- Joined
- Dec 6, 2020
Dustborn - The Latest and Biggest DEI Flop to Date that No One Asked for!
- Thread starter Cucktry Roads
- Start date
Shao Khan
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 4, 2024
fake and gay. but if you are harassing those faggots you are a fucking loser. just ignore this shit and laught when the studio goes out of business
Does hunting them for sport count as "Harassment"?
I promise to eat whatever I kill.
- Joined
- Jan 5, 2022
>communist propaganda fairy tale
>creator's first name is Janny
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2019
Surprised no one mentioned the Gamespot review of Dustborn by Mark Delaney, which goes pretty deep in it's criticism of the game froma neutral perspective, giving it a 5/10:
Red Thread Games' Telltale-like adventure introduces an interesting world, but its cast of misfits can't match it with their own intrigue.
By Mark Delaney on August 14, 2024 at 7:00AM PDT
Dustborn is written as though its creators heard complaints like "Keep politics out of games" and defiantly went in the opposite direction. It is one of the most overtly political and, more specifically, unapologetically leftist games I've ever played, and that uncommonly brazen setup makes its early hours very interesting, but it falls apart in the second half due to monotonous combat and a final few chapters that undo the stronger first half.
A near-future dystopian and plainly fascistic America, fractured into territories following a second civil war, plays the sea-to-shining-sea enemy of a group of bleeding hearts on an undercover road trip to fuel a better tomorrow. With a punk-rock cover story aiding its diverse collection of cast-offs from the new America, and gameplay mechanics akin to a Telltale game, Dustborn checks so many of the boxes of a game I'd normally adore. So it was surprising to me, though ultimately not difficult to explain, when the game left me feeling empty and wanting.
Dustborn's cel-shaded comic-book art direction is captivating right away, and like the broken world it colors in, it immediately caught my eye. I didn't mind, at first, when the opening scene featured the four main heroes being rather annoying. I figured this would be their arc, from awkward pals barely dodging the game's federal force of corrupt cops to defiant leaders toppling tyranny nationwide. I was in for the ride… until I wasn't.
I can't say there was one exact moment that turned me away from the group. In hindsight, it feels like it was more of a slow burn. The game's earliest of its 15 or so hours are heavy on the world-building and I found much of it fascinating. Dustborn plays with an alternate history in which JFK's wife, Jackie, was killed in Dealey Plaza instead of him. This caused Kennedy to crack down on crime with a new national police force called Justice, which, in a manner reminiscent of the slow-boiled frog, reshaped the country for the worse without it ever being obvious enough to inspire a strong resistance.
As people grew more complacent toward fascist ideals, things culminated in a 2000s-era broadcast event that spread disinformation like a virus, thus expediting the country's march toward civil war, but also inadvertently creating Anomals (derogatorily called Deviants) who emerged from the event with various new abilities.
It reads like the setup to a cool book I'd love to read, and it works just as well as an adventure game for a while. I love the way the game depicts its a post-truth society. In an early section, it's explained that disinformation floats in the atmosphere, like a virus on a crowded train, and people can become sick from it if they are exposed. It makes them hostile, mean-spirited, and even drives them to espouse racist, sexist, or other troubling views.
Here is where it becomes obvious--if the game's earlier way of introducing characters' pronouns didn't do it for you--that this is a game made by leftists, about leftists, and very likely for leftists. It is a game that knows when angry young men tweet about wanting no politics in their games, they usually only mean politics with which they don't agree, and so it feels designed in a way that will knowingly, though not exactly purposely, irritate them with exactly those politics. It doesn't pull punches in that regard, and surely many anger merchants will take the bait once Dustborn hits stores. Funnily, when you hear fuzzy snippets of disinformation in the air, they're always regurgitating right-wing talking points on subjects like climate change denial, xenophobia, or even QAnon and Pizzagate.
Though Dustborn does eventually attack the opposite end of the sociopolitical spectrum--you can't really be a leftist without fighting other leftists, right?--it is, by and large, a story that villainizes right-wing fascists, but notably only pities their supporters. It's presented as a mirror to our modern-day reality; its view of people who fall for right-wing charlatans is patronizing, but also sincere, as though it's saying we genuinely ought to feel sorry for such people as the conditions that drove them to be misled are, to some extent, not their fault. It's definitely a game that could only exist because of the trajectory of the US as it stands today. Despite its alternate history framework, it pulls from real life quite a bit. Portions of the banter during combat even reference some of the dumbest things former President Trump has said.
