.
Batman Returns is a bad (good?) example of genre-crossing gone wrong. Where Batman (1989) still feels good, if a bit dated, Returns is a thematic mess that tries to creep the audience out while still being Batman. In retrospect, it’s where Tom Burton was trying to find his own style, which more or less everyone would not now associate with Batman. The movie isn’t terrible exactly but rather very uneven, and not quite what audiences wanted.
I always felt Batman Forever was the first of a long line of third comic book movies that were themselves OK but everyone decided were awful because the previous entries were better (X-men and Spider Man being the inheritors).
I still think its poor explanation. Better would be focussing on the whiplash. Going from Burton’s films to Schumacher’s is bad tonally. You can’t go from a dark gothic story where batman is basically killing people, and Selina Kyle goes kamikaze on our secondary villain, to Schumacher.
On their own though? If you can laugh at yourself, and know what you’re in for, the Schumacher films are awesome. They’re dumb, broad camp about a brand trying to sell toys. I still quote “its boiling acid!” to this day. They’re great comedies, especially once you get to Clooney’s wooden Batman and O’Dowd’s childish in his near 30s Robin. I know they’re seen as about as close to “objectively” bad as possible, but they’re like the Room, so bad, they’re good. They are great camp. They hired Arnold Schwarzenegger to play the tragic villain Freeze, and he spends his time chewing the scenery and making ice puns.
But its the absolute wrong place to take a sequel where the Penguin plans to kidnap and murder children as revenge for his life, where Batman’s love interest seemingly killing herself, before escaping through potentially supernatural means.
Campy Batman is the only kind of Batman I can even remotely stand.
There is no part of any Batman – however gravelly-voiced the delivery – that is not camp. Sometimes the writers appear to be less-aware of this than others.
Better than any Batman since then.
Fite me.
If you mean the live action movies, sure.
If you’re including the animated movies, there will be blood.
Typolice:
Should be “they”.
The “it” is superfluous and needs to be removed.
Ah, hmm. :/ Typolice sounds like a parasite you get when you misspell to many things.
Excuse me?!?! I’ll have you know that the Typolice is a venerable and very respected institution whose significance is second only to the Department of Entire Articles on the Front Page!
If your grammar and spelling weren’t so impeccable, you would have had to pay a fine!
Also, I believe
is usually spelled “po-faced.”
So, watched part of the video, is the girl who cut her hand a mutant? She bled a lot but only for a very short while.
This series makes me glad I forgot Rage 2 even existed. All the cutscenes I see are horrible, and I’d want to strangle all the characters I come across if I ever played it (is it possible to just kill everyone?).
I assumed it was a gimmicked knife, filled with actual red wine/fruit juice.
Possibly because I’ve made a couple of ‘bleeding knives’, at both ends of the ‘realistically bleeding cut’ to ‘spurts like crazy’ spectrum.
Seeing how the writers have the subtly of a charging elephant i dont think they are referencing FO1 here. If they did they would probably use the same names as the ones in FO1 and have like 3 huge nudge wink moments where they drop FO1 hints. And then after the quest is done someone will wonder out loud they are reminded of some game they played before the bombs fell which was also a post apocalypse.
Ditto, there’s no way this game has the subtlety to make a Fallout 1 reference like that without rubbing your face in it.
I doubt the writer/s would have even played Fallout. FO3/4 would probably be much more their sort of thing.
Deep cuts.
Appropriate amount of the article on the front page boss.
Is No One Lives Forever a camp comedy style shooter?
Well, No One Lives Forever is more an immersive sim than a conventional FPS. So…sure, it’s probably camp, but it’s also not going for NEARLY as hyper masculine an audience, so the level of writing talent required is…lower?
Yeah, but it is very camp. It has over the top European villains, campy dialogue, organisation names that are puns and references to the plot, and you can literally throw banana peels to stop enemies. Its high camp.
I would say NOLF is an Over The Top, Loving Satire of some Cheesy source material.
Cheesy doesn’t equal camp, although they frequently get conflated. But there’s not really time on the internet to get deep into Susan Sontag and what camp is.
No One Lives Forever didn’t strike me as camp, so much as an homage to the Roger Moore era Bond Films -which did have camp, but are not on the same scale as, say, Flash Gordon. The game is funny, but it is serious -with all the required lampshading as discussed here.
