Great Article AS always! There is probably one big new you missed. Mario Kart 64 got a Nativ PC Port including stable fps, higher resolut and a map editor.
I think they were worried about their branding being associated with violence. In the 90s, there was a ton of anti-video game propaganda branding it as violent garbage that was corrupting our children.
Ironically, video games are very good at conditioning human responses to iconography. So despite the Red Cross’ hostility, video games still succeeded in conditioning a lot of people to instantly associate plus signs (any color) with health.
The red cross, red crescent and red crystal emblems provide protection for military medical services and relief workers in armed conflicts.
Under no circumstance is it acceptable to create a situation where something could be mistakenly identified as being associated with the Red Cross. If it appears in the game it might appear on a publicly visible computer screen, poster, TV, etc and thats not acceptable.
It is, genuinely, in the Geneva Conventions that nobody should use the red cross except for to designate medical staff and establishments that are protected under the conventions. The idea is to make sure that there is absolutely never any doubt that that symbol means anything else in order to minimise the risk to those people
Yeah they have a legitimate case for defending the use of the symbol so aggressively and the best way to avoid is to use the green and white variant that is used on pretty much every first-aid kit sold.
My biggest gripe with this is games that present a historical setting, such as World War 2 games. The Red Cross was all over the place during WW2. Saying game developers cannot ever use it under any context means that a game that wants to present historical accuracy would not be able to.
The way it could work is that they could just put a message before starting the game that the red cross is only there to present a historical setting, but otherwise is a symbol of Red Cross movement. And there could be a setting to switch to green crosses, if you want to stream, etc.
To add, the first time I heard about it was through the video game stuff. So if anything, I think we should view them going after game devs as a form of spreading awareness. When it hits headlines it makes it clear just how important it is to not use it in other contexts.
i look at this and nod. then i look at sponsored fortnite skins with the red cross and realize they dont give a fuck about that actually, theyre just greedy.
I haven't played Fortnite so I might be missing something, but glancing at screenshots and promotional stuff it looks like they're consistently using white on red instead of red on white
Not sure about everyone else but to me using an insanely popular game to fund global non-profit organisation is kinda a good way to raise money. It’s really a weird hill to die on.
The red cross sign has a very specific meaning and protection under international law. They don't want the symbol to be used outside of the agreed uses because they don't want that meaning, and consequently the protection it affords, to get muddled.
They also don't like when a red cross is used on a random first aid kit in the real world.
Everyone is betting Tonga will not get itself into a war.
But if it hypothetically happened, I assume they would be pressured to use an alternative war flag by the international community.
On a more serious note, applying international laws against sovereign states is always more complicated than to enforce them against individuals and organizations operating inside of signatory states.
I learned to speedrun this but stopped from intense wrist/lower arm pain. I wasn’t great but I could do a sub 20 16 star and pull off breezeless occasionally. Never topless.
It’s still fun to play casually. I have an N64 so I’ll go get all 120 stars every couple years.
7 year old me was playing with keyboard, and years later i graduated to keyboard and mouse. the only reason i touch a controller is to give it to my kid.
Lots of people just hate it (because blizzard or microtransactions or whatever) and can’t understand that people like different things. Ignore the numbers, you got some decent discussion!
I really wish there were custom games where they just play like quick play. I do believe its one of the best games out if not for the players. You either meet Sweaty Eddie who’s on the mic telling you to kill yourself because he thinks youre not winning hard enough, or the guy who thinks the game is to stand there and spam “hello” and the dance emote at the enemy.
I very very rarely get a game where people are just playing the game and enjoying themselves.
Like when you look at the list of custom games, instead of just being weird and wonderful game modes and “chill no kill VC 18+” there was also “regular overwatch being played by regular people”
Never faced this problem because I play i south east asian servers. No one ever comms. Which makes ot a little boring for me as I come from Valorant where players talk a lot about strategy compared to ow2. But I’m getting used to it.
I feel like this is entirely a localizer-added thing, and the original Japanese version was very different. I could be wrong of course, but this is just my gut feeling considering the time TYD released (and honestly it isn’t too much better nowadays).
Now, people can argue whether drastic changes like that are good or bad (I would say it is a massive “it depends”), but personally I would really prefer localizers stick to something as accurate to the original as possible while still being understandable in the target culture, and then include an altered or changed version as an option.
Like being able to choose between the ADV or Netflix dub for Evangelion.
I don’t mind if someone wants to add their own spin or whatever, as long as that doesn’t become the singular defined version for an entire region as is all too common. The original creators had a vision, and I want to see that vision, not the one a localizer is adding on that the original creators didn’t have.
For example, in a culture that doesnt have bread cakes, but they do have rice cakes, I would want a localizer to say characters ate “a food similar to rice cakes” or “an exotic food.” As an absolute last resort “a rice cake” is okay, but certainly not “the characters ate a big feast of pork and jelly donoughts.”
I never played the Japanese version, but I live in Japan and I have worked with various game localization companies. It’s a pretty fine line on how they handle these kinds of translations, and it is often the developers who give the direction.
A good localization firm will take the original intent, and then culturalize it for the target market to make sure it has the same intended “vibe” rather than an actual 1:1 translation. The first company I worked at here did the localization for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. They were using a lot of old Japanese in that, and they specifically DID want us to get as close to 1:1 as possible, while ensuring that the intent was still very clear. Another game that I cannot say was more free saying “please make sure that the jokes land with the US”, and quite a bit of the actual dialog was re-written, but once again, to match the vibe and intent that the developer was searching.
Each project is different. Each player is different. You aren’t wrong for your wants here, but developers aren’t wrong for trying to make something be more culturally appropriate for their target market, often which will sell more copies than their local market.
Yeah, that’s kinda what I mean. I think we agree. It’s just that recently there has been more attention on more… questionable… changes that localizers have been making to entertainment media, some I agree with and some I don’t.
In the 80s and 90s, it was common for overseas versions to change names to be more Western sounding. Personally, I don’t mind this kind of change. It usually doesn’t effect the overall story much, but sometimes a character might have an exotic sounding name in the Japanese version, I would hope that they also have a similarly exotic sounding name. However, it was also common for the entire story to be altered pretty drastically, even with the entertainment itself being chopped up into something entirely different. Which I don’t appreciate. I want the foreign media because it is different and from a different culture, changing it to match my own culture defeats the point of me wanting to engage with it.
Sometimes though, entire conversations are completely removed or changed entirely from their original versions. I mean, completely different, the difference between a character saying “I love you” and “You will always be my dearest friend.” I believe the Fire Emblem series (which I haven’t played very much so I have only minimal experience with) has had a few of these kinds of changes. In those cases, I believe that is a malicious change the developers may not have known about or may not have fully understood when they approved or signed off on the localization. Or the localization agency may have either thought they had more creative license than they actually had or deceived the original creators to push their own version instead.
Jokes are a bit different IMO, since humor is pretty different between cultures. Jokes in entertainment often rely on an understanding of the local pop-culture, so naturally jokes or geographical/historical references may need to change. It is understandable in those cases.
I was worried Subnautica 2 would be just a sloppy cashgrab, but seeing that dev-vlog with the awkward devs describing their work actually gave me hope that they’re actually putting some soul in this game.
OW2 got way better in the past year that I'd say it's a good f2p game, it deserved all the bashing on launch but once they went back on locking heroes and actually started adding new content it's worth a play. Lemmy hates live service though so nobody is going to let you say it out loud without getting mass downvoted.
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