#The early 2000s were a weird time in general for the Mario series.

[rainbogen]

Me with The Super Mario Bros Movie and Mario and Luigi Brothership doing everything to kill the "Mario is a bad brother" garbage.

[skaruresonic]

I think the argument about Sonic's inconsistency is, like many things, one of those criticisms that actually was born from a somewhat solid foundation but got warped over time by virtue of the Sonic fandom being what it is

Because to claim that Sonic is an inconsistent series in terms of general quality and direction...well that's actually true. I'd even argue it's undeniable, as the series has gone from the highs of the Classics to the lows of 06, to gaining back its momentum with the likes of Gens and Mania, to losing it again thanks to Boom and others. Even direction wise: sometimes it's silly, sometimes it's dark, sometimes it's both, other times it's who knows what?

Of course none of this is unique to Sonic, but the series has had so many ups and downs (while also being the target of many internet personalities and such) that a lot more attention has been given to it

Let's also consider that most of the fans that we see flinging these takes around are, most likely, folks who grew up with the 2000s games aka the period when Sonic was arguably at his most inconsistent, in terms of tone, quality and even gameplay style, so to many Sonic being inconsistent is like an inherent part of the series' identity, thus making it that Sonic has always been inconsistent...to them

Because to imply that Sonic has ALWAYS been inconsistent since day one, since the early 90s, would not only require some interesting mental gymnastics but it would also be pretty weird: how can a series that is so inconsistent become one of the best selling of the 90s, able to keep the pace with Mario? Able to survive through thick and thin for decades?

At the end of the day this is just another way of unleashing one's own frustrations on and about the franchise, frustrations that are even somewhat justified in some cases but, like it's often the case in the radioactive wasteland that is the Sonic fanbase, these frustrations take on some twisted forms

Let's also consider that most of the fans that we see flinging these takes around are, most likely, folks who grew up with the 2000s games aka the period when Sonic was arguably at his most inconsistent, in terms of tone, quality and even gameplay style, so to many Sonic being inconsistent is like an inherent part of the series' identity, thus making it that Sonic has always been inconsistent...to them

Hello. Hi. I grew up with those games just as much as they did. Just stating for the record that not everyone in this Adventure-era-fan Chili's is like this.

Not necessarily saying that every Sonic game is homogenous, but like... One man's inconsistent is another man's versatile. I had no problem playing gritty ShTH and colorful Sonic Advance 3 side-by-side, because to me it was just Sonic, you know? Not that I didn't have opinions about those games, but back then I was in more of this "yay, more of the thing I like" headspace.

Besides, quality is so subjective, it's difficult to say what counts as "inconsistent" from one person to the next. I for one think ShTH is an underrated masterpiece

I think, overall, as we move forward, we tend to lose the historical context in which these games were made, and that influences people to judge the series through a much harsher lens.

---

Because to imply that Sonic has ALWAYS been inconsistent since day one, since the early 90s, would not only require some interesting mental gymnastics but it would also be pretty weird: how can a series that is so inconsistent become one of the best selling of the 90s, able to keep the pace with Mario? Able to survive through thick and thin for decades?

I mean. They did it with "Classic Sonic games don't reward instant speed at all times, therefore they're not good games, therefore they only trick you into thinking they're good," they can certainly do that to the games' narratives.

---

At the end of the day this is just another way of unleashing one's own frustrations on and about the franchise, frustrations that are even somewhat justified in some cases but, like it's often the case in the radioactive wasteland that is the Sonic fanbase, these frustrations take on some twisted forms

Maybe there is some grain of truth in there, but like all needles in haystacks, it gets buried under avalanches of bullshit.

To be completely honest, with Sonic being as old and as storied as it is, I don't see the point in calling it "inconsistent" even on a quality or marketing level. I don't see any reason to single out or focus on the inconsistency as if it's something special. Because if we judged everything according to that metric, every single franchise in existence would be "inconsistent" as well.

That's why I called the sentiment a thought-terminating cliché; it pretends to impart genuine information when people only use it when they want to end the argument. We've already lost the original context in which the argument ought to be used, if it even existed to begin with.

[ihatetaxes99]

The Digit-Al Rant (Because I am insane)

 Well, since I'm a Lovecraftian being who feeds off of ranting about things literally nobody else cares about, tonight I'm going to go for broke and make my most obscure rant yet. A rant about a certain character. Not just any character, mind you; A character that hasn't been relevant in over a decade and arguably, wasn't even relevant back when he was still being used. In spite of this, the character still holds a special spot in my weird, black heart.

 We all know corporate mascots. Cute little characters designed to entice you towards forgetting that the company they represent burned down a factory with eight hundred children inside for insurance, and buy their products again. We've had a lot of mascots over the years. Super Mario, Tony the Tiger, some others that I can't be bothered to recall right now. Mascots are a staple of modern culture. And in 2006, the UK government, and particularly the BBC, was facing a crisis that only a cuddly little mascot could solve.

 They had to… Convince boomers to make a minor change in their lives. This is where you can place the Dracula sting in your head.

 Yes, how many of you have heard of digital switchover? How many of you care about digital switchover? Well, come the mid-2000s, it had become clear to the British government that the old analogue television was not really going to cut it anymore, now that those dastardly Yanks were making films and television series with high-quality equipment. Analogue was quickly becoming outdated and they needed to make the switch to the far faster digital switchover sooner rather than later.

 And so, began the creatively titled UK Digital Switchover scheme. The plan was thus: From 2008 until 2012, the entirety of Britain would undergo a switch to digital television. This meant higher quality images, 1080p, support for modern TVs, things of that nature. During that time, they needed to make the general public aware of this, lest riots break out over Coronation Street being interrupted by the switchover. So they initiated their campaign as early as 2006. And at the head of it was the mascot of the event, one Digit Al (geddit?)

 Digit Al was a little robot fella, who initially had glowing blue eyes, although this was altered in later promotional material to remove the glow. His very first outing was a very charming little commercial where Al would interrupt the show that was on at the time, directly addressing the viewer and informing them of the Switchover. In this appearance, he was voiced by comedian Matt Lucas, who gave a certain awkward charm to Al, making him a bit of a klutz, albeit an incredibly friendly one. Lucas would voice Al in at least two more adverts.

 However, after these three ads, things would change. Around the time that Al's eye glow was removed, Lucas stopped voicing the character; In fact, Al would never again, for the duration of the campaign, speak. He was relegated to a background character while the narration was provided by some random fella doing a voiceover. As the Switchover went underway, Al would be used less and less, as promotion moved from informing the public of its existence towards explaining how to set up your television for the switch. From 2008 to 2011, Al's roles were sparse.

 Until, interestingly, 2012, the very end of the Switchover. By that point, Wales, England and Scotland had fully switched over. And this left just one nation in the UK that was yet to do so. The ugly little brother of the group that no one really likes and, coincidentally, my own home country. Northern Ireland. By October of 2012, NI would be the last British nation to still have analogue television, as the stations had been shut down entirely everywhere else. And then, in October, the sword fell. From the tenth to the twenty-third, the Switchover began. And this is when Al made one last appearance.

 On the closure of both BBC 1 NI Analogue and BBC 2 NI Analogue, Al appeared on the final message screen and, in the case of the former, made a brief cameo in plushie form in the final seconds of analogue television's existence in Britain. One last goodbye to nearly forty-nine years of British television. 

 So, why did he suddenly come back for Northern Ireland of all places? Was he an ardent Unionist? Well, I can't actually find any reason behind this. Each channel was basically allowed to do whatever they wanted, with some giving cute little goodbye messages and others cutting to static in the middle of a news broadcast about dead bodies being found (I am not joking, by the way. Imagine that being the last thing you see before your telly cuts out). If I had to make a wild conspiracy theory, then maybe the NI staff decided to use Al since this was the final stage of the Switchover. Once Northern Ireland was done, then the entire scheme was completed. Might as well give him one final wave.

 When all was said and done, the UK successfully transitioned over to digital television without any major issues and Al faded away into nothingness. The obvious reason for this is that he was created for one sole purpose. He was not a BBC mascot, he was a mascot for the Switchover specifically. What are you supposed to do with him once it's all done? He had outlived his usefulness, so to speak and so, the cheeky little bugger was taken out and sentenced to an eternity of wink-and-nod cameos during various other BBC promotions over the years. Of course, it probably didn't help that they stripped all of his personality out of him after Lucas left the project and resigned him to a kind of ugly-looking CGI robot, but still. I like Al for what he was, what he represented. As someone who grew up in the 2000s and early 2010s, Al is almost a symbol of my childhood, a bygone memory of simpler times. For that, I'll always have a soft spot for the little fella.

 A few interesting links:

 https://youtu.be/cerk8CDG8BE - The first advert with Digit Al

https://youtu.be/mWM3KuXidrA - An example of a post-Lucas advert

https://youtu.be/qecN3kmH9Hw - The hilariously unsettling example of the Switchover interrupting a rather morbid news report (it's the first section, BBC Two Scotland)

https://youtu.be/1p8d2Uo8pJk - The Switchover message from BBC 1 NI, the final few minutes of analogue television in all of Britain. Includes the Al plushie cameo.

[thefloatingstone]

We’ve gone from Self-Isolation to Quarantine and in some places to gradual relaxation phases, but that doesn’t stop the need for more nonsense you can watch on youtube while you wait for things to get back to normal. And recommending things and making lists are some of my favourite things to do but I have not yet figured out how to start or structure a video myself, you guys get another rambling tumblr post of things you can watch on youtube.

This time I’m once again just gonna recommend individual videos rather than full channels like I did in part 2.

Part 1

Part 2

In no particular order; 

LOCAL58: The Broadcast Station that Manipulates You

I recently started watching the Nexpo channel when I went on a binge of creepy youtube videos. Most of his videos are really good although the ones where he himself goes into theory crafting can be a little asinine. However, this video is REALLY good. And before you get nervous, LOCAL58 is not a real TV station. LOCAL58 is a youtube channel created by the same guy behind the Candle Cove creepypasta. This video by Nexpo covers the various episodes of LOCAL58 and discusses them. Just be aware going in that this is abstract horror, and will probably get under your skin regardless if you’re unaffected by certain topics or not. although cw for suicide mention.

I also recommend most of the rest of this channel, although be careful where you tread. I don’t recommend his series “Disturbing things from around the internet” as it can sometimes include real life crime, abuse and such caught on security cameras. Everything else is really good tho. (although I was really annoyed by his 2 videos on KrainaGrzybowTV)

The Search for D.B. Cooper

LEMMiNO has a new video out covering one of the most unexplained crimes in the past century of the US. LEMMiNO is the guy I’ve recommended before who did videos on the Universal S. He is very down to earth and not someone prone to conspiracy or even really that fanciful of thinking. (He’s like the one person I feel covered the Dyaltov Pass incident and was confused by why this was even a mystery because if you read the Russian Autopsy reports and documents associated with the case it’s all pretty logical and easily explained)

D.B. Cooper is the name given to a man who, in 1971, hijacked an airplane with a bomb, asked for a large sum of money, and after receiving it, parachuted from the plane and was never seen or heard from again.

The Austrian Wine Poisoning | Down the Rabbit Hole

Down the Rabbit Hole also has a new video out, this time covering the Austrian Wine Poisoning event from 1985. A scandal that involved literally the entire country of Austria, affected multiple countries, and forever changed the way wine was made world wide. As someone who is generally pretty allergic to most artificial substances this one made me personally very angry. But luckily, it has a happy ending and a better world for us all... if I could drink wine which I can’t do anyway.

The Turbulent Tale of Yandere Dev - A Six Year Struggle

The Right Opinion is another channel I only recently subbed to after watching his cover on Onion Boy. I put off subbing to him simply because of his channel name and I thought it meant he would come across as smug and elitist. Luckily this seems to merely be one of those “I chose a bad channel name and now I’m stuck with it” type of situations. (IHE has a similar problem).

Anyway, I have a weird interest in bizarre internet personalities, so I’ve been enjoying his channel as he simply discusses and presents a timeline of events of certain individuals. In this video, he covers the developer behind the much maligned Yandere Simulator. It’s a tale of hubris, arrogance, immaturity, and an unwillingness to accept your own shortcomings due to ego.

Oh and there’s a meme game about Japanese school girls with anime tiddies in there as well.

