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Something from @CatParty in the Culture War thread.

While not a games site, the NY Times has ran an article that is so similar to something a games journalist would write that I can't believe it's not Polygon.

www.latimes.com

Column: In the Trump era, can videogames about killing Nazis be just 'for fun'?

"Through the Darkest of Times," set in Nazi-era Germany, asks players: Would you resist? Its developers say that if your game doesn't include the horrors of the Nazi regime then your game shouldn't include Nazis.
www.latimes.com www.latimes.com

After a bit of Trump Derangement Syndrome, the article then starts to shill for an indie game.

The game is some no name indie shit set in Nazi Germany during World War 2. With NPCs (the ones in the game) saying things like.
“Your Germany is going to be great again.”
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and
We’ll vote the Nazis out, they say, even as they wonder if the elections are being meddled with to the point that they’re rigged.
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The article then goes on to shit all over Wokenstien: Youngblood for not being woke enough, specifically on the topic of climate change.
Even an attempt to deal with climate change is bobbled. Early in the game, we hear a Nazi radio station assure us climate change is a myth, but environmental disaster is revealed to be the result of a Hitler-crafted “doomsday” device. The end result is a message that ultimately says climate change is indeed a myth, and a game in which killing Nazis takes a conservative route.
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The article ends with mentioning El Paso, the New Zealand mosque shootings, Gamergate, and 8chan.

@CIA Nigger summed it up nicely.
CIA Nigger said:
This article ticks all the boxes complete with mentioning Charlottesville and Gamergate, but my favorite part is how it even bitches how other woke games aren't woke enough.
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Sorry, you'll never beat 'Papers Please' for showing the horrifying, depressing reality of a dictatorship. That game is timeless. Yours will be forgotten in a week.

But then again that was communisim, so they're probably in favor of it.
 
Is there some rule that anyone who has an avatar that is some "cute" drawing of themselves is a complete piece of shit?

For instance, Patrick Klepek:

1566768186484.png


Fuck this motherfucker! I want to punch him in his actual face and see him screaming and crying with blood all over his face. I can't exaggerate how much I hate this motherfucker.

This motherfucker:

1566768258955.png


I want to smash his fucking smug face in.

God I hate these avatars.

I'm too unreasonably angry to find more of these but every single person with one of these avatars is absolute trash.
 
www.theatlantic.com

Games Boys Play

How Gears of War helped me come out
www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com

I came out to my dad while we were playing Spider-Man 3 on PlayStation 2. People ask me if it was hard—he’s a political conservative and a Christian, and they wonder if I was afraid he would condemn me. I wasn’t. My father is an artist from a family of New York intellectuals. On social issues, he takes a laissez-faire stance: Live and let live, just don’t hurt anyone. I was pretty sure he’d react all right.

But it was still hard, because coming out to your dad is hard. Sons want to be like their fathers—they just do—and fathers want to see their sons become men. Marrying a nice girl and getting her good and pregnant is part of that, just like playing catch in the backyard is. He teaches and shows, you watch and learn, and a vision of your future life emerges, a picture of successful manhood that is in some ways the most cherished thing you and your dad share. At the very least, that vision would have to be radically reconfigured once I told him I’d only ever had romantic feelings for other boys. I was 16. We were playing Spider-Man 3, and somehow, that made it easier.
Video games were something we always did together—half an hour or so every weeknight. The normalcy of that ritual was comforting to me. The game also gave us something to focus on, so we wouldn’t have to look each other in the eye. I still felt icky using the word gay about myself (“I’m … not straight” is what I said). It would have been intolerable to tell him face-to-face; I almost certainly would have choked up, as I had while telling my mom earlier that day. Coming out felt emasculating enough. Crying would have been utter humiliation.

