Category: Rants

Random Thoughts on the Current State of the Pokémon Games

by macksamson, posted in Gaming, Miscellaneous, Rants

This is just a kind of stream-of-consciousness post. I just want to add my two cents into the endlessly toxic world of people complaining about Pokémon, and hopefully do it in a more civil manner. I say I love Pokémon and have given high scores to the very hated recent installments, yet I had times where I was straight-up bored with those games, despite how much I love them and how much I insist I love the series as a whole. My relationship with Pokémon is very complicated, so let’s go over this in segments. 

For context: I started with Pokémon Platinum and stuck with each main release since. My most nostalgic favorite installments are Black & White 2.

First, the Most Objective Flaw: They’re Ugly as Sin Now

No one—from Pokémon’s most devout fans to its most vocal critics—play these for graphics anymore. We all know that the Nintendo consoles have always been incapable of surpassing the 12k 480fps of modern systems, but most people who work with the thing—from Nintendo to Monolith—have managed to make beautiful games that run well nonetheless. GameFreak has not.

They really have no excuses here. At first, I thought that the data of 1000+ Pokémon alone made it so that they couldn’t invest in graphics without jacking up the file size to cataclysmic levels. However, my experiences with digital game copies taught me that the bulk of data IS the graphics. A ten-hour-long Devil May Cry game will take over seventy gigs, while a 80+ hour RPG made with pixel art (like CrossCode) will be barely over a single gigabyte. I really don’t understand why they just can’t get the games to look good. Granted, it is just the environs for the most part; characters at least look respectable. When Gen 10 comes around, they need to borrow some Zelda devs to make a Pokémon game that looks like Breath of the Wild.

Other than That, I Really Don’t Get Some of the Criticisms

Maybe I’m biased, but I honestly don’t understand what’s so bad about these games. I heard it gets divisive from Gen 4 onward, but starting from Gen 6, the hate feels unanimous. People refer to these games as if their badness is a scientific fact; as a level of gaming sacrilege on par with Fallout ‘76. Granted, my only window into the gaming world is what I hear from the YouTubers I watch…

In any case, I can at least understand why people wouldn’t like Gen 7 (i.e. cutscenes) and BDSP (i.e. the lack of Platinum quality-of-life improvements), but that’s about it. The rest of the games have flaws, DEFINITELY, but I wouldn’t call them travesties. People generally say the newer games are too easy (Souls fans, I presume?), but I have a counterpoint for that I’ll address later. 

I just don’t understand the hate for Gen 6, ORAS, Gen 8, and Gen 9. I will say that the Pokémon games have had unsubstantial postgames after Gen 5, which unlocked huge parts of the overworld, optional bosses, and… the stupid movie studio (well the argument is that it was a lot not that it was perfect). ORAS had the Rayquaza post-game story, but that’s the only one I think compares.

Other than that, the newer games are great mechanically. The eventual removal of HMs was huge, allowing more freedom in team builds. The battles are generally faster, and the actual visible encounters (once added) made it easy to avoid battles and find rare Pokémon. They also make TMs infinite use (or methods to infinitely produce them), which means you don’t need to play the entire game again for that Earthquake TM!

However, They Kinda Have Lost Their Magic

I don’t think the games are these cardinal gaming sins like the rest of the Internet does, but at the same time, I don’t know if I can call them masterpieces either. Each Generation, I always love finding the new Pokémon (since I don’t spoil myself on them) and reacting to them. That’s kind of… it for the most part. Like I said before, I love playing them but also get bored sometimes. 

Ultimately, I think the issue is that it’s for kids. I don’t wanna sound like that guy (especially since I love a lot of stuff geared to kids), but I think being adults and veterans of the series colors our impressions to an extent. Everyone these days says the games are too easy, and I kind of agree. You get a lot of XP in battle, to the point where only bosses are capable of requiring a little effort; they might make ONE Pokémon faint. The games aren’t balanced on understanding the competitive meta either. 

This is where my two cents come in: I think that the bulk of difficulty in Pokémon, moreso than any other RPG, is not knowing the mechanics. No matter what game we started with, our first playthrough was an uphill battle. I remember having to grind up to five-plus levels just to potentially beat a Gym, and now, I can do a lot of fights underleveled. To succeed in Pokémon, you need to know the relationship between eighteen different elements, as well as the stats, movepools, Types, and Abilities of over a thousand Pokémon. 

To further corroborate this, I should mention a YouTuber I watch who knows nothing about Pokémon: StephenPlays. He has a series of stream VODs archiving a playthrough he and his wife did of Pokémon Let’s Go. Let’s Go is Final Fantasy Mystic Quest-levels of aggressively easy; it gives XP out like candy, and doesn’t let you challenge any Gym without a Type advantage. However, they both struggled. Immensely. At the easiest games in the series. Why? Because they didn’t know the mechanics, especially with the Fairy Type being brought into Gen 1. 

By comparison, us veterans know the Type matchups, Abilities, and moves off of memory. In a casual campaign, we can eat everyone except maybe the final boss for breakfast (Gen 9 can be hard at points if you do it out of order, though). Randomizers and nuzlockes are the only ways for us to feel a challenge from them now, and sadly, the former is technically illegal (or, at the very least, will inject malware into your computer). 

Kids playing the “easy” newer games will definitely struggle. Also, since they’re the target audience, the stories of the games will—sadly—never go anywhere interesting. Let’s address it. People complain that the stories in the new games are simple, soulless, and boring, but honestly, I feel like it was ALWAYS that way. The difference is that they have a lot more escalation now. In Red & Blue, you went from fighting silly, incompetent criminals, to cultists who want to control literal gods. Despite this escalation, the stories remain cartoonishly simple.

Most importantly, they try and fail to have character development. People complain about characters being soulless now, but again, they were that way back then. The classic Gym Leaders and Pokémon League members in the beloved Gens 1-3 are no better than the newer ones; one-off people who sit in their buildings like hikikomoris. The newer games do put in a nonzero effort for SOMETHING; they actually have some moments. Sometimes, the brief impression of a Gym Leader that you do get from their Gym alone—such as with Larry—is actually sufficient to make a great character.

Unfortunately, the story only peaked exactly twice: Black & White, and Legends Arceus. In Black & White, the Gym Leaders all have established roles (and actually help you at the end), while it goes into Pokémon training ethics for the first time in the series. Sadly, they oversimplify Team Plasma with a classic “puppetmaster pulling the strings” plot twist; probably another consequence of these games being made for kids. Pokémon Legends: Arceus is the only game to give the main protagonist character development. They are a kid who somehow ended up in Sinnoh of the past, and is immediately regarded as an anomaly by the locals and often discriminated against. The endgame pulls out all the stops and it actually feels emotional. I’m betting that we complained less about the older games’ stories because we’re just nostalgic for them; the ones we played AS KIDS. 

The Manga Actually Looks Awesome, Though

Among One Piece and Jojo is a manga that has run for about as long: Hidenori Kusaka’s manga adaptation of Pokémon. Each Generation has a self-contained story starring both variants of the player character, but with actual personalities.

I haven’t actually read it, though, since it’s huge, not part of Viz Media’s subscription, and my local library is sorely lacking copies. I have skimmed through it and what I saw is actually kind of lit. Unlike the anime, it’s faithful to the game mechanics, while taking creative liberties to extend on the story and the otherwise unremarkable characters from each game. Maybe give it a shot if you’re a devout critic of the games. It won’t fix the games themselves, but it’ll be something.

Despite Its Flaws, Other Franchises Have Yet to Surpass Pokémon (Hot Take, I Know)

Pokémon was a big, important series in the creature collector subgenre, to the point where it almost monopolized the subgenre itself. Naturally, a series like Pokémon has rivals. Although many vocal people have pieces—both trollish and scholarly—about how any of those franchises are better than Pokémon, I have yet to encounter such a phenomenon. I have played at least one game from two of Pokémon’s rivals, and honestly, I don’t get it.

