HalloweenSnarry
No bio...
User ID: 795
HalloweenSnarry
26d ago
Maybe it is just me (I rarely ever replay games), but the Bioshock games do genuinely seem like they're the least-replayable ImSims ever.
HalloweenSnarry
26d ago
I would definitely be curious what your gamer motivation profile looks like.
I got Skirmisher and Slayer, huh.
HalloweenSnarry
26d ago
Exhibit A was The Matrix, there were so many neat elements of it and it's remained in the popular consciousness for that reason, but it had to go eerily spiritual in a film series about technology. Who the heck was that grandma, anyway? What does this chosen one nonesense have to do with robots using humans as batteries?
In mild fairness, I think some of this was an outgrowth of The Matrix starting out as an homage to Ghost in the Shell, which is a rather cerebral and philosophical story which also happens to be bracketed by gorgeously-rendered cyborg carnage.
HalloweenSnarry
26d ago
But I would say that the first canary in the coal mine was Warcraft 3.
If we're gonna be citing RTS games as the warning signs of change, why WC3 and not C&C: Tiberian Sun? That game infamously launched in quite the state, and contra WhiningCoil's above post about auteur studio leads, I doubt that TibSun was supposed to be a magnum opus kind of game. It was an ambitious title, sure, but it was otherwise a bigger-and-better sequel that, as far as the popular narrative goes, was unfairly rushed out the door by EA and never really fixed into what it should have been.
Thinking about stuff I loved from the early 2010's, and then how my gaming consumption habits shifted after that, I think you're onto something, and that something is "the changeover from the 7th console generation to the 8th console generation." The 7th gen was already a huge shock for the industry, leading to multiple studios closing down (and there were still the odd casualties of studios and game franchises even into 2012-ish), and the 8th gen doubling down on high-fidelity probably didn't help keep the AAA side of the industry from becoming a total rat race.
It was customary to release $20 versions of games that had sold a bunch. It was easy in the back half of a consoles life to stock up on all the classics pretty cheap, and brand new to boot.
I haven't touched console gaming in a long time, but I kinda miss this practice. I kinda liked seeing all the "Platinum Hit" covers for Nintendo, EA, and Konami games from the 6th gen. And I think it made a degree of sense, in that for some games, most of the revenue value was extracted more upfront when the games came out, so slashing the price to keep milking the long tail wasn't completely a loss for the publishers. It probably also helped pump up those impressive lifetime sales numbers to lower the price so that the kids who missed out on the launch wave could still buy in.
Like, I'm pretty sure that, right now, on Steam, you can buy the original COD 4 for just 10 bucks. 10 buckaroonies! For a game that was $50-60 new! Activision doesn't give a shit, they have the modern COD-as-a-service as their vehicle of avarice. Valve has similarly slashed the prices on their back catalogue of non-F2P games, literally the most expensive game of theirs right now is Half-Life: Alyx (still at like $60 or so).
Similarly, GOG also just added a bunch of games to their store that made their way there from the GOG Dreamlist (a relaunched version of their long-standing wishlist where people could vote on which games GOG should add), and a good number of them were part of their GOG Preservation Program, intended to make old games playable even on modern machines. Probably the standout here is Silent Hill 4, where they also went and added back in some cut content. Now, this is a game that GOG has put work in, and even gone above the call of duty in making available to their customers (ETA: and this game never even had any PC versions before this!). What do you think the price of this pseudo-remaster is?
The answer: $10. And they also had a sale on these GPP titles that ended yesterday, so you probably could have gotten it for even cheaper. Old games should be cheaper, period.
HalloweenSnarry
26d ago
Yeah...Hanania invokes Chavez and Morales, even though part of the problem is that, from the perspective of some Americans, the Dems were leading us down the same path as Venezuela and Bolivia anyways.
Trump is a flailing incompetent, I can't really argue with that, but why weren't his rivals that much better about governing convincingly? Not to deny any agency of Trump, but our present situation is the culmination, the natural consequence of billions of smaller choices that have led us to his second term and this tariff madness. The populist anger that defeated Harris at the polls is perhaps simply the wages of 21st-Century sin.
HalloweenSnarry
26d ago
I'd consider "two-year-old child in India" to be an edge case. I wonder if the other human deaths from H5N1 were similarly debuffed immunity-wise.
