The whole Crusader Kings II shebang is on heavy pay-what-you-will discount as a “Humble Bundle” for the next few weeks

quoms:

US government blocks League of Legends in Syria and Iran amid escalating tensions | Dot Esports

As tensions between the U.S. and Iran begin to boil over, the conflict has had an unexpected side effect. League of Legends, one of the most played video games of all time, has been blocked in Iran and Syria by the U.S. government. […]

This is an extraordinary occurrence that hasn’t been seen in the esports sphere before. Tariffs, trade sanctions, and threats of military conflict are frequent sights when countries are in active dispute, but the step of blocking civilians’ access to video games is a novel course of action. It’s quite a change from politicians regularly debating the dangers of loot boxes and microtransactions. This can easily set a precedent of conflicting countries disabling access to games as part of ongoing tensions.

The ban hasn’t stopped some ingenious players from cheating the system, though, and using VPNs to get around the authentication process upon log-in (the part where the client flares up a message that says “Due to U.S. laws and regulations, players in your country cannot access League of Legends at this time”). But this still makes it quite difficult for League players in these affected countries to play anyway since VPNs can be quite expensive in these areas.

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I fucking hate 2019 dude

In fairness this is far more timely, relevant, and appealing than anything else I’ve seen from Newsweek in 20 years.

Red Dead Redemption Online has been adding ways to balance its community and honestly it’s a little silly that at this point I can deal with someone killing me by “begin feud”, “parlay”, OR “press charges”, beyond just respawning

It’s weird cause the original RDR’s online mode had one of the first and best and simplest counter-joykillng balances I remember, if you strung together enough player kills you’d get a bounty worth coming after

maybe that unbalanced the in-game economy, I dunno

Was getting bored for a new distraction game and Colin Spacetwinks was like “Just Cause 4 is on sale? No one even told me it came out!” and I was like “Just Cause 4 is out? I just got told!”

The franchise is such an open-world collect-a-thon I was a bit surprised to remember it was Squeenix and not Ubisoft

Thinking about Just Cause’s South America/Malaysia/Mediterranean/South America settings vs. Far Cry’s Africa/Indonesia/Nepal/Montana settings as “peripheral places you could feasibly set a tyranny and an insurgency”

“Sketchy arcade operator” as 80s-culture type

Blip (You Can’t Do That On Television)

Centauri (The Last Starfighter)

Noah Vanderhoff (Wayne’s World)

The Tropico series consistently releases a new game exactly 4 months after I have totally forgotten about the Tropico series and how it’s always about 80-85% as good as you hope

In which it is revealed that FFVI’s World of Ruin wasn’t in the original design and was added because development was coming in ahead of schedule

playing Gran Turismo when I was 14 saved me from crashing in real life at least 3 times

One thing about watching video games mature as a form over decades, you realize it’s not that arcade cabinet games had cheesy, incoherent, overconvoluted, or absurd storylines because the coin-op experience is fundamentally organized as ludic sequences, not narrative progression, no, it’s because SEGA and Capcom are just Like That

A while ago PlayStation gave out free copies of the “remastered” Day of the Tentacle, so I’ve been playing that

The original came out in 1993, and referenced the 1988 Maniac Mansion it sequeled (and the inexplicable Canadian sitcom spinoff that came in between). So there’s some culture lag and that’s interesting

Not so much at object-level so far: it’s only partly “contemporary”, in parallel with Apocalypse Future and Founders-era past, and that that “today” has landline phones and DOS computers seems like a natural part of the already-retro vibe, “mad science” and Elvis and the same vein of midcentury Weird that the B-52s and the swing/burlesque revivals drew from.

This one player character though, premed sophomore Laverne, is so particularly 1993 it’s killing me. Her personality felt hard to place until I realized it’s a combination of things that I’m used to seeing after the fact as distinct period tropes – she’s like halfway between the aetherial ditziness of Phoebe Buffay and the dark bitterness of a Janeane Garofalo character but NOT in a flattering way, like someone assembled a MPDG backwards. Her character animation looks like Delerium of the Endless as drawn in a Slave Labor Graphics book, and all in all I’m starting to think of her as the eponymous girl from The Presidents of the United States of America’s Lump. It’s amazing.

Final AC:Odyssey thoughts

They didn’t really do anything with Sparta/Athens or kingship/democracy, they kinda finished up with a vague sense of necessary balance between an equivalent Order (Templars) and Chaos (Assassins), which was kinda what they were going with London and the Americas ones

They have been hinting in universe in ancient-aliens-voice about a series reboot tho, that’s funny

It was so long I finally got bored at 85%, but that’s only cause I’m the type to grind to 100%

To come back for the 3rd time, it’s really the best use of moralized choices in a narrative I’ve ever seen. I’ve said before it’s less angel/demon than strict/lenient with no obvious relationship to instrumental ends. More than that no obvious relationship to moral ends because it really does grok a pagan ethic where “fiery, proud, vengeful” can be virtuous just as much as clever and subtle; you effectively get the choice to be Achilles or Odysseus.

And the choices are subtle and so distant from their payoff to deter savescumming so in the course of a playthrough you will experience tragedy. But you can’t really “fail” them and they’re not really central except in the Socrates and Hippocrates questlines. Which are written so well that whatever ethical choice you make gets well-challenged and honestly yes the Socrates and Hippocrates questlines should be about ethics.