Digimon

I played through a Digimon game once: the first DS one (whatever it was called). Despite it still having a devoted fandom that insists it’s better than Pokémon, Digimon seems to have died off. It still has new games, but they never looked too amazing (and the Steam reviews I read of the new, visual novel-esque one were pretty mixed, leaning toward negative). The DS ones seemed to actually be among the highest regarded.

Mechanically, there are some things about Digimon that are neat… actually, one thing. The way evolutions work is a lot more interesting than Pokémon. Each Digimon has its evolutions displayed like a skill tree, along with their conditions. You dictate when they evolve, and you can also unevolve them to experience other paths without having to catch a new one. You’ll need to do this, because Digimon have a level cap that blocks them from certain paths, and unevolving them increases their level caps.

However, the positives end there. For starters, the game was super unbalanced around this core mechanic that they expect you to use. You think Pokémon is easy? I two-shot the final boss of this game, just by using its systems like they wanted me to! Digimon retain some base stats on unevolution, making them much stronger than they were the first time. Some of these evolutions require you to do this several times, and by then, a Level 1 baby Digimon will have three-digit base stats. If there is any depth or nuance to combat, it’s useless. In fact, I don’t even think there is anything, at least not from what I recall (it was MANY years ago that I played it). 

In addition, it was a lot emptier than Pokémon; even Gen 8 and its lousy overworld. Structurally, it’s a dungeon crawler, which is fine in theory, but in practice there is nothing to explore, no treasures, NO REPELS TO STAVE OFF ENCOUNTERS, no nothing. Furthermore, the designs are too intricate. Digimon oozes that 1990s-early 2000s aggressive edginess where they had to make everything as edgy as that damn fourth Chaos Emerald. The evolutions also have no logic whatsoever. The grass starter evolves into… an angel? Meanwhile, there’s some other little puppy Digimon that I recall evolving into either a tsuchigumo… or Funky Kong. 

Yo-kai Watch (henceforth known as Yokai Watch because the hyphen is unnecessary)

I played the first game through the main story and most of Psychic Spirits. I actually thought that this was the one to beat Pokémon. The idea of using Shinto mythology in a creature collector setting is brilliant, since there are SO MANY yokai, and Shinto itself kind of encourages making up new ones as you go. The dialogue is some of the best I’ve seen in any media geared toward children, and the designs are REALLY good; arguably better than that of any Pokémon. It has a traditional RPG equipment system, and no HM mechanics, allowing for better freedom in builds. Its overworld (especially in the sequel) is full of life, and has an excellent map for navigation.

However, the positives end there. Where do I even begin with all the issues—that Pokémon doesn’t have—which led to me rage-quitting this series that had so much promise? The first thing that comes to mind is that Yokai Watch has had the worst Western localization in any game this century; I honestly believe former members of 4Kids worked on it, and you can’t convince me otherwise. Even though it was before I did my proper research on Japanese culture, I had still wanted Yokai Watch to be a learning experience. However, I would be quite disappointed to know that pretty much every yokai (except for Jibanyan, his cousins, and certain others) have Westernized names. They are really good names for what they are, but I hated them as localization. I suppose they thought that kids would have trouble with the Japanese names, but the games have full voice acting, including each yokai saying its own name. Thus, there is no reason kids wouldn’t know how to pronounce the names since they would be spoken anyway. 

More importantly, however, is the borderline censorship of Japanese culture (or at least attempts) that I find comparable to the infamous onigiri-into-donuts of early anime. Despite how much they try to pass it off as America, there are Shinto shrines, shinkansen, an equivalent of Tokyo Tower (or Skytree?), and—most notably—an early cutscene in the second game where the main character inserts a 100 yen coin into a gacha machine, despite the currency being localized as USD. I doubt that this kid got his hands on an old-timey dollar coin (and actually spent it). 

I wish the localization was the worst; the gameplay is worse. FAR WORSE. First off, team building—despite what I just said about it—actually sucks. Yes, there is equipment and stuff, but that’s it. The problem is in yokais’ movepools. In Yokai Watch, each yokai has a physical attack, a magical attack, a support move, and a status move (I.I.R.C. of course; I do know the first two are correct). The problem is that yokai fall into specific roles, just like in Pokémon; dedicated physical/magical attackers, tanks, etc. However, the four moves they have are what they get (I think there are TM-like items but they’re rare). This means that most yokai will be stuck with a move that is completely worthless, such as a physical yokai with a magic move and vice versa.

Oh but it gets worse! People hate Pokémon’s reliance on RNG, but Yokai Watch is significantly worse. Virtually EVERYTHING about Yokai Watch’s gameplay is RNG-based. First off, catching new Yokai is awful. It’s a random chance after they are defeated. You might think “Good, then I don’t have to worry about weakening them and using items—” WRONG! In Yokai Watch, you must feed them their favorite food (and touch them in a certain spot in the second game) to increase your chances of catching them. However, even when consistently fulfilling all these conditions, it almost never works. To make it more luck-based, there are hearts that occasionally fly onscreen—AT RANDOM—that increase the odds further (but even with them it rarely worked). There are even static, unique yokai that are really powerful and can join your team once you beat them; key word “can”. Yes, even THEY are luck-based, although not as much as regular mobs. It’s stupid, since they are stronger than most bosses. 

The problem with this compounds on what truly makes Yokai Watch the borderline-unfun slog that it is; fully autonomous party members. In battle, all you can do is use items, rotate through your three active party members (out of six), direct them at a target, hit random powerups (like those hearts), and use yokais’ Soultimate moves. Every move in a yokais’ movepool is decided BY A.I. For catching, this means that your party can (and often will) murder yokai that you’re trying to catch before you can maximize your odds. However, just fighting with them is no fun either. Theoretically, yokai have fighting styles that—for the most part—synergize with their builds; physical yokai will generally use physical moves, etc. There are also items to change this style if you wish. However, this rarely worked for me. I’ve had physical yokai use magic moves and vice versa quite often. 

All this meshes into a game that’s about as easy as Pokémon. In regular battles, you just need one multi-targeting Soultimate to win. Boss battles are more fun, but they’re also stupid. Yokai Watch is a series that highly encourages inflicting status ailments; generally the sign of a well-built, strategy-driven RPG. However, unlike recent RPGs, bosses are universally immune to status! This means that if you have a status-based team, then you lose. Also, most difficulty really comes from the party not doing what you want. As much as Souls fans insist that intentionally programming the player character poorly makes for good difficulty, there comes a point where it just stops being fun.

Yokai Watch further becomes less fun in the overworld. We all hate the long encounter animations in Pokémon; the fanfare plays, the Pokémon appears, then your Pokémon appears… blah blah blah. In Yokai Watch, you have to bumble around EVERYWHERE to get a reading on your radar, then go into a minigame where you have to do some focus thing on the yokai to get it to appear, THEN you can fight! It’s nice that the radar shows yokai ranks to give you an idea of what’s there, but I’ve had times where I couldn’t get anything to spawn at all. Dungeons are better since they are classic, visible encounters, but that’s only half the battle. You also have to grind for money (a lot), and if you’re a completionist, then you must additionally grind for fish and bugs. Although the journal in the second game shows habitats of undiscovered critters, they are still a PAIN to find. They have different rarities, and a very strict quick-time event that you must beat to get them (also the timing is—of course—random). 

RNG also extends into the overworld. For some egregious reason, every single sidequest has a random chance of giving an additional bonus reward… or nothing. For completionists, this means that you must SAVE SCUM to get all the awards; specifically for the rare super bonus rewards that’re better than the regular ones. I always thought that some of the later quests had really powerful, one-of-a-kind items ONLY available through the super bonus; I at least know it’s the only way to get the best revival items. Also, a lot of yokai are only available through an RNG-based gacha that appears at the end of a nerve-wracking stealth minigame that occurs RANDOMLY. Seriously… I dunno. Maybe the newer ones are good, but the notion of Yokai Watch in the West is a pipe dream now, so I’ll never know for sure.

