afaik he was directly responsible for pushing out most of the talented designers at iD (Tom Hall, John Romero, American McGee, etc) and basically turning them into a company that made engines first
also among other things was apparently very against the flying enemies and teleporters in Doom lol
Carmack also responsible for the rise of Luckey Palmer because he saw the idea of a vr headset and then did a majority of the hard engineering work on the initial prototype
Going to start dialing random phone numbers to find people to yell at about how mad I am that this includes Khitans and Jurchens, two groups that did not exist in any meaningful sense until several centuries after the Three Kingdoms period. When they could have instead just created nomadic civs based on Xiongnu or any one of the other northern groups that actually existed in this time period. Or done something actually interesting and acknowledged that Wu’s southwest frontier actually existed and designed a faction around like early vietnamese civilization or something
Come to find out aoe 2 fans are also mad about this but for much stupider reasons and that just makes me even angrier
I mean the problem with this particular complaint is that aoe2 has content across a huge gulf of time - their announcement literally mentions that the khitans and jurchens are post-three kingdoms era - because the campaigns range from like 89 AD to 1600 AD, even earlier if you count the weird return to rome ones that are largely from aoe1. and like, vietnam is already in the game. every aoe2 expansion ever, even the ones focused on a specific part of the world, have always had a wide spread across time like this. They’re just making a China DLC with a name that has the most recognition, and I also don’t think microsoft gives a shit about the xiongnu or thinks anyone who plays aoe2 does (I would like them in the game). I have similar problems with like every xpac they announce but at some point I just had to realize Microsoft does not actually care lol
I know, it still just feels like a weird decision when there are so many other more interesting options possible. And they’re also apparently repurposing Tangut units as Khitans which feels vaguely disrespectful
This is the problem. When you believe you are serving swine you will never create anything but slop.
when they added malay to the game they got a unit that is literlaly described as being like a zergling and its a shirtless berserker guy who costs half a pop and is made of tissue paper. They built the entire civilization around this. like i said its just par for the course they dont care about culture as anything other than a set dressing theme for content to organizie around. when i posted all that i wasnt disagreeing, it is just a game from 1999 that has basically been all about disrespectful slop representations of peoples actual culture since day 1 and has a fan base that hates any change at all. Microsoft made some frankly insincere changes to aoe3 to make it slightly more respectful to native people and everyone freaked the fuck out. Every dlc for years has been “well OK this is the least interesting thing you could’ve done.” Recently they announced a multi part dlc series that’s dedicated like entirely to the trojan war lmao in a game that already has a dlc dedicated to antiquity along with the entire first game.
Also its like the only game in the series that still actively makes money (they just killed all aoe3 dlc and updates for this reason) and the glorified modders they hired to keep it alive are just here to keep the content churn going. one of the last dlc packs was literally repackaged steam workshop scenarios. nobody working on aoe2 anymore has any sense of responsibility, creativity or knowledge of history im pretty sure of that. its a terrible westoid pop history zombie we will never be free of.
as another side note about aoe3 they handled that game so badly it can’t support a 4v4 with AI because the net code literally freaks out at late game army sizes which makes the latency so bad you can’t even click on your units, because MS only cared about competitive players who usually end the game by age 3 by rushing or tech advantage
yeah this sounds miserable lol. i resent how this will probably be popular just among 3k diehards who will go for anything with that setting. they deserve better… ok. maybe just a little bit better. not much
3k diehards deserve worse
Wake me when there’s an outlaws of the marsh dlc
Thelastofuscomplete_ver3.4_FINAL_REALLY FINAL_last edit.docx
If I was a SNES dude I could write an SB post about how Earthbound is Japanese make a game about non-Japanese.
Forced and voluntary assimilation is part of post-war Japan so that would be an essay about something rather than Japan Is Cool! tanuki.
Is Earthbound supposed to be set in a time contemporaneous to when it was released?
Hi SB
It’s called Neverway because there’s never a way I’m remembering this name in a week
P.S. Another 2020s pixel art RPG with a completely bananas player-sprite to screen size ratio?
BioMenace is one of the best of the Apogee platformers so i’m happy to see this. i kinda wish there was just a big collection of these like those Sega Genesis Collections but whatever. these “enhanced graphics” sure seemed to just take some color out of the original. at least the sprites are basically the same i guess. would be cool if this had a level editor like the Secret Agent one does but at least it has an extra episode i suppose.
also this is how i found out that there’s a Duke Nukem 1+2 remastered. it’s only for the evercade though?? i am definitely a fan of Duke Nukem 1, though 2 not so much.
SGDK wins again! 
