And Robotnik Winter Zone in Triple Trouble, and Ice Cap from Sonic Adventure, City Escape from SA2, and White Acropolis in Sonic 06, and the entirety of the Sonic Riders games.
You mean the cardboard character that’s the counterpart to another cardboard character and that only exists because Wario needed a doubles partner in Mario Tennis? Even his name is an afterthought, why would Nintendo suddenly start caring enough to give him a game?
I, We, Waluigi: a Post-Modern analysis of Waluigi by Franck Ribery
Waluigi is the ultimate example of the individual shaped by the signifier. Waluigi is a man seen only in mirror images; lost in a hall of mirrors he is a reflection of a reflection of a reflection. You start with Mario – the wholesome all Italian plumbing superman, you reflect him to create Luigi – the same thing but slightly less. You invert Mario to create Wario – Mario turned septic and libertarian – then you reflect the inversion in the reflection: you create a being who can only exist in reference to others. Waluigi is the true nowhere man, without the other characters he reflects, inverts and parodies he has no reason to exist. Waluigi’s identity only comes from what and who he isn’t – without a wider frame of reference he is nothing. He is not his own man. In a world where our identities are shaped by our warped relationships to brands and commerce we are all Waluigi.
I remembered about that post while writing my comment but couldn’t find it. I didn’t know the sequel but both explain the problem of Waluigi as a character, Nintendo sees him as filler and he’s more useful for them as such. If they start fleshing him out he’ll be less useful in other contexts… Which is also a apt metaphor for why conservative societies want people to fit faceless molds
I figured you might have read it, as your comment had evoked it for me.
I really like the reading of Waluigi as a kind of perfect symbol for our post-modern times. I don’t think the article goes quite far enough. Mario is already a simulacra: a stereotype that doesn’t really exist, certainly not anymore and never really did. So Waluigi is the reflection of an inverse of a simulation without a base reality.
It’s very relatable, as you say, an apt metaphor for how our cultures treat the common person. Maybe the right Waluigi game isn’t one that fleshes him out and brings him closer to the audience. Maybe something like Krusty’s Fun House or Lemmings: burning through legions of Waluigis (1up mushroom clones? robots? one person somehow split into a multitude?) to accomplish trivial goals for Wario, the stand-in for the corporate overlords?
Heya man, I just wishlisted this because of reading your comments in this post. You’re a good dude.
I’m a programmer too, been doing it for roughly 27 years. Next year, I’m going to quit my well paying job, where I have a fully remote working position working with some of the most talented engineers in the field for one of the largest privately held companies in the world, a position I’ll probably never be able to get/achieve again in my lifetime; and throw it all away and start an indie studio with my brother and another indie dev. I’ve wanted to make video games for as long as I can remember. This is a childhood dream of mine.
Life’s too short, chase your dreams while you still can. It doesn’t get easier when you get older.
Hearing about your passion helps keep me focused on hopefully realizing my own dream one day soon :)
Edit: I genuinely don’t understand the downvotes? Could someone help me understand why please? :)
Thank you for the kind words. Personally I wouldn’t do that, seems to risk. Please make sure you have enough funds to survive for as long as possible. I grew up poor and it sucks. I hate that kind of instability. Good luck with your studio! :)
I am good on funds for a couple years of living frugally. I also grew up poor and you are correct, it does indeed suck. One of the few benefits of having been in the industry for so long and trading my sanity and health for $$ is: I’ve got a decent bit of that saved up. Which I’ll be trading away for survival during this :) If it makes money, great, if not, I gave it a shot and I can always get a job again doing the B2B thing, even though it likely won’t be as comfy as the position I’m in. I’m just totally burnt out with it today. To the point where the stress of going to work caused a major health issue to manifest that’s given me a new perspective on life.
Thank you for the well wishes! I’ll be checking out your game when it’s released!
I’m not down voting you and I applaud chasing your dreams, but a well paying, stable, fully remote job is not something to give up lightly.
Maybe that’s why people are down voting you? Not that they should but people be people.
Personally, I’m just some schlub on the internet, but I’d strongly advise you to reconsider leaving that kind of financial stability. At the very least you’ll need a pretty good amount of money saved up to live off of. Most indie games aren’t successful, most indie game companies fail. There’s a gigantic risk for you and a huge lost opportunity cost (your income & benefits, particularly benefits like health insurance if you’re in the USA) just to get started and on top of that you have to make something people want to buy.
Not doubting your talents but people would kill to be in your spot (remote, well paid, full time) - I’d think long and hard about the risk you’re accepting.
I do, however, wish you well and hope you succeed beyond your wildest expectations! Just something to chew on.
Thank you for that writeup, I suspect you’re right, that’s probably why a few people are downvoting :)
You’re not wrong though. It is a little crazy, I admit.
I have a decent bit of funds saved up to live off of, so I think I could do that for a while, and my company has offered to hire me back if I need (but likely without the aforementioned perks…). Worst case, I could take it and take the step down in comfort/lifestyle and go back to kind of what I’m doing today.
Earlier this year I had a medical disability thing that hit and put me out of work for almost 3 months due to stress related to my career.
I had to make a hard choice of trying to continue down this path I was on in B2B, where to get to where I’m at and maintain it is an easy 60+ hours a week plus a boatload of stress consuming my life.
