This is the part with Drinker, MauLer, and this sphere of YouTube in general I don't get - it's not hard to praise something with a woke part. You can say "I enjoy the Amazon Fallout Show despite [Insert stupid cringe here]". The concept of not liking parts of something but enjoying it as a whole is something most adults can comprehend.
EDIT: I posted this in the wrong thread but I'm keeping it here as well. I find it really funny so many people like this comment despite it being "off-topic"
I don't usually use this as a chance to toot my own horn, since.... Mostly my reviews are fucking idiocy designed solely to entertain you guys, but it did make me realize something and I would like to share that with you all: When I review particularly shitty games, often ones with very blatant political angling, more often than not, the game's underpinning message is often a very distant second to how bad the game itself is.
For example, when I covered
Terfenstein, the thing that jumped out at me was the gameplay imitating
Operation Body Count, with player bullets hitting open doors and health items that didn't function correctly, turning every level into E4M1 from
Ultimate Doom, along with Secrets that had nothing in them and levels with useless doors that can't open. The hilariously misogynistic enemy and encounter design barely even fucking registered in my mind compared to shit like this and the fact that the game has no on-board support and crashes if you try to minimize it.
Similar was true for
Extreme Meatpunks Forever - the core problem with the game was the atrocious writing and broken gameplay controls, with the game's political content barely making a single solitary blip on the radar up until the point where you realized that because of it the entire story had its bottom fall out about 20 minutes in.
Exceptions are placed for games like
Smash MAGA, where the game's political messaging is front-and-center that it's impossible to go 20 feet without mentioning it, but even then, the gameplay loop is so atrocious and the moment-to-moment gameplay so bad that I can't look at it and envision a moment where someone goes: "
Yeah, this is a game I legitimately want to play as someone with options."
It's not specifically a leftie thing, either. The same complaints about
Terfenstein can be just as easily leveraged at
Ethnic Cleansing.
Smash MAGA reminded me of
Angry Goy as much as anything else (though that may have been due to how much asset theft was going on). I've never found a rightoid game that tries to do what
Extreme Meatpunks Forever does, but I'm pretty sure that's because no one but a leftist would
intentionally create a game with crytyping in it. It made me appreciate
Alex Jones: NWO Wars all the more because at least that game was roasting itself and Alex Jones in general.
What I'm getting at with all of this is that even with blatantly political games, it should be very easily to divorce the work from its shittiest aspects. I am 100% not the intended audience for
A Night In the Woods, and I would very much like it if the surviving dev of the game (the one responsible for almost none of the quality writing and most of the questionable writing) would fuck off and/or leave the internet entirely, either or, preferably
both, in either order, but even I could find shit to enjoy in that game. The problem with the culture war shit is that as it escalates, it drives off the chance for nuanced takes. Someone objectively breaking something down is going to get the same tongue-lashing from the usual suspects as someone who doesn't even bother and goes "lol bad game bad," and I can't fully blame them for just taking a shot at things when it's going to be construed in the worst way anyway.
But I also feel there is room for it. You just need to find a way to do it yourself.
And if some dumb asshole like me can do it, then people with actual talent and a budget and editing skills have fucking no excuse.