Though those last few paragraphs may well upset some readers across the aisle, I want to emphasize that all of what I just described are the game's coolest parts. I not only have no qualms with the team building a world that reflects its politics, but I also greatly appreciate how thoughtful some of it is. Despite the fun it makes of far- (and even not-so-far-) right thinkers, it sincerely strives for empathy and suggests that it's righteous to help those people come back to reality, rather than leave them to wither away in a cradle of conspiracy theories.
But just because I agree with the game's politics doesn't mean it's a good game.
A lot of Dustborn's extensive cast of characters focuses primarily on Anomals, including the playable character, Pax, who finds herself equipped with the ability to influence and even hurt people with words. Most of her allies have powers too, like Sai who is extremely strong, or Noam who also has a gift of gab, but theirs leans toward getting someone to calm down, whereas Pax's are all built on negative emotions that stir people into a fervor. Some of these abilities of the group even lean into therapy terms that have gone mainstream, such as triggering and gaslighting, and a late-game ability actually lets you cancel someone, though each of these abilities is recontextualized for more familiar party-based combat mechanics.
For example, triggering your allies means buffing their damage for a moment, and Pax's ability to sow discord turns the enemies against each other. You can also hoax enemies, which makes them think they're on fire, thereby turning reality's fake news problem into a spell-casting maneuver. This is all pretty clever, but none of it feels good to play.
Pax's abilities are used in the game's shoddy combat sections and combined with her allies' moves on the fly. This is done with real-time third-person combat, though the game pauses so long as you have your ability wheel open, which you unlock by performing enough melee combos in the meantime, giving it all a slight hybrid style akin to some Dragon Age games. The group regularly battles colorful raiders and anonymous secret police as they trek from the west coast, now known as Pacifica, to Nova Scotia, where their subversive mission is meant to conclude.
However, combat feels stiff, and the camera routinely does not track Pax's movements well. After a few encounters, this created a Pavlovian response in me in which Pax would equip her baseball bat for a combat section, and I would audibly groan. The idea of language being used as a weapon is cool in itself. It fits perfectly with the game's themes of influence and empathy, but as a third-person action mechanic, it's one of Dustborn's weakest parts. I was grateful when, after an early combat scenario, the game asked me if I would rather have more or less combat going forward. I chose the latter, and even then, there was too much, but it's nice to know it could've been worse.
That said, despite my wish not to engage in much combat, the game is hardly better when you're not. Animations are lifeless even outside of combat, and this is partly why I found it hard to connect with any of the game's characters. Telltale's The Walking Dead won awards despite its lifeless character models, but that was 12 years ago. Dustborn runs back similarly janky character expressions and movements to the point that it hurts the actors' performances, the game's light puzzle-solving elements, and even just exploring in general.
Games like this one that belong in the lineage of those from Telltale and Quantic Dream have, in some cases, moved well beyond such archaic animations by now, but Dustborn is distractingly stuck in the past.
Dustborn frequently adds new outcasts to the group during their travels, but by the end, I was lacking even one who made me emotionally invested. I spent the time getting to know each of them; I checked in with them by the campfire each night, and I gifted them found items, such as fancy new dice for Eli, who spends his days on the road hosting tabletop RPGs with the group.
For the most part, they are well-realized and three-dimensional, but the poor animations are buffed by jarring tonal shifts that alter the game from light-hearted ragtag adventure to super-serious political drama, back and forth the whole way. As a result, I never connected with anybody on the tour bus. Because they routinely squirm out of near-death or imprisonment without consequences, it soon became the norm for me to view their obstacles as little more than time killers, which left me uninvested in their mission.
It's not that I was left wondering who these characters were by the end. In fact, none of them ever stops talking. The game is so thick with banter that there are rarely any moments of silence. They are always chatting with each other, and as Pax, you are almost always able to jump in and join them whenever you want.
On the one hand, this is impressive, as it feels like you can virtually double the length of the game just by opting into talking to everyone at every opportunity, even if it does conflict with the plot point that the group is always lacking free time. You learn a lot about each of your allies; you shape your relationships with them, all of which determine how the story unfolds and where each character ends up--some may not even survive. So there is at least the illusion of stakes--though a partial replay didn't suggest major differences in the saga--and there is obvious depth. And yet I just wanted them all to be quiet for a second. Just one second.
They talk so much that other voice lines often cut off their voice lines in an unnatural way because they'll be blabbering on and on, and you'll trigger a cutscene or interact with something that halts them mid-sentence so they can say something else instead. It takes a strength of the game and, through subpar implementation, makes it janky. I haven't heard a cacophony of breathless progressives this grating since I saw Death Cab for Cutie last summer--and I live in Portland.
Dustborn also presented a few technical issues, including a game-breaking bug that caused me to lose all my progress on PC. This bug has since been patched, I'm told, but it seemed not to apply retroactively to my saved data, so while you apparently won't deal with it post-launch, I had to start the game over after several hours. When I did, the game crashed on me four times in my playthrough, though thankfully the auto-saving feature meant this was just a minor annoyance each time.
