/games/ - Games

>>45171
Sally was a princess but at the same time Archie had a lot more context around it, especially with the state of the world (the mobians were mostly fresh out of their version of the stone age), Sally and Elias' opposition and resentment to their own roles and the concept of being royalty.

A lot of nu sonic fans (especially the ones who have cropped up around 'that' twitter circle) I don't consider real fans. They have no appreciation for the subtle writing and themes in the early sonic games or the overt themes of Archie. They're parasites who have no place in the fandom

Luckily they are the extreme minority and it seems a lot of the younger alpha/gen z fans are intelligent enough to understand and agree with the environmentalist/anti-technofascism themes of Sonic. The fandom is probably one of the only worthwhile ones in terms of cultural output and personal beliefs.

>>45171
two things come to mind: speaking strictly on environmentalism, it was all the rage during the late 80s and throughout the 90s, likely because we had reached "the end of history" and everyone was convinced that all it took to save the planet from moneygrubbing industrialists was conscious liberalism. not a single soul believes that today unless you're particularly retarded or an atlanticist (but i repeat myself), so environmentalism was dropped out of everything once the link between capital and environmental destruction became obvious to everyone, no more captain planet, no more x-men or gi joe PSAs at the end of every episode telling you not to litter, and no sonic that speaks for the trees.

second, the early games worked because it relied on narrative simplicity. this guy is the evil industrialist, and then sonic is a real rebel, tuned to what's cool and what's cool is environmentalism. if you squint he looks like he wears air jordans, that's how cool he is. he's like the lorax if the lorax wasn't a preachy fuck. very easy to parse. the minute you have like the president or three later agencies trying to add political nuance, everything becomes shit. it doesnt work and it has never worked (unless you completely rework the universe but i argue the comics arent really sonic anymore but something else entirely) i cant even fault it for it having monarchy apologia. 06 reached lows so remarkably low that it was unable to even deliver a coherent story, let alone an understandable subtext, i mean it feels like the story was more interested in sonic wanting wanting to fuck, and what represents libidinous fantasies more than wanting to fuck a virginally pure holy madonna, you think it's a coincidence that all the sonic fetish stuff balooned after that? no! everyone's unconscious understood the message, sonic is a fuck beast, he fucked even the virgin mary. there's nothing holy anymore.

>>45183 (me)
this is just to say, sonic, being a marketable company mascot, it's not its own entity. it's always been a figure designed by council, emerging from the zeitgeist like some swamp creature. sonic was an environmentalist because it was cool at the time, and he became an enemy/collaborator of a literal deep state because in 2001 the american mind had melted after 9/11. now sonic persists in its eternal twilight, past its intended demise, vacillating between imaginary sexual object for the absolutely deranged, and nostalgia bait. it is what it is.

>>45182
Sonic nazis know their favorite franchise is woke and they hate it. Just like UT/DR (Chuddy Fox copers) nazis or even TADC nazis (Trans Jax deniers). They hate the fact they enjoy something woke and they hate themselves for it, so they actively try to deny the franchise is woke and gaslight everyone into ignoring it's themes. That's why we have people in that Sonic Would Love Us group formed by people like Krack, Richard "Diaper Boy" Kuta, Psyco the Coon or the Homophobe duo (AwesomeTime and PurpDerp) harrassing and stalking every LGBT person in the fandom while playing the victim card, when they get called out for it, only to resort to shittier tactics than any of the people they claim are "attacking" them. It's clear just calling them out doesn't work because it just ends with good people getting doxxed and harrassed. If we really want to keep the fandom clean we need to make them shit their pants. Just saying.

>>45125
Archie is a mixed big, the general consensus is that the comic was mostly shit until Ian Flynn picked up the pencil, and there's more diehard fans who think the comic went to shit when Ian Flynn picked up the pencil. I however thing that Archie, just like the games, is a mixed bag throughout. There's good Penders/Bollers stories and there's bad Flynn stories, but there's also good Flynn stories and shitty Penders/Bollers stories. Though lumping Pneders and Bollers is unfair because Bollers is a better writter and person than Penders. Fleetway clears Archie, though.

i don't understand if this meme is against or in favor of these things

>>46862
I think OP is doing a mockery of pretentious essayists who use big words instead of actually saying anything.