I Have Hope for Cassette Beasts, Though

People still try to topple Pokémon to this day. The most popular attempt in recent years is an indie game called Coromon. It looked great, and had built-in randomizer and nuzlocke modes. However, I was ultimately turned off by what I read about it on Steam. All Coromon have monotypes, and I.I.R.C., can’t even learn multiple moves types for utility like in Pokémon. Also, Shinies have better stats. While it’s nice that you get a reward for finding such rare critters… it also means actually having to grind 1/4000 odds to get the best party, and since the game is apparently quite difficult, you might actually have to even on a casual playthrough.

For the record, I know about Palworld and I’m not playing that either. Mechanically, it looks interesting; like Legends Arceus on steroids. However, I don’t like the whole “cute but actually dark and messed up” image. It pretty much always ends up resulting in something pretentious and politically charged, and insults the idea of embracing your inner child. My therapist’s son is a marine, and the whole pop culture trope of “all soldiers are mindless, remorseless killing machines” is an insult to our soldiers, and oversimplifies the complexities that occur behind closed doors (at least I hope that’s the case).

Anyway, this part is about an upcoming indie game called Cassette Beasts. It looks cool, has expansive mobility options, and the monster designs are really creative and very different from most creature collectors. It has an in-battle fusion system, and a table-flipping Type relations system where using specific Types on another can trigger status effects that help or hinder. There’s also dual typing (at least in fusion)! There is—again—more incentive to find Shinies, which are called Bootlegs this time. However, they don’t seem to have better stats, but are instead different monsters entirely. Honestly, the game looks really hard, strategy-driven, and complex, but I’ll still give it a shot. I just hope that they show previews of the results of your moves so you don’t have to memorize the Type matchups!

Conclusion

I will probably keep playing Pokémon, but I’m not really so sure what should be done to improve it. Part of me thinks that it might be better to not have overworlds or stories at all. The combat in Pokémon is incredibly deep and strategic when taken competitively. People love Stadium and its ilk; the spinoffs that are literally all battles. Pokémon Showdown allows anyone with a computer to build any team they want, right down to Nature, IVs, EVs, Abilities, etc. without grinding hundreds of hours in the main games to get that perfect Pokémon. Unfortunately, I have no real use for it, since I have no friends (and there’s no way I’m fighting randos). 

The obvious good idea is to expand on Legends Arceus. The series has deep and fascinating lore, and that game set up potential to experience this lore for yourself. It could extend to a game set during the Great Pokémon War, and give huge character development to Surge. Arceus still wasn’t particularly difficult, and it was REALLY grindy, but it was a quantum leap in the right direction. Scarlet & Violet, at the very least, had a memorable and dynamic overworld, with huge variety in landmarks and geography. It’s possible to make an Legends game in a traditional open world setting and have it be good. However, GameFreak has had a long habit of coming up with brilliant ideas exactly once and never using them again.

Well, assuming that you’ve read all the way to the end of this long rant, I’d like to know your opinions. Do you love or hate Pokémon? Does the series have any chance to improve, or has it actually been saved with the most recent games?

Having Restraint in a Capitalist Society is Hard: A Rant

by macksamson, posted in Miscellaneous, Rants

PREFACE: Okay, so, this post is going to come off as very petty considering what’s happening right now. However, when scheduling for this post to go out, I wasn’t expecting international order to crumble overnight! Anyway, the real caveat with this post is an announcement regarding the blog, so if you don’t care for my jibber-jabber, just skip to the end. Oh, and, love for Ukraine.

This little blurb is basically a follow-up to  my There’s Too Much: A Rant post. To sum up that post (if you choose not to read it), I’ve been struggling to keep up with the—for lack of a better word—excessive amount of stuff in the first world. Additionally, I seem to be the only one who’s struggling; everyone else I know seems to enjoy themselves just fine in this murk. Fortunately, I’ve been surviving… to an extent.

The main thing that’s been helping me buy less is that I purchased one expensive thing, namely, a new gaming laptop. It’s a beauty, and it cost more than a pretty penny. To pay off the darn thing, I have been forced to really dumb down the crap I buy, making room for ONLY what I truly want. To tell the truth, it’s been liberating. You can save hundreds by not buying something you don’t actually want. Who’da thunk it?

However, marketing is a thing, especially in a first-world country. They do a really compelling job at making you think you NEED something that you don’t want. By following the manga market, I’m bombarded by all the hot stuff that everyone likes that you GOTTA check out for yourself because it’s POPULAR. Even though, with me being myself, I rarely like anything popular. 

I at least have an excuse with that market: insufficient funding. The hardest place to have restraint, of all things, has been Western literature. Thanks to public libraries, books are essentially free. That means I have no excuse to NOT read all those books that Barnes & Noble’s been telling me will change my life forever. 

While I could just ignore all that crap, there’s another dimension to the book market, and to an extent, a lot of the market here in America these days. In essence, I’m referring to the amplification of diverse voices. It’s good that there’s so many of them, but the problem is how those books are essentially weapons in marketing. Thanks to all the months dedicated to particular races, I’ve felt crushed by not celebrating them. I mean, it’s not like one of those dumb themes like Pizza Month; these are reminders of what makes us human. Also, due to how humans work, they’ll just become obsessed with whatever thing’s the newest (with the exception of long-staying fan-favorites like The Hate U Give). It’s just become a never-ending battle; you can never consume enough diverse media to satiate the P.C. community.

Videogames have also become painful. Every month or so, something takes the world by storm until something else causes a new storm in its place. It’s exceptionally rare that I’m part of that. Pokémon Legends: Arceus is my first time playing a trendy videogame since, quite possibly, Breath of the Wild. And as you’re reading this post, Elden Ring and Horizon: Forbidden West are the new storms being watched (or would be if it weren’t for the storm over Ukraine, but in an okay world, that’s what would be happening). I also feel bad at the end of every year in ProtonJon’s community. Fans post their own game clearing spreadsheets to be Booru, and when I see how much more they’ve done and experienced than me, something inside me breaks. I really want to be selective, but in a society all about having and having, it feels like I’m at gunpoint every day that I’m not in possession of the newest and shiny thing.

In conclusion, I’m announcing yet another change to my blogging schedule. If I can successfully resist the siren song of consumerism, I will have way less material to discuss here. Also, buying new blogging material will be harder while gas prices increase. As such, posts will only be on Saturdays, effective immediately. Quality over quantity, baby!

Apparently, Triple-A Gaming is Scary: A Rant

by macksamson, posted in Gaming, Miscellaneous, Rants

I’m a Nintendo kid. Despite its shortcomings, such as terrible online servers (which I don’t use because I choose not to have friends), and games that don’t even remotely meet people’s expectations (that they continue to make despite negative feedback), I am prepared to follow them to the bitter end. In recent years, I’ve learned that many triple-A game studios are, for the most part, heartless swindlers, and Nintendo was the least of many evils.

One bad thing I’ve heard of is microtransactions in pay-to-win games. Normally, they show up in games that are free. However, I’ve heard of them showing up in a lot of games that cost money to buy, too (such as one of the Crash Bandicoot racing games). That’s pretty gross, but that’s only the tip of a much larger iceberg. And gamers are the Titanic.

The worst I had heard of was Bethesda, the creators of Fallout and Elder Scrolls. Their games are buggy; notoriously buggy. And. They. Don’t. Care. This studio rolls in millions of smackaroos by consciously putting out dysfunctional games that people still buy for some reason. Not only that, but some of the controversies I had heard of are actually illegal, such as a scam in Fallout ’76 Collector’s Edition merch, where people didn’t actually get what they paid for.