The group's cover story for traversing the hostile state is that they're a touring punk rock band, and the game even has you perform their shows several times using a Rock Band-style mini-game that is decent and enjoyable, except for its underexplained scoring system. But their music is so sonically tame and decidedly not punk rock beyond the ethos expressed in its lyrics. One of the reasons I was drawn to this game was a sincere desire to hear the original punk rock songs promised within, but there really aren't any to be found. Instead, they're a pop act, maybe pop-punk at best, and that missing aggression in their sound was a disappointment. Some of the game's other lackluster parts are disappointing, but this one is confusing, first and foremost.
The band's incendiary lyrics should likely get them locked up in such a hostile land, but the only time this ever came up in my playthrough was when a Justice cop passively warned me that folks in America don't take kindly to such songs--even though the song was overtly about progressives outliving their political enemies and inheriting a world they can then make better. It seemed like I should get more than a slap on the wrist since the story made a point of telling me how unforgiving the cops are.
That's an excellent example of how it all unravels, too, as it illustrates the chasm between the setup and the execution. The history that Dustborn introduces is engrossing at first. I read every document I could, down to the small signs taped to a fridge, or the packaging on the jerky; I interacted with every poster or book to see what other signs of its alternate history I could find. And in its comic-book art style, it all looked as interesting as its setting first sounded.
But over the course of the game, and particularly in its final few chapters, a story already soaked in metaphors--some better than others--positively drowns in them. It eventually goes so far off the rails that its thoughtful early chapters feel written by entirely different human beings. I'd be more forgiving of this narratively chaotic final act if I were attached to the characters--I like Lost Season 6, after all. In Lost's case, the events could be silly, but at least I'd have my people. In Dustborn, however, I never really had them to begin with, so I was left with nothing to latch onto. Dustborn's moral compass points to true north, but before long, both its story and gameplay go south.
By Mark Delaney on August 14, 2024 at 7:00AM PDT
Dustborn is written as though its creators heard complaints like "Keep politics out of games" and defiantly went in the opposite direction. It is one of the most overtly political and, more specifically, unapologetically leftist games I've ever played, and that uncommonly brazen setup makes its early hours very interesting, but it falls apart in the second half due to monotonous combat and a final few chapters that undo the stronger first half.
A near-future dystopian and plainly fascistic America, fractured into territories following a second civil war, plays the sea-to-shining-sea enemy of a group of bleeding hearts on an undercover road trip to fuel a better tomorrow. With a punk-rock cover story aiding its diverse collection of cast-offs from the new America, and gameplay mechanics akin to a Telltale game, Dustborn checks so many of the boxes of a game I'd normally adore. So it was surprising to me, though ultimately not difficult to explain, when the game left me feeling empty and wanting.
Dustborn's cel-shaded comic-book art direction is captivating right away, and like the broken world it colors in, it immediately caught my eye. I didn't mind, at first, when the opening scene featured the four main heroes being rather annoying. I figured this would be their arc, from awkward pals barely dodging the game's federal force of corrupt cops to defiant leaders toppling tyranny nationwide. I was in for the ride… until I wasn't.
I can't say there was one exact moment that turned me away from the group. In hindsight, it feels like it was more of a slow burn. The game's earliest of its 15 or so hours are heavy on the world-building and I found much of it fascinating. Dustborn plays with an alternate history in which JFK's wife, Jackie, was killed in Dealey Plaza instead of him. This caused Kennedy to crack down on crime with a new national police force called Justice, which, in a manner reminiscent of the slow-boiled frog, reshaped the country for the worse without it ever being obvious enough to inspire a strong resistance.
As people grew more complacent toward fascist ideals, things culminated in a 2000s-era broadcast event that spread disinformation like a virus, thus expediting the country's march toward civil war, but also inadvertently creating Anomals (derogatorily called Deviants) who emerged from the event with various new abilities.
It reads like the setup to a cool book I'd love to read, and it works just as well as an adventure game for a while. I love the way the game depicts its a post-truth society. In an early section, it's explained that disinformation floats in the atmosphere, like a virus on a crowded train, and people can become sick from it if they are exposed. It makes them hostile, mean-spirited, and even drives them to espouse racist, sexist, or other troubling views.