The Most Relaxing Anime Ever Made | Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō

Kenny Lauderdale is a youtube channel which is slowly becoming bigger which I’m very happy to see. He exclusively covers anime and live action Japanese television no younger than the mid 90s (as is the case with YYK) and which usually never saw a release outside of Japanese Laserdisc. I do wish his videos were a little longer, but if nothing else his videos serve as an excellent starting to point to find some older and underappreciated shows... or hot garbage fires. In this episode he talks about the 2 OVA episodes made based on one of my favourite manga, Yokohama Shopping Log. A Post apocalyptic anime about an android who runs a coffee shop outside of her house, and the quiet solitude of living in a world of declining human population, brief encounters with travelers and other people, and just... existing. The anime was never released outside of Japan and is only available on Japanese VHS and laserdisc.... but hey guess what!! Somebody uploaded both episodes, subbed, to Youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2HCVOH6DtA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqSTwfkobME

YMS’ slow descent into madness as he uncovers just how bullshit the Kimba Conspiracy is

I’m linking a full playlist for this one.

YMS is busy planning his review on the “live action” Lion King remake as the original 1994 movie is probably his favourite movie all time (and also self declared what made him a furry). As part of the 2 hour review, he decided to what all 2000 hours of Kimba the White Lion just to mention how The Lion King potentially stole the idea. ....until he actually watched all 2000 hours of Kimba and realised that if you actually WATCH Kimba, it has VERY little to do with the Lion King at all apart from having the same animals in them because AFRICA. Watch as one man slowly loses his mind as he realises just how stupid this conspiracy theory is, just HOW DECEITFUL and straight up LYING people can be. People who write BOOKS. People who teach LAW AT UNIVERSITIES. Because NOBODY bothered to actually watch the entire show and just parroted the “Disney stole this” lie which got started by like 2 salty fans on the internet.

The man set out to just mention how Disney stole an idea, and uncovered one of the most infuriating rabbit holes on the internet. Screaming for SOMEONE to provide him with sources or evidence.

YMS will be publishing his full Kimba documentary this month which he has said is around 2 hours long before he continues to work on the Lion King one.

Science Stories: Loch Ness eDNA results, Poop Knives, and Skeleton Lovers

TREY the Explainer has a video giving us some updates in Archeology from 2019. In this video he discusses the findings of the eDNA results conducted on the Loch Ness to see what animal DNA the lake contains which will tell us what living animals currently inhabit the lake, ancient knives made of poop and if this is a real thing that could have existed, and a skeleton couple found buried together which were at first thought to be lovers, then revealed to be both male, and then how in this instance we cannot let our modern sensibilities dictate what we WANT this burial find to be, but to look at the evidence as presented to us and place in context finds of this nature. The worst thing an archaeologist can do is look for proof to a theory they already have.

The Bizarre Modern Reality of Sonic the Hedgehog

Super Eyepatch Wolf is back and he’s here to talk to us about the very very strange existence of Sonic. a 90s rebellious “too cool for School” answer to Mario, a lost idea as the world of video games changes and culture shifted, a meme and punching bag amplified by a unique fanbase and poor quality games, a transcendence into a horrific warped  idea of what he once was, and modern day and where Sonic and his fans are now. As usual Super Eyepatch Wolf knocks it out of the park.

Kokoro Wish and the Birth of a Multiverse: A Lecture on the Work of Jennifer Diane Reitz

I don’t even sub to this channel as I’m not entirely sure what Ben’s usual content is about. But every now and then he has a “101″ class, where he explains to a room full of his friends in a classroom setting (complete with Whiteboard) an internet artist and oddity, the timeline, and what it is they have created. (wait... didn’t I say this already?). Unlike TRO however, the 101 classrooms are not a dark look into disturbed individuals (although the CWC 101 is debatable) nor is it a “lol look at this weirdo” dragging. Instead, of the 3 he’s done so far, it’s usually a rather sympathetic look at some of the strange artists on the internet who through some way or another, left a very big cultural impact on the internet space through their art. Sometimes they may not be the best people, but their work is so outside of what we’re used to seeing that just listening to him run you through these people’s internet history is fascinating.

In this episode he talks about Jennifer Diane Reitz. And although it is titled Kokoro Wish, the lecture is more about Jennifer’s larger work back in the early internet when being a weeb was unheard of, how being trans influenced her stories and characters, and her world building that is so rich and in-depth with it’s own ASTRO PHYSICS it puts any modern fictional world found in games or movies to shame.

Jennifer is not exactly a nice person... and in many ways can be seen as dangerously irresponsible, but she created something truly unique in a way that you kinda struggle figuring out if it’s terrible or a work of genius.

Anyway I think that’s enough for now

[profoundkittymaker]

There Once Was a Game Called Ribbit King

I once stumbled across a long-forgotten piece of history from the early 2000's called Ribbit King. Released on the Nintendo Gamecube in 2003 in Japan, and 2004 in the west, Ribbit King received mixed reviews and little attention overall. It was published by Bandai, but the studios that developed it, Infinity and Jamsworks, seem to have faded into obscurity, and I've found little to no information about them.

Anyways, Ribbit King is weird. Admittedly, I've only had the opportunity to play a small amount of it, but it was in a multiplayer session, which seemed to be one of the game's focuses. It was a journey, to be honest. First, you would choose which planet to play on. Apparently the game had a space theme of some kind. Ribbetopia was the default stage, and one of the few we could choose at the time. A vibrant, grassy area with palm trees and water, seems normal enough right? Next, we had to choose our playable characters, which included some eccentric choices such as a weird alien kid with antennae, a panda in a caveman’s loincloth, a sentient picnic basket, and... this guy.

He’s the current reigning Frolf champion, apparently. Oh, yeah, this game is about a sport called Frolf. It’s like golf with frogs. Of course, we got to choose from various specimens of frogs to accompany our characters, as well. Each character had a frog to match it, but you could mix and match if you’d like. After choosing from a long list of bizarre power-up items to give to our characters, we were finally thrown into our first match of Frolf. And almost immediately, the confusion set in.

We took turns hitting our frogs with mallets, causing them to jump very high, imitating a swung golf ball until the frogs hit the ground, after which the frogs would take several consecutive hops forward. Once they hit the ground, it would only become more chaotic, as they interacted with various objects on the courses, which were always of the strange variety. Ribbetopia seemed to be the most simple and ordinary stage, but on some courses your frog would be carried by these guys who would wiggle around in a long path on some parts of the course. 

What are “these guys” exactly? We would love to know. Also note the large wooly mammoth in the background, who would attack your frog if it happened to land nearby. All in all, our frogs were able to interact with many things, one of the most recurring of which was airborne flies that the frogs would always jump towards to consume if they were in range. When our frogs landed in water, they would swim until they got to land.

While a course littered with events to interact with might seem like the makings of a game with the potential to be a fun and strategic multiplayer experience. However, in practice Ribbit King is astoundingly chaotic, and we found ourselves at the whims of the game, unable to predict what was going to happen after our frogs hit the ground.

On several occasions, they would be mauled by alien snakes, only to get spat out in a different direction. Every game was impossible to predict. On one match, I got a miraculous hole-in-one where my frog was carried to the end of the course by the objects in the stage. I did not plan this, I did not calculate this. It just kind of happened as we watched on in awe. During another match, one of the players fell asleep, which may speak to how little involvement the players’ actions really have in the game’s outcomes—or perhaps he is just narcoleptic. Most likely, it was a mix of both.

The ultimate end goal of the stage was a giant floating diamond with a large hole underneath. The diamond, strongly resembling a Chaos Emerald from the Sonic the Hedgehog series, perhaps had some sort of story context, but I could not tell you anything about that. However, I can tell you that trying to get out frogs to land in the hole was often rather difficult. While it was a generously sized goal compared to Frolf’s sister sport of golf, the frogs would take large hops after they hit the ground, often leaping over the hole entirely.

Ribbit King seemed to have a variety of quirky stages, but I—regretfully—only had the opportunity to try the three that were unlocked at the start. Other than the aforementioned Ribbetopia, there was Planet Lavatron, the lava-themed stage, and the hazardous, icy gauntlet known as Planet Frosticle.

Planet Frosticle is where things really got dicey for us, as on nearly every hit our frogs would slide across the stage, making it even more difficult to predict just where they would end up. We had already descended to madness in Ribbetopia, but in Planet Frosticle I often found myself bouncing off spider webs weaved above precariously placed holes in the ice, or caught up in giant cyclops twisters. On the ground in Planet Frosticle, there were often these circular boards that resembled that of Skee-Ball, and you would earn some points depending on where your frog landed on the board.

In fact, interacting with literally anything on the course would affect your point total—unlike golf, Frolf is not a simple game of whoever reaches the goal first. The points you earn over the several holes that a single game of Frolf spans can make or break whether you emerge victorious. However, the points earned from reaching the goal in less turns are not an insignificant amount, so it remains the primary objective.

Perhaps the most disappointing part of Ribbit King was when each game finally reached its end. Mind you, not because we were sad it was over, or because we were having too much fun. After the game has reached his conclusion, a screen will flash of the winner’s character celebrating their victory. Then, one of the few voiced lines of audio in the entire game will play.

“The winner is... this character!”

Yes, “this character.” That audio plays no matter who wins. They did not even record separate audio to identify the character that won the match.

Frolf is a game with many intricacies and eccentric characters, and each and every match is truly a spectacle to behold. It’s definitely a unique and impactful experience playing Ribbit King for the first time. Your mileage may vary with each subsequent experience, however.

However, if you are ever willing to try out a very fun title for the Nintendo Gamecube where cute and quirky characters play golf together in colorful settings, I recommend you give Mario Golf: Toadstool Tour a try.

[aion-rsa]

15 Underrated Game Boy Advance Games

https://ift.tt/3vFzwrI

When the Game Boy Advance hit shelves in Japan on March 21, 2001, Nintendo was still riding the incredible success of the original Game Boy. After more than a decade of the Game Boy’s handheld dominance, though, gamers eagerly awaited the next evolution in portable gaming. The GBA delivered that evolution.

In fact, many features we now take for granted in portables like the Switch can be traced back to the GBA. The addition of shoulder buttons, full 32-bit color graphics, and eventually even built-in backlighting with the 2003 release of the Game Boy Advance SP were all lauded as welcome innovations and improvements. Sadly, the GBA’s time in the sun was remarkably short. Pressured by the upcoming release of the Sony PSP, Nintendo released the GBA’s successor, the Nintendo DS, less than four years after the launch of the GBA.

Yet, GBA games continued to be released all the way into 2008. The GBA is still fondly remembered for its excellent ports of games like Super Mario World and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and for helping launch new franchises like Mega Man Zero and Golden Sun, but its library was much more than just those major titles. Dig a little deeper into it and you’ll find that the GBA was also home to some truly excellent hidden gems that are still worth checking out 20 years later.

15. Urban Yeti!

2002 | Cave Barn Studios

Keep in mind that in the early 2000s, developing games for the GBA was much cheaper than making a console game. Steam wasn’t a thing yet, and cell phones could barely run Snake. So, if you were an ambitious young developer with a goofy idea and a dream, your best bet for making it happen was to put it on Nintendo’s handheld. 

Urban Yeti! is the type of weird, charming experience that typically only finds a cult audience on PCs nowadays. You play from a top-down perspective as the titular Yeti who is looking for his mate in a small city. Most of the time, the game plays like the first two Grand Theft Auto games with even more chances to punch random pedestrians. More importantly, finding a boombox starts a dancing freak out that clears the screen of enemies, and “missions” take the form of minigames inspired by titles like Toobin’ and Root Beer Tapper.

It’s weird and short, but always hilarious, and it’s unfortunately become increasingly obscure since its release.

14. Lady Sia 

2001 | RFX Interactive

Most of the platformers on the GBA were either fantastic SNES ports or dreadful licensed fare, but a few original titles do stand out. The first thing you’ll probably notice about Lady Sia is that it looks great. Its big, bright graphics were a perfect fit for the GBA’s small screen. The gameplay is also surprisingly deep and utilizes combos, magic attacks, and even the ability to shape shift into a sasquatch during boss fights. Yes, this is the second game on the list to feature a playable Bigfoot, but we promise it’s the last.

Lady Sia was fairly well received at the time of its release, and a sequel was even planned in 2003. Sadly, it was canceled due to a lack of funding. 

13. V-Rally 3

2002 | Velez & Dubail

The GBA was released at a time when the vast majority of console games were going full 3D. The GBA, however, was obviously built with 2D pixel games in mind. Those perceived limitations didn’t stop some developers from pushing the limits of what the handheld was capable of, though, as evidenced by the V-Rally 3 team managing to cram fully polygonal cars into the GBA.

Graphically, V-Rally 3 is undoubtedly the best-looking game on the system. Its surprisingly detailed outdoor tracks could easily be mistaken for an N64 game. You can even play the entire career mode in first-person. Thanks to some surprisingly smooth handling, though, V-Rally 3 proves to be much more than just great visuals. It may not look like much compared to modern racers, but it’s still the undisputed pinnacle of racing on the GBA.

