• 1 Post
  • 83 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 7th, 2023

help-circle








  • Oh yeah, I wouldn’t say that Nintendo are paragons of virtue or anything. But they are far, FAR better at making games that offer a wide variety of experiences (edit: when compared to Sony/MS. Indies are king). Similarly, sure the Switch control scheme isn’t something nobody had ever conceived of before, but it’s very distinctly different from the Xbox/Playstation controllers.

    They’ve got like… what, 7 or 8 IPs that they actively maintain, right? And about 10 more derelict but still iconic IPs. Plus some stuff made by other companies that’s exclusive to their hardware.

    -Mario -Zelda -Pikmin -Splatoon (Hey look a gun game) -Fire Emblem -Donkey Kong Country -Super Smash Bros

    Dedicated 3rd party: -Xenoblade -Pokemon

    All these games have really different themes and gameplay styles and aesthetics, and that is the reason why I’m convinced that the Switch 2 is perfectly positioned to just completely take over the market the way the Wii did- Nintendo is large and competent enough to avoid the issues that plagued the PS5 launch and later life, and fresh enough to get people interested, unlike the Xbox.

    Where Sony/MS have uhhh… Looks at the PS5 exclusive gamesLooks at Halo/Call of Duty/Fortnite


  • Pffff. The AAA industry is notorious for being about as stale as a three week old french baguette. If it isn’t a Gun Game made for chasing the most recent trends, then chances are they don’t even want to sniff at it. To say nothing of the absolutely egregious thirst for Profit that plagues a lot of titles. It’s one thing to be a $70 game, and another thing entirely to be a $70 game with a subscription, ingame puchases, and day 1 DLC.

    Sony and Microsoft can have their pathetic little ‘arms race’ about processing power and framerates and 150GB+ games.

    In the meantime, Nintendo is likely going to step right up with something that has a nice fresh, intuitive control scheme like the Wii or the Switch, with a solid release library that covers a variety of styles and appeals, and promptly curbstomp the living shit out of the competitors. The market is absolutely wide open for a smash hit console in the near future, coming off the backs of the PS5’s no-games failure and the fact I haven’t even heard about the Xbox in about 3 years.



  • It’s pretty modern if you mean popular, although the idea itself is REALLY old.

    Rather than going into specific examples because there are a lot of them (especially in gaming and TV), I’d like to say my piece on cliches.

    Basically, cliches come to exist because the cliche trope is a really good idea.

    “The Butler did it” as a murder mystery trope is a fantastic idea because some people with too much money will use the protection money affords them to mistreat their employees, providing a great motive you can build on to create a great story with relatable morals and characters. It sets up a character with perfect motives, means and a reasonable position of trust to avoid suspicion.

    Similarly, “Hell good, Heaven bad” is a fantastic trope because it lets you step back and analyse things like the negative impacts of religion and how authorities (and the bible) will portray themselves as good regardless of their actual actions. Plus of course there were periods of time where people were told doing virtually anything that didn’t fit into an extremely narrow worldview meant you were going to hell. You know, stuff like basketball and Dungeons and Dragons.

    Now, the problem with cliches is when someone sees a popular idea that’s also a very good idea, but doesn’t understand why it was a good idea. As a result, when they use the idea, it rings hollow at absolute best, and that kind of terrible execution of something that’s already known and popular tends to be especially disappointing. I think the best example is The Hunger Games, which absolutely defined young adult dystopian fiction for years because it showed how the media industry mistreats its workers, and Alleigant, which used a lot of ideas from Hunger Games (and some other things) without actually understanding the ideas.

    (TLDR: Hunger Games has a love triangle as a prominent plot element, but the actual reason is that it’s perpetuated by the media pretty much on pain of death for Katniss so that she can entertain the viewers. By contrast, Alleigant also has a love triangle but the triangle IS the plot element and the author bends over backwards to make it happen despite the fact none of the characters really feel like they’re suitable for it)

    Anyways, cliches aren’t bad but you need to know how, why, and when to use them in order to actually fulfil their potential, and the heaven-hell one you’ve mentioned above is no exception.







  • Violins are traditional instruments of cinematic mourning, either as background melody or very famously used literally in Titanic where the orchestra kept playing right up until the ship went down (historically accurate).

    Spongebob Squarepants later had a one-off gag where Mr. Krabs wanted to express insincere mourning, so he pulled out a finger-size violin and said something to the effect of “Oh boo hoo. Let me play you a sad song on the world’s tiniest violin”

    Of course, being Spongebob Squarepants, the gag was executed so flawlessly that it was immediately seamlessly integrated into internet culture.


  • That’s great for the workers, but… is Boeing as a company just too far gone anyways? Even a gesture like this doesn’t seem like it could reverse the spiral they’ve fallen into…

    Brazenly assassinating whistleblowers, a notorious focus on moneymaking over public safety, rushing production in order to meet deadlines, self-certifications that are being found not to be up to industry standards, quality rejection by NASA, more whistleblowers citing safety violations on the new 777 that are so severe that it might be more cost-effective to just scrap all the planes than to totally disassemble them to fix the issues, and a complete exodus of talented workers who can pass on essential technical knowledge because driving them away was necessary in order to make all the Speed Over Safety stuff feasible…

    I certainly don’t envy anyone who’s been tasked with saving the rotten zombie husk of Boeing that’s shambling along only by the momentum it accrued while it was alive.