In the end, I decided to try and follow my childhood dreams. The near death-ish experience has given me a new perspective on what is important and matters to me most in life, before I don’t have any more time left to do it.
Truthfully, I might be able to ride out the remainder of my days no longer working, if I pull in just a little bit of supplemental income. I own my own home, and have a modest lifestyle with no children and live well below my means. I’ve been saving pretty hardcore for over a decade, and while it’s not enough to live off of forever, it should cover me for a good while.
Even if this fails, I get a sabbatical from the job that’s killing me, and some new experiences to throw on my resume.
I sincerely appreciate your concern and advice, and it is well taken. I just don’t know how much longer I can even do my job today, every day is burnout day, I’m hanging in there until next year to get my bonuses and to ensure that my role’s successor-ship plan goes through so my engineering team continues to thrive when I’m gone. I’m also not burning any bridges at work, and for the most part, I’m pretty well respected/liked there so I have no doubts I could come back if I needed in an emergency.
But for now, onward :) Going to give this game dev thing a try for realsies :)
I like how the thong in dragon’s dogma 2 is equal to both, and it has a pretty high defense so the game really wants you to wear it at the start where everything kills you easily.
Watched the trailer, looks pretty good! Too bad it’s still in early access. There’s a TONS of farming/dating sim coming out and a lot of them looks…okay i think. Hope it get to 1.0.
This is by far the highest reviewed one I’ve seen lately. 8k reviews with 97% is insane. Some of the other early access games I’ve browsed look like abandon ware or something else
Honestly, it never got big enough for that to even matter. It just lost the content war to the PS2 Xbox and GameCube. Shenmue, Jet Set Radio and Sonic Adventure aren’t exactly enough great exclusives to justify buying the non-Halo machine or the console built by the company that “won” the previous generation.
The fact that it could play DVDs was the primary reason I bought one of the second-gen slim PS2s! (I was previously a Nintendo-only console gamer, and have since gone full PC gamer, so that was my one and only foray into Sony’s garden.)
Third party developers’s fear of piracy didn’t help the console, but primarily it was released at the wrong time for the wrong price with the wrong features. If the 32X and Saturn never released and instead the Dreamcast came out in place of the Saturn, it would not have failed. Piracy didn’t have much to do with it.
In fact, the GameCube sold very badly in some SEA countries because it was too hard to pirate games for. Piracy literally leads to hardware sales in some countries.
If the 32X and Saturn never released and instead the Dreamcast came out in place of the Saturn
The problem here is roughly 4 years, Sega was one of the big players in 1994, waiting until the Dreamcast was ready at the very end of 1998 and living off the Mega Drive (Genesis) + Arcades would be financial suicide
In fact, the GameCube sold very badly in some SEA countries because it was too hard to pirate games for. Piracy literally leads to hardware sales in some countries.
True, both PS1 and PS2 absolutely ruled sales in Brazil given how cheap and easy it was to get pirate games, which usually sold for BRL10 from 1999-2006, while original games would cost well over 10x that.
The 32X and Saturn releases were confusingly close to each other and could easily lead to some confusion with consumers. Releasing both a disk console and a disk addon for the existing console in the same year could confuse people on whether they needed the new console or just the disk addon, especially with marketing that didn’t exactly make it clear. Similar issue the WiiU had with people thinking it was an addon for the Wii and determining they didnt need it. If the Dreamcast had started development instead of the Saturn, and released even 2 years after the Saturns release date in 1996, the console would have fared significantly better.
SEGA just didn’t pick the right console features for the right time. The Dreamcast was ahead of its time releasing in 1998, but by the time the PS2, GameCube, and especially Xbox launched just 2-3 years later, the Dreamcast hardware looked extremely outdated, because it was.
If the Dreamcast had started development instead of the Saturn, and released even 2 years after the Saturns release date in 1996, the console would have fared significantly better.
You’re effectively saying that development of the Dreamcast should’ve begun before the tech for it even existed. The Saturn’s development began back in 1992, after the release of the Model 1, when 3D graphics were a wild dream for home consumers. The Sega Model 3, which served as a basis for the Dreamcast, saw its first arcade release in 1996. M3 was super powerful, but in 1996 it’d also be prohibitively expensive for any home consumer to afford. The Dreamcast that the world saw in 1998/1999 was literally impossible to achieve back in 1996, the “best” thing would’ve been something like a Saturn 2.5 which maaayyybeee could’ve run Model 3 games at significantly lower quality.
Not necessarily. Even if the hardware wasn’t exactly the same, it came out too close to the Saturn. Had there never been a Saturn and the Dreamcast, even if it was slightly weaker like a Saturn 2.5, would have launched in 1996, the console would not have done so poorly. It also would not have been so quickly outclassed by its competition, as it would have directly competed with the PS1 and Nintendo64 the same year.
Its really all to my point that piracy had nothing to do with the console’s failure. There were other problems with the Dreamcast that caused its death.
Still own mine… It failed because Sega was terrible at marketing their consoles.
Sega Master System, Sega CD, Game Gear, and Dreamcast were all better than their competitors when they came out, but they were all pretty big flops comparatively.
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