I also want to make it clear it almost certainly is about America’s very real nightmarish border situation, I just mean…look my thing is graphical communication and if you want to communicate something people will almost always read the most obvious thing your visuals might represent.
And I think about that a lot.
It’s definitely also about the Berlin Wall. If Pope had wanted to draw a more direct analogy with the US border system he could’ve easily made it an entry checkpoint instead of an exit one, but he went with the latter, distinctly Soviet form.
Indirectly that winds up making a point about the US as well though. The US used to conceive of the Berlin Wall as a thing that the bad guys did and they fought against, and then built up a system with suspiciously similar dynamics in some ways.
whereas I am so, like, fanatically opposed to saying what I mean too succinctly or heavy handedly that I would gladly be misunderstood instead
this is the main reason I don’t really get along that well with organizers I think
In the case of Papers, Please its second life as a streamer game reinforces the point by showing how readily e.g. Koro-San becomes Eichmann in Jerusalem
oh my god i watched this like thirty times the other fucking day!! THE WAY HE SAYS SAYS HOW THE MEME IS MORE FAMOUS THAN BUGS BUNNY HIMSELF
I KNOW ITS PITCH PERFECT
let’s hope the prophecy is fulfilled and this video becomes a meme to surpass metal gear
Video-games are often quietly given small revisions without any official announcement, and we don’t really have a singular definitive data-base that documents all the tiny revisions.
The version of Shinobi III on the Sega Genesis Mini doesn’t have the ability to remap the controls in the options menu, but some versions of the game have that.
Also there are so many ROM dumps of NES games floating around that are either produced by archaic dumpers that misinterpreted secondary ROM areas or include hacked code to work around bugs in early emulators. The initially popular ROMs just keep circulating and as the differences are minor, there’s nothing really pushing people to the clean ROMs
As I recall that’s how someone proved that Nintendo was just downloading ROMs for their own games off pirate sites for Wii virtual console rather than use some kind of pristine internal archive which of course they never bothered to create (which is no surprise to me as someone who works at another large corporation, but apparently was shocking to many Nintendo fans)
I think it was mostly feigned surprise given their litigiousness toward the emulation community
I briefly wondered if there might be an equivalent scandal in the science paper piracy world which has the same dynamics, then I realized Elsevier is able to avoid the scandal of having any staff discovered to use Scihub like everyone else by simply not having any scientists at all on their payroll and outsourcing all their peer review to unpaid university academics
In the specific case of NES/FC games, apparently the reason Nintendo uses the iNES headers is because they hired a guy who had contributed to the iNES emulator way back in the day (Tomohiro Kawase), so that piece of evidence isn’t quite the smoking gun it seems (unless some VC game has the text “DiskDude!” in its header).
(Granted, even though the gigaleak (and Star Fox 2 and Trials of Mana) shows that Nintendo is second-to-none in terms of their corporate archival practices (probably due to being several decades older than any other company in the industry), I am almost 100% certain they sourced the majority of their roms from the internet, if only because it would be an order of magnitude easier to track them down on the open web versus in some locked-down internal archive.)
Anyhow, I’m suddenly thinking about what kind of world we’d live in if Nintendo had hired the Nesticle guy instead.
re that thread, imo thinking of the stormtroopers as just cool looking space guys is as valid a read of any of a film where all genocide means is a 2 second beat of the heroes looking sad before going to the next space adventure. rip to alderaan but i’m different. i think the empathy test idea is always unconvincing to me in part since it ignores the way negative identification within these fantasy objects can be a form of critique. locking a sim in a swimming pool to drown is in part a parodic vote of no confidence in the drabness of the game’s intended route. similarly i suspect a lot of pro-empire starwars guys are just registering obscure complaint with that film’s soupy, unconvincing idea of the Good.
have not played Papers Please but i do think the slightly cartoony pastiche of its fictionalised stalinoid aesthetic is at least part of what people pick up when they decide to play a similarly cartoony border guard - in addition to skepticism about the idea of a videogame as a morally intelligible object to begin with, which tbh i find sympathetic!
this is a good line. i’m wondering how much it really applies to the sims, though. idk part of why i like the sims is there is not really an intended route and they also clearly allotted for you to do things like delete doors and toilets. they did not even have to make “drowning” exist in their game, but they did.
i guess deleting the ladder to your swimming pool feels entirely of a piece with dropping godzilla in your simcity level, i don’t think it’s subversive really
Was there anything more enervating than the hashtag-resistance draping themselves in Rebel Alliance iconography
brb making a Drowning Sim
There’s a part where Joel pushes Ellie into a river, for funsies, in TLOU2. And I just set my controller down and let her drown, which I think counts as a vote of no confidence in the drabness of that game’s intended route.
Realizing that 3d games as a rule give me headaches, back pain and insomnia if I play them in the evening. Whereas I can play a 2d game even a pretty difficult one and remain more relaxed. Lately this is comparing my experience of playing Hitman and AM2R in sequence. And I had the same physical reaction to FF7R last year.
I used to blame the precision work of FPS aiming when I had stress reactions to extended FPS play, but now I see I’m also having the same problem with these kind of slow-paced and easy third-person games. You’d think they shouldn’t stress my body very much but they do.
I don’t get motion sickness as such, I never even get it from things like reading in a car or a rocky boat, but 3d camera movement is clearly still a stressor. I feel this must be somewhat universal and related to the VR comfort problem hindering its adoption. But oddly I rarely see people make this complaint before online (or I guess it all gets collapsed into the category of “motion sickness” but I thought that only refers to nausea)
