Pezen

Great video Jan! Also, you’re the first person to convince me by enthusiasm alone to give Pokemon a shot. Never played any of them in my 36 years on this planet. But I am having a good time with SwSh on my Switch. It’s like a cup of hot chocolate on a winter’s day, just the thing I was looking for recently.

Fascinating read, well written and thoughrough as always. Starting it with some hostorical context was a nice touch, and I didn’t even know how complex the Hong Kong/China relationship was.

I was initially sceptical about your comparison to worker conditions as I felt like it was a far reach of a comparison to a Hearthstone competition which by no means is an employment rather than a, well, competition. I also found myself thinking about rules, and an old saying a message board I used to frequent had; ”Our rules are not a democracy”. Meaning, you join with the understanding that the owner amd moderators decide what goes. It’s not a discussion.

However, as I progressed through your text I found myself thinking about how we’re so fast to intellectually reason our way into fascism by agreeing to what seems to be the most reasonable way of thinking without considering the larger picture and the impact even these seemingly small incidents might have long term. Worse yet, I’m annoyed that I didn’t even consider it myself until now regarding this specific incident.

I have always viewed companies as money-first entities, so while I wasn’t surprised to find Blizzard do this to protect it’s bottom line in China, it still was a bit of a wakeup call. I believe it was on the Waypoint discussion about this topic they mentioned the idea that we have been spoon fed for a long time about business being a way to interject democracy and democratic ideals into countries that lack them. But it’s becoming increasingly clear how much of that is a house of cards that fall as soon as doing that threatens the earnings. It is a nice quote to make, but when the influnce is apparently going thw other way, I think we all need to reconsider why we thought that would have worked in the first place.

And speaking of quotes, I take what Epic said with a truck full of salt. I agree that this isn’t about pleasing a Chinese company, it’s just about making a calculated call on earnings. And right now, it looks good to say you wouldn’t pull a Blizzard. But if Epic was in that position, I wouldn’t trust them to have acted according to that quote. It’s easy to wave a ’good guy’ flag when you haven’t been pushed and need to make a call betweem ’freedom of speech’ and hard cash. And to that point, it’s also a growing feeling of it’s no longer really about supporting companies that are ’good’ as much as it is picking companies that are.. the least bad?

Again, very interesting read that went very well with my Sunday hotel breakfast.

I would have been more interested in this if it was a Spotify-esque service. As it stands right now with pay to access and buying a streaming title you have no way of knowing if it'll vanish some day, I'm not the target audience for this. Granted, I said similar things about buying games digitally a few years ago, so who knows what I'll be doing some years from now. I suppose the only difference is that I realized that if I buy a game digitally I could theoretically still store it locally somehow. With streaming there's no way to keep a game if they pull the plug on it.

I can definitely see the comparison to the Mad Max game, as the most fun I had in that game was driving around the dirt because the car handled the way it felt a muscle car in a desert should feel. But as someone else pointed out, the combat (melee especially) seems out of control. There's a disconnect between yourself and the zombies and eveything feels like it is powered by some sort of magnetic force. In fact, it doesn't quite feel like the freakers are acting as singular individuals even when they are by themselves. Something about them even makes them feel disconnected to the world. They seem to lack weight and physics in some way. But maybe that's just how it looks from the outside, might feel different playing it.

Nice work on the interview, fascinating to read! It’s weird though reading such a ’matter of fact’ take on the game from it’s developer as someone that had such an emotionally resonant experience with the game. It brings me back to something Jeff Green said on some podcast about how developing games makes you perhaps see them in a different light as a player, which can be both good and bad. Reading this I got that feeling of looking behind the curtain and exposing the strings to some degree, which was equally fascinating and decontructed my own view of the game in some way beyond it’s purely emotional memory. Again, great work!

I completely get where you're coming from, and we all have sections of our lives where we have more or less time to dedicate to specific creative things. I used to quite like writing blogs on here, but as time has passed I always felt like the community both shrunk and grew at the same time. It feels like Giant Bomb has grown but the feeling of a community that all fall under the same umbrella sort of vanished in the process. Great written blogs gets fairly few comments, if any. The fact that some of the regular bloggers keep it up is impressive, despite what feels like rather lackluster feedback on time spent. And I know I'm sort of part of the problem I wish to fight, as I find myself not commenting as much on the blogs I do read. And my impulse to write blogs has gone down quite a bit as well, unless something really hit my urge to write. Which I do think is quite a shame as it was a good way to keep up my writing in general and always fun to hear other takes on things I was thinking about.

But hope life finds you well and that your other creative projects (and life in general) prosper!

I kept thinking this game reminded me of something until I now realized it is giving me weird Pro Wrestling (NES) nostalgia. And I just read that this franchise and that game shares developer DNA. It all makes sense now. I am actually feeling like getting this, been in the mood for a wrestling game for a while and as stated WWE ones just are not cutting it anymore. I think the restrictions they started putting on CAWs really bummed me the most. But either way, might give this one a shot, it looks fun.

One of my favorite achievements have to be the ”How d’ya like them apples..” one from Assassin’s Creed 3. It is just one that pops with the story but it was such a fun twist that seeing the name of the achievement as it popped actually gave me a good laugh.

Also; Gremlins 2 is fantastic and all this talk about it is making me want to watch it again.

Faces and expressions have a real ”mobile game”-vibe to them. Feel like I have seen variations of them before in other free to pmay narrative games on mobile. But the game has an otherwise nice look. Curious what the story is actually about though, the person that is wanted angle feels a little less interesting than the idea that you’re trying to get by as the last non-automated cab driver somehow.

How To Ruin Planets Through Industrialized Exploitation Of Natural Resources: The Game.

It looks like a relaxing and nice looking game, but something about turning a lush green area into a big industrial plant is rubbing me the wrong way in ways I didn’t even knew I had.