is this actually a good game? all i know about it is lots of twitter weirdos constantly posting about how horny they are about it because you can see right up the main character’s arsehole when she climbs ladders, and this means that western and japanese devs have all gone woke and gone broke because of a bunch of meaningless acronyms
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The demo is pretty whatever to me but might be interesting to check out on a sale as another Souls mutation. The game isn’t like coincidentally crazy good which further underlines the comments as unhinged since they seem to be only motivated by weird backlash politics and Korean antifeminism. Ironically the game feels like it has nothing to say despite it being championed as some bastion of free speech.
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there’s some song that some anti-woke person wrote about Stellar Blade that has the lyrics “handsome gamer boys unite against these woke soys” and honestly this is kind of all i need
i have not said much about people’s comparisons of it to Automata or that the only reason to like Automata is because 2B is hot because i deeply disagree and don’t feel like arguing, but i can’t recall of any response to Automata has been this cringey or toxic
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my policy is just that the market is fake and “the canon” is fake and anything could be something or nothing at all at any given moment depending on whether enough people care and decide enough to make it so or not. this goes not just for games but for everything. people have to work within the contexts/constraints they are given but that doesn’t change that.
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I think it was a great comparison.
Libraries are really fun to wander through. You can pick books off the shelf at random when one title or another catches your eye. At least for me, the bigger the library, the more fun it is, because it increases the chances that you’ll find incredibly specific strange books that you would never have guessed are out there before. When I used to live in Chicago, I had a job at one point where my train took me right past the central library, which was the largest library building by square footage in the world at the time of its construction in 1991 and has over five million items in their collection. If I had the time I would always get off the train on my way home and spend an hour or two there just wandering the stacks, trying out different floors and collections and seeing what I could encounter. (Something especially cool there is their collection of ephemera, in a long row of filing cabinets—it’s like bits of paper you would find on the sidewalk covering the last 200 years.) When I think about moving back there the existence of that library seems to me like one of the biggest upsides.
Of course, most of the time, I go to places online to have this kind of experience, because most physical collections of media can’t practically be so vast as is feasible online—Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, torrent trackers, YouTub and Vimeo, etc. etc. Does anyone really feel that Wikipedia has “too many articles,” or that the Internet Archive has catalogued “too many web pages” or has “too many digitized books” or anything like that? One of my favorite things to do on Wikipedia is press the “Random Article” button because it feels almost like touring the globe—sometimes I’ve even found interesting articles to work on that way (like for the remarkably star-crossed building in downtown Leeds Bridgewater Place or the Europe-exclusive 1994 Amiga mascot platformer Mr. Nutz: Hoppin’ Mad). If it had less articles that would just yield less variety (something you can see if you go to a Wikipedia in a sparsely-populated language)! Likewise, if you’ve ever been on a music tracker, have you ever thought to yourself, “Grr, this tracker has too many albums on it!” What would that accomplish other than decreasing the chances that they’ll have whatever you might look for? I don’t see how games are any exception to this—they’re just another form of media like anything else.
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oh nice, that’s my saturday afternoon tomorrow spoken for
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Awesome, have fun ^^
I agree in that I don’t think the discourse around it is that comparable. The similarity for me comes from Automata developing a legacy over time with a certain subset of gamers that think having an attractive butt is some sort of colossal victory over feminism and they somehow forget to discuss anything else about the game.
I think Automata is more interesting than 2B being hot, I just find it frustrating that it’s a sacred cow. Not many acknowledge that the game is very shallow as a sci-fi project and middling as an action game as well. I feel like it’s often treated as some sort of masterpiece and I remember it feeling lukewarm. It’s most interesting elements (UI, sidequests, ‘gamebreaking’ stuff) don’t get discussed very much beyond a sort of ‘how crazy!’.
I have been meaning to replay it for 7 years.
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i guess i have mostly not been in contact with whatever this subset of folks has to say about the game - like i know people are horny for the characters, but that is kind of the case with any game that has hot characters imo. i feel like thinking 2B and A2 are somehow antifeminist is kind of funny, though. i could go point by point with what i like about Automata, but i specifically have avoided doing this since it was brought up lol. it would just be a lot of energy i don’t have rn.
that said, Stellar Blade does seem like it is meant to cultivate that exact reaction from people, and that it’s working. it’s kind of disappointing to see Taro embrace it so readily, but i guess that is just sort of the deal with him - it’s hard to get a full read on the guy, imo. on the one hand, i think he is just impressed that his work influences anyone at all and he likes meeting those people (he hung out with Toby Fox, if i recall?). he says very dumb, not the most objectionable, but stupid nerd things like “i love women - they are so hot” etc. (not an exact quote), but he seems to understand game design really well and he has a good sense of humor.
i mostly imagine that he is talented but is generally just a sad nerd who probably spends all his newfound monies on alcohol and sex workers in Japan’s red light district. i think he is more interesting than whoever is behind Stellar Blade, but i think he’s flawed.