>>46802
Wtf is "save rooms irl"

>>46979
I don't, because they're garbage. Politics has nothing to do with it. I've never played a Call of Duty game in my life and probably never will, but I would if I actually considered one worthy of my time. If other intelligence agencies funded and made games that were worthy of my time, I'd play those, too. I don't think playing or not playing a video game is any kind of valid moral statement; you can accept that a piece of art is well-crafted and enjoy it even if you don't agree with its message.

Unfortunately, Call of Duty just plain sucks.

While we're on the subject, I'm liking Far Cry 6 rather a lot. The storyline is so bland and uninspired that I'm making my own up in my head as I go along, but the gameplay is addictive, and it's an openly anti-fascist game that does not paint the U.S. as the good guys.

>>46981
Shortest leftists meme

>>47125
can't read award

Shooty shooty bang bang no thoughts, just consume product.

>>47046
A lot of people don't even care that much about that stuff, they just want to shoot stuff

>>47387
Creative Limitation

>>47387
Because nobody making them gives a fuck

>2010
This was the peak "gritty" hype era where every game tried to be hardcore and realistic aka throw a brown filter on everything. Billions of shooter games were made during this time so the Xenoblade devs tried to go for a more grounded art style.
>2020
Anime has become so mainstream and popular that the Xenoblade devs can happily go back to making anime slop art like every jap game dev aspires to.

remakes/remasters are generally made by different people who don't have access to original project files like concept art, series bible, etc

My take is that remasters revolve around the assumption that people will re-buy games they’ve already played for full price because they’re dumb slop consumers who are easily pleased with the phrase “updated graphics” as tru gam3rz are.

Therefore the art style must be discarded in favour of some generic bloom shader (probably out of the box with Unreal engine) that is *technically* superior and can provide a description listing off all the graphics tech acronyms it provides.

If you used modern rendering technology to provide the same art style, the game would just look the same, you’d genuinely have to care what the graphics tech acronyms actually mean and try to have an appreciation for the resulting minor differences. Whereas “woah holy shit I can see Las Venturas from Los Santos! We’ve come so far lil bro” genuinely does shift units.

I loved Undertale back in the day but I can't bring myself to care about this. I don't even doubt that it's good. Ship just sailed. Right time right place yadda yadda

<we're gonna need Moses if it keeps flooding like this

>>47333
as someone who was huge into homestuck when i was a teen (that's the only age you're allowed to read homestuck at) but has never played undertale/deltarune i feel like how magic johnson must feel in that i caught that infection pretty early on and by all means i should've succumbed to the disease but, by the grace of god, i didn't…

>>47326
He would never

Baffled by the positive reception of chapter 5.
(Almost) nothing of note happened. Dialogue was cringeworthy. Jokes were more misses than hits. References for references sake. Flat characters incorporated as round characters. Waaay too long.
Seen some buzz around this or that being unexpected, but something being unexpected is not itself a good thing. The secret boss seems a good example of this (regardless of the character or fight itself).

What do chapter 5 enjoyers see what I am missing?

>>47281
>saw this image in a certain 4chan thread
wait wtf are the threads more connected than i thought

>>47381
>And the souls likes as well, with tons of content being hidden by obscure choices
Thats not pretentious though, thats trying to make use of its multiplayer system. Its hidden only if you play single player (in itself a bad design choice imho, but thats a different conversation).
I would say pretentious games are the ones who are pretending to be something they are not (duh). Like already mentioned David Cage games want to be a though provoking experiences with innovative gameplay, but instead end up a video game versions of Neil Breen movie. Or FPS games which advetise themselves hardcore old school boomer shooters, but have very superficial understanding of those games, and instead you get generic Painkiller clone with not enough pixels.

>>47376
Undertale and (Almost) every game Sony published since The Last of Us.

Portal 2.

Portal had an ominous atmosphere with Aperture Science largely being a mystery, with it being uncertain whether they were as unethical as the test chambers would suggest or whether it's a result of GlaDOS taking over.
Portal 2 completely destroys that mystery by repeatedly insisting upon itself that Aperture Science was extremely unethical.. but only out of stupidity, then Valve makes Aperture Science a self-insert for their 9001 VR tech demos.