Contract JACK, on the other hand, probably was going for total camp (with a villain called, what was it, Il Pazzo or something). And that killed the series.
But Moore Bond was camp. Jaws, Moonraker, one liners like “play it again sam” sarge JW, the flight lesson, its camp.
NOLF is OTT and satirises it by taking the camp a step further. Contract Jack (and NOLF 2 for that matter) have bigger problems-they’re not really funny and they’re not better games.
Jesus, that cutscene is bad. I enjoyed Bayonetta’s overly sexual and over-the-top cutscenes just fine but this is too much.
I followed the wikipedia link. I am incredibly glad that we’ve since invented the word “edgelord” and removed the need for that sort of silly rubbish to exist any more.
For my part, I followed the Wikipedia link for Pink Flamingos. I now regret the existence of language, for its potential use in describing Pink Flamingos.
Pink Flamingos: The only movie Roger Ebert ever refused to give a star rating to.
There were at least a couple of others, probably the last being The Human Centipede (interestingly he had “no rating” for “this movie is too weird for conventional ratings to make sense” vs. “Zero Stars” for “this movie is too offensive to deserve a rating”. The first Human Centipede was “No Rating” while the second was “Zero Stars”)
I thought that I regret, that humanity exists, after I found out about Pink Flamingos. But after watching re:view on it, I understand that it makes sense in the context of its time. Still, wouldn’t watch it though.
I dunno….horrible diarrhea ‘makes sense in the context of its time’. It can even be logically traced back to that dodgy takeaway I ordered a few years ago.
None of that changes the fact that it’s painful, watery – well, you get the idea.
(All that said, since no-one’s making me watch it…)
Though it’s not as common to see live-action Japanese television or film as it is anime, there’s plenty of that same tonal whiplash to be found across that media as well. I feel like Japanese entertainment relies far more heavily on balancing levity with the heavier narrative elements. So you can have your bloody murder story but occasionally put in goofy humor that seems out of place to a Western audience, because in Western bloody murder stories your humor is often sardonic in nature. While Western entertainment has plenty of stories that are both humorous and light-hearted with serious moments – the Marvel films are almost universally perfect at this balancing act – those films rarely hit some of the dark depths you might see a Japanese narrative go. Full Metal Alchemist is probably one of the better examples, what with the constant “Don’t call me chibi/mini!” cartoonish comedy side-by-side with “Oh by the way here’s the story of how a young boy literally lost his arm and a leg trying to adhere the soul of his brother to a suit of armor because said brother lost his whole body from the two of them trying to bring their mom back to life and instead the result was a grotesque pile of flesh and blood”.
…okay, the kid lost his leg to the mother and his arm to the brother.
Regardless, I had actually thought about this case of “tonal whiplash” while playing 428 Shibuya Scramble, a Japanese visual novel choose-your-own adventure thing but with photographs of live actors rather than anime drawings. It also has that element, where characters will be discussing super serious, and then suddenly an absurd comedic element snaps you out of it, almost as if to prevent things from getting too dark.
I’ve always found it an interesting aspect of Japanese story-telling. Rarely do you see stories express the same dynamic range of tone. For some, though, I know it puts them off of Japanese works since they don’t understand how you’re supposed to take it seriously when “they keep interrupting it with jokes”.
I’d argue that Resident Evil 4 does it, but in a way that seems to be taking itself seriously still. It’s not like how people view B-Movie camp these days, with things like “Sharknado” and all that. I think Resident Evil 4 is aware of what it is, but is still going to indulge in its cheesy characters, dialog, and story because that’s just how it is. Leon is like a toned down version of Dante from Devil May Cry, where his refusal to take the villains as seriously as they take themselves often puts them into a rage. The writing isn’t good (“Your right hand comes off?” is an awful response), but if you’ve watched B-movie camp that’s trying to be good and failing at it… well, isn’t that what B-movie camp is? It’s what I’ve always assumed, at least.
Then again, maybe there’s a difference between B-movie and B-movie camp, with the separation visible between Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2, where the latter decided to stop being serious 100% of the time and be a comedic horror (then there’s Army of Darkness, which is just plain comedy).
I mean, sure, the writing isn’t necessarily good, but that particular example is just Leon being bad at quips, which is an established trait of the character. It’s not the writer who fails to be clever, it’s the character.