Here is where it becomes obvious--if the game's earlier way of introducing characters' pronouns didn't do it for you--that this is a game made by leftists, about leftists, and very likely for leftists. It is a game that knows when angry young men tweet about wanting no politics in their games, they usually only mean politics with which they don't agree, and so it feels designed in a way that will knowingly, though not exactly purposely, irritate them with exactly those politics. It doesn't pull punches in that regard, and surely many anger merchants will take the bait once Dustborn hits stores. Funnily, when you hear fuzzy snippets of disinformation in the air, they're always regurgitating right-wing talking points on subjects like climate change denial, xenophobia, or even QAnon and Pizzagate.
Though Dustborn does eventually attack the opposite end of the sociopolitical spectrum--you can't really be a leftist without fighting other leftists, right?--it is, by and large, a story that villainizes right-wing fascists, but notably only pities their supporters. It's presented as a mirror to our modern-day reality; its view of people who fall for right-wing charlatans is patronizing, but also sincere, as though it's saying we genuinely ought to feel sorry for such people as the conditions that drove them to be misled are, to some extent, not their fault. It's definitely a game that could only exist because of the trajectory of the US as it stands today. Despite its alternate history framework, it pulls from real life quite a bit. Portions of the banter during combat even reference some of the dumbest things former President Trump has said.
Though those last few paragraphs may well upset some readers across the aisle, I want to emphasize that all of what I just described are the game's coolest parts. I not only have no qualms with the team building a world that reflects its politics, but I also greatly appreciate how thoughtful some of it is. Despite the fun it makes of far- (and even not-so-far-) right thinkers, it sincerely strives for empathy and suggests that it's righteous to help those people come back to reality, rather than leave them to wither away in a cradle of conspiracy theories.
But just because I agree with the game's politics doesn't mean it's a good game.
A lot of Dustborn's extensive cast of characters focuses primarily on Anomals, including the playable character, Pax, who finds herself equipped with the ability to influence and even hurt people with words. Most of her allies have powers too, like Sai who is extremely strong, or Noam who also has a gift of gab, but theirs leans toward getting someone to calm down, whereas Pax's are all built on negative emotions that stir people into a fervor. Some of these abilities of the group even lean into therapy terms that have gone mainstream, such as triggering and gaslighting, and a late-game ability actually lets you cancel someone, though each of these abilities is recontextualized for more familiar party-based combat mechanics.
For example, triggering your allies means buffing their damage for a moment, and Pax's ability to sow discord turns the enemies against each other. You can also hoax enemies, which makes them think they're on fire, thereby turning reality's fake news problem into a spell-casting maneuver. This is all pretty clever, but none of it feels good to play.
Pax's abilities are used in the game's shoddy combat sections and combined with her allies' moves on the fly. This is done with real-time third-person combat, though the game pauses so long as you have your ability wheel open, which you unlock by performing enough melee combos in the meantime, giving it all a slight hybrid style akin to some Dragon Age games. The group regularly battles colorful raiders and anonymous secret police as they trek from the west coast, now known as Pacifica, to Nova Scotia, where their subversive mission is meant to conclude.
However, combat feels stiff, and the camera routinely does not track Pax's movements well. After a few encounters, this created a Pavlovian response in me in which Pax would equip her baseball bat for a combat section, and I would audibly groan. The idea of language being used as a weapon is cool in itself. It fits perfectly with the game's themes of influence and empathy, but as a third-person action mechanic, it's one of Dustborn's weakest parts. I was grateful when, after an early combat scenario, the game asked me if I would rather have more or less combat going forward. I chose the latter, and even then, there was too much, but it's nice to know it could've been worse.
That said, despite my wish not to engage in much combat, the game is hardly better when you're not. Animations are lifeless even outside of combat, and this is partly why I found it hard to connect with any of the game's characters. Telltale's The Walking Dead won awards despite its lifeless character models, but that was 12 years ago. Dustborn runs back similarly janky character expressions and movements to the point that it hurts the actors' performances, the game's light puzzle-solving elements, and even just exploring in general.
Games like this one that belong in the lineage of those from Telltale and Quantic Dream have, in some cases, moved well beyond such archaic animations by now, but Dustborn is distractingly stuck in the past.
Dustborn frequently adds new outcasts to the group during their travels, but by the end, I was lacking even one who made me emotionally invested. I spent the time getting to know each of them; I checked in with them by the campfire each night, and I gifted them found items, such as fancy new dice for Eli, who spends his days on the road hosting tabletop RPGs with the group.
For the most part, they are well-realized and three-dimensional, but the poor animations are buffed by jarring tonal shifts that alter the game from light-hearted ragtag adventure to super-serious political drama, back and forth the whole way. As a result, I never connected with anybody on the tour bus. Because they routinely squirm out of near-death or imprisonment without consequences, it soon became the norm for me to view their obstacles as little more than time killers, which left me uninvested in their mission.
