Real-world concerns have shifted its depictions of elite police officers operating at their peak to parallels with incidents where people in those very positions have reacted wrongly, with tragic results-and they go beyond the names that make the international nightly news. And for some, it won't be a comfortable game to play, for all of its mechanical triumphs. There are some moments in SWAT 4 that cut a little too close to the bone, in light of what's played out in the very-real news in the years between release and revival. There are scenes of pepper-spraying hostages who won't assume a position, and the bleak routine of seeing a squad-mate shouting at a corpse to surrender. There are some moments in SWAT 4 that cut a little too close to the bone, and for some, it won't be a comfortable game to play. They'd received misinformation that Peters had just shot his roommate. "Being Swatted" has also found a sinister gaming relevance in recent years. While the FBI has used the term to refer to the hoax calling of a SWAT team, or at least a police response unit, on an address where there's zero cause for alarm since 2008, in 2014 a developer of Destiny had police show up at his house as the result of a call claiming that there was a hostage situation. There was not. In 2015 The New York Times ran an article outlining how Swatting had become a real concern for streaming gamers, focusing on Counter-Strike streamer Joshua Peters' live interruption by a wrongly called SWAT team, who initially make him and his family lie on the ground, at gunpoint. Many others have followed in its wake, but none of them have nailed that same feeling of actually being the police quite like this. While it's far from the first police procedural game, itself a part of the long-running Police Quest series (dating back to 1987's In Pursuit of the Death Angel), I still regard SWAT 4 as a zenith for the, I suppose, sub-genre within which it sits. The task ahead of them: resolution of a series of dangerous situations, with the minimum loss of life. SWAT 4 casts the player as the tip of the spear held by the longest arm of the law. SWAT 4's digital re-release, appearing on GOG.com on January 24th after years spent AWOL in the gaming ether (aka restricted to those with the original disc from 2005), has come at a perfect time to topple the infallible protagonist so popular in the current FPS climate. Titanfall 2 puts you in command of a colossal mech, while Doom invites you to tear off a demon's arm and beat him to death with it. Many games are designed to make the player feel powerful.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |