The quality of leadership. In a recent speech given by the prime minister of the united kingdom she said the following, “When the global rules and standards that keep us safe come under threat we must take a stand and defend them,” all the while ignoring the legislative and international bodies that set those standards to begin with. Leadership so it would seem is not a clear cut thing. You either run out of things to say quickly or keep speaking long enough to see yourself referencing the dark knight.
What does this have to do with a video game review? I hear you ask. Well before the thermonuclear biological gas attack turns our fused flesh into the a hybrid eldritch abomination i figured i should get around to talking about the best game. Mount and blade: warband is a cultural zenith towering over swaths of mediocrity and filth that make up most video games. It is said that ninety percent of an medium is trash, if that is so then it is the one percent that uses an offshore hedge fund to dodge tax while bloating the price of pharmaceuticals to justify it’s ownership of resources far beyond its own need or want. bit of a mixed metaphor there.
You play as a wanderlust stricken merchant taking up arms to form your own warband and ascend to the kingship of swadia. Alternatively you could play as number of other people, with different goals working for a other nations but then again why would you? swadian cavalry will make their enemies eat shit as they temple their skulls into their equine companions leavings. They are death on the battlefield.
The game cycles between you moving about the a wide expansive world map, and the battlefield evercetions that take place along the way. The former involves: doing business, talking to people who want you to do busy work for them so you can plough their daughters, like the raiders do to the fiefdoms that you so sorely covert. Yeah that does sound problematic but i’ll come back to that point…
Right away. The game is patriarchal, as was medieval Europe. You can play as a women and at once you’ll be sneered at, denied ownership of land and held to higher standards than your contemporaries. The game’s world is unabashedly sexist towards you, trying to push you into marriage in order to gain land or favour in court, the achievements conversely are often exclusive to a female character incentivizing play. This game is one of the first that made me truly empathise with the world's own social injustice as i knew none of this going in and learnt gradually through play that everyone only valued me based on my cooter’s potential to reinforce blood ties.
Right, i was going to talk about the battles, this isn’t some total war nonsense where you direct the battle from on high, you’re on the ground often leading the charge from horseback while shouting orders and trying not to gain a new orifice at the hands of an enemy polearm. Depending on how you level your character up these engagements can feel very different, i’ve been a charismatic stud in gleaming silver armour having to dodge for my life while my forces do all the heavy lifting. in contract, i’ve been a something akin to a soviet T-26 tank cloaked in black steel and with glowing red eyes as i coat my hands crimson, all the while a couple of peasants chip at the broken remains of those i left behind.
As you level up and gain reputation working for factions you’ll get invited to join wars and formalise your relationship a faction. This means besieging towns, forts and going to lord Harlus’ mid-campaign feasts. Half through a siege to retake the town of Dhrim our wise and noble butterlord decided his 9-5 was a grind and threw a huge ass party with everyone standing around talking about the quality of his butter. The town remains lost to those nordic hooligans.
Once you’ve realised that swadia is the best faction or alternatively succumb to a brain tumour that will tell you something different it’s time to jump onto the mount and blade subreddit and get to shitposting about what trash all the other factions are. This isn’t part of the game per se but does help me to forget the faces of those i’ve killed as their screams haunt my dreams and leave me waking, drenched in my own sweat.
So now you’re a big man in court, you’ve got a swagger and room for a bigger army. Time to INVEST. Buy productive enterprises across the land for weekly dollar payouts, get awarded fiefdoms and forts for your service and start making mad bank, who cares if those peasants are starving you need a new pair of boots and quality cobblers don’t come cheap in an agrarian economy. You can go to tournaments in the hopes of wooing fair maidens only to get knocked out in the first round when they give you wooden javelins to throw against a bunch of angry axe wielding psychopaths.
Best of all you can make friends, something rarely done irl. named NPC’s who you can level up and fill vital role in your party like a doctor or siege engineer. Jeremus is one such man, he comes to you as a simple mender of wounds but underneath his a fearless beast of the battlefield charging down walls of cavillarly with little more than a stick, he gets knocked out a lot but it’s fun to watch. When it comes to defending his fellow man on or off the battlefield jeremus is a true leader, he has good judgement, noble grace and valor outshine us all. So if you play mount and blade, ask yourself what would Jeremus do? Moverover if you are leading a developed western country faced with pressure from your allies to sip the missile strike kool aid, ask yourself twice: what would Jeremus do?
The game has lot and lots of horses, it's even in the title… 10/10 and yes the graphics do look like ass.
No comments:
Post a Comment