Sulphur on 17/6/2019 at 08:32
I hope so, too. I wouldn't expect it from Valve, though. :(
Back to the topic: I took a look at my Steam library, and there's a ton of games with no rating because they're no longer for sale. After that, I have one game that sits at the Mostly Negative side of the scale, and that's Stranded. I've had it for a while now, and this thread encouraged me to give it a gander.
And... eh. It's not bad. It's just very short, and a bit weird. You're a humanoid (female, as implied by the suit which is at first blush standard issue yet allows for some bouncing bazoonga-ige and is tailored for wide hips) in a crashed spaceship on a red planet, freshly woken up from a cryostasis pod. Around this point, it's apropos to call it out as a bit like a 90s Lucasarts game - say, The Dig - but minus a verb list. So you walk around, and that's when it becomes readily apparent that there's a few things about this.
One: the pathfinding is, let's say, special. Your character only walks horizontal or vertical paths, and every time you click the screen, she trudges over to somewhere in the vicinity of where you clicked (if it's traversable - the game's not very good at visually signposting where you can and can't walk), while the mouse cursor helpfully turns into a watch, indicating that you're going to have to wait until she arrives at the other side of the screen, about five seconds later.
Two: it's a game about reduction. That lack of verbs is by design: there is no dialogue, there isn't any real interaction. You walk around a handful screens, observe, find alien ruins and glyphs, but never touch anything except you or your spaceship, where you go back into cryo. You can click on yourself and see a holodisplay that projects glyphs in most places except one, but you can't interact with the display or do anything with the glyphs. Ever.
Meanwhile, there are sentient boulders walking around looking like they whapped over after Wander stuck his +1 sword of regret into their craniums in Shadow of the Colossus and are now consigned to an eternal rock purgatory. They don't try to talk to you. You don't try to talk to them. Later, on one screen, in the far distance, one of them throws itself into a lake. Presumably to become a non-sentient rock formation; the lake could well be this planet's version of Acheron. Your character does not react to this sight.
It's an odd feeling of powerlessness, one that could be very interesting if it's in service of a story. But there isn't one. You can do nothing except go back to cryo, and watch a few things change after inching across achingly empty interstitial screens (there's at least one or two bits of empty sand and vegetation to cross per actual interesting destination), but never anything that sends a cogent message. The game eventually ends after you sleep enough and walk around enough, and then something happens, but why it does remains unclear. It's all a bit muddled, seemingly for the sake of it. In the act of removing the verbs from the usual adventure game experience, the developer seems to have also removed the point.
From the game's store description: 'You wake from cryostasis to find your ship lying crippled on an uncharted planet; shards of platinum-iridium alloy puncture the shimmering alien sand, the wind passes quietly over dead hydrocolliders. It isn't known how long the ruined vessel has sat here, or even what caused the crash, but one thing is clear: Time is rapidly running out.'
The pedantic ass in me immediately gravitates towards a word: 'hydrocolliders'. So, you're colliding... water? I think that's usually called a river, my dude. Or someone peeing into one. There's something about that kind of pretentiousness that felt intimately familiar to me, so I dug a little deeper.
It turns out it's an art project by someone who made it when he was 18 or so. It's not bad, it just probably made more sense inside his head than it did to everyone else, which to be fair is something that tends to happen when you're developing your artistic voice at that age. (If I were being unkind, I'd say it's a sort of solipsism. If I were being a jerk, I'd describe it as the tendency to insert your head so far up your ass that you're essentially spelunking inside your own body. This is something which artists, again, usually grow out of.)
There is, however, some lovely music in there. I'd say try it out for that, at least.
Starker on 17/6/2019 at 08:58
A pun on hadron collider, perhaps?
Sulphur on 17/6/2019 at 09:03
Perhaps, but there's nothing in the game that has the attitude of satire or joke-yness to give it the benefit of a doubt. Within context, it's highly probable it's just a poorly judged word used as flavour text.
