SnotFlickerman

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

SimCopter has a very special place in my heart as possibly the prank that led to the formation of the Yes Men.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCopter#Easter_egg

The game gained controversy when it was discovered that designer Jacques Servin inserted an Easter egg that generated shirtless men in Speedo trunks who hugged and kissed each other and appear in great numbers on certain dates, such as Friday the 13th. The egg was caught shortly after release and removed from future copies of the game. He cited his actions as a response to the intolerable working conditions he allegedly suffered at Maxis, particularly working 60-hour weeks and being denied time off. He also reported that he added the “studs”, as he called them, after a heterosexual programmer programmed “bimbo” female characters into the game, and that he wanted to highlight the “implicit heterosexuality” of many games.

Based “Andy Bichlbaum.”

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

These kind of protests are almost exclusively what the Yes Men do! They got their start when they were making a parody website of the WTO (Then GATT) and suddenly had a bunch of serious industry people mistaking their parody site for the real one and sending them emails inviting them to conferences. Thus Andy Bichlbaum and the Yes Men were born! They always go way beyond absurd to try to capture people’s attention, but most often with groups of “experts” everyone takes them all to seriously.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

The rising costs of developing blockbuster games has also raised the stakes. “When you’re talking about a budget that’s $100mn plus, even for a big company, if you miss with two or three of those then commercially you’re on the ropes,” Harding-Rolls said.

Oh boo hoo, is the only type of game you can think of to release is a"blockbuster" type game?

Because last I checked, small titles regularly do quite well, like Hi-Fi Rush did so well compared to the fucking bomb that is Starfield. Same company, small game vs. big game. Small game did well, big game tanked.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

trust thermocline

Quality reference. Also, in reverse, companies such as Larian prove that trust works.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the buggiest messes I’ve ever played. In that, it gives me warm fuzzy memories of the originals, which were similarly buggy monstrosities.

Despite the bugginess, the deep involvement of Larian with the community at every step of the games development and release proves that trust can get you nothing but accolades, even when your game is a buggy mess for six months post-release.

I’m okay with the post-release bugginess because I can trust that Larian actually cares about resolving those things.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

Maybe they spent too much time with the Encyclopedia of Numbers?

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

Is Foamstars fun?

If you have to ask this question about a video game, a meduim that lives or dies based on how “fun” it is, the answer is probably no.

Fun games don’t have people asking if its fun or not.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

I have yet to see anyone ask “But is it actually fun?” about, say, Baldur’s Gate 3.

Maybe part of the reason why is because games like Hogwarts Legacy don’t respect player agency and spend their time forcing you to play the game the way the developers wanted, while Baldur’s Gate 3 allows you to experiment and try to break guardrails.

Hogwarts Legacy literally won’t let you jump over a fence that your legs are visibly taller than. I only finished that game because I wanted to be able to write correctly about how deeply that game disrespects player choice and is all-in on “you play our game the way we intended, or you don’t play.”

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

The 21st century has been repeated instances of “the man behind the curtain” getting completely caught in the curtain, yanking it down, causing a small fire, pissing himself a little bit, and then standing up, waving his hands and yelling at the gathering crowd “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!” while the fire begins to grow.

The world wouldn’t be so frustrating if it wasn’t so clear that so much of leadership (corporate, especially so) has no fucking clue what they’re doing, certainly no more in depth clue than their own workforce, and they’ve been coasting on things like stock buybacks for the better part of three decades. They continuously fail but they use their absolutely massive wealth to constantly shield themselves from liability, or any responsibility really, from their near-constant fuck-ups that piss off consumers, poison the environment, and harm workers.

Anyway, much like with their constant fucking-with-the-consumer on Windows 11, they’re just barrelling down the “fuck the people who invested in our hardware ecosystem” path because “fuck consumers, amirite?” They mostly cater to other businesses now, which is part of why it’s a lot easier/cheaper to get a Windows license than it used to be (although that’s been changing). This is the same with so many businesses now, they mostly just serve… other businesses, that’s where the real money is… because they’ve bled the US consumer dry and so they’re prioritizing corporate clients, who have deep coffers.

