Vinny mentioned that you are definitively playing as Michael. Do they ever explicitly state in the game which one of the two characters you're controlling? Maybe it's alluded to somewhere that you are controlling explicitly either Kenzie or Michael, and I just missed it? I thought it was actually kind of interesting that they kept that vague, but maybe i'm just thick.
You know, this might be right. In my head it was him saying all that stuff, but I'm not sure they specifically lock it in. They use some pet names throughout, but having trouble recalling a specific moment of identifying the person. Interesting.
Funnily enough, I had it in my head that I was specifically Kenzie, until I realised that I couldn't be sure which one I actually was. I think they even go as far as making them use the same pet names for each other, so that when that pet name appears in text it's not a clue to which one you are.
I can't help but feel like Astro Bot could be so much more if they gave it an identity that wasn't just "PlayStation tech demo", in the way that Mario is an iconic character tied to Nintendo, but you don't see fat Nintendo logos on all the coins.
But then again, if they did that we wouldn't get a simultaneous reference to both the PlayStation Eye and the PlayStation EyeToy.
I bought this game and I've been having a ton of fun with it, but there are some serious UX impediments that should have never gone past the design phase.
To use a non-default skin for your car, you must subscribe to a club, browse the uploaded skins for that club (which is permission-locked so only certain users can upload skins), then click a "Heart" button to add it to your "favorites." There is no text label for this button, and no pop-up when you hover over the button to indicate that you're "favoriting" it.
Then, you have to go to your personal profile, click on a "Skins" section, and select the skin (which is only populated by your "favorited" skins). The Skins section also seems unreliable in terms of updating—oftentimes newly-added skins will appear untextured until you click around a few times to force a refresh on the skin.
Going back to the club subscription: the game currently features a robust skin design system, which is cool. But if you want to actually use a skin that you created in the in-game system, here's the workflow:
1. Use the editing tools to design a skin.
2. Specifically export the skin (not save the project) to a directory on your computer.
3. Navigate to a club that you're a member of (and have upload privileges to) and upload the exported file.
4. Favorite the skin in that club.
5. Navigate back to your player profile and select the skin (which again, may require some clicking around since it most likely will not refresh immediately).
The end result is that there are a ton of "clubs" that people just use to specifically upload their own skins because there's no other way to use your own skin that was designed in the editor tool. I cannot imagine how the design team thought this was a good idea. I spent about an hour Googling error messages and just figuring out how to apply my own designed skin to my car because the UI is so incomprehensible.
I apologize for the wall of text, but I think this game is really fun and I am confused by the sheer butt-fucking insanity that is required to perform a basic function like putting a skin that I designed on my car.
Don't forget step 2.5: add a horn.wav to the skin .zip file.
Seriously though, this process really is utter garbage. During the first ~30 minutes of this quicklook, I'm behind the scenes desparately trying to get the hornC4test skin working (the one Jeff ends up grabbing), and it was a nightmare. There's two types of .zip file (saved skin vs. exported skin) that look identical, the .zip files just appear in random directories with random stuff appended to the file names, and if you pick the wrong one, you get a completely opaque error message when you try to upload it to a club. The solution was to delete everything, only export the skin (not save it) so I'd only have one .zip, and upload that. Luckily I knew that it needed to go through a club in the first place, otherwise I wouldn't have had a chance. And it doesn't even work for everyone - Jeff doesn't hear hornC4.wav in the quick look! Ridiculous.
The underlying skin system hasn't changed in over a decade. For them to fuck this up this badly is just incompetence.
Sexual abuse is awful. Fuck the people that commit it and especially those that do not regret it until twitter comes after them.
I'm not making a moral judgment on whether someone is justified going to twitter to achieve some sort of desired effect, but to pretend like they don't want the accused to suffer is laughable. Are you familiar with humans?
Sometimes the suffering results in a suicide. That's reality, not some attempt to shut up accusers.
But really, the point of my post was just to show the accuracy of the initial guy that was quoted. The people being accused are more than likely to have been the owners of at least one virtue-signaling high-horse seated twitter post.
You're seriously doubling down on people making sexual abuse accusations wanting revenge? Come on. It's plain when you read any of the accusations themselves: they're descriptions of what happened and how the abusers operate. People aren't calling out for revenge; just a plain reading of what people are saying makes that entirely obvious. People are getting cancelled or whatever are results of truths about how an abuser operates coming to light. Blaming this on those saying these truths is at best shooting the messenger, and at worst it's an active argument that people should protect their abusers and keep abuse hidden.
In any case, I've already said above examples of why being 'cancelled' doesn't actually mean much to begin with. Nobody is trying to make people "suffer", and nobody is really suffering to begin with. Or perhaps you want to characterise people having to self-reflect, realise their actions were wrong and disgusting, and go through the painful process of improving themselves as "suffering". This is the only way we're going to tackle sexual abuse at its roots - the abusers - and any argument against abusers having to improve themselves is an argument in direct favour of abuse.
Sexual abuse is awful. Fuck the people that commit it and especially those that do not regret it until twitter comes after them.
It's statements like that, followed by a complete and gross misrepresentation of what abused people are saying. That's virtue signalling.
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@sethmode Thanks, but I'm not really interested in whether the above is going to convince them directly. I'm well aware that the doublethink required to write stuff like this means that a few forum posts aren't going to change anything. I write for two reasons. One: to show people that this is a minority viewpoint in the Giant Bomb community, which I hope helps to foster safe spaces for those directly or indirectly affected by all this. Two: to communicate to anyone unsure where they stand on these issues my thoughts, and to give ammunition to those that already agree with me but are still trying to form their arguments precisely. I don't feel comfortable leaving posts like this unchallenged, as that itself communicates the entire wrong message.
I do find it interesting how all these moral crusaders keeps being outed for what they really are.
ah one of those people who says social justice and morality are bad. As well as caring about anyone outside yourself.
Well I think that outs yourself bud.
It would have been more accurate if he said "moral" crusaders.
Re: Social Justice. Just because some movement or ideal has a righteous sounding name, does not mean it is in fact righteous.
Also, exposing sexual abuse via twitter and immediately siding with accusers is not exactly a neat fit under the "Social Justice" umbrella. Maybe under a more modern, expanded definition. It's not about policies, but aiming to destroy someone's life using the court of twitter.
We've already had suicides as a direct result.
Also, we're talking about issues in the gaming industry, which is heavily comprised of liberals who have more than likely virtue-signaled on their twitter feed previously. So yeah, the poster you quoted is right about who's being outed / accused.
It's telling when you immediately jump to defending those accused of abuse rather than talking about the abuse itself.
These people destroyed their own damn lives. If exposing and discussing a thing that they did destroys their life, then that's on them for doing what they did, not on the abused person for bringing it to light. Besides, this is assuming that anyone's life is "destroyed" by accusations of this form. Louis CK is doing fine. Nick Robinson is doing fine. Max Temkin was doing fine, and still owns a chunk of CAH, so will almost certainly continue to do fine.
Furthermore, to say that the aim of the people taking about their abuse is to destroy someone's life is nonsense. There's no attempt to destroy anyone, as the fact that nobody's life is really ever destroyed by any of this makes plain. This is about bringing light to cultures that ignore abuse when it happens out of sight, and the patterns abusers use to keep it out of sight. This is about stopping abuse, not petty revenge. And it certainly isn't about a bunch of liberals virtue-signalling.
Finally, rhetoric that implies that someones suicide is the fault of an abused person talking about their abuse is fucking disgusting.
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