However, seeing is believing, and I had no idea just how bad triple-A gaming is; it’s gotta be the most corrupt consumer market next to car dealerships. I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but I bought a new gaming laptop. It’s small, but it’s a beast, and it can play pretty much any triple-A game coming out in the foreseeable future. There were some coming out this year that I actually wanted… and this is when I saw the corruption firsthand.

The first sign is Square Enix’s Forspoken. Apparently, PS5 games cost $69.99USD, but Forspoken costs that much on PC as well. According to the Steam forums, Forspoken will start a new precedent by Square Enix to gradually increase the price of all triple-A games… eventually topping off at $100USD. It’s not only disgustingly corrupt; it’s stupid. At this point, the only thing that this generation’s games have is better graphics, and to even appreciate those, you need to break out thousands on a TV that can support such ludicrous resolutions. And that’s not even taking into account the amount of these massively anticipated games that flop hardcore. Even if Forspoken was a good game—heck, even if it was a really good game that’s worth the money—buying it would only feed the beast.

Another problem is Bethesda’s Starfield. I ignored this game when it was announced, but recently, I’ve been watching Tom Fawkes play through Elder Scrolls IV: The Krug Khronicles. Elder Scrolls is my kind of game: open world sandbox, non-linear structure, a myriad of playstyles, and multiple solutions to quests. Bethesda has a good design philosophy… but sadly, they can’t—and won’t—execute it well. I would love to play Starfield, but it’s such a huge risk. As a weeb, I’m also interested in Ghostwire Tokyo. Although Bethesda’s merely its publisher, not its devs, they probably have the authority to tell the actual devs something like “So, if you happen to come across any bugs in the game’s programming, don’t do anything, ‘kay?”. They’ve gotten away with selling broken products for decades. In fact, people still buy their games despite this.

That last phrase is the real crux of the matter, isn’t it? Despite the glaring flaws that these games have, people buy them anyway. It’s almost like a vicious cycle. Square Enix can get away with what they’re pulling, because people will pay anything for the next big thing. I’ve lived through so many games that were supposed to “transcend reality” that ended up being mediocre disappointments. 

Us middle-class plebes boycotting a game won’t do much of anything, because of how the gaming landscape has changed. We have to factor in gamers, and I don’t mean people who play games as their hobby; I mean those who play games for a living. The algorithm is ruthless, and playing the right game at the right time is literally what puts a roof over their heads. Square Enix can raise their prices however high they want, for the professional gamers are obligated to buy any and all highly anticipated releases. They’ll shell out the triple-digit-dough for a special edition when applicable, especially when factoring in collectors. If Square Enix really plans to shift the market like this, they will succeed. It really won’t make any difference if I buy Forspoken or not. In fact, I’m tempted to get it day 1 because it would be an interesting experience to be part of the inevitable controversy surrounding its main protagonist, since apparently having a Black female lead protagonist in 2022 is utterly outrageous.

In addition to all that, we have to worry about these things called NFTs (short for Non-Fungible Tokens). I had heard of them on the Disc Only Podcast, where they were alluded to as harbingers of the apocalypse (I distinctly recall one person in chat responding with “We live in a dystopia”). No one on the podcast actually explained what NFTs were, so it meant they were a big enough deal to assume that everyone knew what they were. Of course, I didn’t because I’m me. Based on what I looked up, NFTs are simply the digital equivalent to a certificate of authentication on a collector’s item. The most corrupt aspect about them just seems to be the fact that rich people have spent millions on them, as opposed to giving that money to charities. I don’t quite know how they will bring ruin to our lives, but apparently, if they become incorporated into videogames, us consumers will suddenly find ourselves with empty wallets and no First Amendment.

The objectively better thing to do is back out and play indie games. While these smaller teams can still make equally bad decisions as triple-A studios (possibly even more-so), they at least cost less, at most half the price of a triple-A game. Best case scenario, you’ll have something that’s just as good as, if not better than, most triple-A games at their finest. Indie games will likely not be affected by an increase in triple-A game prices; in fact, it would only make people flock over to their more affordable games instead. I’m already stoked for this year’s indie titles, with Sea of Stars, SacriFire, and Slime Rancher 2 to name a few (oh right, I gotta upload my review of the first game eventually…). Not to mention that Nintendo still has a promising lineup of $59.99USD games, such as Pokémon Legends: Arceus, Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Mario and Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, Splatoon 3, and more. In fact, listing these titles off already made me more excited for them.

Speaking of Nintendo, I want to end this off positively. Not all of these studios are bad; you just have to look past the ads blaring “NEXT-GEN GRAPHICS” and whatnot. Some triple-A games are actually worth the $59.99USD, and not just Nintendo. For example, Yakuza is a very beloved SEGA I.P. that I’ve never once heard any of these con-art stories from. Also, I’ve been playing Grounded in Early Access. It’s by Obsidian, which is—I believe—a triple-A studio. I’ve really loved it, even in Early Access (although I can’t get any achievements because I don’t have an Xbox account and have to play offline). There are no absolutes in the infinitely complex world of gaming, except for “absolute wastes of money.” 

So, the moral of the story? Don’t play triple-A games, and don’t take up gaming as a career. Okay, that might be an exaggeration, but you should be wary of how the market is because it is capitalism at its rudest. What is your experience with the con artists who make up triple-A studios? Have you converted to indie games because they’re cheaper?

There’s Too Much: A Rant

by macksamson, posted in Miscellaneous, Rants

Okay, well, this post is probably something you can all relate to, and probably something someone has said in much more scholarly capacity. But similar to a certain minor disease that’s been circling around for a while, people must keep complaining about it over and over again as if that would make it go away even though it doesn’t! And today’s topic is something that can only get worse down the road: there’s too much stuff. 

It’s a classic first-world problem; the compulsion to consume media to the point where your actual life becomes forfeit. The first and easiest solution is to stop. However, what else would I do? Should I just toil at my job for forty hours a week, go to bed, and rinse-and-repeat until I die? Since I am an autistic man who has not attempted to make friends, fictitious worlds are all I got.

This issue is additionally difficult by nature of the mediums I enjoy. The Japanese literature industry is the one area I know of that does not have enough subscription services. Viz is a lifesaver, but it only applies to specific titles. Everything else I gotta pay a fat, flat rate on. It’s tough, to be honest. Maybe, in the far future, BookWalker will offer a full-on subscription service? Yes, I know they have a subscribe-to-series for Kodansha titles but that’s not the same thing. Basically, if I reviewed anime, I could get more content for much less than what I’m paying now.

Fortunately, I have managed to lessen the burden. I now have just enough time for YouTube, reading, music, and videogames. Unfortunately, I have to veto a lot of stuff that I like. There are some things that I want to finish, such as World Trigger or Jujutsu Kaisen, but they’re very long and I just don’t know if they’re completely worth it. I’ve already gotten to the point where I ignore 90% of all upcoming light novels that come out on BookWalker. For music, I also have to accept that I cannot learn any band’s discography in its entirety, and most fans probably haven’t either. My new mantra has been “There’s other fish in the sea.”

The issue is, of course, trying to figure out what basket you want to put your precious eggs in. I have low self-esteem, so I always find myself thinking my opinions are wrong whenever I read a review that doesn’t agree with my stance. And there’s always the possibility that I just “didn’t get to the point where it gets really, REALLY good”, even though something like 170-odd chapters of Black Clover should be more than enough of an impression. On the flipside, Mashle is a better-paced, funnier, and more engaging version of Black Clover. The same goes with Undead Unluck over Jujutsu Kaisen. Both manga are about magic kids who fight demons that embody human wrongdoing, yet Undead Unluck is way more creative, has better characters, and SIGNIFICANTLY better pacing. And yet, if I look hard enough, I’ll find a glowing review of Jujutsu Kaisen and I’ll feel bad for not hard-committing to it instead. I’ll need to make myself as confident IRL as I sound on my blog reviews.