It’s much like what’s going on at Warner Bros, where shitcanning a movie and deleting it entirely is more “cost-effective” to a movie studio than releasing it. They don’t give one flying fuck how much it pisses of consumers or the people who made it, all they’re worried about is the numbers in WB’s and their own bank accounts. They couldn’t give less of a fuck about what’s in consumers bank accounts or the laborers and artists who made the films bank accounts.

They’ve fully insulated themselves, the aristocracy never left. They just use the power of money to control and influence the power of the State instead of being a King themselves. They’re simply dictators of their own little feifdoms.

The worst part is how many of The Aristocrats live up to the worst versions of the joke.

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And just wait until they pull a Nintendo and just stop having stuff in their catalogue…

Oh that game you remember from your childhood? Lost to time, go fuck yourself, corporate profits come before nostalgia or even accurate human history.

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And everyone else just realizes how bad this means things are going for the gaming industry as a whole.

This isn’t good news for anyone who likes actually owning their games instead of just having a license, if they own a console.

That ship sailed in PC gaming forever ago, which is honestly fine considering storefronts like GOG exist, but it’s still going to be a gut-punch to people who have invested financially heavily in the Xbox ecosystem.

It’s going to mean smaller selections of games, more gambling/gacha bullshit, and “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy” will dominate the industry. When licensing runs out for music, they’ll just pull a game instead of trying to “fix” it, if it’s not profitable enough. We’re entering an era where there will be a dead-zone of lost media and history because so much of it is increasingly locked up behind corporate barriers.

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And the voices of millions of anti-social-justice-warriors cried out in agony.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

Next Month: CAPCOM’s Guide to Over-saturating an Already Over-saturated Zombie-Game Market.

Next Year: CAPCOM cancels five Resident Evil games in development.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

They are, but five of them? It seems like they’re ready and willing to kill current goodwill in respect to their games by stepping on the gas instead of realizing why people suddenly liked the games again.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu (edited rok temu)

It really depends.

Some games are so old that the technology needs to be sorely updated for modern gamers to be able to understand the controls, and “upating (the controls) for modern audiences” can be good.

Further, older games often have some pretty awful stereotypes in them that don’t need to be preserved so we can remember them.

I know Disney’s Bambi isn’t a video game, but I’ll use it as an example that’s being re-made. Bambi was made in 1942, and a massive amount of cultural references and ideas just don’t make as much sense in the modern era. There are literally things young people today would be like “what now?” in films that old. Sometimes “updating for modern audiences” is removing stuff that just doesn’t make sense anymore, or people don’t recognize or understand.

Even further, it used to be that “getting updated for modern audiences” was the norm. Anyone remember that hokey fucking Romeo & Juliet with Leonoard DiCaprio in the 90’s? Yeah, that was “updated for modern audiences” and it was a smash fucking hit. Back then, updating for modern audiences meant setting it in Verona instead of Venice and swapping swords for guns.

Like if you’re dealing with games that were always meant to frustrate and offend like Postal 2 or Conker’s Bad Fur Day or Redneck Rampage, you’re probably not gonna have a lot of people happy to “update for modern audiences” but there’s not much to update about campy schlock humor anyway.

So yeah, sometimes its not great, but I think the worries about it are overblown.

In movies there used to be a joke about how “the black guy always dies first” in action/horror movies because it held true for a long time. Black characters were given bit-roles that were quickly written out of movies. That is no longer the case, but you don’t see movies that don’t kill off black characters right away as being advertised as “updated for modern audiences” because that’s just silly.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

But something like the first 2 Fallouts on the other hand can really use a controls overhaul.