EvaUnit02 on 23/7/2019 at 23:53
Holy shit, this Avengers game looks terrible. The campaign looks like interactive movie bollocks, for basic bitch console gamers. Just a reminder that Deus Ex pt. 5 was cancelled in favour of this.
[video=youtube;U3YgXe7OlNo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3YgXe7OlNo[/video]
Quote Posted by Starker
Oh please, as if company executives care about social issues. If it's controversy, it sells. Look at GTA, etc. They absolutely love that stuff because it gets them headlines and it gets people talking about it. Look at the edgy Dead Space 2 commercials and the many many more examples of this.
In AAA games, selling on controversy only really holds true for shock value from violence/gore now, but don't worry that will moral police will come for that too within the next few years. You had reports of Mortal Kombat 11 developers supposedly "suffering PTSD" from having to watch research material and model all of the detailed gore, the usual suspects within the gaming media will use that as their attack vector.
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Also, anyone has a right to an opinion. The fact that you mischaracterise it as "pearl clutching" is very telling. I could make the same argument that you want to censor Mark Brown, but I won't, because frankly it's an idiotic argument. What actually happened with Mark Brown was that he wrote a reasoned article why he thinks the gory death scenes feel out of place in Tomb Rider and if the developers agreed with him, that's not censorship, that's listening to criticism.
They literally PATCHED THE GORE OUT OF THE FINISHED GAME. No amount of spin can deny reality, that's censorship.
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Also also, what the social injustice warriors are doing is not "using their own weapons against them", it's inventing a strawman to perpetually fight against, because it's the only way they can "win" and the only way they can protect their livelihood. Anyone even slightly progressive or critical of social issues becomes an SJW in their mind and then they lie, exaggerate, manufacture controversies, do whatever it takes to generate outrage and blow things way out of proportion, because it draws clicks from the gullible.
If you actually pay attention to the crazy shit which far left idealogues say on social media, it's hardly lies and exaggeration. The Boomers in power at companies still think that social media mobs are the voices of their audiences, not just vocal minorities who were probably never their customers to begin with.
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And what SIWs are incorrectly calling censorship is often actually people arguing for more diversity and better, more realistic portrayal of women and minorities. When someone says they are tired of gruff white dudes, they are not saying that gruff white dudes should be banned, they are saying that they are tired of seeing the same old cliche time and time again.
Japanese games get attacked on the regular. Eg Persona 5 Royal got announced around April, the new female party member got attacked because her costume exposed some thigh flesh by Tumblrite types. Jesus Christ, so many vocal far leftists are as prudish as old church ladies. (You don't see much discussion about Western AAA games any more because they bent the knee to far left activism years ago.)
Where have you been the last several years, living under a rock? It's not the 1980's/1990's any more. The leftists hold cultural power in most Western societies. R18 games get banned left and right from Steam every other week it seems. I've seen the receipts from the likes of ResetEra posters, a lot of them do want stuff which don't like to be censored out of existence.
Comicsgate is publishing indie books which crowdfund several $10,000's, $100,000's in some cases. Their opponents try to get their projects deplatformed, rather than compete on the open market. Richard C. Meyer wanted to sell his comic Jawbreakers in Local Comic Shops through Diamond distribution, Mark Waid tortiously interfered and got publisher Antarctic Press to pull out of the deal. Gaming journalist Chris Scullion tried to get Doug TenNapel fired from the dev team working on Intellivision's new Earthworm Jim game. This past month they tried to shut down a panel about crowdfunding comics happening at SDCC, just because Doug TenNapel was on it.
Feminists have killed employment opportunities for other women, eg dart girls, Formula 1 grid girls, booth babes. Don't even pretend that there aren't feminist activism which targets pornography.
Starker on 24/7/2019 at 01:18
If a developer changes their game in response to criticism, it's their prerogative. Mark Brown didn't force the developers to change their game. In saying that criticism is censorship, in effect, you are arguing that the Mass Effect devs changing the ending of Mass Effect 3 is censorship, that the devs making the corpse mechanic in Darkest Dungeon optional is censorship, etc. If you don't see how inane that is, I can't help you.