As much as I rag on anime, I can thank the community for teaching me to let go. Each season, people get so passionate about anime as they air, just to forget about it. They have these massive emotional reactions, from hating a show so much it offends them as human beings, to loving a waifu enough to troll on her behalf. All of this just to seemingly forget the show happened once the next batch of hype drops.

As someone who takes words literally, I’ve begun to learn that there is no entertainment medium that is better than the other. There are so many all-encompassing reviews and blurbs about how “this particular thing will change your life and make you an altogether better human being”, but that’s objectively wrong. You can like something however much you want, but stuff is stuff. It’s just entertainment, and it’s up to each individual to decide which stuff is their stuff.

With all this said and done, I want to allude to a warning of potential long-term changes to the blog. I’ve been reevaluating my priorities for the sake of my mental and financial health. This comes with the likely possibility that I will abandon the bulk of the manga and light novel medium, which was why I originally started the blog. As someone who’s experienced a lot of stuff from different mediums, I’ve realized they each have their pros and cons, but no one is more “special” than the others. There will always be “worthwhile” things to indulge in with each. Basically, what I’m saying, is if I have to make this primarily a gaming and music review blog—the two mediums I had initially covered the least of—just so I can have more than zero dollars in my bank account, then so be it. I have no idea where this blog is going, so I ask you to be patient as I try to figure that out.

In conclusion, this has been a weird mess of a post. Sometimes, you gotta vent your emotional insecurities. If you want to leave a comment on how you feel in this stimulus-savvy world, then by all means. You can also tell me I’m crazy if you want.

Why the Cyberpunk Genre is Stale: A Rant

by macksamson, posted in Miscellaneous, Rants

The cyberpunk genre is definitely not as huge as it was in the late Twentieth Century, but it’s still a genre that a lot of people love and think is mindblowing. But as I said in my first impressions of the manga, No Guns Life, I find the genre to be not-so-mindblowing. In fact, it’s second only to romance (ROMANCE!) as my least favorite genre of all time. This rant details why, based on my admittedly small experience with the genre.

The Human Condition, Turns Out, is Pretty Conditional

To begin this passage, I’ll tell you about a memoir I came across, once for no particular reason (as in there’s no particular reason why I came across it, not why I’m telling you about it). I forgot its title, but it was published in the early 2000s, and it was about a deaf person who willingly signed up to have a computer installed that would essentially replace their dysfunctional human ears. According to the book’s description, the person had an existential crisis and began to question whether or not they were human, simply because they were hearing a “digital interpretation of a real sound instead of the real sound” or something. Although I never read it, coming across this book is one thing that made me question the popularity of cyberpunk.

Why would you have an existential crisis over one part of your body being a machine? I’ve seen this trope before. The main character sometimes has a robot arm or something, making them a cyborg, and then they’re all like “I’m not so human anymore.” My grandfather, who I love dearly, got an intramuscular pacemaker implanted in his heart, and it’s been proving to be one of the best health decisions he’s ever made. But by cyberpunk logic, he would no longer be considered my grandfather, let alone a human being, because the organ that gives him life is not entirely “organic”.

Beyond the scope of cybernetic augments, the trope makes cyberpunk extremely pretentious because it’s all under the notion that humans are special. Sure, we’ve evolved abnormally fast and done some crazy things, but that doesn’t make us special. There’s this one episode of the Neil DeGrasse Tyson reboot of Cosmos where he goes down a list of different animals who display traits that are conventionally thought of as distinctively human. It shows that we aren’t that much different from other species. Because of this, the big “What makes us human?” question that often frames the cyberpunk genre seems pretentious to me. And for the record, that’s why I hate the word “human” as an adjective for a well-written character arc.

“Robotic Overlords”

I’ve seen enough cyberpunk to differentiate between cyborgs and androids. While the previous passage mainly focused on cyborgs, this one will focus on androids, and A.I.’s in general. Androids are 100% machines, built from scratch, with the  intention to be sentient. Out of all the cyberpunk tropes, these guys can at least be done in an interesting way, if done well. But of course, I find them to almost never be done well.

Part of it is because it feels like nobody has bothered trying anything new with them in the past forever. While not technically cyberpunk, Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot did something important with the android trope in the Three Laws of Robotics. To sum them up in one sentence, the Three Laws of Robotics are a set of codes that make it so androids cannot harm humans, and also have to protect humans over themselves. The fact that this essentially robs what are technically living, sentient beings of their rights as people does raise some legitimate questions. But sadly, it feels like writers just repeatedly ask this same question over and over again in cyberpunk.

The whole “humans are special” stigma also applies to androids at times. If there’s one that isn’t evil, it usually hates its own existence. They observe humans and are all like “Wow, emotions are beautiful. Why don’t I have those?” They would give anything to be human, but the fact that they even want something means that they kind of already have what they wanted in the first place. The problem is that I’ve never seen any progress with the trope after the character arc of Data from Star Trek: Next Generation.

Like I said before, androids are the smallest problem I have with cyberpunk. But A.I. are worse. Technically, androids are A.I., but I’m kind of referring to sentient computer programs as opposed to humanoid machines. I’ve never seen this character type done in a way that’s interesting. They’re either some Mr. or Ms. Existential Crisis that—like Data—wants to be human, or something that wants to take over the world “for the good of the human race.”

A recent example of me having been disappointed by an A.I. is  a visual novel that I watched YouTuber NintendoCaprisun play a while back: Eliza. Again, I don’t know if it counts as cyberpunk, but I wanna talk about it anyway. Eliza is about the titular A.I. program, programmed to serve as a therapist. This could’ve been interesting, but nope, they cop out big time. Eliza feeds prompts to a human proxy to read aloud to the client as a form of A.I. therapy. I had hope with Eliza in that first client, when it was able to essentially pretend that the human proxy itself was  speaking to the client, when they were actually still reading the prompts. But from there, it goes south. All Eliza can do is provide a preconceived response to every patient, which doesn’t help them, and it concludes by making them load up on prescription drugs. And when you’re able to deviate from the A.I.’s responses at the end of the game—Whaddya ya know?—it low-key instantly helps everyone. Instead of making us consider the possibility that A.I. could be used as a psychiatrist, they do the “normal” thing and make it bad. I want to say that the message of the game is that A.I. technology is at such an infant stage that no one really knows what the future holds. But with the way the game presents itself, and the fact that its main antagonist wants to use Eliza to steal people’s information for his company’s gain—a typical conspiracy theory trope—I’m led to believe that they didn’t have the guts to challenge conventional thinking. The game slanders conspiracy theories left and right in its dialogue, but sadly, doesn’t practice what it preaches.

Don’t Believe Everything You Hear On the Internet

The Eliza part of the rant feeds into this passage. Cyberpunk first came around during a genuinely scary time in U.S. history, and it kind of warranted the social commentaries. But these days, it feels like the basis for cyberpunk is in the toxicity of social media.

You see, the media thrives on attention. And to generate attention, they have to present the news in a way to make people buy it. Sadly, because of how the human mind works, people are more interested in something negative than positive. As a result, the media will present certain bits of information and withhold other bits in such a way to make it seem that the world is ending. Many people know this and try to shrug it off, but there’s a very vocal, vulnerable part of society who will take it to heart, and if you have a social media account, you will be bombarded with this constant cynicism.

Some of these cyberpunk worlds, and dystopian worlds in general, are ruled by censorship and facist governments, and they’re supposed to be an allegory to our own society. And just… no. Ever since the U.S. federal government formed, people  seem to live under the impression that the president can—at any time—just do whatever he wants, without checks and balances. The U.S. Constitution was made specifically so that it doesn’t happen, even if George Washington and Alexander Hamilton both knew that the country’s political climate would go to hell. If I can’t take our actual society seriously, I can’t take a fictitious world based off of it seriously.

