Orcocracy [comrade/them]

Yes, it is certainly fair to take the reading that the point is to play the game by continually resisting the fascist options that are provided. However, I’m not sure if the “was it worth it” hollow victory screen at the very end forgives the many hours of fascist “hard times make strong men” scenarios that precede it. If anything, the “was it worth it” further underlines the “hardness” of those “hard choices” and therefore does not contest or critique the fascist frame. The fascist would proudly answer “yes” and the game would appear perfectly coherent to them.

It’s not that one needs to take a fascist reading of the game, but to borrow from Stuart Hall, the dominant reading of this game is clearly a fascist one. Yes, an antifascist reading is possible, but that reading is one built through a very careful process of negotiation with the text.

It’s a game that constantly gives you overwrought “tough choices” where the two options are either a) fascism or b) you are soft and naive and everyone will die.

Oh Nintendo already does make exploitative freemium games, but they (mostly) put that stuff on phones and not on Nintendo devices.

The original Game Boy weighs 220g (I’m not sure if that includes batteries or not), but the Switch Lite isn’t much more. It’s 275g with the battery included.

However, the original Switch is quite a bit heavier at 398g, the Switch 2 is 534g, and the Steam Deck is a whopping 640g. The new Xbox handheld looks like it will be quite a bit bigger than the Steam Deck and will probably be even worse to carry around. These devices simply aren’t suitable for kids, and some of them aren’t that easy to hold for adults either. This is a real shame and pushes kids further towards using phones that are filled with exploitative freemium games and social media slop.

Yeah, a mob with a guillotine has never achieved anything. Everyone knows that.

In a capitalist society we are constantly judging and being judged as having moral character based on our consumption. Pierre Bourdieu called this “distinction” and argued that the objects we buy and surround ourselves with represent “taste” that demonstrates and furthers class positioning in a capitalist society. Under capitalism, these objects carry great meaning and a person can communicate complex ideas and social information simply by how they hold a specific consumer good in their hand. Bourdieu argued that class struggle is also a “classification struggle”.

Doom is pretty retro for that setup. It could easily manage Half Life and Unreal, maybe even Quake 3.

Also the Washington Post actually pays its writers.

Considering YouTube live streams about games are usually filled with incels complaining about woke, I hope video game studios have a standard policy of ignoring them.

It’s the Steam fans I worry about. Sometimes they act like Steam is some sort of utopian open source project when it’s just another corporate platform that wants to lock them in.

Those big multibillion-dollar centralised data centres aren’t as reliable as a little shiny disc

Yeah if you’re really hardcore you use a trackball in one hand and a Wacom pen & tablet in the other, none of that fake controller or mouse and keyboard shit for casuals

That reads like AI slop

Astrobot!

The perfectly alienated and isolated liberal approach that changes nothing. Festooning a suburban house with solar panels is like washing your oversized pickup truck with those unbleached brown recycled paper towels.

However, advocating for vasectomies and such gestures towards eugenics and eco-fascism.

You’re right, the Steamdeck can’t even run Fortnite! The Nintendo Switch is a much more capable gaming tablet than the Steamdeck is, and it has a better game library.

Yeah the Steamdeck is a pretty ok gaming tablet

For that kind of money you could just get a Playstation

If you borrow a DVD from the library for free you don’t need to pay for whatever streaming service is holding that particular film hostage, if it’s even available at all. And if it’s a Blu-ray Disc it will have better picture quality than a compressed stream. Making copies is also very easy if you have a computer with a drive, and doesn’t require paying for a VPN to avoid facing the risks of online piracy.