Deep Dive Devin

Oh yes! It's getting worse everywhere, since the UK and EU are now restricting access to all sorts of online content without surrendering a bunch of your personal information, and the US government isn't far behind. Better hope you're not looking for a frank discussion of trauma and violence. Better hope you're not one of us scary queers. Apparently that means your entire existence is harmful pornographic propaganda seducing the souls of our children. In order to protect our children from abuse, we need to cut off their access to resources that educate on spotting and avoiding the sexual abuse of children. We need to destroy Mouthwashing, everyone. Or Detroit Become Human. Oh, what's that? David Cage is a well-substantiated sexual harasser? No we don't care about that, we need to remove his shitty robot game.

Okay, @daisekihan, granted: I didn't expect yesterday when I said Ross need not worry about his image that we were going to see serious false allegations the very next day. I'm still not convinced that interviews and the occasional retweet from people with shithead beliefs will be the main problem, but damn, this is sobering. Stay safe Ross, get 2FA going on your accounts (your wife's too). I don't know what to expect now.

The original idea of Gamergate was a lie that an abuser made up on 4chan to direct harassment toward his ex. It wasn't a well-meaning movement subverted by reactionary conservatives, it was their movement, and "ethics in games journalism" was the mask. I am concerned about a lot of the treatment of Pirate Software, it verged into bullying for things that don't matter. Like, he was a furry? Who cares? Furries are probably more reliable for movements like this. But it's important to remember SKG is for consumer groups and governments with a set goal, where harassment campaigns are meant to make their targets miserable forever. Even if a community had its well poisoned with Grummz shit or whatever, it wouldn't last because there's not much drama to farm. That's probably why Thor was targeted, there's nobody else to make an enemy of but corpos with no faces to offend. Ross considers SKG a populist, single-issue movement (his words not mine). He's done interviews with people that have awful politics, but secured broad support from left figures anyway. Now, I don't love that, I didn't like it years ago when he was doing a live interview with racist crackhead child abuser Nick Rekieta (<-- not an exaggeration, I believe he's currently serving time for the latter two) but at a certain point you have to accept that Ross is taking what he can get. And not for nothing, while we characterize shithead gamers as "conservative", those beliefs don't necessarily flow into the logical extension of economic conservatism, because they're not thinking with 100% logic. So a lot of them would be more willing to support government regulation than something they think is "woke", even when the industry pushes for diversity are capitalist in motive. With the UK petition filled and and the ECI past 140%, it seems Ross threaded that line well-enough, and what's left is in the hands of the professionals, who won't be bothering with random racists on twitter. For the rest, I'd say the community moderation we have had did an okay job keeping a reactionary base from sprouting up. Basic Discord and Reddit rules filter a lot of the worst shit. Twitter sucks and isn't getting better, but I have not seen people being particularly shitty to each other in spaces that aren't deliberately catered to the far-right to begin with. And all that being said, I don't expect the industry to frame us as racist or whatever to dismiss us, because they already don't do a good job getting rid of actual racists, misogynists and queerphobes.

A developer changing their game of their own volition is definitely not "censorship". I'm not even convinced ratings boards count as "censorship" really, publishers and platform creators deserve to have a say in what they're allowing under their name and on their platform. It affects way more things than most gamers are actually aware of and it's frankly kind of embarrassing that the discussion is usually just centered on a game not being violent, sexual or racist enough for the tastes of people who view the hobby as a pawn in the culture war and not as an art form. To me "censorship" has to involve your work being forcibly altered against your will, and a publisher saying "these are the standards for what we will publish" isn't that. Those developers could theoretically put that game out somewhere else if they felt like it and had the money. Of course, to have the money you're not gonna be self-publishing anyway, but it's at that point where you're essentially arguing that censorship is a product of capitalism itself. Which is true, I'd side with anyone saying that, but gamers on the internet probably wouldn't like the implications of solving that problem. Moreover, SKG is not and has never been about stopping updates that people don't like from happening to games, nor should it be. Developers have a right to update their games, and there's no law that can decide whether an update is good or bad. SKG is about making sure some form of a game is reasonably playable after the point the updates stop. If that happens to not be the best version of that game, it's not gonna be SKG's problem unless the developer is clearly bricking the product on purpose.

The last two weeks of unprecedented windfall happened, probably.

