Hypocrite's Haunt

                      A few weeks ago, I made a post about the fascinating and impressive Hearts of Iron 4 mod, Red Flood . What made that mod great was the refreshing new take on world history, a new perspective that changed up the old rules of alternative history. This week, however, I’ll be talking about another HOI4 mod – but this time it’s one that is even further from reality than the last. I’m of course talking about Old World Blues , the total overhaul mod based on the Fallout universe. The current state of the mod focuses on the western half of the continental United States, although it is slowly moving eastward (it now includes some parts of the Midwest, like Colorado and Oklahoma). I’m honestly impressed with the progress the developers had made; they’ve not only introduced new regions with interesting and unique countries and focus trees, but they’ve also added cool new mechanics that didn’t exist in the base...

Last week, I first dove into the treasure trove that is the Xbox Game Pass on PC, taking advantage of the dirt cheap first month deal. A single quid for AAAs to indies, retro to next-gen, even Xbox exclusives! It’s a good thing I didn’t discover this gem until after I finished my degree, or I would’ve been spending all those Zoom classes with my eyes on another monitor, mashing away at the keyboard. Anyway, by taking advantage of the Game Pass’ massive catalogue of games, I’ve managed to download a hefty number – these include games that I forgot, were too expensive, or simply weren’t on my radar. Having so many games at my disposal meant I could switch between them if I got tired or bored, giving me the interesting opportunity to compare them in real time. For today, I’ve chosen two JRPGs – Yakuza: Like a Dragon and Octopath Traveler .   Yakuza: Like a Dragon is one of the newer entries to the distinguished Yakuza series, which had previously followed the adventures of one h...

I hear the soft strains of an organ blending with the wistful, melancholic Russian lyrics being sung, staring at surreal collages of modernist art, historical figures, and flyers promoting fictional regimes, as the small loading bar inches across the screen. I’m playing Hearts of Iron 4, a WWII strategy game, and I feel myself become slightly deranged, tearing my hair out over the terrible loading times on my PC as I listen to the eerie Russian song for the millionth time. But my madness seems fitting, as I am playing the mod Red Flood , a total conversion mod that seems to have taken Percy Shelley’s words that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” and replaced “unacknowledged legislators” with “authoritarian leaders.”   Entering the ersatz world of Red Flood , we can observe a few commonalities with other alternate history worlds – Russia and Spain are competing to see who can have the most confusing and destructive civil war, Africa is in ...

          The Outer Worlds - the return to glory for Obsidian Entertainment, the creators of the much-loved classic Fallout: New Vegas . Having experienced success with their crowd-funded CRPG, Pillars of Eternity , it seems that Obsidian wanted to take another crack at the first-person RPG once again, to take back their lost crown as king of the genre. Now that the game has been out for about two years, the big question is: have they done it? Did they kick Bethesda to the curb, as all the Reddit posts comparing New Vegas ’ dialogue and story to Fallout 4 ’s seem to think? So many options!           It’s a difficult question, but I must say I believe the answer is a strong no. And before everyone raises their pitchforks and torches, ready to lynch the Bethesda apologist, let me explain. The Outer Worlds is a good game - a great game, in fact - but it just fails to scratch the itch that Bethesda’s open world RPGs do. Why? I’ll...

This morning I read a BBC article saying that Banksy’s relatively recent new piece of art that had appeared outside the Reading jail - depicting a prisoner escaping using a roll of paper and a typewriter - has been recently defaced. A blotch of red graffiti now covers the typewriter, with the words “Team Robbo” written below - a reference to another graffiti artist that had a feud with Banksy. The articles written about this incident are filled with despairing comments from a wide array of individuals, ranging from a member of the public who attempted to wash off the offending red graffiti to a member of the Reading Borough Council who found it “disappointing,” as the borough had been looking to purchase the defunct prison. What no one apparently realized was that Banksy’s works are acts of vandalism in the first place - no different from the graffiti that now covers it. The public’s reaction is the reaction to someone painting over a Mona Lisa. This is what happens when someone is en...

   A few months ago, I picked up Prey during a Steam sale and then played the entire thing through in a single weekend. Even though I’m not exactly the biggest fan of sci-fi, Prey was an amazing immersive sim that tickled me in all the right ways – an interesting, well-built world, an impactful skill system that changes the way you play the game, and a cool story (even if the ending was a little abrupt). Having had my interest in immersive sims re-kindled, I took the opportunity to grab the other Arkane game I haven’t yet had the chance to play – Dishonored 2. Unfortunately, it wasn’t… exactly up to the standards of Prey, which is understandable considering they released Dishonored 2 a year before. But I’m glad that Arkane seemed to have taken the lessons they learnt from making Dishonored and applied it admirably in Prey. In particular, I found that the opening and tutorials of the two games were the biggest indicators of the difference between the two, and shows exactly how ...

       Zaum – a literary and social experiment by Futurist poets in early 20 th century Russia, an attempt by these artists to create their own language in order to transcend beyond the inhibiting influence of politics, society, and economics to form a universal tongue that speaks to the hearts of people. The work produced in this “language” was, for the most part, entirely incomprehensible to anyone else other than the writers. Words only make sense to us because of the centuries – millennia – spent impressing upon those meaningless noises with our own understanding. Zaum was a private language, understood only by those who have a personal connection to it. "Dyr bul shchyl," by Aleksei Kruchenykh... the poem goes:  Dyr bul shchyl ubeshshchur skum vy so bu r l èz      Disco Elysium is a game developed by a company called ZA/UM. The game is (mostly) comprehensible, unlike the Futurists’ language. But the game does resemble this language in one k...