This is what happens when woke DEI starts pushing modern ‘beauty’ agendas in video games.

They’re afraid of portraying the male ideal of a square jaw.

And a square head.

And a square haircut.

And square eyebrows.

And square hands.

And bad jewelery.

I played some of the Resident Evil remakes recently (spooky season) and gameplay-wise it basically reminds me of 2, which is the one I liked the most by far anyway. But then you have much richer storytelling, really confident deep worldbuillding, and just an amazing presentation all layered on top. It’s definitely a game and story that’s well honed to my vibes though (meta Stephen King stuff, Twin Peaks, XFiles, folk horror etc)

I didn’t mean to imply you did so apologies if that’s how it came off. I just thought it was worth saying for other non-anime people that I was exactly not the target audience and yet I didn’t find it alienating at all.

I’m really really enjoying it. Somehow it manages to be both a good game and better at being kind of a prestige TV show than most actual prestige TV shows.

They are a good deal of fun if you like anime high school tropes.

That’s fair but for the record I’m old and very much not an anime watcher of any kind, and playing Persona 5 for the first time absolutely hooked me despite it’s occasional anime-ness. I’ve played 3 & 4 now and I think they’re a bit more tropey maybe (I’m not expert, going on vibes)? I felt like the classic good-hearted teenage rebellion in an uptight country that dismisses it’s young people themes in 5 were enough for it to break out of what I expected it to be a bit more and get it’s hooks in me narratively.

I’m not an expert, I’ve just seen them live quite a few years ago and have liked bits and pieces over the years. They’re not a go to band for me (I like my punk more hardcore basically - Bad Breeding would be my main suggestion of actual ideological leftist contemporary UK punk) and they vary quite a bit.

The first couple of records are a bit different from their early EPs and two of the band quit a few years ago and the newer stuff from the duo is slightly different again. I’d just listen to a smattering of stuff on YouTube or whatever and see what and how much of it you like.

Verified banger.

Kid Kapichi are pretty good live and have some other decent tunes in a similar vein. Zombie Nation is good and treads a lot of the same territory, but with a more upbeat two-tone musical influence and a pretty great guest appearance by Suggs of Madness fame.

They also did a horrifically cringey pro-EU tune (Can EU hear me?) and can be very lib, so… swings and roundabouts.

Fortnite is an absurdly big platform now. I have it installed for playing with younger family members sometimes and it’s now multiple full games (a huge Rock Band clone with hundreds of songs, a full racing game, the original wave-based game, the main battle royale), over dozen game modes just by the developers a lot of which have their own maps weapons and more, thousands and thousands of skins and accessories and live service / shop shit, and then on top of all that there’s maybe tens of thousands of other games built in their engine as it’s become a huge garbage pile of user generated content games to rival Roblox. Throw in localisation, sound for all that, and stuff that doesn’t even get used all the time like locations and designs for live events and concerts and it’s an absurd amount of stuff. I’d argue a lot of it is junk, but it’s kind of crazy how much stuff Fortnite ‘is’ now.

I finally started Alan Wake 2 and wow is the style and presentation of it impressive. I’m only a couple of hours in, and in some ways it feels quite retro (although that seems like it’s kind of the point too), but it’s really effective - it’s style, it’s atmosphere, even it’s jump scares etc. The character writing so far is really solid too. Good TV level solid rather than just video game good. I’m really looking forward to playing more.

I haven’t played much as I’ve been pretty hungover from a friend’s birthday, but I played about an hour of State of Decay 2 which is my go-to brain off / audiobook comfort game basically.

I might start Alan Wake 2 tonight if I’m not too tired. I’m excited to start it but don’t want to if I’m not in the mood.

Greta Thurnberg meets PM Theresa May to discuss Britain’s climate goals. - Feb 4th 2019

So much of the ‘game design’ for modern live service games is less like game design and more like marketing campaign design.

Reveals, content drops, surprise reveals, ongoing narrative, roadmaps, engagement drivers etc is much more akin to building sales funnels and advertising strategy, never mind monetisation strategies.

And the secret to successful marketing is that you need to start with a product that a) people want and b) doesn’t suck. Marketing companies like to complicate it, because they get paid for their failures too, but that’s the core of it.

So you can take $100m, five years, and a thousand devs/artists/sound people/writers etc but if 80% of that time and money and effort is spent in pursuit of the sales funnel/advertising strategy type stuff it’s gonna take a miracle for you to come up with something more fun and organically engaging than a far smaller project where that was the primary, or perhaps only, goal.

These are fair points, although just on the last one (working out what to do in bosses) that got less punishing some time after launch when they allowed for the option not to have things kill you, so you can focus on solutions and atmosphere and general creepy vibes. Not a perfect solution, but useful if that becomes an issue for players.