Am I wrong about this? I admit that I’m pretty out of the loop with society, and it often feels like I live in a different world. Everyone else seems to legitimately believe that George Orwell’s 1984 is happening right now, even though the book was an allegory to Communism. Also, they act like censorship is a current, prevailing issue in this century that’s rapidly worsening, as if the government can just disappear anyone at anytime, like in that “F.B.I. open up!” meme. I have no idea where people get this impression, and maybe that’s because I’m falling for that very censorship. How about I move on before I continue to counter-argue with my own post?

Oh No, My American Values!

I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a bad person, but I feel like a lot of writers are not willing to explore the less comfortable themes of cyberpunk. It’s not really anyone’s fault; people are raised on whatever cultural values of, well, whatever place they grow up. Cyberpunk is supposed to explore some darker areas, but in my experience, they take anything that an average person would fear, and don’t bother turning that fear into interest.

My biggest example is Arc of a Scythe (assuming it’s a cyberpunk). I covered it in detail once before, but basically, it’s set in a world where immortality is achieved, and specific humans are hired to govern all death in the human population. If it sounds scary to you, then you’re probably an average person. The author does the basic, obvious thing and makes the idea objectively terrible. A system like this could work, given an insane number of background checks, but in the context of the story, it’s the typical “absolute power corrupts absolutely”. No room for interpretation. And why? Because the idea is too uncomfortable. 

This also gets hammy when it comes to messing with individuality, something I’ve learned is highly prioritized, in the U.S. in particular. You know, the opposite of Spock’s famous “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” line. I most often see this tackled with the issue of altering people’s memories. First off, while the idea is scary, how the crap are we supposed to have that technology? The only way we can give someone false memories is to meet an amnesiac and tell them incorrect information about their identity. I sincerely doubt it’s possible to use technology to inject someone’s brain with an entire prefabricated lifetime. The other application is making an A.I. and giving it a real human’s memories. While that is also scary, my argument is: what’s the practicality of doing that?! That’s just a critical system error waiting to happen, and with how expensive they are, you don’t want to do that. Regardless of how this trope is handled, individuality is pushed to the Nth degree. It’s annoying, especially given COVID, where that individuality made people not willing to follow protocols for the sake of national health.

A great example of this tired trope being subverted is Ghost in the Shell, which I can at least admit is one of the better cyberpunks out there. SPOILERS for the ending: Kusanagi willingly fuses with another cyborg, and it’s painted as a good thing. What an outlandish turn of events, and all it took was coming from a country that’s not as uppity about the self as the U.S. of A!

One final thing I need to mention, which happens to be short enough to not get its own section, is that I have autism. As a result of living in society as someone with autism, I’ve had to study my own mind in order to combat my many anxieties; something I’m still doing to this day. So when the blurb says “This made me really look at the world and myself differently”, they probably mean that, since it actually WOULD be their introduction to such deep thoughts. My lack of interest in cyberpunk themes can easily be chalked up to the fact that I’ve already done the deep thinking that the genre is supposed to make you do for the first time.

A Silver Lining

Not to toot my own horn, but I’m nowhere near as conditional as a lot of other people on the Internet. I’ve seen so many comments from people who act like it’s written in stone that “generic protagonists” or “simplistic narratives” are objectively bad. Despite how much I rag on romance and slice-of-life, I enjoy some very specific ones. And I think the same for cyberpunk as well. The aforementioned Ghost in the Shell is one example. Furthermore, despite everything I’ve said, they still have some good entertainment value from their visually appealing settings (almost all of which look vaguely like Tokyo, which is a bonus for me), sexy sci-fi outfits, high-octane action, electronic soundtracks that pack ambience as well as adrenaline.

I might have ended up ranting about science fiction as a whole and not just cyberpunk (which is ironic because I had a separate rant about that). In any case, cyberpunk really isn’t as stale as I claimed in the post title. Like every other genre, 90% of it is crap. While it still bothers me that people actually think that this media rooted in archaic Red Scare thinking has any kind of accurate representation of our future, the genre is at least more respectable than romance.

Postscript

Look, full transparency here. This whole post was me trying to make a Hail Mary pass at disputing the common consensus that stuff like 1984 are accurate to our current society. Honestly, given my anxieties, I am actually all too willing to take cyberpunk worlds as accurate portrayals of our future. I mean, how many U.S. election results have been falsified? That, in addition to COVID data, including the stats on the CDC’s own website? I’ve also seen, in limited capacity, the notion that hackers are developing A.I. to pose as world leaders. Also, I don’t think I’m alone when it comes to feeling that crushing pressure to consume the same predetermined set of media, lest I be cast off from the human race.

But at the same time, what if it’s not society at all, and cyberpunk is just as BS as I made it out to be. Recently, I’ve had to dive into my own mind, and learn how human insecurities work. Our anxieties are not directly caused by society, but by how we respond, emotionally, to the stimulus from society. Basically, what if—in the same way that the media uses topics like illegal immigrants and minorities (which have real issues) as scapegoats for America’s problems—we use allegedly corrupt governments and censorship as scapegoats for our own individual problems? In that case, cyberpunk is just a shallow method to reaffirm those beliefs.

Look, I know America is not perfect; it never was. But at the same time, the Founding Fathers were idiots for making the American Dream something as impossible as a perfect nation. Sorry for rambling… Basically, cyberpunk can be a great subgenre, I just try to take it with a grain of salt.

Project Winter is Better than Among Us: A Rant

by macksamson, posted in Gaming, Miscellaneous, Rants

If you’re reading this, then the unthinkable has happened: One of the biggest gaming trends of 2020 has managed to stay trendy into an entirely separate year. Yes, even an uncultured swine such as myself has been aware of Among Us, the game that coined the term “sus”, which is a shortened version of the word “suspicious”. As to be expected, things that are trendy tend to be inferior to a more niche product of its ilk. In this case, an online multiplayer deception game known as Project Winter is significantly better, and I will detail why.

Just take my claims with a grain of salt; I have not played either game myself. One of my biggest gripes with online multiplayer games is that they’re considered so great, despite the fact that you need eight or more friends in order to play them at all. That kind of hurts what little confidence I have; it’s as if having over eight friends is NORMAL in life. Personal issues aside, I at least have some confidence in this post because I have watched many-a gaming video of both games, specifically those uploaded by ZeRoyalViking and ChilledChaos (who you should watch by the way because they have really good multiplayer gaming videos). 

How to Play

Before getting into the topic at hand, I must explain the basic mechanics of both games, just in case someone is as uncultured as I am. In Among Us, you are a bunch of little bean astronauts who are marooned in a base that needs fixing. They all must fix the various areas of the facility to win. However, there are two imposters who can kill crewmates. No one is able to speak while walking around in Among Us, except in two circumstances: either someone reports a dead body, or uses one of their limited uses of the Emergency Meeting button. This triggers a brief period where the players can talk to one another, and eject a player through voting; their only way to defeat an imposter. If the crewmates finish all tasks or defeat all imposters, they win. But if the imposters kill enough people so that there is one crewmate left for every imposter, then the imposters win.

In Project Winter, a group of people are stranded in a randomly generated frozen world. In half an hour, a giant blizzard will appear and snuff the life out of them. They must quickly craft, hunt, and repair in order to call a rescue vehicle to save them. However, there are two traitors in the group, who must try to stop the survivors’ efforts. Both traitors being felled DOES NOT declare survivor victory; the only way survivors can win is for at least one of them to escape. Traitors must see every survivor fall; even if they themselves die, it still counts as long as they bought enough time for the Mega Blizzard to finish off the survivors.

Among Us: Pros

Among Us is the more accessible of the two games. It can be played on pretty much any system, including mobile devices. That makes it so anyone can play! It’s also a lot simpler, since you don’t talk to people for that long. 