Completely out of the range of the spectrum SKG covers. None of this matters if you literally can't play the game at all, and most of it doesn't matter even if you can. Games are made by companies, and those companies are necessarily going to do what they can to appeal to the broadest number of people. If they alter a throwaway string of text, it's because they think that will protect their bottom line better, and have something to back it up. If this is upsetting, go dismantle capitalism about it. It's frankly embarrassing to compare this tepid culture war garbage to actual real-world examples of governments leveraging the law to attack protestors, silence journalists and dismantle people fighting against, y'know, real problems. It's even more obvious when you're including remasters or rereleases changing things. That's not a product you already bought, it's a new product that repackages previous content! You're just upset that they made a decision you don't like. The idea that it has anything to do with "protecting speech" goes out the window when you consider that the new version of a text is just as worthy of protection and preservation as an old version. There's no such thing as an objectively good or bad work of art. Frankly, this is far more an example of the outrage culture and "perpetual offense" you're pretending exists than any kind of opposition to it. Who are you to tell game developers they can't do what they want with their own work? As long as you can play the game, it does not matter. If you're saying that Stop Killing Games, the movement that uses the government to save games, should be telling publishers what to do with their product, you are in favor of censorship, because you're literally asking the government to alter a sold work of art to fit your sensibilities. Everything else here is just complaining about bad updates or a lack of ability to roll them back or mod out the changes, and none of that should be compared to bricking a product people already paid for. If SKG stops games from being destroyed, you'll be able to run some version of games theoretically forever, and in all likelihood, most changes to games in updates will become much easier to preserve due to the lack of online-only DRM preventing them from being played.

Okay well that's not as good as mine. Ross should take however much time is comfortable whether his fanbase is patient or not.

Seconded. Ross, you've cultivated a patient audience! We value your continued function way more than any deadline you set.

The Sonic Unleashed PC port does open the floodgates for Xbox 360 ports, but only partway. The static recompilation tools developed for it essentially translate code from 360 to PC, and can work on any game, Unleashed was just the one the devs wanted most. It's not as viable as stuff like the N64 recomps we saw last year, since Dario and Skyth had to rewrite the game's render pipeline, but there is a lot more that can be done with this stuff in the future.

chatGPT has revolutionalized fake accounts. there are still some more basic ones on here but they go through cycles and patterns. a lot of times they're scraping and rephrasing other posts on the site. honestly, given our relative lack of activity, I'm just surprised they target the place at all. I can't imagine there's many people coming here clicking their scam links.

It's not a joke because it's not anything, this is a bot.

Oh come now, I think we're all gonna make it to dying as climate refugees or getting shot at protests in at least two decades.

@Mira are you really sure you want to be baiting bad arguments out of people? I don't think it's going to be fun or helpful for anyone, and if you're not careful the mods may come down on you for it. If someone doesn't respond to reason in a polite environment I don't think they're going to respond to it any better in an antagonistic one. I understand if it's just a dunk, I like dunks on conservative dipshittery, but I don't know if actively targeting someone is going to get you anything other than a ban, and I don't want what dwindling members this forum has left to be occupied by the aforementioned dipshittery.

Played this game last week while I was ill. Fittingly, it felt like a fever dream. The visuals really convincingly emulate the aesthetic of pixel art despite the entire game being 3D. It allows for a cleanness of style with the freedom for more expressive cameras and perspectives. I don't know that the animesque character drawings totally fit that setting, but it avoids Ross's Yuppie Psycho complaint of over-the-top expressions. The game wears its Silent Hill 2 influence on its sleeve, in that you're looking for your dead wife and start the game staring in a bathroom mirror. The story wears its Neon Genesis Evangelion influence on its sleeve, in that it doesn't make any fucking sense, but I cried anyway. The puzzles aren't the hardest, but each one took me a fair amount of time and didn't feel too leading, without ever requiring a guide. I would say they respect the player's intellect more than they directly challenge it. The survival horror gameplay is also super-smooth, enough that I would recommend veterans of the genre play on harder difficulties, since I'm a novice and it was still pretty comfortable for me on normal. I kinda wanted to feel the squeeze, a little bit more than I got. Just make sure to use the "extended inventory" option. Some people might think futzing around with too few item slots is rewarding. I don't. The psychological/cosmic horror aspect gave me a headache. This story would be confusing and non-linear even if it didn't feature the breakdown of reality making both the player and protagonist unaware of what's real. This is the classy style of Lovecraft, where the influence of something sinister is felt more than the presence of the thing itself. If there even is a something. It might all be one thing that's a different thing. It also might not be real. Interpretive art! All in all, you have to be willing to accept that the story is more emotionally honest than literal (you also have to like lesbians) but it was one of the most arresting experiences I've had with a game in a long time. Highly recommended if you enjoy good survival horror mechanics and having all hope crushed from your psyche.