I get they weren't going to get through a much longer game without some kind of story that elaborates on Aperture Science, but the writers made every single aspect of Aperture Science goofy and wacky and lol robots ftw.

And then they had the barefaced cheek, the fucking bollocks, to complain that "the cake is a lie" was overdone, unfunny and had to be excluded from their wackiness.

>>47382
half life 2 no, but definitely the episodes and alyx

All Final Fantasy games. I haven't played a single one which ddn't have a totally ridiculous story. All Persona games too for that matter. 200 fucking hours of high school cringe dialogue simulaton stuffed with the most boring combat system ever made by any human being.
I demand total jap game dev death NOW

>>41197
Great minds think alike, I built a tower to the height limit as an extension in mine

I was playing a desert run. Ocean level at 1 with desert set as the only biome. It was fucking brutal and I was scared of losing everything when I die. After several days, I came across a village that had saplings and well…

proof of concept: it is possible to turn an entire village into a single building using walls

>>41398
I liked this concept so much that I expanded on it. Here is the finished build

>>41200
activate windows go to settings to activate windows

I think Cyberpunk 2077 looks better at day than it does at night

there's a LUT mod for cyberpunk 2077 or whatever that lets you tone down saturation which makes it look a lot like your third image and less like los angeles. in fact cyberpunk 2077 is hands down the best rendering of a cyberpunk city ever made for a video game, too bad the game itself is so fucking shit.

Cloudpunk is really the only game i've seen capture cyberpunk urban sprawl/arcology at anywhere near the correct scale. The sequel is going to be a lifesim, and largely ditch the voxel graphics, so it could either turn out great or completely disappointing in that aspect.

>>47361
pure kino

low bit depth retro colour palette in this game, very grey and concrete levels but they also had these sunny dirty grassy areas in syndicate (1993), doesn't have the neon design and 3d lighting aesthetic of cloudpunk.

of the devil

Detective visual novel set in cyberpunk future.

its not chudded out like Val-hall-a and gameplay mechanics are pretty good. p sure the author is lefty sympathetic bc they explicitly mention gentrification, neoliberalism, anarchists, communists, and the whole cyberpunk shebang in the lore tidbits that integrate with the story. No the plot is not some revolutionary but a criminal(youll find out when you go through it what type of criminal she is) who masquerades as a lawyer. also i love the art style. spritzes(light mist) you with common themes in cyberpunk and sci-fi like autonomy of inorganic(read AI/clankers) beings, gender, and stuff and of course capitalism but it doesnt really distract from the game or the characters itself. i think its the brain fog or maybe im just stupid but its quite a brain teaser if you cant remember details that well.

>>47370
oops forgot to write the rest.

like when you do make mistakes, its like oh duh of course. that makes sense. Logically sound. You cant really fail the lawyer sequences unless you run out of chips, which serves as the currency/pseudo-health bar which is pretty neat just typing it out. The main way of gaining chips is by selecting the correct dialogue chains and you can gamble them in key moments to up your chips even more.

Although I myself do not mind this, characters are written to be more contemporary and thus in line with fandom culture. You wont get a lot of depth from each character as it is drip-fed and often played for jokes/funny moments. But they are enjoyable characters to get you through the story. Although ive never played the game, its supposedly inspired by Phoenix Wright with zany characters you slowly unravel that has been satisfying for all three cases(there are going to be 5 in total but only the first two have been released as the prologue does not "count" as a case) .Cases are usually murder cases but the world itself is the character as various people in the world and their roles, beliefs, motivations, and political views unravel and entangle themselves neatly as each case progresses. Exchanges of dialogue centered around determining if the cybernetic of a working class mechanic was utilized for self-expression or if it was because it was produced by companies as necessary for on the site jobs are key moments in the trials, and the neat part is either scenario could be plausible so you have to really think before you lay down you cards.

the music is mostly open source but they made sure to emphasize their game is indie and individually produced. Not like multi-millionaire company produces indie aesthetic, but small team of friends producing bits and pieces of the game. There are original soundtracks composed for the game. If you're not familiar with Visual novel games, this would definitely be a linear visual novel with variants of static images for different character emotions and 3D rendered environments for that cyberpunk flare with neon colors. personally all the open source music is pretty good and i already mentioned it but I ADORE THE ARTSTYLE. first time an artstyle clicked for me in a way that i didnt know until i saw it that I wanted it.