12. Car Battler Joe

2002 | Ancient

Car Battler Joe is a decent RPG mixed with awesome car battling sections that elevate it above most of the GBA’s library. The story isn’t great (your father is missing and you have to find him), but the hook is that in this world, cars are a rarity. As such, you have to build your own Mad Max-style vehicle from spare parts found around the world and eventually battle other vehicles as you work to finish your quest.

That concept alone is begging for a sequel or spiritual successor. Sadly, most people have long forgotten about Joe, and even its re-release on the Wii U eShop in 2015 didn’t garner much attention.

11. Kuru Kuru Kururin

2001 | Eighting

Kuru Kuru Kururin is one of those puzzle games that sounds so simple in theory but ends up being surprisingly complex and a lot of fun. You play as a rotating stick (or “helicopter” in the North American version) that must make it to the goal at the end of a series of mazes. You control how quickly the stick rotates, and you’ll need to master that mechanic as the difficulty ramps up significantly in the later levels. This game remains a remarkably addictive experience until the end.

Though Kuru Kuru Kururin‘s core concept boasts nearly universal appeal, the game was only released on the GBA in Japan and Europe. A localized version finally made its way to North America in 2016 through the Wii U eShop, but Nintendo of America seems oddly stubborn about acknowledging the series. Neither of its two sequels ever made it out of Japan. 

10. Sabre Wulf

2004 | Rare

Most gamers say that Rare peaked during the N64 era with a string of successful platformers and shooters, but old-school Rare still managed to squeeze out a handful of classic games for the GBA after the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. Everything gamers love about classic Rare games is on full display in Sabre Wulf: the cutting-edge graphics, tight controls, and the trademark offbeat British sense of humor.

Unfortunately, Sabre Wulf didn’t find much of an audience. Prior to the release of this title, the Sabreman character hadn’t starred in a game in almost 20 years. The updated gameplay apparently didn’t appeal to older fans, and wasn’t innovative enough to attract younger gamers. It’s aged better than many other GBA games, though, and it’s certainly well worth a playthrough now.

9. Zone of the Enders: The Fist of Mars

2002 | Konami

While it was never as successful as Hideo Kojima’s other games, the Zone of the Enders series is still fondly remembered for some of the better action games of the PS2 era. Their unique mecha combat and Kojima’s flair for cinematic storytelling helped those games stand out from a competitive pack.

Unlike its console brethren, The Fist of Mars is a turn-based strategy game. That means it’s not nearly as fast-paced as the other Zone of the Enders games, but there is an aiming reticle for targeting enemies, so this is more action-oriented than the typical strategy game.

While Kojima wasn’t directly involved in the development of The Fist of Mars, the writing is surprisingly strong, hitting all the right dramatic and philosophical notes that mecha fans have come to expect from the genre.

8. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

2003 | Griptonite Games

EA released a couple of solid beat ‘em ups for consoles to coincide with the release of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, but the GBA versions are actually even better than those largely beloved adaptations. Like The Two Towers tie-in released a year prior, The Return of the King is basically Diablo in Middle Earth.

There are a whopping eight different playable characters pulled from the movie. Despite the technical constraints of the GBA, each of those characters plays completely differently. Aragorn is the classic warrior, Legolas is the able-bodied archer, and Gandalf uses magic to fell waves of orcs. They’re even all completely customizable with their own weapons and equipment.

Read more

Games

25 Best Game Boy Advance Games

By Chris Freiberg

Games

Castlevania: Why the Game Boy Advance Games Are Worth Revisiting

By Chris Freiberg

The GBA version of Return of the King still stands out as one of the best Lord of the Rings games ever made, and future games inspired by Tolkien’s books would do well take a few cues from it. 

7. Summon Night: Swordcraft Story

2006 | Flight-Plan

Thanks to lower development costs, the GBA featured many experiments that led to unusual combinations of genres. For instance, whereas many dungeon crawlers are typically slow, plodding affairs, Summon Night: Swordcraft Story sped things up through fast-paced, real-time battles inspired by the Tales of series. Battles in Swordcraft Story story are an absolute joy since you’re doing more than just scrolling through menus.

The sequel, released just a few months later on the GBA, is also worth checking out. Sadly, while the Summon Night main series is still chugging along, the Swordcraft Story subseries looks to be abandoned at this point. 

6. Klonoa: Empire of Dreams

2001 | Namco

For a brief period in the early 2000s, the Klonoa series felt like it was on the verge of becoming a household name. All of the games were praised for their tight, diverse platforming, and the series’ word of mouth was generally strong, but the games just never seemed to reach a large audience.

Empire of Dreams is a side-story set between the events of the two console Klonoa games. It features the same use of the “wind bullet” to capture enemies and the same creative level design as its console big brothers. While it can’t pull off the 3D effects featured in those games, impressive multiplane backgrounds and advanced rotation effects do help it stand out among the GBA’s crowded library of platformers. 

5. Rebelstar: Tactical Command

2005 | Codo Technologies

Don’t be fooled by the Rebelstar name: this is actually an X-Com game through and through. While there’s no base building or resource management in this GBA title, that classic tactical combat against an alien threat that defines the X-Com series can be found here in all its glory. Then again, what else would you expect? Rebelstar was created by the same guy behind X-Com, Julian Gollop.

Of course, this being a GBA game, Rebelstar’s visuals aren’t quite up to par with an X-Com title. In fact, some may find its more cartoony style jarring when paired with this style of gameplay, but Rebelstar certainly makes for a unique experience compared to the other tactics games out there.

4. Yggdra Union

2006 | Sting Entertainment

The final days of any gaming platform are a dark time typically defined by sporadic releases and shovelware. Yet, every now and then, a bright spot appears for those gamers who haven’t yet moved on to the next generation. As a deep mix of tactical RPG mechanics and card battles bolstered by some of the best 2D graphics on the portable, Yggdra Union is one of the better games released in the GBA’s post-DS era.

While the game’s story isn’t great, the regular banter between party members is charming, and there is a lot of content to keep you busy if the gameplay manages to hook you. A Switch port was even released in Japan last year, so keep your fingers crossed that it makes its way stateside. 

3. Drill Dozer

2006 | Game Freak

Game Freak will always be known for the massively successful Pokemon franchise, but the developer has occasionally dabbled in other genres. The best of those experiments has to be Drill Dozer: a game about drilling. Need to go forward? Try drilling. Backward? Also drilling. What about jumping? Yeah, that actually involves drilling, too. It sounds repetitive, but there are so many different ways use to Jill’s Drill Dozer that the mechanic actually never wears out its welcome.

It might be tempting to check out Drill Dozer via emulation, but it’s actually worth tracking down the original cartridge for this one since it’s one of only two GBA games to feature a rumble back in the cart. It adds quite a lot to the experience.

2. Astro Boy: Omega Factor

2004 | Treasure

A handheld game based on an anime that hasn’t been popular in the United States since the ‘60s sounds like a recipe for disaster, but legendary Japanese developer Treasure could do no wrong in the ‘90s and early 2000s. Like most of the games in the Treasure catalog, Astro Boy: Omega Factor features fast arcade gameplay, massive screen-filling special attacks, and some of the most beautiful sprites the GBA could produce.

Though Treasure was once a prolific developer, responsible for classics like Ikaruga and Sin & Punishment, the company has gone quiet in recent years. The studio hasn’t even released a game stateside in the last decade. However, a re-release of this gem could mark a great comeback for the legendary developer if the licensing could be worked out.

1. Ninja Five-O

2003 | Hudson Soft

Ninja Five-O should have been a system seller for the GBA. The game feels like a lost classic from the 16-bit era. It’s a beautiful combination of Ninja Gaiden and Bionic Commando bolstered by tight controls and an over-the-top story about a magic-wielding ninja who is also a cop. Anyone who has managed to track down a copy swears up and down that it’s one of the very best experiences on the handheld.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Yet, Ninja Five-O was set up to fail from the start. It’s unknown how many copies were made, but it was nearly impossible to find one at the time of its release. Even though the game was developed in Japan, it was never even released there. Media outlets also barely covered it. Yet, the legend of Joe Osugi has only grown over the years, with complete copies of this game regularly selling on eBay for around $1,000. Even an authentic standalone cartridge will set you back several hundred dollars. You know what, though? It’s actually one of the few rare games that may be worth the price. It really is as good as you’ve heard.

The post 15 Underrated Game Boy Advance Games appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3vHGg8f

[blessuswithblogs]

On the anti-imperialist roots of the Super Robot genre

Tadao Nagahama is probably not a name you're familiar with. I won't reproach you for it, it's been a while, I had to look it up myself to help me remember. However, Nagahama is an extremely important person for my current subject of discussion: the anti-imperialist, anti-war roots of the Super Robot genre. Shinzo Abe, the current prime minister of Japan, probably most widely known in the west for wearing a Mario hat to promote the next olympic games, has been in his own quiet (and not so quiet) way contributing to the rise of hard right nationalism, historical revisionism, fascism, and a whole bunch of other nasty isms that have found traction in today's sociopolitical climate. Recently, I saw in passing a tweet about how the ever-popular, ever-mystifying Kancolle had an episode where Japan ended up winning the battle of Midway. Propaganda in media is nothing new, but that was quite egregious, even by my desensitized standards. It got me thinking a little bit about my own niche anime interests and how the common perception of the mecha genre is probably one either of random Gurren Lagann bullshit or simplistic, thinly veiled pro-Japan ideology packaged in a kid friendly, larger than life veneer. In a lot of ways, early Super Robots shared more in common with classical American Super Heroes than actual Japanese Super Heroes like Kamen Rider, which evolved into their own tokusatsu genre quite distinct from either paradigm.

I cannot rightly dispute these preconceptions as wrong, but I do want to at least bring up that some early, influential franchises rejected this narrative. One of the first of these, of course, is Mobile Suit Gundam. While now we have the distinction between Super Robot (robots that are like larger than life super heroes) and Real Robot (robots that are presented in a realistic context as weapons of war using standardized technology employed by military and paramilitary forces to project force) for tedious nerds to bicker over indefinitely, in the days of the original Gundam, that distinction did not exist. Indeed, to play for ratings, Yoshiyuki Tomino, famed creator of the Gundam franchise, had to make many concessions to his sponsors and make Amuro Ray's Gundam more like its more popular contemporaries, with goofy mid-season combination upgrades and some extremely anachronistic weaponry like a beam trident and a huge, MS sized ball and chain. On the back of his later success, Zeta Gundam and the seemingly never ending number of side-stories like War in the Pocket and Stardust Memory, Tomino would actually go on to revise the original series in a definitive movie compilation that cut out a great deal of filler and blatantly unrealistic (or at least immersion breaking) elements. This version is extremely good by the way. Give it a watch if you're interested in the genre's history or if you just like old sci-fi.

The reason I bring this up is sort of my roundabout way of arguing that while the Gundam of today is made of entirely different stock than Super Robots, the original article deserves a space in this discussion. The discussion being, of course, the distinctly anti-nationalist bent of a lot of early Super Robot shows. In all of its many incarnations, good, bad, and inbetween, Gundam is a story about war really sucking and how tragic it is that we fail to understand one another because it's easier to just kill one another instead. Now, of course, a lot of fans are either too thick to understand this subtext (and text-text) or simply willfully disregard it because they like cool robots that shoot lasers. Basically think of Dan Ryckert's relationship with Metal Gear. While certainly not all Gundam series have been good, they have always been faithful to these ideas, which is laudable. In broad strokes, anyway. SEED Destiny was pretty weird in spots.

Mobile Suit Gundam 079, which chronicled the One Year War, was not at all shy about this. The One Year War began as a movement for Spacenoid (a slightly ridiculous term for a person living in a space colony or on the moon) independence from the hopelessly corrupt Earth Federation. Naturally, the Federation did not take kindly to this and moved to suppress the movement, but found itself overmatched by the Principality of Zeon's advanced Mobile Suit weapons. To keep an even footing in the war, the Federation resorted to using nuclear weapons and other atrocities on largely civillian colonies to buy time as they developed their own brand of Mobile Suit. In retaliation, Zeon counterattacked with an even more devastating new weapon: dropping space colonies on earth. All told, the One Year War was not a good time to be alive, and nearly half of the Earth Sphere's total population died in one way or another. While all this was happening, the original founder of the independence movement died under suspect circumstances and power was seized by the Zabi family, who were Really Bad News. The Federation, meanwhile, turned to conscripting child soldiers in a desperate bid to keep pace.

