Anyone still playing the Hitman games?

[Retinend]

I was down on the non-main missions before, but now I feel as if they are a mixed bag. Sometimes they do just feel throwaway, as if created with a randomizer ("kill [NPC] with [weapon] wearing [disguise]"). But at other times they feel cleverly crafted, with their own particular atmosphere and internal logic. I am thinking of the one I played last night: the New York escalation mission where you are dressed as the bunny-mask bank robber and you start in the car park. It was enormous fun, and it exploited the vault area of the New York map in a way that made it seem like something new, rather than something reused.

Chasing the IO dragon, I decided to buy Hitman: Blood Money for a tenner on Steam. It's definitely what I needed: new maps, rather than retreads of maps I've already played to death. The main gameplay elements are all there. I quite like how the "x-ray specs" aspect of the new games wasn't in this game. The x-ray specs in the modern generation of games are a huge help, but it is kind of overpowered, I now realize. It's a more immersive experience without.

Changing topic, is there a racist subtext to the training level of Blood Money? Maybe I've spent too long researching alt right memes, but Joseph Clarence and his black drug dealer cronies seemed dangerously close to the racist cliche of the black thug with his Jewish lawyer. I think they were going for "cartoonish", and they were playing with Hollywood stereotypes, but it made me slightly uncomfortable that in the mission where you are encouraged to play  freely with the most deadly game mechanics (headshots, human shields, garrotting, defenestrating, death by explosion etc.), the NPCs were designed to be a racially homogenous gang of black drug dealers. In contrast, in the next level, the voice actors are speaking Spanish in a way that seems to be going for tension and realism - and moreover, there's no question of you just butchering them all, never mind a voice in your ear telling you to do it... So... I dunno. It makes me understand why IO prefaces every boot-up of new Hitman with a message saying they are now a company with multicultural values.

[Pink Gregory]

Yeah that tutorial...woof.  Feels like a relic of the days of the 6/10 gangsta themed third person games on the original Xbox.

I heard someone on a podcast posit the theory that the unpleasantness of the people in the Hitman games is a reflection of how 47 sees the world as a remorseless genetically bred assassin but that's definitely a post-hoc justification.  Interesting to think about though.

[Noodle Lizard]

Changing topic, is there a racist subtext to the training level of Blood Money? Maybe I've spent too long researching alt right memes, but Joseph Clarence and his black drug dealer cronies seemed dangerously close to the racist cliche of the black thug with his Jewish lawyer. I think they were going for "cartoonish", and they were playing with Hollywood stereotypes, but it made me slightly uncomfortable that in the mission where you are encouraged to play  freely with the most deadly game mechanics (headshots, human shields, garrotting, defenestrating, death by explosion etc.), the NPCs were designed to be a racially homogenous gang of black drug dealers. In contrast, in the next level, the voice actors are speaking Spanish in a way that seems to be going for tension and realism - and moreover, there's no question of you just butchering them all, never mind a voice in your ear telling you to do it... So... I dunno. It makes me understand why IO prefaces every boot-up of new Hitman with a message saying they are now a company with multicultural values.

I never considered that (but I also wasn't really aware of that particular stereotype/trope). I feel like the targets are generally pretty equal opportunity, and the emphasis on not killing non-targets as well as the ever-present tint of comedy makes it feel sort of fine even when you're chucking an old woman off a balcony.

I think you're right, though, that they're probably a bit more careful about it all now after that whole Absolution/Sexy Nuns kerfuffle.

[H-O-W-L]

Changing topic, is there a racist subtext to the training level of Blood Money? Maybe I've spent too long researching alt right memes, but Joseph Clarence and his black drug dealer cronies seemed dangerously close to the racist cliche of the black thug with his Jewish lawyer. I think they were going for "cartoonish", and they were playing with Hollywood stereotypes, but it made me slightly uncomfortable that in the mission where you are encouraged to play  freely with the most deadly game mechanics (headshots, human shields, garrotting, defenestrating, death by explosion etc.), the NPCs were designed to be a racially homogenous gang of black drug dealers. In contrast, in the next level, the voice actors are speaking Spanish in a way that seems to be going for tension and realism - and moreover, there's no question of you just butchering them all, never mind a voice in your ear telling you to do it... So... I dunno. It makes me understand why IO prefaces every boot-up of new Hitman with a message saying they are now a company with multicultural values.

Every pre-2016 Hitman game is uncomfortable at best and racist/sexist at worst.