It's not that I was left wondering who these characters were by the end. In fact, none of them ever stops talking. The game is so thick with banter that there are rarely any moments of silence. They are always chatting with each other, and as Pax, you are almost always able to jump in and join them whenever you want.
On the one hand, this is impressive, as it feels like you can virtually double the length of the game just by opting into talking to everyone at every opportunity, even if it does conflict with the plot point that the group is always lacking free time. You learn a lot about each of your allies; you shape your relationships with them, all of which determine how the story unfolds and where each character ends up--some may not even survive. So there is at least the illusion of stakes--though a partial replay didn't suggest major differences in the saga--and there is obvious depth. And yet I just wanted them all to be quiet for a second. Just one second.
They talk so much that other voice lines often cut off their voice lines in an unnatural way because they'll be blabbering on and on, and you'll trigger a cutscene or interact with something that halts them mid-sentence so they can say something else instead. It takes a strength of the game and, through subpar implementation, makes it janky. I haven't heard a cacophony of breathless progressives this grating since I saw Death Cab for Cutie last summer--and I live in Portland.
Dustborn also presented a few technical issues, including a game-breaking bug that caused me to lose all my progress on PC. This bug has since been patched, I'm told, but it seemed not to apply retroactively to my saved data, so while you apparently won't deal with it post-launch, I had to start the game over after several hours. When I did, the game crashed on me four times in my playthrough, though thankfully the auto-saving feature meant this was just a minor annoyance each time.
The group's cover story for traversing the hostile state is that they're a touring punk rock band, and the game even has you perform their shows several times using a Rock Band-style mini-game that is decent and enjoyable, except for its underexplained scoring system. But their music is so sonically tame and decidedly not punk rock beyond the ethos expressed in its lyrics. One of the reasons I was drawn to this game was a sincere desire to hear the original punk rock songs promised within, but there really aren't any to be found. Instead, they're a pop act, maybe pop-punk at best, and that missing aggression in their sound was a disappointment. Some of the game's other lackluster parts are disappointing, but this one is confusing, first and foremost.
The band's incendiary lyrics should likely get them locked up in such a hostile land, but the only time this ever came up in my playthrough was when a Justice cop passively warned me that folks in America don't take kindly to such songs--even though the song was overtly about progressives outliving their political enemies and inheriting a world they can then make better. It seemed like I should get more than a slap on the wrist since the story made a point of telling me how unforgiving the cops are.
That's an excellent example of how it all unravels, too, as it illustrates the chasm between the setup and the execution. The history that Dustborn introduces is engrossing at first. I read every document I could, down to the small signs taped to a fridge, or the packaging on the jerky; I interacted with every poster or book to see what other signs of its alternate history I could find. And in its comic-book art style, it all looked as interesting as its setting first sounded.
But over the course of the game, and particularly in its final few chapters, a story already soaked in metaphors--some better than others--positively drowns in them. It eventually goes so far off the rails that its thoughtful early chapters feel written by entirely different human beings. I'd be more forgiving of this narratively chaotic final act if I were attached to the characters--I like Lost Season 6, after all. In Lost's case, the events could be silly, but at least I'd have my people. In Dustborn, however, I never really had them to begin with, so I was left with nothing to latch onto. Dustborn's moral compass points to true north, but before long, both its story and gameplay go south.
The Good
- Comic-book art style is captivating throughout
- Some of the world-building is very interesting
- A thoughtful interpretation of how political bad actors claim victims
- Combat is stiff and monotonous
- Technical issues such as game crashes
- Characters don't often stop talking, which leads to janky dialogue
- The story goes way off the rails in its final act, hampering some of the earlier intrigue
- Animations that lack emotion lead to interpersonal drama that misses the mark
- Musical gameplay sections feature some frustratingly bad songs
Last edited:
- Joined
- Dec 15, 2022
Maybe if the latino man converted to "latinx atheist", they would have stopped bullying him and his religion?
- Joined
- Mar 7, 2024
Saw that E;R was streaming the game, so popped on for the hell of it... I think I lasted about 3 minutes (one of the characters displayed its "They/Them" pronouns) and that was enough for me! May this game be lost upon the dustbin of history...
- Joined
- Mar 24, 2013
It's that way because the game is supposed to be a comic book. The game even references that you're "writing your own comic book" so some inane bullshit like that. Just another layer in the cringe cake.
Real men trophy hunt, using the corpses of the animals you kill to decorate your home. Besides, can you imagine how disgusting these Leftist retards would taste? They probably taste like cigarettes, shitty overpriced coffee, faggt fru-fru drinks, and abject failure. And hair dye, of course.
They are certainly colourful, but there's also nothing dignified or pleasant about their appearances.