This all culminated in the creation of the Gundam by Tem Ray, Amuro's emotionally absent father. Due to Circumstances, Amuro finds himself in the cockpit and becomes the most important soldier in the war overnight because the Gundam is several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything Zeon can field. The character of Amuro is explored most fully in Char's Counterattack, when he is a fucked up adult instead of a fucked up kid, but from the outset, Amuro is defined by forces completely out of his control and his fatalistic acceptance of his own lack of agency. Despite his nigh legendary piloting skills, Newtype powers of precognition and telepathy, and status as hero of the One Year War, Amuro might actually be the most passive motherfucker in the god damned galaxy. This puts him immediately at odds not only militarily but interpersonally with the dreadfully overambitious if mostly well-intentioned Char Aznable, his lifelong rival. Their entire history of conflict is based entirely upon the simple irony that they both want the same thing but, despite being Newtypes, lack the ability to understand this. The One Year War's violence and brutality defined them and their relationship to another, because of a petty twist of fate that put Amuro in the Gundam's pilot seat instead of some other sap.

Gundam uses many more overt methods of conveying that the One Year War is not glamorous or cool or just. Characters die regularly on both sides of the conflict, oftentimes for no real reason other than "this is war, sucker." Tomino developed quite a reputation for this style of storytelling, earning the moniker Kill-'em-all Tomino, especially in some of his non-Gundam works like Aura Battler Dunbine and Space Runaway Ideon. The entire continent of Australia got rendered uninhabitable by colony drops. The White Base, the federation battleship housing the Gundam, is crewed and staffed almost entirely by people who have yet to reach 20 years of age and they've got a pack of prepubescent toddlers running around on the ship because they've got nowhere else to go. I personally find the interpersonal conflicts acting as microcosm for ideology and war to be the most interesting, and most intrinsically Gundam thing about the franchise, but you don't have to go looking between the lines to find evidence of the show's ardent anti-war, anti-nationalist proclivities. The intensely nationalistic Zeon is surreptitiously usurped by a power-mad dictator without anyone even catching on after Ghiren Zabi uses a giant ass space laser to kill both his father and an influential Earth Federation general while they're trying to broker a peace deal. The death of that general, in turn, allows the worst elements of the Federation government to run amok and eventually create the deeply fascist Titans in Zeta Gundam, who make it a point of policy to oppress spacenoids as brutally as possible.

So Gundam, at least, has profound roots in the denunciation of military power as a metric of moral superiority. That's not really news to most people. Oddly enough, it's the most obsessive of fans that tend to miss the memo because they're presumably too busy making sure Mobile Suit measurements are exactly as documented and all character motivations are completely rational and logical, like them. Let's dig a little deeper for some more surprising examples of this kind of ideology in unlikely places. It should be noted, of course, that I am not heralding Gundam as some sort of bastion of progressive thought. Tomino's sexual politics are located roughly in the Stone Age until about 2000's Turn A Gundam, where they progress to about on par with inudstrial revolution social mores. Progress, I suppose. This is a problem with a distressing amount of media, especially in the 70s and 80s, but I'm trying to look at the bright side of things. At least it's not Cross Ange, right?

Moving on, when we look at the genesis of Super Robots as a genre of animation, we will invariably look to Go Nagai. Though a number of shows about large robot men fighting evil like Tetsujin 28 and the live action Giant Robo came first, the seminal Mazinger Z had the popularity and iconic staying power to define everything that came after. Though I could write a great deal about Go Nagai and his Dynamic Robots, they don't really pertain to my particular topic of discussion today because Go Nagai was about as progressive as a sack of bricks. His work was largely apolitical, at least in the sense that he did not intentionally make his stories about contemporary political issues, so at very least Kouji Kabuto never waxed nostalgic about the time Japan was allied with Nazi Germany. In fact, one of the show's major villains, Count Brocken, is a reanimated SS officer cyborg who carries his head around with him because of a decapitation in a previous life. Generally speaking, not a good or sympathetic guy, despite his protests to the contrary. Go Nagai focused on themes of brotherhood and being outcast by society for just being too damn hotblooded and having sideburns that were just too damn thick, though these mostly manifested in his manga. The TV adaptations of Mazinger, Getter Robo, and Grendizer were largely sanitized and inoffensive.

I mentioned Tadao Nagahama at the beginning of my piece, and it is now with him we come to a very important point in the genre's history. Nagahama was the director of three particular Super Robot shows: Combattler V, Voltes V (here the V is treated as the roman numeral, so it's really Voltes 5), and Toushou Daimos (roughly, Brave Leader Daimos). Colloquially, these three are known as the Nagahama Romantic Trilogy, and they are denoted not only by the iconic designs of the robots themselves, towering, blocky things made out of many constituent parts in a fairly sensical way (as opposed to the famously Unpossible Getter Robo), but also by the injection of genuine interpersonal and ideological drama into the proceedings. They were also super popular in other areas of the world, much like Go Nagai's Dynamic Robots. Voltes V in particular was popular in Southeast Asia. Combattler V was instrumental in cementing the notion of The Honorable Rival in the genre, a character aligned with evil that still conducted themselves with decorum. While you would find few such characters in the ranks of Dr. Hell's armies or King Vega's invasion force, in the Romantic Trilogy, they were critical to the show's success. Combattler V was not especially revolutionary, but it laid the groundwork for Voltes V, which in many ways was.

Voltes V is the tale of the Boazan Empire, an interstellar civilization with an expansionist streak and a highly stratified caste system. Unlike previous villainous organizations, the Boazans are noteworthy for being three dimensional and not painted in shades of black and white. The Boazans invade earth for the purposes of annexing it to their growing empire, with the crown prince Hainel leading the charge. Their battle beasts are too much for earth's military (and the militaries of many other planets), but the super electromagnetic robot Voltes V, piloted by a team of five headed by Kenichi, appears to beat them back. Things become interesting when we learn about Kenichi and his two brother's lineage. Their father, the brilliant scientist behind Voltes V's construction, is actually a Boazan expatriate. Not just any expatriate, but former royalty, no less. Boazan's strict caste system is based solely upon whether or not a citizen has horns. If they do, they're nobility. If they don't, well, uh, sucks to be them. Such a system, already untenable, is exacerbated by the fact that the vast majority of Boazans don't have horns. It's a rare genetic mutation. The whole Boazan war machine is powered by a gigantic underclass of slaves-in-everything-but-name. Kenichi's father believed that this was morally reprehensible and that reform was necessary. Unfortunately, this was not a popular opinion among the nobility, and he was disgraced, de-horned, and ousted for his ties to rebellion movements.

Complicating matters even further, he had a son while on Boazan, the aforementioned Prince Hainel. After relocating to Earth to escape persecution and devise some way of bringing change to the empire, Kenichi's father settled down and had a family. Now bereft of horn, he was largely indistinguishable from the average earthling. Parallel evolution is a concept emrbaced heartily by old sci-fi in both Western and Japanese media, probably because people thought alien babes were hot. Fair, honestly. At any rate, Kenichi engages in mortal combat with his half-brother's forces on a regular basis, which creates interpersonal tension mostly lacking in earlier shows. Sometimes Duke Freed got snippy at Kouji for being all love and peace at the Vegans but that was usually resolved at the end of the episode. Hainel himself gradually changes, too, starting out as arrogant, dismissive, and openly ashamed of his connection to a disgraced expatriate and his sons but gaining more depth as time goes on. The end of the show takes place on Boazan itself, with Voltes V spearheading a hornless revolution while Hainel turns on the emperor, vengeful and disgusted by his cowardice. Or maybe it was a movie. Look it's been a long time and I'm going from memory give me a break.

For a kid's TV show at the time, this was honestly pretty wild. Voltes V was not shy about displaying its moral core: people are not defined by the circumstances of their birth, and systems of government based upon the oppression of an underclass deserve only to be destroyed. Voltes V is not as morally complex as Gundam, but it is leaps and bounds ahead of many of its Super Robot contemporaries. Nagahama believed in a sort of fusion of genuine human drama and moral complexity with the more simplistic, bombastic style of storytelling common to his predecessors, and it resonated with viewers all over the globe. At the time of airing, a number of Southeast Asian countries were under the thumb of repressive dictatorships, and the final episodes had to be heavily censored and edited so as not to promote seditious ideas. That, more than anything to me, is the mark of something that is genuinely anti-nationalist in nature. Who would know better than fascist dictators themselves?

The final entry in the Romantic Trilogy, Toushou Daimos, continued the trend of creating morally and politically complex circumstances in which the karate robot made of transforming trucks must punch bad guys. The aliens of the day are the Barmians. The Barmians, however, buck convention and come to earth in genuine peace. Their story is a tragic one - their planet was destroyed in a catastrophe, and the survivors were evacuated on the aptly named mobile space city Small Barm. Due to severe space and resource constraints, a billion Barmians have to remain in cryogenic sleep while a skeleton crew of nobles and military officials keep Small Barm afloat as they search for a place to live. Naturally, they find earth to be a charming place as any to settle down (as it must have seemed in the early 80s before the environment started collapsing) and initiate negotiations with the governments of earth to try and accommodate their people. Expert martial artist and principle protagonist Ryuzaki Kazuya is the son of a brilliant scientist who created the robot Daimos and the special Daimolight energy that makes it so scary strong. Said scientist is part of the diplomatic delegation sent from earth to Small Barm (in some universes alongside the illustrious Rilina Peacecraft, but that is a story for another time entirely) and is a major proponent of the Barmian's request for peaceful integration into earthling society.

Regrettably, this all goes awry when the Barmian hardliner military faction assassinates the King of Barm during the meeting with poison and blames the earthling delegation on it, engineering their own perfect casus beli for a war of domination against Earth. Fascists are remarkably bad at sharing and getting along with others, as has been demonstrated. Prince Richter, the honorable if somewhat dim and hot tempered son of the King wasn't too hot on the assimilation idea because of his prideful belief that the superiority of Barm's culture and technology should allow them to dictate more favorable terms, but was ultimately loyal to his father above all else and acquiesced to the idea. When his father is assassinated, of course, he flies into a rage and declares earth to be the enemy of Barm and kills Kazuya's father. So there's a lot of bad blood between the two of them. Kazuya and Daimos stand up against Barm's battle beasts and prevents the invasion from progressing. He eventually meets and falls in love with princess Erika, Richter's sister. Where Richter is brash and hasty, Erika is intelligent and patient, and much more compassionate. These qualities allow her to see that the circumstances of the King's death, and any motivation the Earthling's might have had to assassinate him, were extremely suspect. They part ways, but Erika eventually joins a resistance faction on Small Barm against the military hardliners who had assumed power. Richter continues to dance to their tune, too consumed by misplaced anger and vengeance to see what is really going on. Erika's relationship with Kazuya only makes him more unreasonably mad.

Of course, Earth has its own hardliners, and in his battles, Kazuya not only has to contend with Barm's battle beasts, but General Miwa, an odious Earth-supremacist convinced that all Barmians, regardless of their disposition, must be eliminated immediately and without mercy. If we want to talk about more alternate universe scenarios, for reference, Miwa was a fucked up enough dude to cast his lot in with the Blue Cosmos organization after his Barmian extermination ambitions never panned out. He really fucking sucks. Ultimately, Kazuya and Erika manage to uncover the plot to assassinate the King, defeat the military holdouts, and bring the peace their fathers wanted about. Where Voltes V presented a scenario of a civilization run by ultra-nationalists needing to be restructured from the ground up, Daimos offers the inverse: a peaceful, tolerant civilization in a time of crisis gets hijacked by a few selfish, warmongering fascists and nearly destroys itself. Coming to understand and love one another, even when from different planets entirely, is an even bigger theme in Daimos than Voltes V, and is in many ways a more personal story. A romance, if you will, for a romantic trilogy.

Nagahama's Romantic Robots were well loved around the globe and left a lasting impact on their genre, encouraging those who came after to experiment with more complex themes and characters, even in the larger than life universe of Super Robots. While not all (or even very many) of these successors live up to this high minded ideal, it's an important part of the history of Japanese animation, proving that drama and politics were not just for Gundam or more "serious" shows. We can see the legacy of Nagahama in a number of more contemporary titles. Evangelion is so much more about interpersonal conflict than actual robots that the final episode of the TV series didn't even have any fighting in it (albeit mostly due to budget constraints). People hated it, of course, and Hideki Anno went on to make End of Evangelion to either appease or piss off further the angry fans, but it happened nonetheless. Gun X Sword represents an evolution of the genre into that of a pseudo-western, where heroes and villains are separated by the thinnest of ideological margins despite the fantastical robots and setting. Gurren Lagann briefly flirts with political complexity before promptly imploding on itself (maybe this one is a bad example). Even Shin Mazinger, an unabashed love letter to older Go Nagai properties, managed to create a surprisingly affecting and compelling character (dare I say, Protagonist?) in its reimagining of Baron Ashura.

