One other side point that came to mind after the main post.
We’re so conditioned to think realistic violence in games is fine, but realistic sex in games is “wrong” or “sad”. But honestly, I realized I played through 3+ games without doing any violence* and had a blast, and that was actually really refreshing.
We’re so conditioned to think realistic violence in games is fine, but realistic sex in games is “wrong” or “sad”.
Not just in games. In all media. You bring to mind a great quote from George R. R. Martin.
“I can describe an axe entering a human skull in great explicit detail and no one will blink twice at it. I provide a similar description, just as detailed, of a penis entering a vagina, and I get letters about it and people swearing off. To my mind this is kind of frustrating, it’s madness. Ultimately, in the history of [the] world, penises entering vaginas have given a lot of people a lot of pleasure; axes entering skulls, well, not so much.”
Not just sex; dancing, music, poetry, novels, games, decorations. Anything which takes joy in life and expression is forbidden.
Suffering while alive is seen as the proper punishment for being born human - seeing people and nature as beautiful and divine is legitimately blasphemy to these people.
I remember a quote from a famous porn actor “nacho vidal”.
“I’d rather have my kids playing with “fake plastic penises” around the house than playing with fake plastic firearms.”
I’m not comfortable with the idea of kids playing with sexual toys. But it makes me feel something weird that I’m not more weirded out by kids playing to kill with fake guns.
And this isn’t just the lead and the love interest: supporting characters look this way too, and even villains (frequently clad in monstrous makeup) are still played by conventionally attractive performers. Even background extras are good-looking, or at least inoffensively bland. No one is ugly. No one is really fat. Everyone is beautiful.
Heh, this reminds me of this scene in Last Action Hero (Just watch until 1:34 or so for the scene I’m referring to.
Honestly though, I think this might be starting to change. Looking at shows like Resident Alien and Wheel of Time, for example, there are plenty of casting choices that go against that trend. Now, I’m not saying anyone in these shows is ugly or anything like that, but there are a lot of folks being cast who are not “classic Hollywood pretty” and it’s very nice to see. I like seeing people playing the everyday Joe art who actually looks like an everyday Joe. It really breaks immersion for me when the “ugly girl” part is played by someone who is beautiful dressed in a frumpy outfit.
Yeah, usually the stars are classically attractive still, but there’s a lot more space for other people in other roles. I think comedy in particular has a lot of stars who aren’t incredibly hot.
However, probably a lot of people who are getting jobs as extras are trying to make their way in the industry. The industry, being dominated by attractive people, attracts attractive people. Ugly people fear they wouldn’t succeed, so it creates a selection bias.
Omg what an utter dogshit of an article this is. I bet a fat person expecting unnecessary sex scenes in action movies wrote it. Like go watch some BBW porn you whale.
I didn’t expect a media critique article to make it click why I don’t find “ideal” body types half as attractive as a chick with a realistic belly (of any size sans starvation) and a flirtatious smile.
But yeah, media and culture have become largely sterilized in regards to sex.
well tbf one of the detailed sex scenes (in the book) is between a 30 yrs old khal drogo with a 13 year old daenerys targaryen, and it’s being depicted as a good thing, he’s the first guy that cares about her
Leading up to the release of Cyberpunk 2077 a relatively innocent post about whether players would be able to romance anyone and sleep with them. The absolute mockery and scorn OP received was shameful. It really struck me because it was so clear how we’ve been conditioned to reject sexuality while at the same time being ultra-desensitized to violence.
What I do recall was one guy asking very specific questions about how much we would be able to customize genitals, and whether sex would be fully interactive with visuals of full penetration.
And while none of those things are wrong per se, the general vibe of asking about all of those things was very weird and pervy.
Hm maybe my memory of the post is fuzzy but that is more pervy than I recalled. Still gets to the larger point though about how we talk about violence in graphic detail with no self-consciousness but can’t do the same for sexuality.
You know that even fantasy sex is a problem to the puritan mind, even mild representations of sex like activities becomes weird. Well in the Western society that is. I found out that some temples in India are finely decorated with more or less explicit scenes. In certain societies sex is seen as an engine. The issue with violence is that it isn’t just highly but it’s nearly a constant in our western society. Go back to the middle ages, how many people whacked each other in popular imagery. Even recently we have seen more violence than ever. Gore doesn’t do much any longer for many adults, but it’s supposed to elicit a strong evolutionary reflex of disgust and fear. I feel we’ve been overexposed to these things, but not others.
Part of the actual answer to that question is that, while violence is often loud and public (and sometimes government sanctioned on massive scales), sex is something that is usually done in private, intimate settings without observers.
Please note that this is mostly an American thing, in European TV and books we have naked people and (not too explicit detail in TV, books differ) sex.
Some of us are always wondering about this. Something 18+ might be sex or gore related.
Kinda funny to see it in Canada as well, especially when you throw Quebec culture into the mix (things seem a little more sex positive over there compared to other parts of the country, which is neat to think about sometimes).
It was wild being raised by my mother who didn’t mind if I saw consensual sex, because I should eventually have sex, but restricted all violence because ideally I’ll never see violence in person.
I have no idea how good this is a philosophy for raising children. Sample size is too small.