HalloweenSnarry
26d ago
Isn't there a "defense tech bro" scene in some other part of California, though? I think there has been a culture shift occurring, though somewhat slowly and silently.
HalloweenSnarry
27d ago
I'd rather we just didn't.
I think the problem is that we honestly just can't not. I think destructive nonsense like this has become an inevitability in some way, and it's going to keep happening until enough destruction has passed.
HalloweenSnarry
27d ago
That one was even based on a Jack Chick tract comic, if I'm not mistaken.
HalloweenSnarry
27d ago
and let's not get started on the Volkssturm or Hamas' choice of soldiers.
You may notice that the former were the pathetic last-ditch force of a faction that was effectively defeated and was trying not to realize that, and the other is likely heading towards a similar position (if it is not already there). Child soldiers are the disgusting last resort of a faction that has no meaningful right to use violence.
HalloweenSnarry
27d ago
the obvious one being fatherlessness:
Goddamn, blacks have that problem in Britain, too?
HalloweenSnarry
27d ago
preventing NAFTA
Wasn't it more like "preventing the TPP"?
HalloweenSnarry
27d ago
Yeah, Stellantis is huge. It's literally a combination of Chrysler, Fiat, and Peugeot.
Granted, those layoffs are probably all on the Chrysler side, so probably still bad optics.
HalloweenSnarry
27d ago
Off-topic, but: I wonder if the problem with the Jones Act wasn't exactly the restriction itself, but the failure to enforce export discipline. In another timeline, the Jones Act is probably still around, and is much more unassailable because the US went South Korean with shipmakers.
HalloweenSnarry
29d ago
Safe Needle Space Needle?
HalloweenSnarry
29d ago
HalloweenSnarry
1mo ago
The sales decline in Europe is at least potentially explainable by the backlash to Musk, what explains China? Preference for domestically-made EVs?
HalloweenSnarry
1mo ago
Yeah, we have them here in Phoenix, and as a native resident of Phoenix, I can say that we have some truly questionable human drivers on the road as it is.
HalloweenSnarry
1mo ago
True, there's already enough that's made by humans that one can find easily, and yet, we are getting generative AI pushed in our faces anyways. Every tech corporation is on a crusade to put an AI button within easy reach on UIs and even physical devices.
HalloweenSnarry
1mo ago
Now, hold on, this probably needs the caveat of "terrorism works in the short term." I doubt this automatically means that the Greens are going to get the pick instead.
HalloweenSnarry
1mo ago
I am going to pre-register my position of "no major Happening occurs." It may well just be for the purposes of carrying out another flashy, expensive bombing run on the Houthis. Why strike Iran now and not before?
HalloweenSnarry
1mo ago
I dunno, some of the ways I can think of to bring down a transformer station or a concrete-hulled building involve violent forces that would, in fact, be similarly capable of reducing a lone infantryman to a bloody pulp.
HalloweenSnarry
1mo ago
I think you replied to the wrong comment (at least, I see you replying to yourself).
I guess it's time to drop this take: did we accidentally end up reintroducing slavery?
I don't say this lightly. The archetype/stereotype of the immigrant worker is a man who has come over to America to work for an illegally-low wage (that is still more than he could earn by staying in the corrupt shithole he fled from), and faces challenges such as: he can't get the law on his side if his employer abuses him (because then he'd be caught and deported), his failure to meld with the local culture places him at odds with the native population, and his children are pseudo-orphans because their parents are only able to raise them for as long as they aren't caught and deported. And what do we, the natives, get out of the exploitation of this man's travails? Cheaper products as a result of cheaper labor.
"Cheap labor" is the motivating force for capitalism, and business owners have always sought it out wherever it could be found. First, it was slaves taken from Africa and the Native American population. After the Civil War, it was the native-born blacks and dirt-poor whites who helped build the industrial cities of the Eastern US. Towards the end of the Cold War, it was overseas countries where quality of life, wages, and cost of living were all low. At some point, immigrant labor also gained a share of labor power.
Now, to an extent, I like the world that the Neoliberal World Order built, but all those blue-haired Adbusters-reading leftists are directionally-correct that we are addicted to cheap labor and ignore all the externalities that come with it. Is it right to just shut off the supply like Trump is trying to do? Should we not wean ourselves off of it now that the world is so interconnected anyways? Is it fair to keep racing to the bottom for more-work-for-less-paychecks even as we speculate about the wonders of total automation that seem so tantalizingly closer with every passing day?
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