Those were literally on my mind! I know Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II got some updated control schemes more recently, including gamepad support, but it seems my favorite Fallouts are still stuck in the past.

God damn it what I would give for a modern Fallout in the style of Baldur’s Gate 3. It breaks me how Bethesda has ruined that series.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

I agree with this sentiment in respect to the idea that you’re actually trying to learn something from what you’re looking at. I agree, because I felt the same way when I watched censored WWII cartoons. If you’re willing to learn from them, that’s great, but here’s the thing.

Not everybody is taking away the same things.

What you take away from it isn’t what everyone takes from it. While you might rightfully not be a giant piece of shit yourself, there’s a lot of people who are.

My personal example is growing up with the Grand Theft Auto series. As a youth, I thought concerns with it were more or less overblown, and I was more or less right, for the most part.

However, after the torture scene in GTA 5 and talking to a wider community about it, I started to realize a lot of people weren’t learning anything good from that scene other than how to torture people, and a perverted glee in being able to do so.

And that’s where I begin to worry, because while like, I’m in the middle of an Evil playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3, like… It’s hard to feel real “glee” at being evil. Many of the decisions I make tend to make me go “awwww” inside, but I tell myself “I can’t get caught up in that if it’s an evil playthrough.” And in that sense is where I agree, because like, yeah, I should be allowed to play evil if I want.

But the reality also is that a lot of people don’t care about the nuance and are looking for reasons to be pieces of shit, looking for dark things to make fun of, and are generally going to take horrible justifications from what they do learn, and yes, that does worry me a bit.

while everyone else only gets the PC mush of the moment.

You realize that while there might be some hamfisted attempts at this, that not all of them are so hamfisted, right? This statement doesn’t inspire confidence that you see that.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

When driven by the studio though, I’m a bit more skeptical.

This is a really good point. When it’s in the hands of the creators, you’re still dealing with people who know what they were creating.

A lot of the stuff that people complain about are hamfisted attempts by corporate flunkies to make the game “appeal to a wider audience” as opposed to actually caring about removing unnecessary or offensive material in a constructive way that doesn’t lessen the original impact of the piece of media.

Corporations never decided that women, black people, latinos, and LGBT were humans with inherent value to them simply from existing, but rather, they decided that “Oh shit, we’re leaving money on the table by not marketing to these groups or hiring them.” It’s all about dollar-signs. It’s why corporations will fly the Pride Flag in June on Twitter… Just not on their Saudi Arabia Twitter corporate account. The corporates don’t care about the issues, they just care about getting your labor and your money, in other words, extracting value from you.

And attempts to extract value from you are where hamfisted attempts at making pieces of media “more appealing to everyone” by trying to shove as much strained “diversity” (the corporate kind, not the real kind) in there as possible in hopes to increase sales.

…on the other hand though, some of the original creators simply never grew up and are just obstinately wanting to continue to offend people for no good reason other than getting off on triggering other people. Like I’d have more hope from a remake from Neil Druckmann over John Romero, for example.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

I like the Wasteland games, but something about being alone in the wasteland felt so much more dangerous…

Part of why I liked Fallout is that it (for the most part) dispensed with the party and had you running on your own.

They had a handful of companions you could pick up in 1 & 2, but it was mostly lone gunning.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

Balmer needs them dividends, bruh! /s

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…businessinsider.com/…/steve-ballmer-annual-micro…

You don’t gotta be working there to own stock and get dividends.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

You know, these companies share mountains of data with each other before mergers or buyouts.

The idea that they don’t know these “areas of overlap” as they call them before the deal is done is a joke.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

Of course they know them.

I know, that’s why I called it a joke. They always post these bullshit PR statements after the fact as if everyone didn’t know this was coming.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

No problem I’m not upset, I was just clarifying. We’re obviously both on the same page with this haha.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

copro euphemisms going around trying to hide that they’re firing people.

