calvincell

[calvincell]

I was watching a great Star Wars critique that brought up how lightly the franchise treats the institution of slavery as the dire, inhumane act it is & due to some extremely lame comments I’m reminded how thoroughly I despise the platitude that “not all forms of slavery were/are torturous/some slave owners treated their slaves fairly”. Whenever I hear it I always have the urge to ask if those making such an argument would honestly & deliberately choose life as a slave as long as it was under the thumb of a “kind slavemaster”? Because from my perspective, enslavement always comes with the sacrifice of one’s dignity & free will, overt abuse or not.

It doesn’t matter how “kindly” you might be treated as a slave, you would still be considered property at the end of the day and any of your supposed freedom under the yoke will always only extend as far as what your master would consider most convenient and beneficial for them. If your owner wants you on call 24/7 then travel would be out of the question no matter how much you might want it. If you meet the love of your life and want to start a family, if your owner has no interest in letting you be “distracted” by granting your loved ones attention nor any interest in providing for a few more mouths to feed especially if they belong to an infant who wouldn’t be able to pay for such luxuries with their own labor then building a family would be out of the question for a slave with the troubling possibility of your partner and/or child being sold off at your owner’s discretion.

People don’t seem to understand that the institution of slavery isn’t reviled only because of its documented history of involving abuse, flesh trading, assault & grueling, dangerous & uncompensated labor. It’s inhumane because it’s explicitly about establishing a system where certain people are considered closer to property than actual human beings. It’s just prima facie an institution of inhumanity and one that is perpetually ripe for abuse because just because one slave is treated well, doesn’t mean every slave even potentially under the same owner would receive equal treatment. When you rob people of their humanity & personhood, you open the door to people who will use that opportunity to justify any and every act they might inflict to their “property” from the mundane like denying them true freedom to the vile such as assault & slaughter. So to frame those who critique slavery as not factoring in that “not all enslavement is inhuman” are being fundamentally disingenuous by pretending that such is the sole reason it’s distasteful. Never mind the fact that those who make such an argument would likely never choose to be enslaved themselves.

[calvincell]

For no reason, here is Art Spiegelman's 1991 graphic novel Maus, for free on the Internet Archive.

[calvincell]

Purchased & been thoroughly enjoying Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2 on my Steam Deck. Since the PS Vita is the last Sony console I have ever bought, I was completely left out of the hype around the first game & the death of my gaming PC ensured I wouldn’t even be able to try out the Remaster and was stuck simply experiencing the game vicariously through YT Let’s Plays. Though I did subscribe to PS Plus for half a year & completed Spider-Man Miles Morales via cloud streaming which I had a lot of fun with.

Thankfully with the advent of the Steam Deck & PlayStation’s porting of their popular exclusives to Steam, all I had to do was wait patiently to get my hands on Spider-Man 2; fully avoiding spoilers this time around too. 3+ hours in and I can honestly say that the wait was worth it so far. Much of the graphical fidelity options needed to be dragged down to the low & lowest settings for the Steam Deck to tolerate the game but considering I’m personally fine with reduced graphics for a smooth gameplay experience the game performs very well IMO.

Though I haven’t 100%’d the game, all of Insomniac’s Marvel Game output has made me extremely optimistic about & excited for not just their Wolverine game but Arcane’s Blade & Skydance’s Marvel 1943 as well! The Marvel IP has just lately been much better served in the hands of game devs than Film & TV crews sadly.

[calvincell]

LOL You absolutely aren’t alone! I suck at RAM but highly technical combo-heavy spectacle fighting style game mechanics are always my jam; so I’ll gladly hit my head against the wall that is the game.

It’s exactly the kind of roguelike experience that I love where I always get the tools to pull off badassery & nearly every loss feels less like bad luck & more about my failure to utilize those tools competently even in hectic situations.

man ram is so fucking good but i'm so fucking bad at it

[calvincell]

It’s frankly hilarious how anti woke chodes are just so blinded by their bigotry & rage against diversity that they fail to acknowledge or just straight up ignore things such as the fact that one of the 3 protagonists’ in the 1ST FILM OF THE FRANCHISE was Dr. Lora Baines, the woman who was an expert computer programmer & engineer who was fundamental in creating the very digitization laser tech which is the critical catalyst for the entire foundational premise of the franchise overall.

