The News Grandmaster 4000

OK, guilty as charged. I ain’t no tankie though. :sunglasses:

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Who here wants Chinese brand communism

Socialism with Chinese characteristics? More like Socialism with Capitalist characteristics!

Mao: Fuck that guy
Stalin: FUUUUUCK that guy
Lenin: Started strong, but fuck that guy
Castro: Not a fan of the authoritarianism, but otherwise he can chill w/ me

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apparently @Persona isn’t the only one who thinks valkyrie profile should make a comeback

personally v OK with this as I think it was always one of the better/best ways to reimagine the jRPG when it originally came around, it’s just that it was very seldom used in games where the other elements were any good

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I mean with most of these guys the main things to criticize are a) the body count, which in most cases is inseparable from the historical fact that a lot of communist revolutions occurred in nations that had yet to industrialize and should therefore be judged alongside e.g. the industrial revolution in terms of overall cruelty (the difference being that no one other than like, Alan Partridge would defend the character of a 19th century industrialist; and is also why cuba comes out looking better, because nothing was on the same scale in terms of time or land or production or anything else) and b) the intellectual dishonesty and personality cults and general idolatry that justified the barely-if-at-all-better-in-practice political philosophies (and rabid enforcement thereof) that we got from them. everyone pretty much agrees to dock Stalin for A but that’s barely even a start.

I basically agree with all of that. The 20th century socialist political leader I actually admire was Allende, who had a democratic vision rather than a personality cult. The fact that he got totally merked right quick is one of the reasons I extend Castro a lot of grace - he was pretty much the only Latin American socialist whose country made it out of the 20th century with their sovereignty in tact.

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gotta love someone who made the CIA look that bad that many times

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TETRIS EFFECT RELEASES IN ONE WEEK

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also the game is about shooting people in the fucking head so for that to be acceptable while all this is not

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Oh Lord Paprium.

So to give a short view of this whole project. A bunch of europeans got together and made a for Real JRPG for the sega genesis. You can see an image from it in my profile. It’s not great but it is the full 30 hours long and once you find some QoL buried in the confusing Secret of Mana style menu is mostly playable. It was eventually ported to everything.

As they were porting it to everything they opened up a “gems” based donation system for a new game that was going to be defined by the community. That eventually formed into Paprium. Which I think is a belt scroller.

Which two years ago opened preorders and since I had bought Pier Solar I got it at a discount. And they waited years of development before they put up the preorder. That made it enough of a real company that I trusted it.

I just did a search and I never did explain anywhere on this forum what then happened. Just that semi-in-jest comments that maybe I would get to play it soon.

This isn’t journalism so excuse me if I get some of the facts or steps wrong. They got their paypal account locked after preorders started supposedly because of how many they got. They also have something of a real office. They are also terrible at communication.

Outside of just the game they were also going to release a high quality Genesis arcade stick. I haven’t heard a peep about that in the past three years.

So then we get a tentative release date of Dec 2017. And oh there are some bugs March 2018. And then…silence. In May somewhere they say the factory they were making the games at shut down.

And nothing from then. Apparently the manual was done and circulating but even the guys that did the manual didn’t have confidence in the game coming out.

Throughout all of this were people screaming for a refund.

In early October this year suddenly we got a message. Hey we are going to have a release party for Paprium! You will get your email asking for shipping soon. Maybe We all can play it at bumpass and decide “this is okay?”

The release party was on October 27th in Paris. The uhhh game they showed was uhhhh

I still have not received an email asking for my shipping address. Based off the developers forum, facebook, and the sega 16 forums there are no clear answers. You might need to use the Sega CD to even play the game because they are using the Sega CD for ram??

The developers are saying oh that game we showed off was an early beta not to spoil the game! Or they are saying the game is actually still in alpha. Or they said before the party the game is done.

It is now a week after the party and we are back to radio silence. And based again off the internet they have burned all goodwill and everyone with common sense is yelling for a refund. The problem well. Everyone paid years ago and Paypal…terminated the developers account??

I am treating my money at this point done and gone. I wouldn’t hold out hope considering there are multiple people screaming they have been trying to get a refund for months.

And that’s the story of Paprium!!

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I’m still glad that commercial got made, though. Sorry about your money, Rudie.

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really don’t want to have this debate but this is a stupid thing to get upset about

i mean honestly, if i could deal with my castlevania statues not having boobs out or taverns in rpgs selling root beer or whatever i think we will all survive

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I will never not get indignant about the sanitization of everything interesting or even vaguely transgressive from media, it’s almost certainly an artifact of the half-evangelical household I was raised in that I find it so blandly abhorrent but I really get my hair up, to me it’s almost like an insult to the concept of multiculturalism to suggest that it’s OK to remove a dumb wall texture of a titty bar to make a war game more palatable

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I know there’s a fine line before you get to “Gore Vidal on China” though

Nothing about anything derived from Tom Clancy can ever be transgressive

Actually the forced alteration of the product due to the market influence of a world power in direct competition with US hegemony is the most transgressive thing possible in a Rainbow 6 game

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What really amazes me is that they’re actually changing the art for all regions; plenty of games have modified art assets for Chinese release which still kept their skulls etc. intact when played in other markets.

valkyrie profile already made a comeback, unfortunately they put the name ‘lightning returns’ on it and used ff13 assets

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sorry but this post was extremely worth pushing you to inspire

anyway to the extent that a lot of modern left discourse is about actually acting in self interest when challenged by hegemonic and economic forces rather than always feeling compelled to affect the wisdom of Solomon in any case in which there may well be winners and losers, I think that feeling a flicker of cultural chauvinism in response to something like this is fairly healthy, because it’s in that conflict space that we do actually learn things and others have the ability to gain some perspective; I know this perspective is least likely to be shared by people who have had to experience the negative aspects of that chauvinism, and rightly so

I am upset over it but I am almost certain that I don’t want to see the terms that other people in siege’s audience who are also upset about it are couching it in

and I also don’t think that “nothing derived from Tom Clancy can ever be transgressive” is even true as written if you aren’t only talking about an American audience!

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Siege represents in many many ways Ubisoft at their least ham-fisted so I’m not surprised to see them actually trying to reconcile this rather than create a (worse in any case) bifurcation

also I think as a general point I am being very east coast at you here

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