The Mecha Genre used to be, and still kind of is, one of my big guilty passions in life. This essay is more personal in nature than a lot of my others, because from time to time I feel like I have to justify to myself why I like this garbage even when it's weird regressive shit. I guess the compromise I have found is that, in certain circumstances, it can be weird progressive shit, too.

[moonlightfanfics]

FAQ (sort of)

I thought since I've been away for a while, I need to reconnect with you guys so here's some stuff I thought you'd like to know about me😋

(It’s extremely long so it’s all under the cut!)

Name: Maya

Nickname: May-May

Zodiac sign: Leo

Where was I born: England

Where do I currently live: US. (That’s why in my writing I alternate between American spellings and English spellings lmao). Also my accent is fucked ahaha

Book/series I reread: Hunger Games Trilogy

Books I have yet to read: Game of Thrones & HARRY POTTER

Aliens or ghosts: Aliens

Favourite song: I have too many so I'm just gonna do my top 5 (not in order)

Ed Sheeran - Sing

Chris Brown - Forever

The Weeknd - Earned It

Aaliyah - More Than A Woman

Jennifer Lopez - Love Don't Cost A Thing

The last person who hurt me, did I forgive them: In terms of like boys, erm yes, kind of

What am I most afraid of: Deep sea, I have a huge phobia

A good quality of mine: Good listener

A bad quality of mine: Hold grudges

Actor/Actress I trust enough to watch whatever they're in: Actor/s - Sebastian Stan, Evan Peters. Actress - Emma Stone

Favourite season: Spring

Am I in a relationship: No

Something I miss: Watching the twilight saga for the first time lol

My best friend: I have like six, no joke

Eye colour: Brown

Am I excited about anything: Going on vacation this summer

My current obsession: Evan Peters bc American Horror Story

Someone I love: Parents

Someone I trust: Not many

Favourite TV shows as a child: H2o, That's So Raven, Drake & Josh, Wizards of Waverly Place

What do I think about the most: This isn't to be fake deep lol but I'm always thinking about equality, racism etc. I'll just be studying and my mind wonders to it idk why

Do I have any strange phobias: Dogs, I am absolutely terrified of them, oh and also bridges

Favourite hobbies: Going to the gym

Last book I read: It's been an embarrassingly long time since I last read a book, fifty shades of grey. I'm constantly reading fan fiction though

Last film I watched: Friends with Benefits

Superpower I wish I could have: Telekinesis

When do I feel at most peace: When there are no upcoming tests, finals etc

Do I sleep with lights on or off: Off

What is my song of the week: Ed Sheeran - Shape of You

Afraid of heights: YES

Pet peeve: Incorrect grammar

Have I ever had a friend turn enemy: Luckily no, the minimum time I've known one of my best friends for is four years. The longest is 14 years

What is my current desktop picture: A skyline

What fictional universe would I like to be a part of: Harry Potter

Something I worry about: This seriously keeps me awake at night, the idea that I'm not going to get a good job in the field I'm interested in, I'm not going to marry someone who I think is the perfect match for me and that I'm not going to be able to have kids

Scared of the dark: YES

Can I sing: Yes

Something I wish I could do: Shut off my emotions

Where do I want to live: On an island by myself

Do I have any pets: Yeah, a fish lol

Early bird or night owl: I can be both

Story behind my last kiss: One of my friends house party, drunk, big mistake

Favourite genre of music: Hip-Hop

Who is my hero: The person who invented earphones

What makes me really angry: Racism/inequality fucking boils my blood

Kindle or real book: Real book

Favourite sporty activity: Dancing

What was the last thing I bought: Ben & Jerrys lmao

How tall am I: I'm tiny, 5"4

Can I cook: I'm a fast learner

Can I bake: Yes

Do I have more girl friends than boy friends: Yes

Sexual orientation: Straight

Last time I cried: This morning, watching Obama leave the White House

Guilty pleasure: Cookie dough ice cream

Favourite youtuber/s: E and Gray

Favourite game/ app: MARIO Run

Favourite number: 7

Am I religious: No

Do I like space: Yeah, but if I think about it too much it scares me

Do I like deep ocean: HOLY FUCK NO

Am I much of a daredevil: Hahaha no

Do I like clowns: Its not a phobia but I don't like them at all

Do I admit when I'm wrong: Unless it's to my parents, yes

Am I bad loser: No

Forest or beach: Beach

Am I good liar: Yes

Do I talk to myself: A lot

Hogwarts house: Gryffindor

Am I very social: Yeah

Do I keep a journal/diary: No but I am going to start asap, my mom suggested it to me cos she wrote in hers for years and she said it helped her so idk

Do I believe in second chances: Unfortunately, my dumbass never learns so yes

Do I believe people are capable of change: Yes

Have I ever been underweight: Yes

Am I ticklish: I am sooooooo ticklish

Have I ever been on a plane: Yes

Do I have any piercings: Just my earlobes and my nose

Do I want children: Yes, so so much

What makes me nostalgic: Listening to early 2000's music

What colour mostly dominates my wardrobe: Black and gray

What do I hate most about myself: My boobs

What do I love most about myself: My boobs

How old am I: 16

One of my favourite quotes: I can't remember who said it but it's always stuck in head - "if you fall in love with two people at the same time, choose the second one, because you wouldn't have fallen for them if you really loved the first person"

Have I learnt from my mistakes: Ahahaha hell no, still making the same dumb ones:)

Do I dream: Yes, and they're weird af

An experience that has made me stronger: It has also made me more aware and woke, just my ex in general

If I were immortal, what would I do?: I'd learn every language in the world

If I could get away with any crime, what would I do?: Shoot Donald Trump

Love or money: Money

Love or career: Love

If I could time travel, where would I go: I'd find out who really killed JFK

Zombies or vampires: Vampires

Dragons or wizards: Wizards mate, Harry Potter n all that

Do I judge a book by its cover: Unfortunately, yes, I'm working on it though because I've been proven wrong so many times

Have I ever had my heart broken: Yes, it was messy

Do I like my handwriting: I love it ahaha

How do I handle anger: Really bad, I cry and cry and then I turn into an emotionless monster, so yeah really badly

Was I named after anyone: Yeah the poet Maya Angelou

Do I use sarcasm a lot: Ahaha yeah, I get it from my mom

What TV character am I most like (personality): Bonnie Bennett - The Vampire Diaries 

Favourite fictional character: Jon Snow - Game of Thrones

This was soo long but wayy overdue. If you actually read all this thank you so much!!

[beesyrup]

Every third question

bless u for this procrastination material <3

ruby: favourite pre-2000 song?  this is too many songs and now i just am not in the mood to be choosing 

vermilion: have you ever pulled an all-nighter? if so, tell us about the first time. 

oh yeah definitely, I was pretty young and was staying the night at my best friend’s house and we were pretty much just eating nachos and playing mario party all night. passed out at like noon the next afternoon and was comatose for like 2 days

red ochre: are you inclined to watch a tv series if a lot of people on the internet are talking about it? 

depends on what people are saying about it, but generally no? getting me to watch anything is like pulling teeth but I have succumbed to the hype train a few times

cardinal: what is the first song that made you cry?  okay i had to think for a bit bc I cry at a lot of songs nowadays so the first was kinda hard to pinpoint but I thiiiiiink it was Hey There Delilah by Plain White T’s (yes I realize what a weird answer that sounds like so storytime) I was an infant in early middle school and I was Obsessed w this one boy in that intense gremliny way you do when you’ve gone to school with the same 40 people since you were 3. ANYWAY that song (my FAVORITE song atm) came on at the nasty little school dance and I was like OH BOY HE’S TOTALLY GONNA ASK ME TO DANCE. and so I (totally inconspicuously and casually, im sure) stroll abt the gym to be like “ahaha fancy seeing u here” only to see that he was already dancing with the girl in my class that I had previously and arbitrarily decided was my Mortal Enemy (bc that’s just how it works when ur an 11 year old tomboy and another girl wears lipgloss I guess). Obvs I was crushed but then the song came on the radio later that week and I just started bawling in the car and my parents were SO confused lmao 

scarlet: think of your favourite genre. what kind of media in that genre do you prefer - books, films, or tv series? im a big scifi/high fantasy fool and I def love books the most. I like being able to fill in some of the details w my imagination and it’s just much, much easier for me to get absorbed in a book vs a movie/show.

strawberry: what album would you love to have on vinyl?

would loveeee a copy of Warning

lipstick red: if you could live one day with no one recognising you, what would you do?

I uh.. hmm.. this is an interesting one. immediate answer is steal, but upon further consideration: it would be fucking hilarious to use my personal knowledge to fuck w people that have wronged me. like imagine just rolling up to someone’s house, knocking on the door, issuing a hyperspecific curse that cements this event in their minds and plagues them for years in the future, then just disappearing forever as I would have been a person that does not exist. *rod sterling voice* pretty fucked up huh? im a twisted cycle path

pomegranate: favourite and least favourite fruits? im a slut for pineapple and pomegranate i do not particularly care for honeydew nor cantaloupe  

[entergamingxp]

Harmonix’s Fuser bets on user creativity as the future of music gaming • Eurogamer.net

Where do you go after Guitar Hero and Rock Band? That’s a question the music genre has been trying to answer for about 10 years, with varying degrees of success. Some games have looked to VR to replace the physicality of performing on peripherals, yet the platform still remains out of reach for many thanks to cost and space requirements. Others have taken risks with unique spins on rhythm-action – often brilliant in their own right, but none have captured the mass market like the guitar games of the 2000s.

Does the answer lie in user-created content? That’s what Harmonix is betting on with its latest title, Fuser, a music-mixing game officially unveiled today. Part performance game, part creative tool, it’s a far cry from the days of rocking out with a peripheral in your living room – instead favouring a Coachella-influencer vibe as players mix current tracks together to satisfy crowd demands.

“A lot of our traditional games – whether it’s Rock Band or Dance Central, even some of the stuff we’ve done in VR like Audica – are very different in that those games are either a recreation of, or performance to, an existing song,” Harmonix exec Dan Walsh told me during a preview session. “Fuser is a music-mixing game where you are creating things as opposed to recreating things.”

Launching with over 100 tracks, players will be able to pick and choose from set song lists to develop a mix. The gameplay centres around a deck where you can play four different discs at once, with each song broken down into four components: drums, bass, lead instruments (such as guitar, synths and horns) and vocals. Players can mix these into any combination they want – even four voice parts at the same time, although this doesn’t sound the best.

Oh, and there’s no peripherals: just a regular release on PC, PS4, Xbox One and Switch sometime this autumn. That’s pretty close to when next-gen consoles launch, but Fuser will also be playable on PS5 and Xbox Series X thanks to their backwards compatibility support, “so you won’t be shut out or have to wait”, Walsh confirmed.

All it takes is a tap or drag-and-drop to add music tracks from the cards above to the deck below.

It’s an impressive bit of tech, with tracks automatically adapting to the key and tempo as they’re introduced. Both can also be adjusted by the player as part of the overall mix, such as switching between major and minor. Harmonix used a similar system for its 2017 card game DropMix, in which songs were divided into parts and then mixed together on a peripheral. Fuser expands on this by giving players more creative control, allowing them to change the texture by muting tracks, or adding in custom sounds via what looked like an in-game MIDI pad with six instrument options (something Harmonix plans on detailing at a later point).

So, that’s the mixing interface: how does this work as a game? Fuser is divided into three core gameplay modes: campaign, freestyle, and multiplayer. The latter is listed as two to four players in the press release, with the opportunity to “collaborate or compete with players from around the world” – but Harmonix is waiting until later on to reveal more details of how this works, too.

Freestyle gives players the opportunity to mess around, save mixes and upload them directly onto social channels. The campaign, meanwhile, is about 10-15 hours long, and follows the career of a DJ from “some level of success” to headline act.

Points are scored by fulfilling crowd requests, keeping the mix moving, and hitting mission goals such as keeping the track within set bpm parameters. You can get combos on crowd requests by dropping a track that satisfies two at once: for instance, Billie Eilish’s bad guy would fulfill a request for pop, and a request for 2010s music. If you introduce new tracks on a downbeat you get bonus points, while yellow lines on the time bar indicate “musically interesting” parts of loops which are particularly suitable for changes.