It’s also just one more blatant display of the complete disingenuous nature of anti woke tools who delude themselves into believing they are the only “real gamers/fans” - collectively complaining about how pronouns, minority representation and usage of diversity & inclusion consultants are all “blights” on the entire game industry; all the while explicitly ignoring massive obvious industry issues such as: worker exploitation and abuse at the hands of overpaid c-suite executives, mentally & physically debilitating levels of crunch, the degradation of game preservation, completely untenable development & release schedules on grossly bloated AAA game budgets, anti-consumer pricing & monetization tactics, efforts to rob customers of ownership rights of their game purchases, the draining & callous discarding of industry talent (individuals & studios alike) by major publishers, poor optimization & performance of supposedly complete full price releases, rabid trend chasing as seen with NFTs & live service games, etc.

New Tron game looks dope, I'm definitely looking forward to it. That being said it is extremely funny to me that the trailer dropped this afternoon and is already bringing the anti-woke crowd out to complain that Tron has "gone woke" because of the skin tone and supposed genitals of a fucking computer program.

[calvincell]

After months on months of eager anticipation, I’ve finally purchased & put a few hours into Empire of the Ants on my Steam Deck and been hooked.

The game is an exploration RTS blend that honestly reminds me of a mix of Pikmin & Brutal Legend with their shared active strategy mechanics infused with a gorgeous nature documentary aesthetic that seeps into the art style, graphics and gameplay at a foundational level which genuinely make you feel like you’re playing through the insect kingdom segments you’d see in nature docs like Planet Earth or Monster Bug Wars. All that’s missing is the running commentary of David Attenborough, Morgan Freeman or Werner Herzog; an inclusion that honestly I’d happily pay for DLC of 😄

The Xenofictional perspective of the ants does do a terrific job at immersing you in the mindset of an ant whose personal & colonial survival depends on clashing with a massive world where insects and bugs barely the size of a human thumb, rainstorms & hungry birds are all daunting threats for you & your Sister ants.

And speaking of Brutal Legend & Pikmin, the exploration aspect like them is similarly fun but to play the game means also earnestly engaging with the real-time strategy gameplay all share. Like those games, getting through EotA means getting adept with the plate-spinning style gameplay of building & strengthening units and bases while getting your Warriors or Gunners to battle encroaching hoards of enemies and using your personal skills to bolster said units & keep them alive lest you have to call for reinforcements and possibly fail altogether.

If you feel that sort of RTS gameplay is the type you love like I personally do or at least tolerate/feel you can comfortably handle, then I earnestly recommend giving Empire of the Ants of shot; particularly since the devs also put out a Roadmap outlining a deluge of major content additions in the near future, much of which is aimed towards expanding the strategic side of the game.

And Side Note: Though a lot of the early marketing pushed the angle of the game’s graphical fidelity heavily, the game IMO has been beautiful & still runs easily and fluidly on my Steam Deck assuaging my previous fears that it’d be extremely taxing for my system.

[calvincell]

Completed what must collectively be my 15th or so full rewatch of Cowboy Bebop since the days when it first aired on Adult Swim & just getting to those final episodes reminds me of why I consider the Bebop Crew to stand alongside the likes of the Strawhat Pirates in One Piece & Guts’ Party in BERSERK as one of the all time best Found Families in fiction.

Similar to what the creators accomplished again in Samurai Champloo, the creators of Cowboy Bebop have a fantastic knack for convincingly splitting up a wayward cast of misfits while simultaneously still making it an emotional gut punch seeing a family in the purest sense of the word, a group of people whose faults and talents enrich & complement each other so beautifully and naturally that their eventual mutual love is a matter of course (even if they don’t admit as much), split into their own separate lives to possibly never see each other again. It’s such a bittersweet feeling that never fails to make me teary eyed during those last handful of Bebop episodes.

[calvincell]

I was already optimistic about Gunn’s vision for the Live Action DC Universe but the fact that he’s including Hawk Girl, Krypto & Mr. Terrific in his foundational Superman movie has me even more hype than I expected to be

[calvincell]

The fact that an extremely high visibility Marvel project like Marvel Rivals earnestly includes & adapts Cloak & Dagger has me foaming at the mouth with joy!