I’m not even sure that example is even just Leon being bad at quips. I mean, biology and/or physics violating levels of body horror are…common…in Resident Evil. A hand actually coming off and moving around, like Thing from The Addams Family, is MILD by the standards of the franchise. Amazed it hasn’t actually happened, somehow.
I’ve always associated that kind of tonal whiplash to Hong Kong movies in particular. Scenes can shift in an instant from goofy pratfalling and head smacking (a la 3 Stooges) to a display of murderous rage with accompanying gunplay. This is a totally non-Hollywood approach to writing/directing/editing a movie.
Yakuza Zero does this tonal whiplash a lot, and it’s still works effortlessly somehow.
Must say, some anime I saw also using this tonal mishmash in great effect. I suspect, japanese people know some great secret ingredient, that opens this feat for them
Oh man, the Yakuza franchise as a whole is certainly a great example. One moment you’re doing some over-the-top 80’s rock karaoke, and the next you’re experiencing a completely straight-faced expression of a Yakuza Lieutenant’s philosophy before a boss fight.
And now I want to play the game again.
I’m also curious now what a Shamus write-up on a Yakuza game would be like. I don’t know if it’s his brand of action system, though (heck, I play a lot of Japanese action games these days and I’m not sure I’ve ever really been good at any of the combat systems). But hey! If anyone has Xbox Game Pass Yakuza 0 is “free” on there now (though dunno if it carries over to PC).
Zero is on Steam sales now, I think.
I’d certainly love to see Shamus’ impressions on this one
I recently watched the old TV series “John Woo’s Once a Thief” (mostly Canadian), and it does do a lot of things like that. The funniest scene was a martial arts fight scene interrupted by changing the music from a nearby stereo (due to another struggle) and having the combatants fight according to the music. It stops at one point on the Canadian national anthem, and they dutifully stop respectfully to listen to it. But there’s also a lot of gunplay, fights, and serious issues in it.
Probably the Western series that fits this best might be the original Twin Peaks (which I also recently watched), mixing very serious and dark issues with oddball humour, stories and characters.
Chibi Puck in the Berserk manga comes to mind as another example of that Japanese tonality difference in a different medium
There are some instances where it can work. The Metal Gear Solid games are a good example of generally-serious games where quite often they pull off ridiculous silliness out of the blue, and even some random 4th-wall breaking here and there. Despite that constant change of tone, this is one of the most popular franchises out there.
Sure, those aren’t technically “shooters”, but they’re certainly big-budget games aimed at western audiences (well, perhaps not directly “aimed”, but they sure as hell are incredibly popular here), and they can get pretty violent. Though you can argue they’re basically 3D anime.
In fact, I’d argue that “tonally changing” is a tone in and of itself. It might be hard to pull of, yes, but if done properly it can work perfectly fine. Granted, you have to be deliberately pursuing it out of a desire for that particular style, and not because you’re a chump who can’t decide or because your story is written in parts by different people with different ideas, which is probably what happened with this game.
Maybe all that tonal changes looks plausible in MGS, because its western culture portrayed through foreign perspective? Often people of non-western origin have quite a cheesy perception of western (American especially) culture, and so, they are sincere in its portrayal.
In my limited experience working with game developers, they tend to have a deep well of game experiences to draw upon. People who end up working in games, even if they happen to be working on mediocre games, don’t get there by mistake, and are regularly at least as obsessive and passionate about games as the average reader of this blog.
That certainly doesn’t prove that the writer was deliberately making a Fallout reference, but it seems very plausible to me that a writer snuck that reference in there and no one else noticed, so no one else commented, so that particular reference didn’t get design-by-committee’d into oblivion.
All that to say, I think when it comes to game development, deliberate reference to other games is usually a more likely explanation than coincidence is.
“But what do they eat?!” now becomes, “But what do they watch?!”
I bet the gizmo thing is a coincidence. The writers are Swedes and probably wrote the game in Swedish first.
Wait, really? You get through all this madness, doing the race, and the Tv show, and the bug planting, and then it just drops you in the dungeon with the tank you were doing all this to find? I’m surprised you weren’t more infuriated by that than anything else!
I think he’s lowered hs standards for this particular game. But also, delivery aside, it fits the gameplay and story requirements: the player is faced with a challenge (and introduced to a couple of new gameplay elements) – then after beating the challenges, they get the thing they were looking for.
It’s also a twist that has comedy potential, being dropped on the thing you’re trying to steal. Sounds like something that would happen in a Saints Row game.