He took it great, as I’d predicted, but I think we were both glad to have something in front of us that we could look at while we talked. The task of swinging on webs through Spider-Man’s pixelated streets absorbed enough of our attention that, looking at him with my peripheral vision, I could tell him this raw truth.
Men are good at relating to each other in this way. We get along well when there’s a project in front of us—when we’re side by side looking at some third thing. All of the classic “male bonding” activities are like this—when you’re hunting, or working on a car, or shooting free throws, you can look together at the deer, or the transmission, or the basket, and talk. The common objective gives you something to talk about, and not having to face each other means you don’t have to lay the full weight of your emotions on each other.
I suspect that’s why so many of my closest male friendships have evolved at least in part around gaming. My three best buddies in high school all played. As grunty teenagers to whom conversation didn’t come easy, we could spend hours on the Nintendo GameCube in my family’s back room. After my parents, they were among the first people I came out to, and boy was that scary: What if they thought I had a crush on one of them?

They didn’t. They were in fact models of maturity. It was my first time really being vulnerable with them, and they showed themselves to be the stand-up guys they have remained ever since.

After what felt to me like an explosive revelation, the routines of our friend group took on new significance. Wandering around town, going to action movies, calling one another gross names—the mere fact that we kept doing that stupid stuff showed me I was still their pal.

That’s another important feature of male friendship, I think: the unspokenness of it. Your bros show up for you without calling attention to it, and you never have to thank them. In fact, they’d probably prefer if you didn’t, otherwise things might get awkward. My high-school friends demonstrated their care for me in a thousand tiny ways, most of them involving swift and gruesome death at their digital hands.

That they didn’t go easy on me may be what I appreciated most. They schooled me at Halo and shot my head clean off in Gears of War. They continued to give me endless shit, too. Verbal abuse is another way to show affection indirectly, and we were ruthless because (though we would never have said it) we loved each other. Being gay was another thing for them to make fun of me about, the way I made fun of them for having acne or being short.

Our verbal roughhousing was egalitarian: One of us had obsessive-compulsive disorder; we made fun of him for how long he spent going back over every level to pick up all the ammo. One of us was a first-generation immigrant; we used to say that he couldn’t understand English when he got a game’s instructions wrong. And I know how this sounds, but I would have been devastated if I hadn’t gotten called faggot a couple of times. It was how I knew my friends weren’t going to treat me differently, and that meant everything was going to be okay.


That kind of insensitive banter has fallen out of fashion; in some circles it has become anathema. I get it. Kids can be cruel, and bullying can have terrible consequences. I understand the impulse to defuse it at all costs. But in my own case, policing schoolyard taunts would have been counterproductive. Goading one another was part of how my friends and I were able to connect. You couldn’t have stopped us without blocking off one of our main routes to true friendship.

In the past 50 years, Americans have moved from stigmatizing homosexuality to tolerating or even celebrating it. When progressives tell that story, they often cast straight, cisgender males as the villains: Change would have come sooner if society weren’t so hidebound with outdated notions of manhood. We should therefore expunge traditional forms of masculinity from our public life so gay people can be liberated, along with women and anyone else who might feel alienated. Video games, according to that narrative, are breeding grounds of the boorishness and exclusivity that can make maleness so harmful.

None of that rings true for me. Like everything else, video games and masculinity can go wrong—if unchecked, they can foster aggression or even violence. But those are corruptions of things that are, to me, inherently good. The playful belligerence, the bravado, and the intense competition with which my friends and I gamed together weren’t obstacles to our acceptance of one another; they were how we formed and expressed that acceptance. I know plenty of other guys who came out as gay, or bi, or trans with a controller in hand. For many of us, gaming is a way of talking and relating to other men that feels normal and relaxed—a way to be one of the guys while still finding space to open up.

My boyfriend, Josh, is a gamer too. He and I have been separated by the Atlantic Ocean for much of our relationship, and playing together online is one of the ways we deal with the distance. We spent a formative few months playing Diablo III, a collaborative game in which you slay undead demons. Most of the time we played with two other guys, who are also a couple. I’d stumble to my laptop in the dark at 5 a.m. in England, while Josh and our friends would settle in at 9 p.m. in Los Angeles. Over a four-way Skype connection, we’d alternate between strategizing and small talk.