I was already on board the moment they included both Black Panther & Storm as playable heroes but to go the extra mile & put Tandy & Tyrone on the roster AND as a paired hero rather than splitting them up ensures that I’ll likely be putting in hours equivalent to the 100+ I clocked back when I played classic vanilla Overwatch.

Now all I want for future Marvel Rivals content is the addition of Silver Surfer to the roster. Only then will I be satisfied that all of my woefully under-appreciated/under-represented faves get time in the limelight that IMO is long overdue!

[calvincell]

Though I’m only a handful of hours into Metaphor Refantazio, I’m compelled to express how wild it is that the game thus far has been keenly keyed in on the pulse of the current political climate (primarily from my perspective as a US citizen)

Vague Spoilers for the game’s premise & foundational worldbuilding elements established early in the first ~5-7 hours…

In Metaphor, the primary antagonist is a haughty elitist with zero regard for others who commits a multitude of reprehensible & violent crimes to gain a kingship & thus access to immense (unchecked) power. He’s protected by a private militarized force which, inbetween bouts of infighting & fracturing, expressly uses force to oppress citizens & aid in the explicit slaughter of citizens to sow fear and desperation in the populace & cut down dissenters. And yet despite all of that vile behavior & a literal admission of aiming to gain power by killing the former king, the antagonist still appeals to a majority of the populace leveraging their fears & zealous worship to become the frontrunner for earning the crown via mystical election.

Those who support him either: believe there is no better alternative, buy into the antagonist’s philosophy that “might makes right” and/or outright salivate over his blatant lack of morals or compassion as well as his rhetoric of wielding iron-fisted violence to crush any who might even have a chance of opposing his ideals or actions.

All of this occurs within a societal climate thick with hate, bigotry & discrimination (a lot of which is explicitly born from & reinforced by the narrow-minded tenets of the country’s major religion), where those who are considered “lesser” due to race are victims of poverty, exploitation, social stigmatization, limited or non-existent access to medical care, verbal & physical abuse by those from races who consider themselves to be fundamentally (& even divinely) “superior”, and farcical justice where one’s race could increase the likelihood of not only being unjustly arrested but also outright executed (privately & publicly) with zero avenues for proving their innocence beforehand.

On reflection, I’m certain that 8-10 years ago, many would have considered these aspects of Metaphor’s story & setting to be: “unsubtle”, “exaggerated”, “heavy-handed” or “over the top” etc. with little relationship to the realities of our contemporary society. Yet now the major differing factors seem to only be that, unlike real life, the world of Metaphor simply happens to have magic & monsters.

[calvincell]

Extremely happy for the exposure that an Anime Adaptation might potentially bring to GNOSIA but like with so many similar adaptations (Danganronpa, Ace Attorney, When They Cry Series etc.) the experience of the game is too often just so much more satisfying.

In GNOSIA’s case I genuinely consider it to be one of the most successful recent innovations in the VN genre for its fantastic melding of Social Deduction gameplay & storytelling. Crafting an engaging solo Social Deduction game is a feat in itself but GNOSIA manages to be outright transcendent when enriched by its characters & narrative.

Not trying to douse the hype for this anime since GNOSIA is long overdue for a heavy fandom devoted to it considering that IMO it alongside YTTD & Ai Somnium Files are collectively amongst the Top 20 or so post-Danganronpa VNs of the last decade. Still, I’d definitely recommend supporting the devs with purchases & playthroughs of the original game particularly to anyone with the slightest interest in VNs generally & Mystery VNs specifically.

GNOSIA TV anime announced - Gematsu

Aniplex has announced a television anime based on the petit depotto-developed science-fiction “werewolf game” time loop murder mystery game GNOSIA. It will air in 2025.

Watch the teaser trailer below. Visit the official website here. Follow the anime on Twitter @GNOSIA_Off.

Teaser Trailer

[calvincell]

100% Accurate 😂

I myself finally actually got around to watching the Senritsu Kaiki File Kowasugi Series (on YT for those interested) & as far as I’m concerned, it was a stroke of genius for Koji Shiraishi to make the leader of his fictional ghost hunting team a straight up deranged prick rather than another rote faux-spiritualist sage like the Warrens from The Conjuring franchise. Kudo is essentially Zak Bagans from Ghost Adventures minus the fake tough guy persona thus actually being entertaining to watch.