What makes Among Us fun is the lack of communication. Imposters must take advantage of what the crewmates know or don’t know in order to build abilis for themselves. Both sides have a good number of tools at their disposal. Imposters can use vents to quickly travel around the map (as long as they aren’t seen), such as getting a kill and quickly escaping the crime scene so that no one’s like “Uh I saw that guy walking away from the body”. They can also shut off the lights, or trigger a nuclear explosion that instantly gives them the win if two people do not stop it together, which also gives the imposters an opportunity to off two people. 

It would be too easy if imposters could just kill willy-nilly. Both imposters have a kill cooldown, and they need to try to act as “un-sus” as possible during that time. Crewmates also have access to cameras, which can be decisive evidence if a killer is caught in the act. Imposters can talk during the meetings to spread discourse among the crew. They can also stick with players for long periods without killing them in order to “marinate” them. Crewmates will need to be clever, and observe every insignificant detail of the players’ pathing; one of them could’ve used a vent (or you could be Ze who gets accused just by walking around).

Among Us: Cons

I don’t know if they fixed it, but one of the dumbest things in Among Us is the fact that the codes for private lobbies are constantly displayed at the bottom of the screen (and since Ze and Chilled have not moved their webcams from that spot, I assume the issue’s still there). That’s just plain dumb. 

As far as gameplay is concerned, things can get stale fast. I don’t know if playing Among Us is better or worse with experience. Rookies are likely to play with settings like Visual Tasks, which show animations to all players and can guarantee someone as a crewmate, or Confirm Ejects, which will tell you if you offed an imposter through voting. With those disabled, the game is more fun… or is it?

In an experienced lobby, there are so many nuances that are just understood that it almost puts an unfair advantage in favor of crewmates. Imposters usually spend time standing next to a task to “fake” it. But when you’re a veteran, you know the exact amount of time—down to the second—that it takes to finish a task, and there aren’t many that they can defend themselves with (like the asteroids or card swipe tasks). It’s also understood that the imposters will clarify whom the crew is voting against during a meeting, just so they can off a crewmate. Experienced players also have a system on when to vote and when to abstain based on the amount of people left, which can be used against them by imposters, but still makes games redundant.

There are also a lot of little “cheap” things that anyone can do. The Emergency Meeting button cools down faster than the Imposters’ kill button, but the Imposters’ sabotage ability is ready to go right after a discussion. With good timing, imposters can kill the lights or set off the reactor to where their cooldown is complete before the crew can fix those areas (since the Emergency Meeting won’t work during a sabotage). If they only need one kill (or two if both are still alive) in order to win at that point, then they win. The only way for crewmates to prevent a double kill is for one of them to mash the shortcut key for interacting with something in order to potentially report the first person’s body the instant before they themselves are killed, but it’s not always possible.

Crewmates also have annoying perks. They can stick together, making it impossible for imposters to win unless they get the rare “stack kill” (but even then, it’s possible to tell who did it because of subtle details with the server’s latency). The crewmates can also have someone camp the light fixtures, instantly fixing them as soon as they go out, disabling the imposters’ best tool. There’s also a rock in one particular map that someone can hide behind and catch someone using the nearby vent. Overall, I feel like Among Us can quickly devolve into the same thing over and over again. The whopping three maps don’t help its case either.

Project Winter: Pros

Unlike Among Us, everyone talks constantly. However, Project Winter has proximity chat; a piece of 21st Century technology that dynamically adjusts the volume of players’ voices in the call based on their distance. Things get more interesting thanks to the radio items. By pressing the CTRL key, you can talk to anyone who has the same color radio over any distance. Traitors also get a free red radio to coordinate on. 

Project Winter plays like Minecraft; you have to worry about hunger and warmth along with your actual HP. You can cook food, and craft weapons and resources. Every game of Project Winter requires you to fix two facilities located somewhere on the map. These can require sets of mechanical parts, electronic scrap, and gasoline, or batteries and buried pieces spread throughout the world.

What makes Project Winter fun for traitors is having to hold a conversation with the survivors, while also coordinating with each other over their radio. Imposters get better firepower and items through traitor-only boxes found throughout the map, but obviously, they cannot be seen opening them. The ideal strategy for traitors is to spread discourse among the survivors. While they can try to get survivors alone, it would look extra sus if they were the only one of two people to return to the hub area. If tasks are being done, they can try to sneak a sabotage on the repaired objectives. Unlike Among Us, traitors can still try to win even if caught. There is a voting system to exile them from the hub, but they can easily live off of traitor crates around the world. 

Nature itself will try to mess with the crew. Wild animals will attack, for starters. Also, random events will occur. They can scatter boxes throughout the map, or do things like make everyone go crazy, turning them into bunnies who look indistinguishable from one another (a perfect opportunity for a traitor to launch a surprise attack). While not nature-related, there’s also the possibility that an escape pod will spawn, allowing one player to abandon the mission and secure a win for themselves (like Ze did in that one video).

I’ll admit that Project Winter wasn’t at its best in earlier versions, but it gets a lot more depth with current patches. One notable addition is that of roles, special abilities that both traitors and survivors can have. You can have a scientist, able to bring a player back to life at a special area on the map (although that player will be muted), or a hacker who can open bunkers by themselves. There’s also the defector, a survivor who can open traitor crates; an easy alias for traitors to claim.

Project Winter gets even MORE interesting with its new Blackout mode. In the Blackout, there is only one traitor. However, that traitor can convert survivors to traitors in one of two ways: as a Demon, they can revive a downed player to convert them, and as a Whisperer, they can use an AOE attack to slowly fill up a traitor gauge and convert players. It’s a really good, long-con style mode that can go south for the survivors if the traitor manages to convert several people (although one of them could accidentally throw when they get converted for the first time by yelling out “They made me a traitor!” in a panicked stupor). There are also some scary new events, like darkness covering the whole map (except for traitors, who can see with “red vision”), and sending the spirits of all the animals that players have killed against them. Blackout also has the yeti, a neutral role who cannot be converted, and must merely live to the end of the game to win, even if it means siding with the traitors.

Project Winter: Cons

Since I obviously like this game better, there aren’t as many issues. One annoying traitor tactic is the ability to steal necessary parts to repair facilities and hiding them behind structures (which cannot be seen due to the fixed camera). There’s also the fact that dead players can use their chill ability on the traitors to send a message from beyond the grave. This isn’t necessarily a flaw, as dead traitors can also use this to spread discourse, but I doubt it was the dev’s intention for the dead powers to be used this way. Inventory management is also abysmal, even by survival game standards. 

The Most Important Ingredient for Both Games…

The thing with online multiplayer games comes down to one simple monniker: they are only as good as those you are playing them with. The digital world is full of toxic people. But even in private lobbies, you get bad games of Among Us AND Project Winter, even with your personal friends. This passage is probably because I’ve only watched YouTubers play these games. I get that they’re entertainment, but it’s annoying when they throw “for content” (even if Tay killing everyone because of Chilled getting her to write Ze’s name from beyond the grave was pretty hilarious). 

I’ll admit that a bad Project Winter match is worse than a bad Among Us match. Everyone in Ze’s group has good enough experience in Project Winter to know exactly what to do, yet Ze tends to be the only one who actually tries to help, even as a traitor! The others, even as crewmates, will just mess around, and sometimes consider offing someone for shits and giggles (however, I’ll admit that the one time Chilled made poison berries and stuck them in the community chest was pretty funny). It’s unfair for both sides, because the survivors would be losing a valuable person, or they could just get a lucky BS shot on a traitor. While it does capture that “survival drama” feeling really well, it’s annoying to see only one person (i.e. Ze) carry the game EVERY SINGLE TIME. 

Overall, Project Winter at its best is a really fun experience. There’s more opportunities for role-playing, which can be really fun if you have really good friends. The random maps make it to where you can’t just memorize everything like in Among Us, requiring players to not just play fast, but learn fast. And even if the traitors get a really good gun, it’s possible for a survivor to win with just punches (even if it’s unlikely). 