Players are able to fully customise the character, and perform in six different venues. To keep things varied, the campaign gives different narrative reasons for each mission: such as playing the second day of a festival when everyone is…. fragile, and wants something calm.

In the context of the release of Media Molecule’s Dreams this month, it’s interesting timing for Harmonix to announce Fuser – and it feels like part of a larger trend giving players the tools to create content within a game. I asked if Harmonix felt this was the future for the music genre, too.

Pushed to the periphery

Almost inevitably, the topic of peripherals came up when discussing music gaming – and it’s unsurprising why the industry has moved away from them.

“I will never speak ill of the Rock Band instruments – [they] really sell that full experience,” Walsh said. “But it’s also a lot of complication… you’ve got to figure out manufacturing, shipping timelines and inventory logistics, and selling people on them. Also getting retail to dedicate the space, and asking people upfront to make a much larger investment than a traditional game because they have to buy all the extra stuff.

“It’s nice to be able to have people either purchase it physically or digitally. You don’t have to worry about whether or not you have something that’s compatible with the last generation, and it’s going to work with your current generation. [It’s] much more straightforward.”

Not to mention all that plastic probably isn’t great for the environment.

“At the moment, yes, just because if you look back at when rock band and Guitar Hero came out, rock star culture and the rock star fantasy were very much of that time,” Walsh explained. “Late 90s, early 2000s, mid 2000s. People wanted to be on stage at Lollapalooza, they wanted to be shredding on the lead guitar out in front of thousands of people.

“Music culture has sort of shifted over the last 10-15 years to where DJ culture is influential, mashup culture is really influential. Festival culture is bigger than it’s ever been right now. So this game is sort of our attempt to reflect modern music culture in a way that’s still a game, but it’s also creatively fulfilling in a different way than Rock Bands or Dance Central or Guitar Hero.

“From a creative standpoint, you look at influencer culture as well where people just want to create and share things all the time. And this is sort of a reflection of that, Dreams is a good reflection of that. Mario Maker is another example, Minecraft of course – it’s like turning people loose into a sort of gamified playground with a lot of access to a lot of like tools and interesting and interesting things.”

The music-mixing aspect of Fuser is something Harmonix has been thinking about for a while: Walsh told me the studio “started experimenting” with games Fantasia and DropMix. “[With Fuser], it feels like we figured out the rest of it, the game wrapper around it that makes it still accessible,” Walsh said. Getting the balance between creative freedom and game rules was a challenge, so Harmonix tried to focus on “purposeful decisions that are also musical in a way you [can] score them.

“Figuring out that balance took a little while and some of our other experiments… I don’t think quite found the way to make your creative decisions ‘gaming'”, Walsh added.

Fuser is already launching with a significant number of tracks, but Harmonix hasn’t ruled out adding more post-launch. ‘Harmonix has a long tradition of supporting its titles with ongoing content and features,’ project director Daniel Sussman told me over email. ‘You can expect Fuser to be similar.’

Given Fuser’s focus on influencer-style sharing, I started to wonder how the music world’s strict licensing rules would work with publishing mixes to social media. How do the music rights work with that? Well, Harmonix doesn’t quite have the answer yet.

“It’s definitely complicated. For normal people, you’ll be able to share to your personal timeline,” Walsh explained. “When it comes to like influencers or YouTubers, things of that nature… that’s something that we’re still working through, both with licence holders as well as platforms. We know them both very well over the years. Obviously, when the game comes out it will include guidelines on how to do it.”

Is it more of a problem when people are monetising on top of the mixes they’ve produced?

“Monetisation does add a layer of complication… yeah, that is harder to navigate,” Walsh added. “Not necessarily impossible, but still something that we’re working through.”

Much to sphinx about.

I did manage to get a little hands-on time with Fuser for 10 minutes (and watched some gameplay expertly demoed by community manager Zoe Schneider) – and I was pretty bowled over by the mixing technology on display. It’s easy to use, packed with a good assortment of current hits and classics, and complex enough that players will be able to produce some unexpected mixes. Dropping new tracks on-beat was surprisingly satisfying in a different way to timing a Rock Band note, as hearing a great transition is rewarding to the ears. And there’s a certain novelty to hearing Smash Mouth and Migos inexplicably work together.

That said, I’m not yet entirely convinced by the core gameplay shown in the campaign, particularly the request system. In later levels these requests come in “pretty frequently”, Schneider told me – and while you can ignore them, the game encourages you to hit as many as possible to get a high score. This means the track is constantly shifting, and it often felt a little frantic and unnatural to my ear, as the music wasn’t given time to settle. The alternative, I suppose, is to dial back the amount of crowd requests: but then this risks making the gameplay slow.

The idea of responding to crowd requests also seems a little weird to me, as it suggests successful music artists only follow the demands of fans – and I’m not sure how many people actually want to live out a wedding DJ fantasy. And, unfortunately, the gameplay often looks quite static. It doesn’t have the drama of Rock Band – either on-screen, where rows of glowing blobs would hurtle towards you, or in the entertainment value of watching a friend perform on a peripheral in your living room. I wonder if this will impact the game’s ability to spread on social media platforms, as Harmonix would clearly like.

There are still so many unknowns surrounding Fuser it’s impossible to know how it’s going to pan out: we still know very little about multiplayer, precisely how the custom instrument tracks work, or what players will eventually make in freestyle mode. I really admire the focus on creative elements, along with the strength of the mixing system which makes the process accessible. Personally, I can see myself spending quite a few hours in freestyle mode tinkering with tracks. But is there enough of a game amongst the mixing tools to keep me hooked? We’ll see.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/02/harmonixs-fuser-bets-on-user-creativity-as-the-future-of-music-gaming-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=harmonixs-fuser-bets-on-user-creativity-as-the-future-of-music-gaming-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net

[nicholerestrada]

How A Generation Of Sims Players Got Away With Murder

Mortimer Goth settles in to one of the 15 wicker chairs that have suddenly appeared by his lit fireplace. He feels strangely compelled to sit and remain seated, as if guided by an unseen hand, even as the room he’s in grows curiously hotter and hotter. Before he knows it, the chairs around him burst into pixelated flames. He’s on fire! He calls for help, but his wife, Bella, can’t hear him. She’s swimming in circles in their backyard pool, searching fruitlessly for a ladder that doesn’t exist. 

For the uninitiated fiddling around their family desktop, the original version of “The Sims” was mostly about nurturing humanlike characters through life’s minutiae. For everyone else, “The Sims” was and is a game about death, about wacky, inconsequential death, about fiery death and watery death, death by starvation and death by electric shock and death by skydiving malfunction ― Mortimer and Bella’s worst recurring nightmare. And as the game evolved over the years, a kind of meta-game has formed around it: a subtle relationship between creative, death-obsessed “Sims” players and the game’s ever-adapting designers, keen on raising the stakes of the simulated lives we so easily ended.

Today, death on “The Sims” can feel harder and harder to come by. But it’s never impossible.

In the scenario above, the deaths of Mortimer Goth and his wife were no accident. They were the result of a human player deciding to set in motion a series of events that would lead to the inevitable demise of digital beings brought to life in a simulation game. That human player could have ushered Mortimer and his wife into a room and removed the door, watching as the Sims starved inside. The player could have prompted the characters to start making a feast with their cooking skill at Level 1, tempting a shoddy oven to burst aflame and engulf them. The player could have even neglected the couple’s guinea pig, only to have Mortimer pick it up and allow the rodent to administer one fatal bite.

But that player chose to cluster highly flammable chairs near the fireplace and hope they caught like tinder, and remove the ladder in the swimming pool once Bella, ignorant of the option of simply lifting herself out, dived in.

Back in the heyday of the game’s first iteration, everyone killed their Sims. I feel confident in stating this even without hard data to back it up: Killing Sims wasn’t exceptional behavior, it was the norm. Just look at the Reddit threads relaying depraved “Sims” activity with comments spooling into the thousands, or this Polygon article, where it is written, “It is a proven fact people love killing off Sims.”

“That was the only enjoyable way to play ‘The Sims’!” Maddy Myrick, 31, told me. She’d responded to my callout on Twitter, asking first-generation “Sims” players to explain the morbid habit of killing a thing you were ostensibly tasked with keeping alive. “Sometimes I would start a new family, convinced that I would let them live. But, inevitably, I quickly became bored with designing their house (which I was never able to finish).”

And so she killed them. Sims have died for less.

One of the most common tactics for killing a Sim, beautiful in its simplicity and effectiveness, is the “murdershed” method, as one “Sims” player described it: the doorless room.

“My favorite thing to do was lure my Sims into a seemingly normal space and then take away its exit,” my colleague Sara Boboltz confessed in a direct message. “So, I’d make a tiny house and take away the door. I’d make a pool and take away the ladder. Make a two-story house, take the stairs. You get it. Sometimes my Sims would be teachers I didn’t like.” 

“I made a guy who was a compulsive neatfreak,” Reddit user vsanna wrote in a comment that rose to the top of its thread. “Put him in a really surreal little house with a wedding buffet and a hamster or something, deleted the door. Eventually he went insane from lack of cleanliness and depression over his little rodent friend dying, and starved to death once the banquet rotted. I put the resulting urn in the room. I then repeated an identical scenario several times, always keeping the urns in the room.

“Eventually the tenth iteration of this guy is up all night, every night, terrified of a parade of ghosts of himself.” 

Our penchant for serial killing has not gone unnoticed at “Sims” headquarters. According to “The Sims 4” senior producer Grant Rodiek, who’s been with the company since 2005, the latest version of the game registers around 28,000 Sim deaths per day.

“I think [killing Sims is] a way players can express ultimate control over a thing. It’s funny, mischievous, dark, without being grotesque,” Rodiek said. “It’s a kinder, gentler method of using a magnifying glass to burn insects.”

Between life and death in “Sims 4,” there’s still no single path to playing. The vastly open-ended game nudges you toward certain goals — meeting your Sims’ physical needs; securing them a means of making money — but no task or accomplishment is necessarily required.

Rodiek and his colleagues have had a lot of time to analyze the preferences and behaviors of “Sims” players. He’s whittled users down to a handful of types: There are the “aspiring Frank Lloyd Wrights” who love tinkering in the game’s Build mode; the Create-a-Sim artists who painstakingly remodel favorite characters or celebrities in digital form, or the narrative writers who play out classic storylines (think: mysterious new kid, star-crossed lovers, etc.) in Live mode. 

“And then you have the sort of people … we call them deviant players,” Rodiek said. “People who like to mess with their Sims, people who like to poke at the system, people who like to have fun and break the game and do weird stuff.” (These categories, I’d add, are not necessarily mutually exclusive.)

In the early years, these players, in an effort to discover all the ways they could ruin their Sims’ lives, might’ve swapped stories with friends about building murder houses and endlessly uppingtheir budgets for DIY torture devices using the “rosebud” money cheat.

As the internet’s capacity to bring people together has evolved since the early 2000s, so have user-created parameters to keep gameplay interesting. Forums hold lists of restrictive challenges, which can involve everything from having one Sim birth 100 babies to re-creating consecutive historical eras with each generation of a family. On YouTube, players show themselves re-enacting “The Hunger Games” or building lengthy mazes meant only to make simulated life harder for their tiny humans.(One Simmer who orchestrated 12 seasons of Sim “Hunger Games” — complete with training days and sporadic gifts of food like apples — was recently hired on by Electronic Arts as an associate producer.)

Over the years, the current base game — there are four total now — is supplemented with expansion packs to provide new ways to play the game — and kill your Sims. Rodiek said it’s the first thing developers plan out with each new expansion, along with new places for your digital hedonists to hook up.

Much-beloved YouTuber “Call Me Kevin” has a series showcasing his comically deadly restaurant in “Sims 4,” where unskilled chefs serve up the sometimes-fatal pufferfish nigiri introduced in the “City Living” expansion pack. It’s the only thing on the menu. Watching him play, you see Sims dining casually together, only to be interrupted when one diner clutches at their throat and falls head-first into their food. He’s amassed quite the graveyard behind the restaurant, complete with a coffin that you can WooHoo in — Sim-speak for sex. 

Part of the widespread appeal of killing Sims might be that the actual moments of their demise aren’t particularly disturbing. Generally, dying Sims just drop or crumple to the floor in distress, disappearing altogether in some versions of the game. Coming across a hungry cowplant provides the bizarre and delightful visual of a giant flower consuming a Sim, but there’s no blood or errant limbs left behind. In a fire, Sims might become visibly odorous as their Hygiene levels plummet, but that’s about it — no gore or horror-movie theatrics.

There are some deaths “The Sims” avoids altogether.