PSYCHIC MEDIUM: it's weird that you don't seem to have a soul.

KUDO JIN: idk I guess. look, I've had some experiences. whatever. moving on.

[calvincell]

This OVA psychically damaged me because since seeing it, just hearing Luffy say “Set Sail!” is more than enough to trigger my eyes watering 😭

This series completely has my heart in a vice & I cherish every second of it

one piece fan letter was beautifully animated and written all the way through but this scene was the part that really got me

[calvincell]

You know what’s absolutely kino? Each and every time one of the Strawhats declares to doubters and shares between themselves that Luffy is the man who will be King of the Pirates. Many people remember most often Zoro saying as much during the conclusion to Thriller Bark but for me it goes hard as hell anytime any of the Strawhats say it. Even when they endearingly call him a moron and/or get exasperated by his spontaneous & risky behavior, all of the Strawhats have unwavering faith in his ambition & are more than ready to walk through fire and worse to get him there. It’s just so fun going through the series and see so many of the Strawhats go from being baffled by the dude to earnestly seeing the future where their captain obtains the One Piece.

[calvincell]

Finally got around to buying & playing the starship combat roguelike deckbuilder BREACHWAY & adore it so far. Despite the deckbuilding intergration, the game honestly does still envoke the tactical starship captain experience that I’ve craved since FTL Advanced Edition minus the semi-realtime crew management & overall minute control that allowed for strategies like blowing invading hostiles out of your airlock & snuffing out fires in the same manner. It helps that the game absolutely dazzles in the presentation department. Artwork for various crew members & the 3D modeled starships are all extremely evocative. Watching the ships trade blows & ultimately explode gloriously during the split screen combat grants the game an engaging cinematic quality. It also feels very rich worldbuilding-wise even in Early Access thanks to the different ship & character designs as well as the various factions birthed from a somewhat rote but still well-sketched intriguing sci-fi setting.

I don’t blame anyone who might feel particularly burnt out by the roguelike deckbuilding trend of the last half decade but IMO games like BREACHWAY help keep the genre from truly becoming stale & I happily welcome even simple tweaks & stylish presentations that are capable of drawing me into one more game in the genre. Definitely recommended to deckbuilder and/or FTL fans.

[calvincell]

Absolutely True! The fact that Trump & Project 2025’s architects were even associated to start with exposes the fact that all this “distancing” is only theater for the sake of deniability. The moment Trump & his administration gain even an ounce of presidential power, Project 2025 will be re-embraced as the administration’s blueprint. All of this supposed distancing is just a rejection of Project 2025 only as a label because the fundamental goals of P2025 are 1:1 with Trump’s (and the general MAGA GOP’s) very own explicitly admitted policy plans.

This is a lie. This is a huge, epic, 100% bullshit lie.

Do not believe this.

The only people who believe this are people who were going to vote for Fascism, anyway, but just wanted some kind of rhetorical cover.

[calvincell]

100% co-signing this! Bithell Games in particular is stubbornly refusing to let Tron die the death Disney seems fine sentencing it to by canceling Uprising & letting Ares wallow in production purgatory and I’m with him all the way. I’d rather get games like this from diehard fans in the indie space than for some AAA company getting contracted to have their devs crunch for 3+ years only to deliver a subpar product with a multimillion dollar budget

Some Tron fans might be a little disappointed that TRON: Catalyst isn't a big fancy AAA game with cutting-edge graphics and whatnot, thinking that Disney doesn't care about the franchise enough to put huge sums of money into it (compared to, say, Star Wars games). But me, I was actually kind of relieved when I looked at the system requirements for the game and saw that it can most likely be run on my sligthly old, not-cutting-edge-specs computer. I'm happy that I won't have to buy a whole new computer, or a new game console, to keep up with the Tron franchise, at least not for a little while longer (who knows, maybe we'll get a big high-end game to tie in with TRON: Ares somewhere down the line?).

I felt similarly about TRON: Identity, and I might go so far as to say that I almost hope that Tron remains a "lesser" Disney franchise, if it means that we'll get more low-budget, but still well-made and interesting games set in its universe. To quote Jordan Mallory, "I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding."

At the same time, I will also admit that I'm happy that Catalyst does seem to have one important improvement over Identity: Voice acting. Even though that presumably require a slightly higher budget.