A rack of antlers looks nice on your wall, or a taxidermied boar's head.
But would you really want the head of a five hundred pound lesbian (male) mulatto with self-diagnosed aspergers leering over your home?
Besides, a lot of 'em are vegan or vegetarian.
That makes 'em herbivorous.
And thereby, a natural prey animal.
That and anything you can do with a regular pig, you can also do with the long kind.
- Joined
- May 23, 2019
You're telling me the stuffed head of a huge bull dyke with purple hair and facial piercings wouldn't be frightening? Friends and family would stare in awe as you regale the tale of taking down the ferocious beast.
- Joined
- Mar 12, 2022
Whoa slow down there chuderino. You can’t just interrupt a hecking good boy Tier 1 citizen like that. You don’t want to hate crime do you?
- Joined
- Mar 24, 2013
If they're stuffed and mounted on your wall, that means they're no longer voicing their asinine opinions, fucking up pop culture, voting, or just generally making everything worse for everyone around them.
And there's no meat or animal products in ciggies, booze, or overpriced coffee (unless there's cream, milk, or whipped cream added, and there's vegan alternatives for all those). Pronghorn are prey animals and herbivores as well, but they still taste absolutely rank because all they eat are desert plants like sage and scrub oak. You have to get Pronghorn meat mixed in with other kinds of meat like pork in a ratio that favors the other kind of meat just to make it somewhat edible. I really don't think there's anything you could do with Commie game dev meat to enable one to choke it down.
- Joined
- Apr 26, 2023
x to doubt.
its crazy how tumblr had more of an effect on mass media than 4chan or reddit or any other huge social media site. I mean it makes sense considering its the only mainly female one and they get jobs so much easier, but still. its not like reddit was able to meme their favorite tv show into getting 15 seasons or cause numerous movies pandering to them to happen or heavily affected media to conform to their fetishes.
tumblr died in 2018 yet the effects of it being the biggest website for women until tiktok is still seen today.
how?
remember Clone High? JFK junior was like a proto-bill clinton. the problem is both guys sexual misdeeds have now officially outweighted their accomplishments to the people on the left. look how quickly hilary vanished from people's eyes after 2016. the Kennedys being symbols of "old america" doesn't help either, even if they were the wokiest people of their times.
just based on her looks i assumed she was a classic american, but she's some euro trash. Like why aren't people whining more about that? europeans effectively have been taken over by americans ever since the internet launched. i know a half dozen women that look exactly like her, but their circumstances are bit a more understandable, i highly doubt this euro chick's dad was a vietnam vet and demanded perfection and was obsessed with the southern baptist church
Lincoln was a lot like Joe Biden, he made a speech being for and against every viewpoint possible in his entire career. i bet Lincoln even has a speech talking about fucking air travel and gays.
thats another point, if its not on your face its a real nothing burger, the only person i know that has it literally has it could easily cover it up if they weren't so obsessed with dressing like they're at the beach all the fucking time.
you forget that this game was made by europeans, nixon and ford are the last names of movie stars to them not presidents. Reagan is the reason they weren't killed by the russians so they can't badmouth him. all that leaves is JFK.
i've watched playthroughs, while the dialogue doesn't matter the formats where its unique, you have a shitload of minigames to do and you're supposed to "die" and start over at least a half dozen times, being a new character each time because what items you get on every playthrough carry over. Also you're a mostly silent protag who just experiences other people's stories for the most part. So on one play through you'll help some brothers break into a taxi cab and on another playthrough you have to piece together how they did it or shit like that. like you follow an assassin and a target's stories. interacting with the same dozen characters and piecing together their stories on your separate "lives"
i'd say its ultimately a leftist game but its clearly more Latin American influenced than DEI influenced. Like all your characters are kids who escaped being kidnapped by the government and are moving across the country in hopes of jumping the border to a new one and the "evil" president wants stronger border protections. and its all set in the 90s around the time the dictators finally were being kicked out of office.
my favorite alt-history stories are where they include famous celebrities and then those people get canceled so you have funny things where the "evil" people killed Harvey Weinstein and its a national tragedy on par with 9/11.
thats one of the few things the internet destroyed, the lefty ability to defeat straw men without being called out. like 15 years ago pre-steam exploding in popularity this type of game (although heavily toned down) probably could have gotten better sales. think about Spec Ops: The Line and how dogshit that game was overall or how by the numbers Bioshock was outside of the "story" or how every new quarter the obama administration seemed to find a new low level GOP supporter to pretend was the new hitler. remember Rick Santorum or Christine O'Donnell, neither remotely held political office when people were saying they're going to destroy democracy back in the early 2010s.
