As someone who spent much of the 2000s with a Hot Water Music avatar on various forums, learning of that HWM/Terror split made my day. Pre-ordered the vinyl with a quickness!
I am but a humble spooky boy with a haircut, and I think this show rules. Easily the most fun of the new shows that have premiered so far. I totally get people's sentiment about not enjoying expressly negative stuff, but for what it's worth I don't get the sense that they're actually denigrating anyone's creative effort, or the people who enjoy these albums. They're just fucking around and ribbing the absurd egos that bring these things into existence. Consider Giant Bomb's long-running comedic characterization of Peter Molyneux. It's kinda like that.
Hell yeah, the assault suit games rule. As a kid I spent a bunch of hard-earned lawnmowing money on Cybernator purely because I thought from the name it had something to do with Terminator, which I was a huge fan of. So kudos to whoever renamed the game for its Western release, because they were probably looking to piggyback on that exact association.
I was wrong about the Terminator connection, but played the hell out of the game.
@madaboutpandas: Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Your points are well-taken, and I've ended up at a place where I pretty much agree. I'll edit my posts to be less flip about the granularity of the borrowed material so that passer-by aren't misled into thinking the story's use is more unseemly than it is.
Yeah, the discussion in this thread has convinced me that my initial reaction was founded in a conception of IP that just isn't really relevant to this particular combination of source and surrounding context. All in all I'm into what this game's going for and look forward to trying it out.
@dr_mel: Totally agree that modern copyright laws are insane, and that in general it's cool for works to incorporate and be in conversation with stuff that came before. It's just that when it so directly hits the same beats down to rephrasings of lines present in the original text, it's a little harder for me to swallow without at least some kind of acknowledgement of the source or transformation. As an example, the movie "I'm Thinking of Ending Things" contains a monologue directly quoted from a Pauline Kael review of A Woman Under the Influence, but it's employed in a way meant to call attention to the fact that it's a direct quote, and engender consideration of why it's being dropped into the script in the way it is. Samples in hip-hop songs often do something similar. Here, the Kafka story is dropped in for the purpose of building the same sense of befuddled unease which the story achieves on its own, with no reference to the source. It'd be like if someone wrote a horror story and lifted a monster description from Stephen King's It because hey, that guy can describe creepy things!
Even in a case of copy-pasted monster description from a work still under copyright as described above, I wouldn't be arguing for that author's crucifixion for plagiarism or anything. I'd just be less interested in their work. So I guess my initial comment was just me waffling on how interested I am in what this game's putting down. Certainly not meant to be a call-out of any kind!
The story of the man encountering a gate on a road is very clearly a retelling of a Franz Kafka story (Kafka's story ends when the guard informs the man the gate is made only for him, so all the bird stuff after is divergent).
It's public domain at this point, so I'm not accusing the developers of any kind of wrongdoing. Just kinda gives me pause to see a sequence that's presented as just another development in the mounting weirdness come heavily borrowed from a writer whose vibe the game is clearly going for. Makes me wonder if the rest of the vibes (which, to be clear, I'm into) come from other sources I'm unfamiliar with.
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