Sometimes, as the hours wore on, we’d find ourselves tackling tougher subjects: our dissatisfactions at work, or our fears about coming out to folks who might not respond well. We joked that we were taking down CGI demons in the game and personal demons in our conversations, helping one another defeat whatever we were facing, online or in real life. These bizarre and distinctly modern get-togethers were like virtual double dates—part hangout, part support group, part romance. We called ourselves “The Boys Who Fight Hell.”
Josh and I also started playing online with my father, so that the two most important men in my life could get to know each other. I couldn’t help thinking back to that day playing Spider-Man 3, when I had told my dad the secret I feared might change everything. Here we were 12 years later, and it seemed as if almost nothing had changed between us. It was still him and me, talking and laughing and playing games. Only now it was him and me and Josh.
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It's almost sad how thin-skinned people are getting nowadays, but this article is why verbal abuse is good.

@Vulpes Incunta , The kid is gay, is a gamer, came out to his father while playing Spider-Man, is capable of talking shit as well as taking it, and is in a long-distance relationship on Diablo
 
I want to talk about Children of Morta,

Steam
GOG
Epic

which is great, and RockPaperShotgun's coverage of it, which is not.

Tom Garvey's review
John Walker's preview

Children of Morta is a game about family.

John Walker, who wrote the preview, may be soy, but he's straight and a father. And his preview is not particularly wrong, even though he plays an early demo build (and sucks at it). He says John the character is "fairly standard" (he's the most complicated of the lot, although not by much), he says there'll be a total of 7 characters (there are six), and he says it's a strategic choice to stop a run before getting killed (there's no penalty for dying - always push forward until you return home victorious or die).

He also writes things like
But what makes this feel really special just now, alongside an already strong action game, is that it’s replete with tiny details of beauty. After one death the game returned to the starting house, but instead of zooming in through the roof to where I can select new abilities or launch a new game, the camera drifted to the left, where my character’s pregnant wife was putting down a bowl of food in the garden.
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Tom Garvey wrote the post-release review.
He came to my attention because he has this faggoty notice on his website:
Piss off, spamscum*. *Unless you are just some innocent Russian person. Sorry, but we have had to nuke basically all Russian domains due to the latest actions of the spam legions of the Arseholian Empire. We do not dislike Russia or Russians (to be honest, we don't really know any). Just spamshits. Email us on this domain if you take exception to this.
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Why hello there, you piece of trash.
(And what you blocked is not domains, it's IP ranges. Mine is currently 188.170.20.117, for instance.)

Tom is a troon, and goes on the interwebs by "Sin Vega".

You'd be utterly shocked to know Tom
HATES
families.

Tom is a proud homewrecker. Apparently, as a man, he was quite the hot piece of ass, and fucked his way through a legion of married thots.
I was 19 the first time someone said “I love you”. I didn’t ask “what about your husband?”; I asked “why?”. It wasn’t some vain attempt to fish for compliments. I honestly couldn’t get my head around the concept. She’d spent weeks being nice to me, even in front of other people, and until we kissed I had honestly assumed she was taking the piss.
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Not so hot after he's trooned out, though:
sin-vega-sinisteragent-depraved-fantasies-such-as-cuddling-in-bed-21546119.png

Tom hates his abuse-surviving mother, and traded her for living with
a bona fide psychopath who came onto me then when turned down moved on to screwing our married housemate in his wife’s bed
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which he celebrates as the high point of his life.

And Tom hates Children of Morta, because he's a piece of incel trash who's bad at videogames.

It’s a slashy light Diablo-ish game without the loot. Instead of classes you choose a member of the family to delve into the ISO standard monster cave underneath the family mansion.
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Nothing about the game is Diablo-ish except the top-down view. How can you even look at a game where the controller is near-mandatory and have your first thought be "that famous CLICKER game"? Morta is a brawler or twin-stick-shooter, depending on character. Random items are buffs with different use and expiration schedules and do not persist between runs. Your own skill at dodging, blocking and aiming matters. Stats you buy for the whole family, and if you're any good you never have to save up - it's never a strategic decision to buy or not buy, just buy the best thing(s) you can afford.
And you use the portal underneath the family mansion to travel far and wide. Chapter 2 takes place in a bright, open, and geometric desert city (spoiler alert, I guess?). Tom was evidently stuck at Chapter 1.