No doubt in my mind this game would have been all over g4 and been called "the greatest game of the era" if it got released in 2012, the same way they shilled fucking Brutal Legend. its crazy in hindsight remembering albums like "rock aganist bush" or comedians like Marc Maron and David Cross acting like they're edgy kings and everyone buying it, whereas everyone "in the know" treated them like the fools they were. Like the opening speech in Newsroom was considered one of the greatest things on television and Aaron Sorkin thought he was going to be arrested once it aired, but by the time the season ended the internet was treating the entire show like a massive joke, the same way people are treating this video game today.
its amazing how easily people accepted the whole "we're underground and they're the mainstream" viewpoint even when Obama was elected. but even before that, even if people weren't open about their politics it was obvious where people stood and outside of Tough Crowd you didn't really get to see non-libs with crowds cheering them on outside of country music or comedy.
Frightening?
Sure.
But what about the room decor?
The rainbow hair alone would throw off the colour coordination.
And I can't imagine wanting to eat or relax nude with it in the room; I'd have to turn it to face the wall.
Shame about pronghorn meat, they look like good sport.
You might have a point regarding the diet of your average human social contagion, though I expect a lot of them have switched over to vaping, which might be worse.
Perhaps the only thing to be done is to capture them in a live trap, and control their diet for a week or so before slaughter.
- Joined
- Jun 3, 2024
I can't quote you @Northern Blockhead. While I wouldn't call that neutral, this part in particular caught my eye.
It's interesting how he caught onto the fact that "unforgiving cops" don't act like that pretty quickly. However, "your time is past, your kind won't last" and "we will replace you" make it pretty clear it's not "outliving." Their actions make it more like "outright destruction." Our motley crew kills and destroys the lives of everyone they come across; including denying the reality that Mr. Gamespot here is so insistent about. He glossed over the part where "gaslighting" and the like are manipulative and designed to make victims reject reality, not "return to it." A couple of you already spoke about their it's-okay-when-we-do-it mentality of using emotions, human psychology against itself. At the risk of repeating myself, these people keep telling on themselves. They're oblivious to the reality of how people live. What makes it worse is that their insistence on dictating everyones' behavior and thoughts and feelings reveal just how vile they really are.
It's rich that he calls it a game about bad political actors claiming victims. In that case, he's right, but not for the reasons he thinks.
It's interesting how he caught onto the fact that "unforgiving cops" don't act like that pretty quickly. However, "your time is past, your kind won't last" and "we will replace you" make it pretty clear it's not "outliving." Their actions make it more like "outright destruction." Our motley crew kills and destroys the lives of everyone they come across; including denying the reality that Mr. Gamespot here is so insistent about. He glossed over the part where "gaslighting" and the like are manipulative and designed to make victims reject reality, not "return to it." A couple of you already spoke about their it's-okay-when-we-do-it mentality of using emotions, human psychology against itself. At the risk of repeating myself, these people keep telling on themselves. They're oblivious to the reality of how people live. What makes it worse is that their insistence on dictating everyones' behavior and thoughts and feelings reveal just how vile they really are.
It's rich that he calls it a game about bad political actors claiming victims. In that case, he's right, but not for the reasons he thinks.
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- Joined
- Sep 29, 2022
The Lowtax stream explains it a bit more but it wasn't just a humiliating experience watched by thousands of people (it streamed to 7,000 people—modest by today's standards but by 2006 standards was big numbers) and during a post-match interview, but around 3:20 Lowtax says "I'm probably going to lay in bed until I die", which as we know was oddly prophetic, even if no one knew it in 2006.
It's also been speculated that Lowtax's back issues started with injuries in the fight.
He didn't physically die at the hands of Boll but Null makes the case that the year 2006 was terrible for Lowtax (along with the mangosteen article incident) and heralded the beginning of the end for Something Awful and Lowtax's own life.
i
So then they tried to force those values and remove any escape or compromise away from them. and thats what got people going. you cant just accept hoards of migrants. you have to constantly be aware of and truly love them so no more white historical figures or mythological or classic fictional ones for you, and the rare one will of course brow beat you to accept it as well. you couldnt just have fun with no homo and trap jokes treating it as something less than normal, no now all movies must have gaynal fag sex in 4k, you cant just fantasize about women who arent bitches, no those have to be "realistic" too.
and they try to portray it as a positive thing. clone high seems to think that being more gay magically means high school is now fun and care free and people dont have toxic repressions or bullying and were in a golden age of understanding even as people kill themselves and feel more lonely and are more hateful and divided than ever. (not to mention clone high was supposed to be about unrealistic tv shows not real teen life so misunderstanding the source, as an aside) and other media trying to make it upbeat and happy. no one is fucking happy. theyre even less happy because now they cant even escape clown world in their media or dreams.
the problem for them is they successfully destroyed the past for a time and had people feeling worthless and purposeless and even reveling in it with fantasies of being some amoral v for vendetta fan faggot that survived as the world crumbled and who were defiant for defiance's sake, but they didnt make their own shit seem uplifting. no man actually wanted the current domestic situation, no straight person the current worship and constant forced screenings of gaynal or dyke sex, no normal person the push to take kids to castrate them, but to them they had achieved their dream and didnt realize they were tolerated not beloved. they had it all seemingly the love of the people and mainstream status with an eternal enemy to beat on and pretend to be oppressed by.
