Hypocrite's Haunt

Victoria 3 , in my opinion, has succeeded in bringing a vision of the industrial revolution and its human dimension to life. By modernizing the gameplay elements of the previous games in the series, and taking several radical steps to make mechanics match the vision, they have created a robust and unique foundation to build upon. Unfortunately, these changes inevitably made some people very upset and angry. A few were entirely unwilling to understand the creative vision behind the overhaul of mechanics such as warfare, and insisted that nothing less than a simple graphically updated version of Victoria 2 will satisfy them. Nevertheless, the development team were brave enough to hold strong (while taking into consideration constructive feedback) and ultimately delivered an innovative experience that was thematically and mechanically cohesive. This is why I was so disappointed when I woke up to see the most recent Dev Diary , which covers the issue of autonomous construction . In Victor...

  I believe it was my first year at university that I found myself, for the first time, rethinking the word “realistic.” It was during an introductory art history course, and the teacher (a graduate student) was presenting some of the artwork from the Renaissance. When compared to the medieval art we were previously shown, the most obvious point of comparison would be its “realism”; this was an opinion shared by most of the class.   Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights , c. 1490-1510 Raphael, School of Athens , 1509-1511 Clearly, Rafael’s fresco bears more resemblance to the “reality” we experience, especially when juxtaposed with the flat, surreal figures that populate Bosch’s painting. Or at least, this was what I thought before the teacher pushed back against it. Does Rafael’s painting, the teacher asked, truly capture the actual experience of reality?   Claude Monet, Woman with a Parasol , 1875 J. M. W. Turner, The Slave Ship , 1840 Being a vis...

  Paradise Killer was a good game. Although the mechanics were not groundbreaking, the central mystery and setting was compelling enough that the superb aesthetic and audio design carried the day, leaving me satisfied after the five or so hours it took me to complete the game. The good: Paradise Killer ’s sound design deserves a standing ovation. First: the music. The funky jazzpunk soundtrack was excellent, leaving me bopping and swaying to its hypnotic beats and sweet solos. It was also a neat touch to make some of the game’s music diegetic; the volume of the music depends on your distance to the nearest loudspeaker that peppers the landscape. This meant that some areas were left entirely silence aside from ambient audio and your own character (and sometimes the high-pitch giggle of the resident demon), making these spaces eerie and disturbing. Combined with area-specific music, this gives each region a unique feel, making it distinctive and fun to navigate the island. The ...

So. Battlefield 2042 . So many terrible things to say, so few things that haven’t already been said thousands of times on Reddit. Everything from the gunplay to the bugs to the lack of a campaign – there are plenty of things to hate here. So, am I here to contribute to this unending flood of criticism? Well, yes, a little, but perhaps with a little bit of a different perspective. See, I didn’t play the game. Nor do I play many Battlefield games (the last one I appreciated must have been the Bad Company 2 , which is positively ancient at this point). Why am I writing about it then, you might ask? Well, I think as a bit of an outsider, I am uniquely positioned to simply not care about much of the more minute details of actually playing the game. After watching a few reviews (and more than a few angry rants on Reddit), I believe I understand where Dice, the studio behind the series, is coming from, and how they failed so miserably. So, here I go: the core issue behind Battlefield 2042 i...

I usually don't enjoy isekais. For those who aren't otaku or weaboos, "isekai" roughly translates to "different world," and it has become a metonym for stories that involve being transported or reborn into a different world - usually either a swords-and-magic fantasy world or a video-game. This has become a standard within the anime/manga/light novel world, with each iteration relying on increasingly ridiculous gimmicks and becoming unbelievably more generic than the last. I do enjoy isekai when it's done well - the first arc of Sword Art Online is iconic as a genre-defining anime; KonoSuba was a satire that came out right as the market was being saturated by isekais and mocked them with acerbic wit. But as they keep flooding out each season, with each of them vying of the prize of best power fantasy, I've lost any desire to consume any more. It gets to a point where the the cliches are so tired, the tropes recycled one too many time, that all of t...

This is a long comment I made on Youtube as a response to Rick Beato's video, which was called " Why Gen Z Doesn't Care About Music ." For those that don't know, Rick Beato runs a Youtube channel focused on music from the latter half of the 20th century, with guitar tutorials and interviews with famous musicians. I discovered him through Adam Neely, who is another musician with a Youtube channel focused on jazz and bass. I first saw the video pop up on my feed a few days ago, but the very obvious clickbait title irritated me so much that I refused to click on it just to make a point. But today, my resolve wavered and I indulged in the mean-spirited, scandal-mongering, mob-rage part of my soul - and so I watched it. I thought the only thing I would be doing was rolling my eyes and going "OK boomer" under my breath. But to my surprise, he immediately singled-out video games as the most important reason that Gen Z doesn't care about music (allegedly). U...

Hades , the critically acclaimed rogue-like by star indie developer Supergiant, was a massive step forward in narrative storytelling through video games. The script, written by Greg Kasavin, stretched to over 300,000 words - but this novel-length text was not spat out at the player through paragraphs upon paragraphs of lore, but rather integrated into the game as part of its dynamically reactive narrative, through dialogue and narration. These hundreds of thousands of words are not written for every player; rather, they exist for every possibility, such that when a player experiences an event unique to them, the game will be able to recognize and acknowledge what the player has done.  The example of this everyone has at least heard of is with the boss of the first area, Megaera. She, of course, has tons of variation in her dialogue, keeping the encounter feeling like a genuine conversation between two characters, rather than just repeated generic dialogue. But Supergiant goes even ...