It’s a bit older, but I thought Soma was fantastic.

I agree and I think that’s the most likely outcome. I just was continuing on from the previous comments that if there’s a cultural control over profit aspect to this as there has been in some of the other media spaces (social, news) it’d seem an obvious target. Generally though, especially with the majority coming from the Saudi investment fund, I think the motive is just just profitable assets and more soft power in sports.

Agreed. I still wasn’t convinced we’d actually see a new proper Mass Effect, never mind yet another Dragon Age, even before this rumor and then confirmation of a buyout.

But yeah, the Sims seems like the obvious target if they were gonna try and meddle in studio culture and go after ‘woke’ output. Maxis has rightly taken some criticisms for moving too slow on representation issues in the past but they’re way beyond most big studios on inclusion when it comes to race, gender, trans-inclusivity, and increasingly differently abled and medical representation. A lot of the vibe of the studio and game is also extremely utopian-corporate, ultra-tolerance, progressive-lib in a way that’s probably a bigger red cape for the de-woke-business types than even something/somewhere actually more leftist.

Honestly, despite having played the original two back in the day when they were new, this new one is how I’m going to picture them going forwards. Not just because I never liked tank controls, but because it feels like such a natural evolution, like the way the game would have been of they had the tech at the time.

I’m kind of amazed at how good it looks too. There’s nothing actually very flashy about it and obviously it’s a very ‘last gen’ game but the smaller scope and really careful, subtle detail to the environments really sells it. Early on in the sewers I was looking around randomly after realising I’d been so focused on the water (for obvious reasons) that I hadn’t really looked up, and where there was a little industrial light there were maybe four or five little moths just fluttering around each other, crowding it. The attention to detail like that, somewhere 99% of people will never look, is just great.

The randomiser thing does sound cool and I could perhaps see myself using it in the further future, but I doubt I’ll be jumping in for another run once I’m done any time soon. One of the things I’m really enjoying about it is playing a bigger budget game that is a much tighter, busy parent friendly experience and I’ll actually probably finish the same week or two that I start it.

There’s so few of those these days. Yet the weird thing about this is that I always think I’ve been playing for longer than I have. Not in a bad way, but in an engrossed kind of way. Each time I think, oops I’ve been doing this forever I bet it’s after midnight already, I find a typewriter to save and discover I’ve only been playing for an hour instead of the two or three I’ve assumed. I’m not sure whether it’s an engrossing atmosphere thing, a pacing thing, the steady but simple pace of progress or what. It’s a strange sensation but very liberating when you’re old and busy.

I’ve had some time off this week and whether it’s just the spooky season looming or the fact that I never played it when picking it up cheap years ago, I’ve been playing through Resident Evil 2 Remake and really enjoying it. Admittedly I’m playing on a low enough difficulty to not worry too much about saves, ammo conservation etc, but that’s letting me just soak up the atmosphere, small details, and ghost-train vibes of it when it does actually manage to surprise or challenge me. It’s a great modern remake of a classic that I almost have more nostalgia than actual memory of at this point.

On the other end of the scale, I’ve been playing a bit of the new Skate with extended younger family members online. That core trick and control system that Skate always had is still really good and just skating around chatting (or occasionally listening to a podcast) until you find an interesting spot and then trying again and again to try and do a cool thing there or compete for the best line is still great and genuinely reminds me of what little skateboarding in my more youthful days.

The problem is everything else. It’s riddled with AI garbage from board designs, to writing, to voiceovers, to dozens of “songs” all just credited to Universal Music Co instead of an artist amongst the actually otherwise pretty varied and good but much shorter soundtrack. The whole vibe is bland, corporate, and completely fucking souless. The new Stunt challenges built around ragdoll physics are obviously supposed to be a slightly silly streamer hook, but they still suck and are incredibly dull. It feels very feature incomplete too (it’s Early Access but what does that even mean for a free live service game that already has founders packs and paid shops and live seasons?) even as a multiplayer sandbox too with the few things like co-op challenges that are in the game poorly implemented.

It’s definitely a win for those campaigners/unions/worker groups, and a blow to Israel, but it’s also worth mentioning that it’s a bit of a fudge from Microsoft so let’s not give them too much credit.

They’re pulling data hosting from Unit8200, which is the secretive military data unit that was storing and surveilling every phone call in Gaza. But it’s also a massive tech incubator so a lot of Israeli spy/digital genocide tech is privatised through Unit8200 linked companies, which Microsoft will undoubtedly still support.

Pinky, the little asteroids, when my partner would do the grunt during Pong.