And the right wing reactionaries absolutely and demonstrably lie, exaggerate, and do whatever it takes to portray "the left" in the worst light possible and they strawman anyone who is critical of social issues as SJWs with a sinister agenda. This is how a few tweets from inconsequential people saying they don't like something in a game become HUGE OUTRAGE ON THE LEFT and THEY ARE TRYING TO CENSOR THE GAME. I have already shown you how these controversies are drummed up and manufactured by sites like One Angry Gamer.
As for the right wanting to ban content, it's not 80/90s I was talking about. The UK porn block was just a couple of years ago (and started to be enforced this year). The White House meeting I linked to was just last year.
There are more games with violent content and nudity than ever before and their content is more graphic than ever before. As the result of leftists holding cultural power in Western societies, whatever that means.
EvaUnit02 on 24/7/2019 at 02:08
Quote Posted by Starker
There are more games with violent content and nudity than ever before and their content is more graphic than ever before. As the result of leftists holding cultural power in Western societies, whatever that means.
An excess of violence in Western AAA games, certainly. Far left activists will come for violence in the coming years. The old anti-violence tradcon/Christian Justice Warrior slain enemies of the past are returning too, since they've seen the Western AAA industry bend the knee to Sarkeesians of the world. Jack Thompon has already climbed out of whatever hole he was hiding in.
Nudity though? An increased proliferation of schlongs, maybe. There is a very obvious war on femininity in mainstream AAA popular entertainment (eg Mass Effect Andromeda vs. past installments, (
https://youtu.be/iOdrgDVANEM) Carol Danvers gradually becoming less feminine with each failed comics reboot), but keep telling yourself that it's all conspiracy theories, buddy. The AAA exception to rule that I can think of is probably CD Projekt RED works (and whatever Wolfenstein 2 was), but there are signs that they maybe falling in line with everybody else. We've already seen them (
https://www.oneangrygamer.net/2019/06/gwent-censors-whoreson-junior-card/87696/) censor a Gwent card very recently. It could be a change for the Chinese market, it could also very well be because Sarkeesian sperged about TW3 Whoreson quest in a recent podcast like the article suggests. Something like Cyberpunk 2077 is too far along to see too significant alterations, the next BIG game that they do will be the litmus test.
Starker on 24/7/2019 at 02:12
Making up imaginary enemies coming to take away your video games doesn't make it so. There are actual hardcore porn games on Steam. Shows like Game of Thrones are chock full of graphic nudity.
EvaUnit02 on 24/7/2019 at 02:20
Quote Posted by Starker
Making up imaginary enemies coming to take away your video games doesn't make it so. There are actual hardcore porn games on Steam. Shows like Game of Thrones are chock full of graphic nudity.
Now name some examples which aren't indie, Japanese indie, or Western AAAs well in development before 2014.
Did you fail to notice that I was talking about Western AAA industry specifically?
EDIT: I loved how you had to truck in an example from outside of gaming. Oh and Game of Thrones toned down the occurences of female nudity for key characters like Daenarys. It went literal years between Danny's nude appearances, i.e. when she burnt the Dothraki Karls to death, which was in S6.
Starker on 24/7/2019 at 02:29
Remember Mass Effect and the controversy about its sex scenes? Was it the far left activists who made the stink about it?
Had to truck in an example from outside gaming? Says someone who just brought up comics in the previous post.
EvaUnit02 on 24/7/2019 at 02:38
Quote Posted by Starker
Remember Mass Effect and the controversy about its sex scenes? Was it the far left activists who made the stink about it?
Nice Pre-Obama example, buddy. The bending of the knee to far left PC/outrage culture didn't really go into high gear until well into the 2010s.
Again, name some examples with sexualised female nudity which aren't indie, Japanese indie, or Western AAAs well in development before 2014.
EDIT:
Quote Posted by Starker
Had to truck in an example from outside gaming? Says someone who just brought up comics in the previous post.
That discussion point then was regarding wider cultural shifts, this is one specifically about Western AAA gaming.