This only got worse with Absolution, to the point of Absolution's original designs intimating at the violent sexual death of an underage girl (no i shit you not) and the final product having several really horrible racial and offensive elements in a terrible attempt to be "GRINDHOUSE!!" (more like outhouse). The final game has a really awful subplot of systematic sexual assault and murder of strippers including a tasteless and gruesome topless and nearly-bottomless dead sex worker model with horrifically-well-rendered ligature marks and decomposition... that exists basically just as a distraction to scare some guards away. 

There was also the huge wrestler bodyguard that Dexter had (because he's huge and mexican, he must be a luchadore! despite him not wearing a mask and doing deathmaches...) who spoke only in fractured sentences that included "PENDEJO!" and was based on Danny Trejo without license. And a heinously offensive Jewish stereotype arms dealer NPC in one level that literally speaks the line "This could be better for us than this nine-eleven thing". I could dig up more but frankly I'd have to go play Absolution again and fuck that.

I wouldn't say the new 2016 games are the most socially progressive games ever but it really doesn't feel like any sort of offensive shitshow like some elements of the earlier ones do. And I say this while really liking the earlier ones (Contracts the most, and that one has probably the least racist stuff that I recall.)

[H-O-W-L]

I heard someone on a podcast posit the theory that the unpleasantness of the people in the Hitman games is a reflection of how 47 sees the world as a remorseless genetically bred assassin but that's definitely a post-hoc justification.  Interesting to think about though.

It is 100% canon in Contracts since that's all his flashbacks, and it's why the oversexualization of certain women in Contracts works, IMO, so well. When you come back to reality in the final mission, the women you see are significantly less sexualized and I think it shows that he's very sexually fucked up. His reaction to Mei Ling kissing him is also changed -- in his head-flashback in Contracts he's just sort of bemused, but in the original he's visibly disgusted and shudders afterward. Her cleavage is also a lot more prominent. There's a lot of stuff in Contracts that is completely unrealistic (laughing ghosts in a room a girl was murdered to death, a literal ghost, random occurrences that make no sense etc) that works in a similar tone to this.

 

hitman 3 spoilers

In his dreamscape in Hitman 3 he fantasizes/has nightmares about Diana and the Constant in a romantic relationship, and clearly considers this to be a betrayal of some kind, so he obviously has a fucked up internal reward structure around women, and Diana especially. I think it's no coincidence that in Blood Money there's also two female seducer-assassins that can instakill 47 in a cutscene, even if they are horribly objectified.

[close]

In the other games -- no it is just because it was for boobywank gamer boys.

[Kelvin]

I actually think the sex and violence is missing too much from the new games. For me a big appeal of the early entries was the sordid, grimy nastiness of the world you were passing through. Everyone was perverted, twisted, or damaged by the lives they led, everyone was on the make, nothing good could survive. And the look of the games was grittier, dirtier to go along with it. The series had a real aesthetic and mood, beyond the gameplay itself. 

I haven't played any of the games since Absolution (only just got a PC that can run them), but I find the look of the series so utterly anodyne now, by comparison. All that nastiness and grindhouse edge stripped out, and replaced with this banal Bond-theming and flat "realistic" environments. I don't doubt that the new games play well, but from what I've seen, a bit part of their identity has been lost or neutered.

[H-O-W-L]

I would agree that the newer games are not dark or moody enough, but I would also say that Abso went too far. The fact it sounds similar to "deso" doesn't do justice. Berlin in H3 is probably my favorite level thus far aesthetically because it almost gets back to that grimy horrorland that the series used to inhabit.

[Kelvin]

I would agree that the newer games are not dark or moody enough, but I would also say that Abso went too far.

Actually I was just about to post the same thing. Absolution's tone was juvenile, rather than edgy or dark, and the sexualisation went from appropriately sordid to teenage "boobywank" fantasies :)

I do think Absolution was the last time the series had the right overall "look" though. Even though lots of the plot, characters and dialogue were witless, the world and art design still had a "dirtiness" that seems completely absent from the playthroughs I've seen of the subsequent games. It just had a graininess I liked, even if the broader strokes fell short.   

[Kelvin]

I've posted this sketch before, but it's great:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-THi6dTSx4

A guy plays hitman, then finds himself living out the life of a barber. 

[H-O-W-L]

Doing non-standard shit alongside the objective is one of my favorite things in Hitman. Like luring the doughnut FBI agents with coins into the target's house in A New Life and assassinating the target without them noticing.