“We don’t let toddlers burn to death,” Rodiek said. “That’s just gross. That’s not funny, there’s nothing humorous there. We don’t let dogs burn to death because like, again, that’s gross.”

Eventually, the grim reaper, who can talk to but sadly not have children with Sims, comes to collect your character’s soul, leaving an urn or gravestone in the Sim’s place. The reaper himself has a cellphone or a tablet, ostensibly to process the Sim’s soul, or something. It’s all a little goofy.

The fact that players have long brought Sim death on themselves is all a part of probing the edges of an established world.

Philosophy professor C. Thi Nguyen, who has written extensively about the philosophy of games, likened the act of killing Sims to the innocent phenomenon of “speedrunning,” where players try to complete a given game as fast as possible. 

“One of my favorites is a speed run of ‘[Super] Mario [Bros.]’ where you try to get zero points … even though the traditional goal of ‘Mario’ is to max out your points. Trying to get to the end as fast as possible with zero points is actually much harder and much weirder,” he said. “You’re playing the game in an unintended way, which, for some people, I think it makes them feel more creative.”

“The system seems to tell you, ‘Look, the point of this game is to take care of the Sims,’ and all the tools that are given to you are given to you to take care of your Sims,” he said. “So if you want to kill your Sims, you have to do kind of creative and unexpected things and kind of remix the game.”

However, Nguyen said it was also possible that, for the players who like “The Sims” for its narrative possibilities and engage with “the fiction of the game,” explorations of death could have deeper personal significance.

“It may vary from player to player, but I think from talking to a lot of players it’s actually about the creativity of using the system for a new purpose,” he said. 

Whatever the explanation, the game’s creators have come to understand that we use “The Sims” not just to simulate life, but to play God. And it’s impacted the way the game has shifted, from “Sims 1” to “Sims 4.” 

The first two versions of “The Sims” ― which Rodiek described as “disastrously hard” ― made it easier for the Goths to expire outside of a player’s purview. Direct Sim-on-Sim homicide isn’t possible, so accidents were more often fatal: a grilled cheese that burns down the house, a malfunctioning skydiving simulator, or a fatal shock delivered to a character standing in a puddle during an electric repair. In “The Sims 2,” simply being in the front yard at the exact time a satellite falls to Earth could be the end of a Sim’s brief journey.

But nowadays, compared to “Sims 1” and “Sims 2,” it’s a lot harder to deliberately kill off dear Mortimer and Bella. Anyone coming to “The Sims 4,” the game’s latest version, might notice their characters can now easily hop out of a pool, ladder or not. It’s a change that came with “The Sims 3,” effectively eliminating one of the preferred manners of Sims murder.

“I love how funny and surprising it is to say, ‘Hey, we as a team recognize what you’re doing and, ha-ha, we flipped the switch,’” Rodiek said. The decision was born out of developers’ desire to further up Sims’ intelligence and self-sufficiency with each new version. Players, he said, “got pissed at this.”

“Basically, our thought was if Sims are smarter, and if Sims are less likely to just frickin’ die all the time, well, maybe they’re smart enough to pull their asses out of the pool,” he said, noting that you can still kill them from exhaustion if you build walls around the pool. “They’ll still fart at the wrong time and they’ll still just pass out in a pool of vomit if they’re tired enough and the timing is wrong, but that, at least, is a win for them.”

Now, if you leave them unattended, “your Sims will basically default to neutral,” Rodiek said. Players can worry less about making sure everyone has had a bathroom break or a meal. If you don’t direct your Sim to do it, they’ll likely figure it out themselves.

“Our tagline was, ‘We want to move past peeing,’” he said of shifting Sims’ needs beyond basic survival. “However, for them to really succeed, you have to nurture them. And nurturing your Sims comes from more emotional, higher-level fulfillment.”

Now, Sims have aspirations generally based on interests or specific actions: One Sim might want to become a tech genius, while another wants to become the neighborhood enemy. Fulfilling these wishes results in rewards that make the Sim better.

I’m usually a gentle “Sims” player, nurturing my families into fulfilling home lives and careers, watching as they level up in activities like baking and guitar playing, occasionally tossing in a love affair here and there. For the purposes of this article, though, I set out to kill as many Sims in “Sims 4” as I could.

Not wanting to delete doors and watch my Sims starve, I fell back on faithful killing strategies, like the classic fire scenarios. There were newer tactics I could try, too: In “Sims 4,” even Sims’ emotions, taken to the extreme, can be fatal; their hearts can explode from sheer rage or cease beating from hysterics. 

In “Seasons,” the most recent expansion pack, Sims who are skilled in flower arranging can whip up a mysterious plant, the scent of which ages or kills its recipient. A video from website Sims VIP illustrating this particular death demonstrates the cruelty: At first, an elder Sim is pleased to be receiving a gift. But upon realizing his bad luck, he becomes angry, shouting out “Narb!” He wipes his brow, swoons to his knees, and even checks his pulse one last time before the grim reaper arrives.

“Seasons” also allows the possibility of death by freezing or overheating, or getting struck by lightning. New kinds of warnings tip you off to these sorts of ends: The game indicates via a Sim’s “moodlet” that your electronic buddy might die if he doesn’t get out of the blizzard, or change out of his snowsuit during a heat wave, or run in from the thunderstorm.

One of the suggested ways to murder your Sims is through overexhaustion, though once a Sim becomes “uncomfortable,” many actions, like jogging, become unavailable to a player. In “Sims 4,” more Sims simply die of old age than tragically before their time: Age accounts for 30.5 percent of deaths in the game, compared to the 11 percent who die of hunger; the 10.7 percent who drown; or the 10.6 percent who die in a fire, according to statistics provided by Rodiek.

Maybe I’m unpracticed, but I couldn’t murder my Sims. I made one Sim flirt with her husband’s dad in front of her husband, enraging the husband until the spouses became enemies, then nemeses. I had them all fight — illustrated by a cloud of dust and occasional flashes of limb — but it only made them a little dazed. I had them all pee themselves, then installed a shower and had them all walk in on each other, but no one reached the deadly “mortified” level of embarrassment. I made the dad swim in the pool in wintertime, but he kept getting out once he started freezing. Without resorting to the walls-around-the-pool method Rodiek mentioned, I couldn’t play God quite like I used to.

Defeated, I had the enraged husband and wife divorce before closing my game. It seemed only fair. When I opened up “Sims 2,” however, I found that one installation of the “shoddy fireplace” did the trick in no time. My Sims freaked out and wailed, too frantic to obey my requests for them to stand directly in the flames — but the blaze got them in the end.

Electronic Arts

A “shoddy fireplace” did the trick to start a fire in “Sims 2.” The cat, seen in the lower right corner, ended up running away. The fifth household member was swimming in circles in the pool.

Stakes, Rodiek acknowledged during our interview, are what make “The Sims” fundamentally interesting. Making death a part of the game from the start provided those stakes.

“It is really great when people have a Sim that they really care about, and they care about how they orchestrated their life, and they see them raise children, and maybe get a divorce, and then their children grow up and then they die. They go, ‘Oh, man, I could just re-create them, but it will never be that Sim.’”

“Our game is about creating weird, quirky, erratic, strange little humanlike characters that we want you to care about deeply,” he added.  

In a perpetual quest, developers hope to keep inching “The Sims” toward a better reflection of real life and death, to keep raising the stakes and allowing customization in ways that matter to players.

In 2016, “Sims” released an update that expanded the possibilities of gender expression among characters, no longer restricting certain hair, makeup or clothing items to one gender or another and allowing players to select whether a Sim could impregnate others or get pregnant, regardless of outward appearance. Similarly, Rodiek said, creators are discussing the possibility of incorporating Sims who are deaf or hard of hearing, blind, or use a wheelchair. To help develop these, the team has been talking to players who have similar experiences.

“In actually talking to these players, talking about how it affects their lives, we’ve been thinking, how can we reflect this in a way that works in our game?” he said. “That’s the stuff we’re actually looking into that we really want to figure out, because it’s scary to get it wrong, but I think it’s so important if we can get it right.”

In terms of death, Rodiek said he could envision developing a kind of long-term, terminal disease within the game from which Sims can’t recover (but, seriously, don’t ask him about it on Twitter, because they’re not making this right now). 

“I could see us approaching that in sort of a generic way that we’re not saying that it’s this specific cancer. But we’re basically saying that your Sim has something that can’t be cured and they will die before their time as a result of that,” he said. Maybe, he added, it’d be an option players could toggle on or off.

“I think it’s a reality of life … in a way that is like, yes, it’s real, and yes, it’s sad. But maybe for someone who wants it, it’s cathartic or its interesting and it helps you tell a story,” Rodiek said. “Those are some of the things we’re trying to grapple with and talk to our players about how to get right. And it’s terrifying, but it’s really cool if we could do it.”

Illustration by Tara Jacoby for HuffPost.

Download

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/killing-sims-death-murder-ea_us_5adf94dbe4b07be4d4c58fd4

Source: https://hashtaghighways.com/2018/10/28/how-a-generation-of-sims-players-got-away-with-murder/

from Garko Media https://garkomedia1.wordpress.com/2018/10/28/how-a-generation-of-sims-players-got-away-with-murder/

[michaeljtraylor]

How A Generation Of Sims Players Got Away With Murder

Mortimer Goth settles in to one of the 15 wicker chairs that have suddenly appeared by his lit fireplace. He feels strangely compelled to sit and remain seated, as if guided by an unseen hand, even as the room he’s in grows curiously hotter and hotter. Before he knows it, the chairs around him burst into pixelated flames. He’s on fire! He calls for help, but his wife, Bella, can’t hear him. She’s swimming in circles in their backyard pool, searching fruitlessly for a ladder that doesn’t exist. 

For the uninitiated fiddling around their family desktop, the original version of “The Sims” was mostly about nurturing humanlike characters through life’s minutiae. For everyone else, “The Sims” was and is a game about death, about wacky, inconsequential death, about fiery death and watery death, death by starvation and death by electric shock and death by skydiving malfunction ― Mortimer and Bella’s worst recurring nightmare. And as the game evolved over the years, a kind of meta-game has formed around it: a subtle relationship between creative, death-obsessed “Sims” players and the game’s ever-adapting designers, keen on raising the stakes of the simulated lives we so easily ended.

Today, death on “The Sims” can feel harder and harder to come by. But it’s never impossible.

In the scenario above, the deaths of Mortimer Goth and his wife were no accident. They were the result of a human player deciding to set in motion a series of events that would lead to the inevitable demise of digital beings brought to life in a simulation game. That human player could have ushered Mortimer and his wife into a room and removed the door, watching as the Sims starved inside. The player could have prompted the characters to start making a feast with their cooking skill at Level 1, tempting a shoddy oven to burst aflame and engulf them. The player could have even neglected the couple’s guinea pig, only to have Mortimer pick it up and allow the rodent to administer one fatal bite.

But that player chose to cluster highly flammable chairs near the fireplace and hope they caught like tinder, and remove the ladder in the swimming pool once Bella, ignorant of the option of simply lifting herself out, dived in.

Back in the heyday of the game’s first iteration, everyone killed their Sims. I feel confident in stating this even without hard data to back it up: Killing Sims wasn’t exceptional behavior, it was the norm. Just look at the Reddit threads relaying depraved “Sims” activity with comments spooling into the thousands, or this Polygon article, where it is written, “It is a proven fact people love killing off Sims.”

“That was the only enjoyable way to play ‘The Sims’!” Maddy Myrick, 31, told me. She’d responded to my callout on Twitter, asking first-generation “Sims” players to explain the morbid habit of killing a thing you were ostensibly tasked with keeping alive. “Sometimes I would start a new family, convinced that I would let them live. But, inevitably, I quickly became bored with designing their house (which I was never able to finish).”

And so she killed them. Sims have died for less.

One of the most common tactics for killing a Sim, beautiful in its simplicity and effectiveness, is the “murdershed” method, as one “Sims” player described it: the doorless room.

“My favorite thing to do was lure my Sims into a seemingly normal space and then take away its exit,” my colleague Sara Boboltz confessed in a direct message. “So, I’d make a tiny house and take away the door. I’d make a pool and take away the ladder. Make a two-story house, take the stairs. You get it. Sometimes my Sims would be teachers I didn’t like.” 

“I made a guy who was a compulsive neatfreak,” Reddit user vsanna wrote in a comment that rose to the top of its thread. “Put him in a really surreal little house with a wedding buffet and a hamster or something, deleted the door. Eventually he went insane from lack of cleanliness and depression over his little rodent friend dying, and starved to death once the banquet rotted. I put the resulting urn in the room. I then repeated an identical scenario several times, always keeping the urns in the room.