Once you’ve got to the point where you can put monsters down in a few blows, the way skeletons burst apart and hefty ogres flop to the ground is as satisfying as it is well-animated. It’s just a shame it takes so long to get there.
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Tom, you lying degenerate, you never got there because you suck at vidya.

The opening two characters felt weak, and were woefully out of their depth when it came to fighting the bosses. Dadman is a boring, hopelessly slow liability with a tower shield, and eldest daughter Linda uses a bow that’s little use against bosses, who love to charge and barge and teleport-leap onto you far faster and more often than either of them can dodge.
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They're actually super strong. John is the most complex character, what with having an extra bar to manage, has fast attacks and dishes out mad damage to groups, has temporary 100% damage resistance, and is thus excellent to learn the ropes with when you're just starting. That's why he's the starting character! Meanwhile, Linda is one of two twin-stick-shooters and is an easy safe character for beginner bad players (but not for the deliberately bad, like Tom here), requiring no skill except two brain cells to rub together and decide on buying a speed upgrade.

I’ve no idea how new characters are unlocked. Whether it’s levelling up, doing side missions, or simply the number of times you fail a run.
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I think it's the total amount of money gained, which translates to the total sum of character upgrades. Out of the four characters, I unlocked two after winning the hardest unlocked run(s) (one time I got two cutscenes in a row), one after losing to the boss (so, a good haul), and one I don't remember when - probably after winning a low-level training run for another unlocked character.
Obviously, when you win a run, the number of times you failed doesn't increase. Because Tom never won and unlocked a character immediately after, he must have not been winning much.

After hours of banging my head against a frustrating boss fight, Kevin absolutely brutalised the entire cave and its boss under ten minutes. He racked up over double the kill chain his elders ever had, and I hadn’t even levelled him up yet.
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And here I start doubting Tom even played the game. A run takes from half an hour to an hour, you level up in the level, and your goal (especially as an unleveled character) is to collect gold, xps, and random items that are absolutely crucial to successfully completing a run. You can't heal out of the box. You can't control until midgame. Random items is where you get all these. Items are critical to survival, and they're found in the main dungeon, found in challenge rooms, or bought from a trader with tokens that are themselves found randomly. You have to fucking explore. (It's fun, if you're good! It's like unwrapping Christmas New Year (am Soviet) gifts. But you have to.)

Eventually his even younger sister, Lucy, showed up.
...
Oh, and then their older brother shows up and outdoes his elders by going in with nothing but karate.
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Tom lies like a rug here, the unlock order is predetermined and that's not it.

Compounding this is the way its cut scenes (which to their credit are short but still skippable) play immediately after a failed run, ie at the exact moment you don’t want to see a cut scene.
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Cutscenes play when the story progresses, Tom, you thankless dickhead. You should be jumping for joy that it progresses after failed runs, too.

It may be thematically appropriate that the family is loving and brave and generally perfect, but everything’s so wholesome it’s just boring. Why would I care about any of these people?
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There's an alcoholic character who lost his marriage to the bottle. Tom, I'd think I'd find this a tad relatable, eh? Also, being a True and Honest woman that you say you are, you should've appreciated how the stay-at-home, cook-the-food, heal-the-sick, record-the-chronicle pregnant mom Mary is a hero in her own right. Neither her nor the dungeon-delving wise grandma Margaret were worth a mention in that review. Tom, are you ~sure~ you're a woman?

I was not charmed by its story. The concept is terrific but I just had no reason to care.
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I am shocked that the values of family, community, and heroism are totally lost on a troon. (There's refugees, too! Some of them are black and wear conical dresses, like in Journey. Troon doesn't care about refugees.)

And it has local co-op! (Online will come soon.) Me and the lady of the house had a blast playing as John and Linda, respectively. There's no mention of co-op in the review.
Tom, do you have friends? Do you even wish for friends, rather than for fleshlight upgrades?

Tom is a greasy loser rapey soy friendless faggot leech.

And Children of Morta is a great game. Go play it if you have a controller.
 
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