Like Return to Office? Never has the corporate C-Suite ever had an easier excuse to shitcan people for no good fucking reason.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

Makes me wonder if Valve has actual plans for TF2

Don’t break the community’s heart anymore, I don’t think they can take it.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Riot is a trash company.

I feel for the employees who lost their jobs.

Its always grating when CEOs say they “take responsibility” but they’re not taking a demotion and paycut. No, somehow, the idiots who made the shitty decisions get to keep making them. Apparently that’s “responsibility.”

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

kotaku.com/inside-the-culture-of-sexism-at-riot-g…

washingtonpost.com/…/riot-discrimination-100-mill…

When your culture of sexism results in a class action lawsuit from former and current employees, and you pay out to the tune of 100 million and keep all the same executives who were accused of harassment and discrimination, and you have to have a third party watch over your company for years to make sure you’re not still doing this stuff: you’re a trash company.

so it’s good pr at least .

I couldn’t roll my eyes any harder. That’s literally all it is.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

I’m not your Buddy, Pal!

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

Starship Titanic is similarly incredibly under-rated, as is the companion novel written by Monty Python’s Terry Jones.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu (edited rok temu)

1. It was announced way way way too early.
2. Announced “It will be finished when it’s finished” on that way too early reveal.
3. Years later, it’s not finished, but tough shit, the studio is out of money and the shareholders are pushing for release.
4. It was released unfinished. Oops.
5. Years later, it is now closer to the original expectations.
6. Still no wall-running, so a lot of things they hyped and were expected are still unmet.
7. The Flathead was supposed to be a thing you kept throughout the game, but they never got the AI pathing right with it, so they dropped it.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Well you’re mostly right in your original post, game was a solid 7/10 on release, but the studio just did so much disservice to themselves by hyping it up for nearly a decade before release, and especially hyping a bunch of stuff that never made it into the final product, and on top of all that breaking their own promise to not release until it’s finished.

The whole reason people liked The Witcher 3 was people were convinced the multiple delays to release “made it a better game.” It was at that moment that CDPR built the image that they won’t release a game “until it’s done.” They now had their own studio history working against them when they made the promise of “It’s finished when it’s finished” and people were expecting that. People loved that CDPR was so dedicated to the gamers that they wouldn’t let pesky things like money-men push a game out too early when it’s half-baked. Oops, they did exactly that with their next game, which absolutely shot all that goodwill from the players right through the heart, especially after already waiting nearly a decade for it.

In the end, are the expectations really unreasonable if the studio themselves were the people who built the hype those expectations were based on?

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

I’m not really pissed off, I’m just listing off things that were unmet based on the studios own desires and their own promotional materials leading up to release.

There’s still videos out there from when they were hyping wall-running and the Ghostrunner class. *shrugs

I really don’t think it’s unfairly maligned when those expectations were set by the studios themselves.

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Maybe they need to listen to the name and fucking end it already.

Try something new.

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I mean “new” as in “Not Final Fantasy.”

Not something “new” as in “New Stuff in Final Fantasy.”

No, scrap the fucker. It’s well past done.

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Next you’ll tell me Game Genie is still around!

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Company with market cap of $2.75 trillion can’t even plan a fucking feature properly and then blames the gamers for their own fucking stupidity.

Also, I’ll honestly be shocked if MS views this as “bad press” since it was only a few years ago that they ignored all the bad press when it come to banning Minecraft players for things they said in their own private servers.

arstechnica.com/…/microsoft-will-start-banning-pl…

That still happens, the bad press stopped happening, but people still lose access to Minecraft for what they do in private worlds that are “friends only.”