Also not as much as AC:Egypt (which, not AC:Rome, is the one with Julius Caesar) but things like the Minoan ruins and all the collapsed temples really realized the fact that the cultures we consider “ancient” were living among reminders of civilizations just as far back themselves

They use a flavor epithet - malaka - but sometimes they just say “fuck”. Also the herms don’t have dicks out but some of the statuary does so good.

More AC: Odyssey thoughts:

It’s really good, they found a good balance between stealth and melee-as-rhythm game and the missions and locations have a good mix of objectives

The writing/acting/directing is seriously good! There’s a lot of choices and they’re not eyerolling angel/monster moral dichotomies but more strict/lenient where it’s not obvious what choice yields the desired result

There is SO MUCH of it, I got to the capstone level gold achievement like half my playtime ago and I’m maybe 2/3 done the five main progress threads and after that there’s maybe another third worth of random quests and then another third of bonus content that keeps coming out. Now I get why Far Cry: Montana felt a bit rushed, they were def. cannibalizing it in favor of this as their flagship open world

Oh my God, AC:Odyssey has the Great Outdoor Fight in it

having goons say “why won’t you die?” is verging on a vidya equivalent to the Wilhelm scream by now

More AC:Odyssey thoughts:

they do a good job of painting, and draping, and landscaping the temples to make you grok like that one building plan you see all the time in bare ruins really would’ve been experienced distinctively different

in general they do a lot to show how the same layout (of houses, buildings, amphitheaters) done in different material and different detailing comes off as a really different experience, which is both a history and a level design win

which feeds into something - where in previous games it felt like a competition for most glorious historical city, this time around even Athens and Sparta are meh (can’t go that high or that hard until someone invents the arch), they make Ancient Greece feel like the rival of any others by how complete the towns are, each one compact but with theaters and temples and statues built for centuries

There was some scoffing at Ubisoft apologizing for forcing a hetero relationship but no that kinda is a failure, AAA games are all one genre that steals from each other and this cycle Ubisoft went for stealing BioWare-style character work

And that’s not just sleeping with everything that moves as your sex of choice (which you totally can, this game loves wallowing in Dionysian decadence), it’s well-written dialogue trees with positive/negative/lie options where it’s not intuitively obvious what the minmaxing option is so you may as well inhabit the role

The “mercenary” mechanic is lifted from the LOTR orc warlords but not as good.

The animals-in-cages in the outposts really make clear how much Ubisoft is cannibalizing Far Cry for AC these days

Model Metropolis

The original SimCity was an implementation of a Nixon-era libertarian theory of urban decay cycles

Was just playing AC:Odyssey and noticed just how many distinct species of trees there were

And not only that but how well they modeled suckering and interaction between multiple trunks and the differential death of shady-side branches on slopes AND the spindly noodles that grow to replace them low on mature trunks

All of which are things I know well from my yard work but hadn’t seen modeled at all before

Hey Caroline Couture, Environment Artist in charge of vegetation!

Nice work

Been playing Yakuza Kiwami - a remake of the original Yakuza - cause it was free on PlayStation last month, and it’s pretty clearly the missing link between River City Ransom and Dead Rising, which I hadn’t realized was a link to be missing

Been thinking back over the RDR2 single-player campaign.

Something that jumped out at me – Rockstar games always had a strong sense of time and place but they used to filter that through preexisting movies about the setting and now they take on that first-order role and treat history directly, and that’s a big change

GTA3 was New York crime as filtered through Coppola and Scorcese and other gangster movies; Vice City was Scarface and Miami Vice. San Andreas lifted its aesthetics from gangsta rap and Hughes brothers movies. Even RDR1 leaned heavy on Peckinpah and spaghetti westerns

(Bully, I suppose, comes off as an entry in the British “school days” novel genre from someone who grew up in Trainspotting-era Manchester, transposed to the United States)

But starting with GTA4 it feels like they decided to try to grab the zeitgeist barehanded and honestly? I’m not sure it works. 4’s “modern New York, with immigrants shaped by post-Soviet chaos” is a real thing, but not really a resonant thing. In 5 Franklin’s lament that people still have an image of south LA as mid-90s ghetto while it’s solidly lower-middle-class and climbing is accurate but doesn’t really build into something; Trevor and Michael could be a metacommentary on the two traditional threads in Rockstar vidya - anarchic violence and domesticated interior plot - if you squint, but you have to squint.

I noticed this thinking of how RDR2 checked off so many boxes on “what was happening in late-19th cen America as the frontier closed” - you’ve got your Chinese workers building a railroad over here, your reintegration of the unchastened South over here, your resource magnates consolidating here, your German immigration important to the Great Plains here, your native tribes (who integrated freemen after emancipation) being moved on again from first-wave reservations here…

It’s probably newer (or more easily missed) to people w/o my interest in American history, and more subtle and better done than a lot of contemporary AAA stuff – in a lot of cases there’s a parallelism to Arthur and his band that’s used to play with things, one mission sequence is retrieving things for a dispossessed old man and it really leans into his self-pity and what he’s lost but the final twist is he was a slavecatcher and Arthur’s righteously angry, y’know his band idealizes freedom; and anyway a bit later you’re mourning the good old days of freedom… to be a bandit… in between breaking lives for economic reasons and capturing fugitives… it’s like “oh, hm”

But still for all that it’s box checking - yeah, we fit that in, and it just builds up into a pile, and I think it could’ve made a good revisionist Western out of any one of those things instead

(Well it does have heist movie pacing, like GTAV did, that’s something)

(alt.: it’s plenty Scorcese, just later indulgent Gangs of New York/The Aviator Scorcese)