Wingmen in WC: Prophecy

Everyone is entitled to have their opinion, of course. But if you really dislike them that much, just don't play them.
 
Personally I dislike it when games (or films, TV shows whatever) decide to stop taking themselves seriously and go the opposite route and just play everything for cheap, dumb laughs. Best example - the Command & Conquer/Red Alert series, the cutscenes became painful from Red Alert 2 onwards.

That's...kinda the point of RA2 though, it's supposed to be campy. It's part of the charm. I think RA2 did some really great things with their FMV - you only see the characters two or three times total for only seconds at a time but the over abundance of their personalities really makes it clear who they are supposed to be.
 
It made me so angry when the game about space cats bullying space birds in space stopped taking itself seriously.
 
"I can take you with one gun tied behind" in a thick country accent or when responding to a call for assistance, the happily yelled "This sounds like a job for....ME!"

I found most of the voices of these characters rather daft and irritating, especially the one who talked like Gomer Pyle ("Dey caaayn't stop mey!"). I doubt any fighter pilots in real life talk like this, even ones who come from the Deep South part of the USA, they're supposed to be educated officers, not redneck grunts.

Of course, it's been a while since I've been around some, but...

Military pilots are, for the most part, nuts. And a good number also have a little less decorum, both in the wardroom and, for a lesser extent, in-flight than you'd probably imagine. While, yes, they are educated and certainly disciplined, pilots also know how to cut loose and while I've never been around Army pilots, a good number of the Navy, Air Force and Marine pilots I've known are a bit crazy.

One of my squadron commanding officers in my early days (a Navy Commander who I'd privately nicknamed "Gallagher" because he looked just like him, save the long hair) was one of the craziest pilots I'd ever met in both personality and piloting skills. I'm thinking this is true because...well, inflight accidents or otherwise close calls happen and you never know when or where they'll strike. At one point during my deployment, he had to dodge fire from a Phalanx close-in weapons system cannon from our escorting destroyer, the USS Arleigh Burke, because they started to practice fire the cannon before all aircraft were clear. To get clear, he pulled barrel rolls...

...in an SH-60F helicopter, which was the first model of the Navy version of the Army Blackhawk. That particular skill came in handy from his being a test pilot for more than half his career...otherwise, that helo likely would have been shredded into a few pieces. He ended up ripping the Arleigh Burke's skipper a new one (I did the message draft and saw the P.C. version of what otherwise was a few choice words), but even in my squadron office he was kinda jovial about it. His copilot, however, had a little less color in his face for a few days after that while his two enlisted aircrew were grateful to be alive and amazed at the piloting skill, as neither knew a Seahawk could do what CDR Thompson did.

You never know what, when or where. And that's a large part of their mental compensation.
 
An interesting story! I'm wondering exactly what you mean by "crazy" but I suppose in their job it probably helps not to have too much fear.
 
That's...kinda the point of RA2 though, it's supposed to be campy. It's part of the charm. I think RA2 did some really great things with their FMV - you only see the characters two or three times total for only seconds at a time but the over abundance of their personalities really makes it clear who they are supposed to be.

Going on off a tangent here but of course I realise Red Alert 2 was trying to be campy, but deliberate, over-the-top campiness doesn't always work for me, the RA2 cutscenes said to me "we know our audience are 13 year old nerds, so we're not going to bother doing anything properly". The film Flash Gordon is incredibly camp and daft but it's still played more or less straight. And don't come back with "What about Brian Blessed's performance?" because he's like that in everything he's in.

It made me so angry when the game about space cats bullying space birds in space stopped taking itself seriously.

I thought my comment would be misread, let me put this way; Star Wars: A New Hope, a lot of cheesy elements but you still buy into it all because it never "winks to the audience".
 
Going on off a tangent here but of course I realise Red Alert 2 was trying to be campy, but deliberate, over-the-top campiness doesn't always work for me, the RA2 cutscenes said to me "we know our audience are 13 year old nerds, so we're not going to bother doing anything properly".

I don't think that was their intention with Red Alert 2 at all. You're making it sound like they didn't care, but I think the game universe speaks for itself - there is an incredible amount of story and characters revealed in RA2, and if they really didn't care and so just made it campy because every 13 year old would by it that material wouldn't have made it into the game.
 
I did think Tiberian Sun's cutscenes were a bit dull and dreary (yes I realise it's set in a decaying world), so I suppose they decided to take a different direction with RA2, I just think it went too much the other way. I found them a bit patronising. It's just an opinion.
 
(...)
On that note, are there ever any Terran casualty statistics for the Kilrathi war? I've seen some discussion about the Kilrathi side of things in relation to why it was so high, but I'm not sure I recall anything about Confed casualties (I guess I shouldn't say Terran since there are other non-humans serving with Confed?).

A bit late but the WCP guide says that 2.1 Trillions humans died. It doesn't specify whether they were all Confederation citizens or not. 7.1 Trillions Kilrathi died.
 
I don't think that was their intention with Red Alert 2 at all. You're making it sound like they didn't care, but I think the game universe speaks for itself - there is an incredible amount of story and characters revealed in RA2, and if they really didn't care and so just made it campy because every 13 year old would by it that material wouldn't have made it into the game.

Well, we should probably acknowledge that camp was a big part of what made those first two games great. From the joke TV channels to Kane chewing green-scenery to the fact that Red Alert actually opens with a goofy caricature of Albert Einstein murdering Hitler, the series was full of straight fun stuff.

The problem boils down to the stupidest decision they ever made about the IP--splitting it into two properties and letting one be deadly serious and having the other keep the comic elements.

For my part, I much prefer the increasing camp of the later Red Alerts to the damnable earnest seriousness of the Command and Conquer sequels. The fun got sucked out of the series and it became a weird action movie and then elaborate super-serious dedicated sequels to a weird action movies that *have* to be generating diminishing returns.

(Red Alert works in the other direction. I think most of what you're seeing with RA2 comes from trying to turn the characters from the first one into... characters... but there's certainly a deep dive into wholesale camp with Yuri's Revenge (*two* Tanyas!) and then you drown in Red Alert 3.)

Plus, wasn't it cool when they reveal that Kane was Stalin's advisor in RA and hint at there being some explanation as to how everything in the world came to be? They sure dropped that potato.
 
I didn't mind the separation of the serious Tiberium series vs the silliness of Red Alert. I still happily play both.

Refresh my memory, though: what do you mean by two Tanyas?
 
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