So then they tried to force those values and remove any escape or compromise away from them. and thats what got people going. you cant just accept hoards of migrants. you have to constantly be aware of and truly love them so no more white historical figures or mythological or classic fictional ones for you, and the rare one will of course brow beat you to accept it as well. you couldnt just have fun with no homo and trap jokes treating it as something less than normal, no now all movies must have gaynal fag sex in 4k, you cant just fantasize about women who arent bitches, no those have to be "realistic" too.
and they try to portray it as a positive thing. clone high seems to think that being more gay magically means high school is now fun and care free and people dont have toxic repressions or bullying and were in a golden age of understanding even as people kill themselves and feel more lonely and are more hateful and divided than ever. (not to mention clone high was supposed to be about unrealistic tv shows not real teen life so misunderstanding the source, as an aside) and other media trying to make it upbeat and happy. no one is fucking happy. theyre even less happy because now they cant even escape clown world in their media or dreams.
i actually dont think thats an oversight. i think they keep doing the thing of making the supposed right wing bad guys less and less cruel is to try and gaslight people into thinking the reasonable compromise is further and further left. they might beat and kill you but dont call for a genocide, whoops now its dont deport them, whoops now its let them into jobs they didnt earn, whoops now its dont raise your voice, whoops now its dont raise any sort of whisper of genuine concern and follow the plan like robots there.
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- Joined
- Apr 30, 2024
This game released on more platforms, let's see how it's doing over there...
The PS5 and the PS4 numbers are in the same ballpark on these two sites, and the Steam DB is also somewhat close to what is presented here. So if we take this info at face value, then this game is a giga flop. I bet that Quantic Dream nor Red Thread Games will never release the oficial numbers for this big L.
(These might not be the most accurate sources for the game, but those trackers check the first archivement triggered for each user and count it as a "owner". The cherry on top of this shit sundae is that no one can 100% this game on any platform because one trophy is bugged)
ETA Formating and missing paragraph, and also to laught my ass off at 0 sales in Epic Store.
The PS5 and the PS4 numbers are in the same ballpark on these two sites, and the Steam DB is also somewhat close to what is presented here. So if we take this info at face value, then this game is a giga flop. I bet that Quantic Dream nor Red Thread Games will never release the oficial numbers for this big L.
(These might not be the most accurate sources for the game, but those trackers check the first archivement triggered for each user and count it as a "owner". The cherry on top of this shit sundae is that no one can 100% this game on any platform because one trophy is bugged)
ETA Formating and missing paragraph, and also to laught my ass off at 0 sales in Epic Store.
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- Joined
- Mar 8, 2023
The machine is the system and ghosts are white people.
They're pissed off that huwites own the system, that there are too many huwhite towns and that they're free to walk around.
- Joined
- Sep 29, 2022
A large part of that was the fact that Bush 43 represented (and was supported by) the "moral majority" despite the fact that the media was in full control of the situation. Big business still tended to be associated with right-wing interests; it went from flimsy to unbelievable when you had the corporations openly supporting DEI and the left still had the gall to claim they were "the resistance" during the Trump era.
I've already gone over that if you're shit at worldbuilding is to make things ambiguous as possible with only vague allusions to the reason way things are. The other issue is establishing character morality. Doing outright criminal acts (don't know exactly WHAT they do besides rob banks) rather than just being an obnoxious pest is usually for at least one of the categories.
1. The main character is established to be an amoral psychopath and/or criminal (and would be a criminal in any lawful country).
2. Criminal actions are justified in a larger narrative where there is a traditional good and evil fight, but evil is far worse. (This also comes with caveats, including avoiding trying to ruin anyone's life and no killing unless in self defense). This includes wartime provided you don't do anything that would violate generally accepted Geneva Conventions rules (don't needlessly torture people, don't rape civilians, etc.)
3. The work is comedic.
Under these rules, stuff like Grand Theft Auto is acceptable on grounds 1 and often 3, any game involving war is acceptable on 2, LucasArts games often play with all three, and so forth. Outside of those, you've lost the plot in establishing if your characters are "good" or not.