[Chairman Yang]

God, I love the Hitman games.

Who's that enormous bald bastard over there? Oh that's just Sandeep. You know, the normal barber?

[Chairman Yang]

I know that David Bateson thinks that 47 got too chatty in the new games but I think it's always funny to discover that Hitman's like... a concert pianist or has an encyclopedic knowledge of butterflies, because one time he needed to kill a guy.

[Retinend]

Doing non-standard shit alongside the objective is one of my favorite things in Hitman. Like luring the doughnut FBI agents with coins into the target's house in A New Life and assassinating the target without them noticing.

Yes. Some one my favourite experiences from the games like this have been:

1. again - Mumbai - being the barber. I shaved some people. Unless I am misremembering things, I believe that I was even told by Diana that someone was the Maelstrom but decided against it because the guy was too normal... which was prudent because then the real Maelstrom came in but he gave me such a rousing speech about choosing who it is one serves that I spared his life. After defeating the real villains, Vanya and Dawood, I was given the objective to kill "Wazir Kale." I was tricked into killing the man I had chosen to spare, the Maelstrom. Weird feel.

2. in Another Life, I started off by tracking the local political candidate and seeing the characters come out of their doors and hint at their various humours. Then you get bored and start to notice that every house is the same shape and size. It seems to be a bit of a copy paste job. But then, realizing that each house was cut off from its neighbours, I tracked my first target and stripped the house methodically of his guards, disposing of their bodies in various rooms. By the point it had come time to introduce my presence to Janus, he ran screaming around his empty house. He called for help in vain. No one heard him. Eventually he locked himself in his shed for safety. But I had a key. Dead. Then, because you know that every house has the same layout, the next target, Nolan Cassidy was toast: he came home and never knew what hit him.

3. End of an Era: in China, I had my first experience of suit-only, silent-assassin gameplay. When you restrict yourself like this, you end up perceiving the random objects in a room as key pieces of the level design puzzle for you to solve. You have to snap to kneel-height objects while the enemy's head is turning from north to south. Then you have to skirt around the edge of a room that you would normally just walk straight through in an appropriate disguise. Playing this way on a level like End of an Era was fascinating, because you really got time to overhear all the clever dialogue that explains the plot of the setting and targets without you needing to follow the linear path of the mission stories. It seems like this was what Blood Money was attempting to do, in a limited way (audio files take up a lot of room on a disc). By the time you get to the highest and lowest levels of the mission, where the targets potter around, you can satisfyingly pick up on their bossy and amoral character traits and care about putting an end to their rule. Very satisfying experience - suit only, silent assassin.

[Noodle Lizard]

I think I only assassinated the actual target in the Landslide version of Sapienza once. Every other time I've revisited, it's been entirely about finding amusing ways to dispatch the annoying singer.

[Cold Meat Platter]

I love that you can be getting the full "ALERT INTRUDER IN SECTOR B" activity but you've already changed out of the clothes they're searching for so there's just mad panic you can stroll or legitimately run through.

We're conditioned by other games to have to whip out the guns at that point but if you hold your nerve it can be a really satisfying 'victory snatched from the jaws of defeat' scenario.

[Noodle Lizard]

I love that you can be getting the full "ALERT INTRUDER IN SECTOR B" activity but you've already changed out of the clothes they're searching for so there's just mad activity you can stroll or legitimately run through.

We're conditioned by other games to have to whip out the guns at that point but if you hold your nerve it can be a really satisfying 'victory snatched from the jaws of defeat' scenario.

Yeah, the guard AI is really from a different planet. If you snipe someone from a mile away, they're somehow able to figure out exactly where the shot came from, exactly what the perpetrator must have looked like and will be running directly to you as soon as the shot is fired. On the other hand, you can brutally merk someone in plain sight, run into a nearby bathroom to change your clothes and they'll be utterly flummoxed when they follow you in there and find the same bald man with a barcode on the back of his head wearing a slightly different black suit.

I do wonder, though, if some of these breaks in realism might be a good thing. Not only for quality of gameplay, but for our own psyches. There's something slightly detached and farcical about it all that keeps it from feeling too grim. More like a slightly silly strategy game than a murder simulator.

[H-O-W-L]

Yeah, the guard AI is really from a different planet. If you snipe someone from a mile away, they're somehow able to figure out exactly where the shot came from, exactly what the perpetrator must have looked like and will be running directly to you as soon as the shot is fired.