I think people wanting to say horrible stuff on their own server is disgusting, but what’s more disgusting is the weird Microsoft Nanny State that says you can be banned permanently for that…

I expect Microsoft to stand firm that they don’t give a shit about bad press.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

“Star Wars Outlaws, the open world Star Wars game, is set to release late this year,” the post reads (thanks, IGN). "The game lets you explore distinct planets across the galaxy,

Desperately not trying to fall prey to the Starfield curse of too many fucking loading screens.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

Welp, it’s officially a hype bubble like cryptocurrency/NFTs.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu (edited rok temu)

I mean, it is and it isn’t. On one hand, yes people will probably lose their jobs with these tools supposed to filled the gaps.

But that doesn’t mean the AI tools are actually anywhere near as competent as a human, and it will result in watered-down, anodyne, and to be more blunt, just boring art and writing.

Corporate will use the tools because they’re “good enough,” but we all know they’re really not good enough. They’re just one more way to cut costs at the expense of user experience and employee workload (the employees that are left being expected to do more work).

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

I honestly don’t think they’ll even quietly go back. It’s clear “customer service” is becoming something that isn’t considered a return on value, so they’re shutting them down all over. Customer service will be the number one thing replaced with AI and they won’t go back on that.

Customer service for the last 20-30 years has absolutely been nothing but a shield for corporations to hide behind while screwing their customers. Low paid phone jockeys have to deal with people furious at being fucked over by conglomerates like Comcast. There is no way to contact anyone further up the chain, and that is deeply purposeful.

They record all the phone calls, but they refuse to learn anything that benefits the customer from them. All they do is deploy psychological tricks to try to get the customer to be happy while not actually rectifying the problem. It’s always a purposeful half-measure that has been deeply researched to calm people down and accept the big unlubed dildo in their ass like they should.

So yeah, the “customer service voice” will be long gone to be replaced with increasing shitty “customer service AI” with no human to talk to, and if you get lost in the shuffle and put in a digital black hole, well, “go fuck yourself” is clearly what they’ll be telling you. They already pretty much do this (especially Google) but it will become increasingly pronounced and difficult.

Clawing back anything that corporations have stolen from you will increasingly become an exercise in total futility as you’re stuck in an endless AI loop that refuses to give you options that actually address your issue.

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they were interested in tying their customers into their eco system.

Data, they were also interested in that sweet, sweet, data harvesting. Previously only Valve was grabbing all that via Steam.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

Yeah, but the argument was “does taking a free game help them or not” not shifting goalposts to whether Valve does it, too.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

Literally nobody in this thread told you that you couldn’t. You’re not a fucking victim here. I had an opinion and I expressed it.

If people online telling you that you’re wrong influences you so much, I’d say that’s a personal problem.

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If you really think you’re less clever than an entire industry that has been built up around tracking people and keeping ghost profiles on them, go ahead and keep patting yourself on the back, bud.

They know who you are, that’s not anywhere near as clever as you think.

You realize IP addresses exist, right?

SnotFlickerman, rok temu (edited rok temu)

Tell me you don’t understand business terms like “license” without telling me you don’t understand business terms like “license.”

Also:

1. Valve has made clear that if they ever go out of business, they will transfer a copy of each game you have a license for to you (providing they still have distribution rights).
2. This isn’t even a problem with GOG because they still distribute games in the old way where you can download a standalone installer and keep that copy of the game in perpetuity.
3. Epic has no such plans or guarantees.

Make of that what you will.

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

I guess things like Speech Pattern Analysis don’t exist then, nor has Big Data ever been known to sift through data to connect data points.

Like unless your job is director of IT Security for Microsoft, I doubt you have the credentials to be as anonymous as you think you are.

On top of the fact that most people know that the more you try to anonymize yourself, the more you actually make yourself unique in terms of data because very few people use obfuscation techniques, and those techniques are well known. Thus, if they think you’re obfuscating your identity, you’re now just thrown in the “people who like anonymity” bag of data, which when connected with previously collected data on “people who like anonymity” can be used to create a profile on you, specifically.

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👍

SnotFlickerman, rok temu

IIRC Bethesda modernized their classic games to run well on modern Windows when they got bought by Microsoft?