“Eventually the tenth iteration of this guy is up all night, every night, terrified of a parade of ghosts of himself.” 

Our penchant for serial killing has not gone unnoticed at “Sims” headquarters. According to “The Sims 4” senior producer Grant Rodiek, who’s been with the company since 2005, the latest version of the game registers around 28,000 Sim deaths per day.

“I think [killing Sims is] a way players can express ultimate control over a thing. It’s funny, mischievous, dark, without being grotesque,” Rodiek said. “It’s a kinder, gentler method of using a magnifying glass to burn insects.”

Between life and death in “Sims 4,” there’s still no single path to playing. The vastly open-ended game nudges you toward certain goals — meeting your Sims’ physical needs; securing them a means of making money — but no task or accomplishment is necessarily required.

Rodiek and his colleagues have had a lot of time to analyze the preferences and behaviors of “Sims” players. He’s whittled users down to a handful of types: There are the “aspiring Frank Lloyd Wrights” who love tinkering in the game’s Build mode; the Create-a-Sim artists who painstakingly remodel favorite characters or celebrities in digital form, or the narrative writers who play out classic storylines (think: mysterious new kid, star-crossed lovers, etc.) in Live mode. 

“And then you have the sort of people … we call them deviant players,” Rodiek said. “People who like to mess with their Sims, people who like to poke at the system, people who like to have fun and break the game and do weird stuff.” (These categories, I’d add, are not necessarily mutually exclusive.)

In the early years, these players, in an effort to discover all the ways they could ruin their Sims’ lives, might’ve swapped stories with friends about building murder houses and endlessly uppingtheir budgets for DIY torture devices using the “rosebud” money cheat.

As the internet’s capacity to bring people together has evolved since the early 2000s, so have user-created parameters to keep gameplay interesting. Forums hold lists of restrictive challenges, which can involve everything from having one Sim birth 100 babies to re-creating consecutive historical eras with each generation of a family. On YouTube, players show themselves re-enacting “The Hunger Games” or building lengthy mazes meant only to make simulated life harder for their tiny humans.(One Simmer who orchestrated 12 seasons of Sim “Hunger Games” — complete with training days and sporadic gifts of food like apples — was recently hired on by Electronic Arts as an associate producer.)

Over the years, the current base game — there are four total now — is supplemented with expansion packs to provide new ways to play the game — and kill your Sims. Rodiek said it’s the first thing developers plan out with each new expansion, along with new places for your digital hedonists to hook up.

Much-beloved YouTuber “Call Me Kevin” has a series showcasing his comically deadly restaurant in “Sims 4,” where unskilled chefs serve up the sometimes-fatal pufferfish nigiri introduced in the “City Living” expansion pack. It’s the only thing on the menu. Watching him play, you see Sims dining casually together, only to be interrupted when one diner clutches at their throat and falls head-first into their food. He’s amassed quite the graveyard behind the restaurant, complete with a coffin that you can WooHoo in — Sim-speak for sex. 

Part of the widespread appeal of killing Sims might be that the actual moments of their demise aren’t particularly disturbing. Generally, dying Sims just drop or crumple to the floor in distress, disappearing altogether in some versions of the game. Coming across a hungry cowplant provides the bizarre and delightful visual of a giant flower consuming a Sim, but there’s no blood or errant limbs left behind. In a fire, Sims might become visibly odorous as their Hygiene levels plummet, but that’s about it — no gore or horror-movie theatrics.

There are some deaths “The Sims” avoids altogether.

“We don’t let toddlers burn to death,” Rodiek said. “That’s just gross. That’s not funny, there’s nothing humorous there. We don’t let dogs burn to death because like, again, that’s gross.”

Eventually, the grim reaper, who can talk to but sadly not have children with Sims, comes to collect your character’s soul, leaving an urn or gravestone in the Sim’s place. The reaper himself has a cellphone or a tablet, ostensibly to process the Sim’s soul, or something. It’s all a little goofy.

The fact that players have long brought Sim death on themselves is all a part of probing the edges of an established world.

Philosophy professor C. Thi Nguyen, who has written extensively about the philosophy of games, likened the act of killing Sims to the innocent phenomenon of “speedrunning,” where players try to complete a given game as fast as possible. 

“One of my favorites is a speed run of ‘[Super] Mario [Bros.]’ where you try to get zero points … even though the traditional goal of ‘Mario’ is to max out your points. Trying to get to the end as fast as possible with zero points is actually much harder and much weirder,” he said. “You’re playing the game in an unintended way, which, for some people, I think it makes them feel more creative.”

“The system seems to tell you, ‘Look, the point of this game is to take care of the Sims,’ and all the tools that are given to you are given to you to take care of your Sims,” he said. “So if you want to kill your Sims, you have to do kind of creative and unexpected things and kind of remix the game.”

However, Nguyen said it was also possible that, for the players who like “The Sims” for its narrative possibilities and engage with “the fiction of the game,” explorations of death could have deeper personal significance.

“It may vary from player to player, but I think from talking to a lot of players it’s actually about the creativity of using the system for a new purpose,” he said. 

Whatever the explanation, the game’s creators have come to understand that we use “The Sims” not just to simulate life, but to play God. And it’s impacted the way the game has shifted, from “Sims 1” to “Sims 4.” 

The first two versions of “The Sims” ― which Rodiek described as “disastrously hard” ― made it easier for the Goths to expire outside of a player’s purview. Direct Sim-on-Sim homicide isn’t possible, so accidents were more often fatal: a grilled cheese that burns down the house, a malfunctioning skydiving simulator, or a fatal shock delivered to a character standing in a puddle during an electric repair. In “The Sims 2,” simply being in the front yard at the exact time a satellite falls to Earth could be the end of a Sim’s brief journey.

But nowadays, compared to “Sims 1” and “Sims 2,” it’s a lot harder to deliberately kill off dear Mortimer and Bella. Anyone coming to “The Sims 4,” the game’s latest version, might notice their characters can now easily hop out of a pool, ladder or not. It’s a change that came with “The Sims 3,” effectively eliminating one of the preferred manners of Sims murder.

“I love how funny and surprising it is to say, ‘Hey, we as a team recognize what you’re doing and, ha-ha, we flipped the switch,’” Rodiek said. The decision was born out of developers’ desire to further up Sims’ intelligence and self-sufficiency with each new version. Players, he said, “got pissed at this.”

“Basically, our thought was if Sims are smarter, and if Sims are less likely to just frickin’ die all the time, well, maybe they’re smart enough to pull their asses out of the pool,” he said, noting that you can still kill them from exhaustion if you build walls around the pool. “They’ll still fart at the wrong time and they’ll still just pass out in a pool of vomit if they’re tired enough and the timing is wrong, but that, at least, is a win for them.”

Now, if you leave them unattended, “your Sims will basically default to neutral,” Rodiek said. Players can worry less about making sure everyone has had a bathroom break or a meal. If you don’t direct your Sim to do it, they’ll likely figure it out themselves.

“Our tagline was, ‘We want to move past peeing,’” he said of shifting Sims’ needs beyond basic survival. “However, for them to really succeed, you have to nurture them. And nurturing your Sims comes from more emotional, higher-level fulfillment.”

Now, Sims have aspirations generally based on interests or specific actions: One Sim might want to become a tech genius, while another wants to become the neighborhood enemy. Fulfilling these wishes results in rewards that make the Sim better.

I’m usually a gentle “Sims” player, nurturing my families into fulfilling home lives and careers, watching as they level up in activities like baking and guitar playing, occasionally tossing in a love affair here and there. For the purposes of this article, though, I set out to kill as many Sims in “Sims 4” as I could.

Not wanting to delete doors and watch my Sims starve, I fell back on faithful killing strategies, like the classic fire scenarios. There were newer tactics I could try, too: In “Sims 4,” even Sims’ emotions, taken to the extreme, can be fatal; their hearts can explode from sheer rage or cease beating from hysterics. 

In “Seasons,” the most recent expansion pack, Sims who are skilled in flower arranging can whip up a mysterious plant, the scent of which ages or kills its recipient. A video from website Sims VIP illustrating this particular death demonstrates the cruelty: At first, an elder Sim is pleased to be receiving a gift. But upon realizing his bad luck, he becomes angry, shouting out “Narb!” He wipes his brow, swoons to his knees, and even checks his pulse one last time before the grim reaper arrives.

“Seasons” also allows the possibility of death by freezing or overheating, or getting struck by lightning. New kinds of warnings tip you off to these sorts of ends: The game indicates via a Sim’s “moodlet” that your electronic buddy might die if he doesn’t get out of the blizzard, or change out of his snowsuit during a heat wave, or run in from the thunderstorm.

One of the suggested ways to murder your Sims is through overexhaustion, though once a Sim becomes “uncomfortable,” many actions, like jogging, become unavailable to a player. In “Sims 4,” more Sims simply die of old age than tragically before their time: Age accounts for 30.5 percent of deaths in the game, compared to the 11 percent who die of hunger; the 10.7 percent who drown; or the 10.6 percent who die in a fire, according to statistics provided by Rodiek.

Maybe I’m unpracticed, but I couldn’t murder my Sims. I made one Sim flirt with her husband’s dad in front of her husband, enraging the husband until the spouses became enemies, then nemeses. I had them all fight — illustrated by a cloud of dust and occasional flashes of limb — but it only made them a little dazed. I had them all pee themselves, then installed a shower and had them all walk in on each other, but no one reached the deadly “mortified” level of embarrassment. I made the dad swim in the pool in wintertime, but he kept getting out once he started freezing. Without resorting to the walls-around-the-pool method Rodiek mentioned, I couldn’t play God quite like I used to.

Defeated, I had the enraged husband and wife divorce before closing my game. It seemed only fair. When I opened up “Sims 2,” however, I found that one installation of the “shoddy fireplace” did the trick in no time. My Sims freaked out and wailed, too frantic to obey my requests for them to stand directly in the flames — but the blaze got them in the end.

Electronic Arts

A “shoddy fireplace” did the trick to start a fire in “Sims 2.” The cat, seen in the lower right corner, ended up running away. The fifth household member was swimming in circles in the pool.

Stakes, Rodiek acknowledged during our interview, are what make “The Sims” fundamentally interesting. Making death a part of the game from the start provided those stakes.

“It is really great when people have a Sim that they really care about, and they care about how they orchestrated their life, and they see them raise children, and maybe get a divorce, and then their children grow up and then they die. They go, ‘Oh, man, I could just re-create them, but it will never be that Sim.’”

“Our game is about creating weird, quirky, erratic, strange little humanlike characters that we want you to care about deeply,” he added.  

In a perpetual quest, developers hope to keep inching “The Sims” toward a better reflection of real life and death, to keep raising the stakes and allowing customization in ways that matter to players.

In 2016, “Sims” released an update that expanded the possibilities of gender expression among characters, no longer restricting certain hair, makeup or clothing items to one gender or another and allowing players to select whether a Sim could impregnate others or get pregnant, regardless of outward appearance. Similarly, Rodiek said, creators are discussing the possibility of incorporating Sims who are deaf or hard of hearing, blind, or use a wheelchair. To help develop these, the team has been talking to players who have similar experiences.

“In actually talking to these players, talking about how it affects their lives, we’ve been thinking, how can we reflect this in a way that works in our game?” he said. “That’s the stuff we’re actually looking into that we really want to figure out, because it’s scary to get it wrong, but I think it’s so important if we can get it right.”

In terms of death, Rodiek said he could envision developing a kind of long-term, terminal disease within the game from which Sims can’t recover (but, seriously, don’t ask him about it on Twitter, because they’re not making this right now). 

“I could see us approaching that in sort of a generic way that we’re not saying that it’s this specific cancer. But we’re basically saying that your Sim has something that can’t be cured and they will die before their time as a result of that,” he said. Maybe, he added, it’d be an option players could toggle on or off.

“I think it’s a reality of life … in a way that is like, yes, it’s real, and yes, it’s sad. But maybe for someone who wants it, it’s cathartic or its interesting and it helps you tell a story,” Rodiek said. “Those are some of the things we’re trying to grapple with and talk to our players about how to get right. And it’s terrifying, but it’s really cool if we could do it.”

Illustration by Tara Jacoby for HuffPost.

Download

Read more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/killing-sims-death-murder-ea_us_5adf94dbe4b07be4d4c58fd4

from RSSUnify feed https://hashtaghighways.com/2018/10/28/how-a-generation-of-sims-players-got-away-with-murder/ from Garko Media https://garkomedia1.tumblr.com/post/179530072194