Game musings and news

[Mothra]

Fucking

MARCH 20, 2020

THAT'S LIKE A YEAR AWAY

[beatbandito]

They were disappointed they missed my birthday this year so decided just to wait until the next one.

In further news, I can't remember the last time I thought about a physical collector's edition.

[Blossom]

Cyberpunk 2077: bad gameplay, pretty racist.

Also, like I've been saying since the announcement, incredibly transphobic. Like, viciously so.
Linked because this is borderline NSFW! Despite being on an nVidia press site and shit! Trans bodies aren't real and don't count.

Of course, they claim the woman with the massive erect dick in the soda ad saying "Mix it up!" is commentary.

[Mongrel]

CD Projekt Red have always been very, very white. You'd like to imagine that in our modern world, an international game company might transcend its local roots - in this case eastern european, deeply conservatively catholic, and lily-ass-white - but sadly that sure ain't the case this time.

In any case, I don't think anyone who'd ever heard of The Witcher series, let alone played it, would imagine the treatment of sexual topics in a CD PR game to be anything but juvenile.

it IS disappointing that they're not even seeming to bother with the transhumanist aspects of Cyberpunk though. You'd think they'd at least get that.

[Blossom]

Of course, there is a difference between "We, the devs, are Polish" and "We're taking what was a white gang in the Cyberpunk 2020 source material and turning them into hyperviolent Haitians so you'll have more black people to gun down in droves".

[Mongrel]

Of course, there is a difference between "We, the devs, are Polish" and "We're taking what was a white gang in the Cyberpunk 2020 source material and turning them into hyperviolent Haitians so you'll have more black people to gun down in droves".

Yep.

That's why I brought up CD PR's own record. The Witcher series is not known for being racially inclusive (or even for having non-whites *anywhere*) or sensitive to gender, it's known for Geralt fucking Yennefer on a unicorn, because hahahaha amirite guys?

It's also a series of great games, but hey, it seems like Cyberpunk 2077 is also going to screw the pooch on that count.

[Friday]

I just don't understand how you could put a chick with a MASSIVE ERECT dick on an ad poster and think it was anything other than awful.

Like, imagine that ad poster was a black guy holding a watermelon and the soda is watermelon flavored. Then someone confronts you about it and you're like "actually it's commentary."

[beatbandito]

Nintendo Clarifies there's no character customization in Fire Emblem: Three Houses, just M/F. And there goes almost all of my interest.

[Mongrel]

This is great.

Super Mario Battle Royale lives on as DCMA Royale

DMCA Royale now involves the characters Infringio and his brother, Copyright Infringio. All of the assets have been changed to look like a knock-off someone’s grandmother bought from a nice man at the flea market.

Version 2.0.0 was “patched” yesterday (with a one-word patch note: “Fuck”)

[Newbie]

Despite being really excited to play the just-released Mario Maker 2, and despite still playing WoW on a daily basis (which was just rewarded with the release of the 8.2 patch), the game I am spending most of the time thinking about and trying to get people to play is THE OUTER WILDS. It has been a difficult subject to broach, though, and the Errant SIgnal video that just came out does a good job explaining both why that should be the case, and why I love this game so much.

(But seriously, if you think there's a chance you might play this without further convincing, go do so, as I haven't been this overawed by a game's premise and execution since the original Portal.)

[Mongrel]

It's clearly a very different game, but I'm getting some good Star Control vibes off that.

[beatbandito]

Outer Wilds definitely screams that there is some kind of big moral or thematic draw, but I've been watching a lot of gameplay that never seems to find it.

I'm always down for a game that actually draws me in with the story. But, like Pathologic 2, it seems like I'm going to walk(jet) around a very atmospheric world(space) for an hour or so, get frustrated that I don't feel any closer to any understanding, and get bored.

[Mongrel]

Yeah, sometimes the point of having the game come to you a bit is not to make it easy, but to make it a viable way to pass the time for more players. It's tough to strike a balance between catering to people who want to be full-on Inspector Detector and not have their hands held, versus those who just want to relax and enjoy a story.

[beatbandito]

I should also note that Outer Wilds does have a constant mechanic of "3D Lunar Lander" with some interesting designs based around it. So it's not just a pure walker.

I'dunno I guess I'm just being fussy. The last time I really enjoyed a single player gaming experience was Undertale and I found out about that because Zara and Leeham were both in #FF the day after it dropped like "this is a videogame that everyone needs to play", and I wish all great media was that easy.

[Mongrel]

Yeah, I mean I could easily see myself ending up in the same place, of not enjoying not getting anywhere and having any "epiphanies" be only brief moments of relief in a long streak of frustration than any sort of fun, such that I just end up looking up answers.

But that's because I'm dumb and am usually stumped easily. :B

[Newbie]

For me, there's basically two things that keep me playing and make me want to watch other people experience this.

First, there's the sheer awe of this planetary sandbox and its clockwork mechanisms. There's a museum in the starting area that kind of teases the kind of things you'll be encountering as you explore--orbital physics, artificially modified gravity, "macroscopic quantum objects" that move to one of several random locations any time you're not looking at them, etc. All of this is interesting enough, but it really pales compared to the Total Perspective Vortex-level of dread I experienced the first time I felt the microgravity of a comet threaten to leave me hanging in space as it (and my ship!!) continued its orbit to the far side of the solar system, or the deep thalassophobic chills I get every time I slip beneath the surface of the oceanic planet. One solar system has no business having as many fascinating astral phenomena as this one has.

The other thing I'm loving, though, is that this game is a power fantasy, in which your power is the ability to investigate and understand everything. This isn't like No Man's Sky where they just generated a ton of random Spore creatures and your "exploration" consists of sticking your name on as many as possible; this star system has a history which is culminating in real time, and you immediately have all the tools you will need to understand any aspect of that history. It's just a matter of using your Rumors log to see which threads you still need to yank on. It's Majora's Mask in which almost all the NPCs are dead, but retracing their steps is complicated by the fact that they were hopping around like Billy from Family Circus in some kind of Rube Goldbergian contraption built out of planets.

Seriously, this game barely has puzzles. It might be more accurate to say it has archaeology on a schedule.

[beatbandito]

Mechwarrior 5 Pushed to December. Oh, and it's an Epic Exclusive now.

I don't WANT to dislike the Epic store. I like the idea of more going to the game makers. But could they once have one of these reveals not be last-minute and with shitty accompaniment?

[Thad]

I wish Epic well and I hope their efforts result in developers (not just publishers but the talent) getting more money.

And if they start selling games that will run on my operating system, I might buy some.

[Niku]

FUCKIN PIP PIP CHRIST GALARIAN WHEEZING GETS STOVEPIPE CHIMNEY HATS AND SMOG BEARDS GAME OF THE CENTURY

[nosimpleway]

why does Galarian Zigzagoon have an ahegao face

no one can answer this for me