Honestly one of the most interesting things in vidya politics in the 2010s since the birth of vidya verticals and GamerGate as the first sign that millennial media was going rancid, was Ubisoft going in with Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed on this specifically Canadian vision of the open prairies and English industrialism and French equality
Thinking about how Rockstar Games is our Martin Scorcese not just because they’re period-and-setting-detailed crime stories about American culture but because they’re increasingly specifically downfall stories – The Red Dead Redemptions, L.A. Noire, Lost & The Damned, even the base GTA4 at the end.
Compare with how Vice City climaxed in a reenactment of the “say hello to my little friend” Scarface scene but winnable
Rocket League said it was adding new music for Pride and it’s like, Hayley Kiyoko and something that sounds like Carly Rae Jepsen?
And it’s funny but like, the tracks do fit with their established aesthetic, which makes this the most thoughtful, sincere corporate attempt to make shit queer for Pride I’ve seen
I honestly like how the Scott Pilgrim video game played with the old River City Ransom drop-change-on-death thing x “in Canada, a coin can be worth up to $2”
A fan! Enjoyed CK2, EUIV, didn’t really get into Hearts of Iron IV but honestly appreciated a model of WWII as a multidimensional spreadsheet of industrial production and political consolidation
I picked up most of the Stellaris DLC from a Humble Bundle a few months back, then bought the rest on another sale. Recommended if you like space and grand strategy, though I don’t have any neat insights beyond “robots have so much less to deal with than organic races” and “blowing up the galaxy is funny”
Oh, that too. It was a little disorienting having a game so specifically mimic Master of Orion for the sake of working in fundamentally different ways
Honestly one thing I like about Assassin’s Creed is how they send you back in time but highlight that even that past lived in the shadow of further legendary past.
AC: Ancient Greece you visit tons of Attic ruins-already, and at least one crumbled Minoan palace, in the Egypt one it’s the very dawn of the Roman Empire and the pyramids are already ancient. Those and the AC: Vikings one with the English settlement still speaking Latin were more Roman than AC: Rome which was set in the Renaissance amid ruins, with Leonardo da Vinci as your gadget guy
(I do like how for the American Revolution one after the Ezio trilogy they teased Benjamin Franklin like he would be the equivalent and instead you just overheard him talking about the appeal of fucking older women)
So my college Japanese course (8 classes and 10 hours of practicing in the tape lab every week, scaled down from a full-year immersion program for scholars, diplomats and spies) actually focused on vocabulary significantly less than many others, instead it focused on teaching the structure of the language with the idea that we could pick things up from immersion
The funny thing is I suspect this is actually happening with the Yakuza (/龍が如く) series, which as I’ve said is “Being Japanese: the AAA Franchise”. In a world where everyone is casually speaking Japanese all the time, I find myself able to follow along to a degree, and it certainly helps that there are subtitles to check against
Also last April when I had a mental breakdown and went crazy and turned bi, Kazuma Kiryu was the principal expression of masculinity I had to impress upon, which strikes me as quite fortuitous and healthy.
I had River City Ransom as a kid, would be weird to go back and tell that kid that genre would be his major source of self-improvement next plague year
Playing a few games lately – the FF7 remake, various Yakuzas – that make the point that the Japanese urban planning technique of “turn everything into a shitty dirt lot and slap up crappy disposable buildings of any type up to the property line wherever, if it’s too incompatible a use block it off with a blank wall” makes for some weird and incredibly ugly neighborhoods, now appreciating why it was that Silent Hill was clearly psyched to present detached houses with yards in rows on dedicated streets.
Because Yakuza 7 is hilariously leaning into being a JRPG there’s a badass mysterious hitman from the exotic stylish faction with unnaturally-colored hair that fights you at first but then joins your party, and the faction is “Koreans”
Yakuza 7: What we need now more than ever is to come together in an organization that stands up for outcasts and the grey zones of life, defending them from exploitation and cruel, deadly plots
Yakuzas 0-6, also Yakuza 7: ::organization that legitimizes itself as guardian of outcasts and grey areas and mostly extracts resources from them by force turns out to be source of massive wave of cruelty and death::