The reason guard AI is so conditioned to instantly recognize shooters is unfortunately because speedrunners in the 2016 era would use gunshot distractions and leg-shots (shooting a guy in the leg to make him fall down and knock him out) to make missions trivial, and for some reason IOI decided to nerf this.

I love that you can be getting the full "ALERT INTRUDER IN SECTOR B" activity but you've already changed out of the clothes they're searching for so there's just mad panic you can stroll or legitimately run through.

We're conditioned by other games to have to whip out the guns at that point but if you hold your nerve it can be a really satisfying 'victory snatched from the jaws of defeat' scenario.

Did you know that if you end up disguised as a guard in these scenarios, civilians will run up to you to report the crime they just saw you doing? It's fantastic.

I had my first experience of suit-only, silent-assassin gameplay.

I got ahold of Hitman 3 on Steam (a very generous friend got it for me to spare my conscience) and I've been doing every map properly for the first time in SASO. It's a great way to do it if you're up to the task because you learn shitloads about the map and you end up bumbling into learning where things are.

Then it's great to do a messy run right after where you just run through punching people. :D

[Famous Mortimer]

Talking of Steam, the number of different purchase options feels like it's designed to trick people into paying for the same thing multiple times.

[H-O-W-L]

Talking of Steam, the number of different purchase options feels like it's designed to trick people into paying for the same thing multiple times.

Yes, this is one of the many reasons I think IOI are complete bastards. Especially since the Hitman 1/2 "expansion passes" are more expensive than the games themselves. You technically get all the content from them in H3 with said passes, but you don't get the actual games, which is deceptive and nasty as fuck.

[Cold Meat Platter]

Aaargh I just almost did Sapienza on Master difficulty (1 save only) but they sussed me on the way to the plane and shot me as I was holding the 'leave' button nyaargh

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Serves you right for not pressing the 'remain' button.

Yes, this is one of the many reasons I think IOI are complete bastards. Especially since the Hitman 1/2 "expansion passes" are more expensive than the games themselves. You technically get all the content from them in H3 with said passes, but you don't get the actual games, which is deceptive and nasty as fuck.

Is it just a coincidence that the baddies in guffy nerd manual Ready Player One were called IOI?

[Cold Meat Platter]

The only options were 'leave' and 'remoan'

[Cold Meat Platter]

Mea culpa, however, a scientist in a hazmat suit should not have had a shotgun on his back.

[Cold Meat Platter]

btw, if anyone wants a janky Russian WWII Hitman clone:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/9800/Death_to_Spies/

[beanheadmcginty]

Whenever I see IOI I get a bit peckish because it reminds me of looking down upon my dinner.

[Famous Mortimer]

Serves you right for not pressing the 'remain' button.
Is it just a coincidence that the baddies in guffy nerd manual Ready Player One were called IOI?

I would've guessed both places got it from the back of the stormtrooper outfit, but I just checked and that's OII. So I like your theory better.

[Pink Gregory]

So after not managing to get into Hitman 2016 on PC, I picked up the complete first season on Xbone for not very much; had a little check of the xbox backwards compatibility list and found that Hitman Trilogy HD (2, Contracts and Blood Money) is back compatible and fairly inexpensive, so got that too.

Quite excited, played about halfway through Blood Money on PC yeeeears ago but dropped it during the mission with Father Christmas?  Never quite managed to get back into it because I haven't had a desk since.  Hitman 2 I did finish, I remember wandering around in Moscow in an ushanka having no idea what to do and also pulling off that mission in which you assassinate two guys in a park flawlessly completely by accident.

[Mobius]

I tried to play Blood Money recently but I think I'd played too much modern Hitman, so it just felt a bit weird with the different controls and layout.

I'm still playing Hitmans occasionally but am just finding a lot of the challenges so arbitrary. Kill all targets with a fish and shit like that, just stupid. I know it's a silly game but I like some level of immersion. Kill 5 cocoa workers whilst disguised as a Scarecrow?! You're only meant to kill the target....

[Cold Meat Platter]

Well, that's kind of the point in 'challenges', isn't it, they're arbitrary? The main game rewards you for only killing the target. It's like an arcade mode.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I'm still playing Hitmans occasionally but am just finding a lot of the challenges so arbitrary. Kill all targets with a fish and shit like that, just stupid.

Ni!