Stellar Blade - just everything about it, feels cynical in every way to me. there is no soul there, there is no there, there. it has nothing to say other than to be the purest form of misogynist capitalist object, which is exactly what some people want.
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Agreed on all points.
Apologies, I didn’t mean to drag more discussion out, just wanted to be clear on my original comparison.
Ultimately Stellar Blade feels surreal because of how much hype and money it’s getting despite how surface it is. I imagine it’ll be forgotten by most in a month.
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i like it when people actually talk on a forum back and forth for a while its always good to read
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
ross’s (game dungeon) latest project seems to be picking up steam
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I appreciate the thoughtfulness of ur reply, I think we agree more than we disagree but do disagree. Just a different place in which to bound a decision about what we derive ‘meaning’ from when we discuss a specific object. Maybe im overly-typifying but it reminds me of this (long) discussion of Benjamin and Adorno’s differing conception of “aura”.
If i’m understanding what ur saying correctly, you’re delineating between a materially-bound history of objects (commodities) vs. the possibilities of thinking through their existence as originating in a more qualitative conceptual realm, which is then cleaved into shape via material limitation, essentially being made by an artist into active knowledge. Where the latter allows certain aesthetic ideas to be discovered more freely than insistence on treating a commodity form (& its limitations) as primary.
My feeling is that what u describe as research, generative connections that allow us to pursue deeper meaning away from the sphere of profit, is also something that can equally be drawn from the materially specific life of these commodities. Not that an object or pinball machine is ‘complete’ because its now wrapped up in final form as commodity, rather that it’s meaning is in constant active flux, determined and made unique by the history & context of specific objects. That this may even be a way to consciously and artistically address (certain unacknowledged) histories contained within a form.
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Little gaming news from the world of impermanence, Littlebigplanet 3 servers have been taken down ‘indefinitely’ after being disabled “temporarily” in Jan due to “ongoing technical issues”
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Depending on your disposition this may make your more or less interested in the game, but Stellar Blade is pretty much a 360 era B-game. Shift Up has never made an action game before and you can tell. I haven’t really followed internet discussions at all and I understand it’s somehow the current front of a culture war but part of that might be because lots of people bought PS5s but there’s little in the way of PS5 exclusives to buy this year. So people might be extra invested in it because they really, really want it to be a good game.
It might be the most aesthetically boring thing I’ve seen Hyung-tae Kim ever do though. The character designs trend way more towards generic anime styling, and the monster designs feel like the kind of things a middle school thinks would be cool (stick lots of blades on everything). That “naked” costume that people seem to use in all gameplay videos is straight up ugly. You even have to squint really hard for it to even look like naked skin- it’s a completely different color from the character’s skin and it’s got a completely messed up skeletal design on the back. It’s really garish.
I may just be missing aspects because I haven’t been following the game, but comparisons to Nier Automata feel surface level because very little about it feels like Nier Automata in practice, outside of the premise having the normal tropes of this particular corner of genre fiction.
I feel like I recall Nier Automata first going viral because Taro was openly saying how much attention he gave 2B’s butt so it would be perfect. But now that people liked the game and its story, that’s been retroactively kind of re-written, or forgotten, or forgiven, because people actually liked 2B as a character in the end.
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Just for clarity, the particular issue LBP3 was facing was that some people had figured out how to hack the game and serve up any message they wanted in the game’s online interface. Like global messages and stuff. If you google around you can find images of transphobic messages people were seeing as notifications, and things like that.
But of course for Sony it is much cheaper to shut down a game than fix it.
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didn’t know they made a third one
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i was delighted to see stellar blade seemed to be more prominently positioned by sony than you’d expect from anything else about it, like Knack as filtered thru the nexusmods collective unconscious.
all the handsome gamer boys / thank their grandma for the toys
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For the record I wish to state that Glorious Trainwrecks is exactly what I advocate for. (I’ve got 40 to 50 games on it lol)
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