I was disappointed by Fetish Locator; I wasn’t into any of the included fetishes, so I rapidly got to the end, and missed all the content. Got an ending screen suggesting I should go back and try something, but like, no thanks! Still, at least it was free!
You do kind of have to buy into it. Most of the engagement of the story is locked behind the various options there, and it can really be surprisingly good beyond the adult content.
Maybe don’t explore anything that’s a full on ick, but I would second that, if there’s something you’re at least neutral on I’d recommend giving it another shot.
You know how romance novels are mostly popular with women for various reasons?
Porn games are that, but as an interactive picture book. Not a bad thing, I just think it’s funny that most guys need to see them boobies instead of reading about them.
I can’t say I’ve ever used a dualshock 2 clone, but I’ve used a sixaxis and ds3? Ergonomically they seem somewhat similar. In terms of quality, I can’t say. The controller I’ve linked is wired only, however. If that’s a dealbreaker, a company called 8bitdo make some fairly affordable wireless gamepads which are all Linux friendly (directly interpreted by steaminput)
My friends and I can play boomerang fu for hours. there’s a surprising level of depth to this deceptively cute looking game. Can get pretty competitive, but it’s always fun 😊
If you have Skyrim and want a new story, download Enderal. It’s pretty much an entirely new game built on Skyrim’s engine. It’s pretty great and free if you already have a copy of Skyrim
Yeah nah there is no gameplay there its pure coomer shit. Match 3 puzzle game, thats not a genre the only games that use that has their core gameplay are designed to be scams.
It’s certainly what the majority of the genre became with the advent of mobile gaming, as with so many other simple puzzle games. But the original Bejeweled and Puzzle Quest were both excellent and huge hits, and were complete games before the microtransaction garbage that came later.
It’s a nice genre for relaxing and turning off your brain, similar to a Tetris or a Bust-A-Move. I know there have to be titty and microtransaction filled variants of both of those, does it invalidate them as puzzle game genres?
Yeah coomer games are similar to mobile games. Theyre puzzle games that are designed to be extremely easy to make players feel good. They are technically still puzzle games just bad ones.
Maybe the match 3 stuff, but there are a lot of ‘adult’ games that are beyond that. Go play The Last Sovereign and tell me it isn’t better than all the final fantasies, I dare you.
I was going to mention The Last Sovereign in this thread. It’s a little bit hard to recommend because it’s like, barely modified RPG maker sprites and some serviceable art for sex scenes, along with the difficulty. However that game is a damn magnum opus.
On the m/m side, the visual novel Coming Out on Top is a remarkably well-written, if saccharine, dating game about a college guy figuring things out. I don’t usually like VNs but this one was worth playing. It’s has a lot of gay sex in it, that is literally the entire point so, you know, be aware of that.
Nice. I don’t typically go for M/M unless femboys are involved, but it’s what my wife likes, and that’s one of the ones I linked her when she asked me to research a few games for her to try.
Femboys can be hot too, though often authors seem to mix up femboys with trans women and that ends up being frustrating when I try a CHOYA game marked as m/m and it doesn’t have any actual m/m in it.
Some of these games have incredible writing. Personally, I’d recommend trying Eternum. It’s not finished yet but there’s already a ton of content and the writing is incredible. Another game by the same person called Once in a Lifetime is also really good but shorter.
Besides those two, I’d really recommend The Princess Trap. Also unfinished but still lots of content. This one is definitely a bit more niche and might not be for everyone but the drama and mystery in it is really incredible.
All of these games are pretty slow to get to the sex stuff to be honest (especially The Princess Trap). But every moment in-between makes it so worth your time.
I just finished what exists so far for The Princess Trap last night. I have to recommend holding off on it till it’s finished so you don’t end up in as much despair as me.
Classics still had lag. DK Country 3’s final boss was so laggy it’d affect the boss music.
Not quite super classic you mentioned but a chunk of the speed run tech around Super Mario 64 is how to optimize the camera to avoid lagging on certain effects (the sunshine to the wing cap, the top tower in whomps fortress, the sub in dire dire docks).
I say that less as a knock on the game and more that there were technical compromises made back in the day as well. Nostalgia sometime last hits and people assume everything ran blazing fast.
The Nintendo64 did run blazingly fast. Comparatively, even modern consoles are a step down in terms of power compared to Nintendo64 hardware for its time.
Had the draw distance been lowered in Ocarina of Time, its performance would have been at minimum a steady 30fps, as Ocarina of Time runs in a more optimized Mario 64 engine. Which, naturally, is less optimized than what Kaze has done to Mario 64’s engine, but Kaze also has like 20 years worth of more coding and computer knowledge learned, making comparison pretty unfair.
Framerate is also not the only metric in determining if a game’s performance is bad. Ocarina of Time runs at 20fps (unless you are in PAL region, then it runs at 17fps because of PAL standards, oof), but it never misses a frame. It is extremely consistent at 20fps. The frametime is perfect even on original hardware. The same cannot be said about most modern AAA games, even Nintendo games. Modern games might mostly run at 60 or 30 fps, but they very often dip below that and even more often have hitching and stuttering due to inconsistent frametime. Even though the fps may be high, the playability of the game is worse than Ocarina of Time.
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