>>47370
>>47371
I played the first episode and i'm both intrigued and somewhat disappointed.

The story didn't strictly impress me, yet it's a very solid set up. Morgan seems like both a fun character and someone you rarely see as a protagonist, so i would really like to see how she is utilized and plays off the future suspects. Gameplay was a mixed bag, because everything was so easy and tempting to savescum. Still i can see future episodes making more creative use of the gambling mechanic and thus making it harder to savescum without genuinely minmaxing.

>I ADORE THE ARTSTYLE
This is where i need to disagree the hardest. The 3d environment mixed with 2d characters invites comparisons to Danganronpa, which i see as extremely unfavorable. The smooth, washed-out environments feel non-specific and lifeless, like an empty Garry's Mod map, clashing with the decent character art. I don't know if this a generational thing, but i absolutely cannot stand the plasticy blender look of many modern indie games.

On a side note, camera movement is extremely jarring and a lot of other individual ui elements feel super scuffed. Why would i want to look at the diegetic navigation device phone from the side instead of the front like a normal menu! Again Spike Chunsoft did all of this right from the very start. The last i played was V3, so i'm probably going to start playing the fangames now.

>its not chudded out like Val-hall-a
Could you elaborate in what way it's chudcoded specifically. I was getting more of a strong lolbert current, because of the way it glorified living in literal Night City – Chiba, Japan.

>>47375

unfortunately i dont think the base formula will change. in fact it might even get easier especially in high rolling mode which doesnt really prevent savescumming. you get lots and lots of chips from winning. Of course they could balance this by making the stakes even higher but for the first two episodes if you've accumulated a lot of chips, even if you dont save scum you're basically god mode. I think high roller mode should not allow a "save file" at all unless you fully complete the episode.
oh i havent played danganronpa . i think that waS one of the games they are inspired by it. agree w your critiques tho.

>lolbert current
yeah its apologetic because of all the tech and stuff and its implied benefits. Maybe i was a bit heavy handed with non-chudded out but i think thats just a problem with cyberpunk in general, the glorification of night city. at best it takes on an attitude "sigh thats horrible but what can you do right?". I wouldnt say its a strong lolbert current, I think the writing, especially in news articles gives it a decent lefty spin. Not in depth of course but communism, anarchism etc does exist.

I assume you're done with the prologue right? Although dont expect too much, the first two episodes should shake off a little of that lolbert flavor I'd hope/if i remember correctly. At worst it makes the capitalist adjacent characters into quirky fun villains.

>>47383
>Maybe i was a bit heavy handed with non-chudded out but i think thats just a problem with cyberpunk in general
I was asking about valhalla. If anything the presentation seems liberal in the "sigh thats horrible but…" way you mentioned.
>thats just a problem with cyberpunk
The game seems somewhat atypical to cyberpunk, with the government reportedly "spending a lot of money" and running the justice system you interact with. It's even made me start doubting, if the megacorporations are really the ones in charge!
>I assume you're done with the prologue right?
I am. I think it would actually fit if they made Morgan a total liberal machiavellian wet blanket, who constantly gets dunked on by others. I'm probably going to wait for them to finish all of the episodes until i get a copy.

>>47352
piracy HAS to work because it's not only a means of obtaining stuff, it's literally a means of archival. clamping down piracy worries me more than digital distribution ever will, because that means losing access to shitton of movies, video games and music IP holders have 0 interest in distributing in my country

This shit is so annoying!
I have no idea how anyone can be a capitalist in 2026

>>47359
at the end of the day all games are 1s and 0s so as long as nerds have the time and energy to decompile and/or crack games, they cannot be gatekept. As long as we have access to portable storage devices, we can share media, even if it has to go offline.

>>47363
a capitalist is a person who owns means of production and exploits workers. people like being capitalist because it makes them a lot of money. a capitalist is not simply a worker who "believes capitalism is the best system". that's called false consciousness.