Conclusion

It’s pretty consistent in popular culture: the less depth, less thinking required, and more accessible something is, the more popular it’ll become. Project Winter takes a lot to get used to—but dammit—it’s better than Among Us by a longshot! Well, that’s another item on my list of popular things I don’t like. I think the lesson learned is that gaming is better if you have eight or more friends… Man, there goes my confidence again.

I Miss Hard Science Fiction: A Rant

by macksamson, posted in Miscellaneous, Rants

Honestly, I don’t even know if I wanna post this, but it’s something that’s bothered me for a couple of years and I wanted to get off my chest. If you’re familiar with my other rants, you’d know that I had very different tastes back when I was a teenager. I was SO edgy, I did things that not even edgy kids did. For music, I only listened to classic rock. For movies, I only watched old movies; from classics like Dead Poets Society to freaking Spellbound (which is a boring slog that’s only any good in the climax). And for books… I read hard science fiction. 

Hard? Haha, like a—

I know it’s a euphemism, but hard science fiction is a genre. Think of popular science fiction like Star Wars. Epic battles, witty dialogue, memorable characters, spectacular spectacle… Now, think of the opposite of all that; think of Star Wars’ rival older cousin, Star Trek. Slow pacing, tons of dialogue, tackling some very difficult ethical issues… That is hard science fiction. 

As implied by the title, hard science fiction is meant to read like a history book of the future. And also implied by the title, it’s difficult. Perhaps more difficult than any genre to comprehend. They really pour everything into trying to make their worlds as immersive as possible, and it’s a damn undertaking. Tolkein was impressive enough with his Middle Earth. But hard SF authors had to do the same thing, only with multiple star systems, each with as much history as Middle Earth itself. Most adults would have a hard time reading it, and as a teenager, well… Results varied.

Greg Bear

Okay, so, technically, my first hard SF novel was Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But, well, that one is just technically a satire and definitely not meant to read like a future history (right?). However, when I first bought it, I saw some books by a Greg Bear next to it. And, well, after finishing Hitchhiker’s (and almost having my brain fall out), I tried out some good ol’ Bear. You saw the last two words of the previous passage, right?

The first novel of his I read was called Darwin’s Radio. The premise was simple.: Sscientists discover ancient cave drawings (or something) that show that mankind has been slowly evolving into a new species. There was a lot of dialogue, a lot of which was just buildup to the revelation that mankind has been evolving in the first place (oops, spoilers).

As expected, racism is the immediate public response (side note: one of my most distinct memories is Bear actually writing in dialogue from a certain someone who I can’t name because he was a celebrity until people realized he was a rapist. But it’s still funny how it makes the novel dated due to whom Bear chose). This isn’t “racism” as we know it today; unlike people with other ethnicities, this is a legit new species. And another curveball is that mankind had a decent basis to become racist. Due to how evolution and natural selection works, Homo sapien was essentially going to go extinct due to this new species, and thus they respond in fear, which is expressed in the form of racism. 

I remember being both bored and engaged with the novel at the same time. It was weird, but I loved it. There was also a sequel, Darwin’s Children, but all I remember is that there’s some kind of concentration camp for kids of the new species and it’s supposed to make us, the readers, angry that they’re being treated that way. One big issue with both novels is that they had incredibly loose endings. To this day, I have no idea if Bear wrote a third book (or if he even still writes). 

The Bear doesn’t stop there! I was hooked enough on his writing prowess to read a rather thick standalone novel: The City at the End of Time. This book went places. What I remember most is that there were these people who had these emblems and had to stop… something from happening. It was nonsense for the sake of nonsense, from the objects getting folded and crumpled into incomprehensible shapes, to cats guiding some guy through some weird castle. Beautifully written, but with no purpose nor meaning. After this, I would read several pretty lackluster standalones from Bear, and then…

I read Queen of Angels. A lot of positive reviews consider this his best novel, and I definitely agree. It had two different plots going on at once. Half of the book focused on this old guy (that I remember picturing as Jerry Stiller for some reason) who was supposed to investigate a murder, which would eventually involve entering the accused’s consciousness, and the other half was about some other guy who had to help an A.I. attain sentience. It was an amazing mess, with themes focusing on mental health and what constituted as being sane in the first place. It iconically ends with an entire page of I’s spelling out a giant capital I. Hilariously enough, it’s actually part one (or even part two) of a four-book series, and I didn’t know that because it ended so loosely, like all of Bear’s other books. I have not read Queen of Angel’s sequels to this day.

Kevin J. Anderson and Stephen Baxter

I was mixed towards Greg Bear. Afterwards, I would try to read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, and fail spectacularly. It was too large in scope for me to handle, and I have always wanted to re-attempt at reading it to completion someday. However, after having given up the ghost with Foundation at the time, Kevin J. Anderson and Stephen Baxter would help hook me on hard SF.

Anderson writes books closer to Star Wars in pacing and action, but with more hard SF scope and mind-bending concepts. His epic series, Saga of the Seven Suns, was the first long book series I was able to read to completion (yes, before Harry Potter), and I remember it being great. I also read the much more recent sequel trilogy, Saga of Shadows, but I don’t recall it being as good.

If Anderson was the weak attack that staggered me, Stephen Baxter was the heavy finishing blow. I only read two novels from him, but they were bangers. I forgot their names, but I definitely didn’t forget what they were about. In one, the main character is trying to find his missing ex (or something), and stumbles upon a secret cult of women who have lived underground for so long that they evolved into an entirely different species. The other one is supposed to have been that book’s sequel, even though it’s set about a million years in the future, and involves some guy who needs to fight aliens… of some kind. Baxter wrote a lot of wild stuff, but my library decided not to stock them. He would’ve become one of my favorites if I had more access to his bibliography.

Alastair Reynolds and Peter F. Hamilton

Now I was getting into the good stuff! I recall Alastair Reynolds and Peter F. Hamilton being real good at incorporating crazy ideas in ways that were relatively easy to comprehend thanks to their writing prowess. Their novels felt like narratives, and not history books. 

My library had a lot of stuff from Reynolds in particular, so I was more familiar with his works. He was definitely the more imaginative of the two authors discussed in this section. To list off a few examples, Reynolds’ novels include but are not limited to: a disease that fuses people with nearby machines, a mad scientist plan of reversing a planet’s rotation, someone getting cut into 150 individual pieces while still being alive (sort of like Law in One Piece), and some alien race’s simulation of an alternate 1950s where WWII never happened, which was also infested with mutant five-year-olds for some reason. 

Peter F. Hamilton is a guy who thinks big. He’s written a lot of books set in various eras of his fictional Commonwealth world. I mainly read the Void Trilogy. It was… complicated, but I remember it being about this guy who dreamt of a parallel dimension where some wizard boy is supposed to do… something. There was also some android girl being chased by an assassin, maybe? I always wanted to read his gigantic Night’s Dawn Trilogy. But since I have this blog, and that series is about 4,000 pages in total, I think I will not be able to fulfill that desire.

Kim Stanley Robinson

Things got iffy again with Kim Stanley Robinson. From a literary standpoint, his books are absolutely phenomenal (at least out of the ones I read). They are among the most realistic-feeling science fiction novels I’ve experienced. He’s most known for the Mars trilogy, which is an incredibly well-thought out epic showcasing mankind’s colonization of Mars. It felt so real it was like reading an actual history book from the future.

But given what I think about realism, Robinson’s books didn’t do it for me. They were so real, so human, so grounded in reality, that I couldn’t get emotionally invested. I just don’t like people very much, and the characters all felt like people. Also, the hypothetical politics regarding things like preserving the natural beauty of Mars, to a parallel of the United States declaring independence from Britain, felt so real that I hated them as much as regular politics. If you can get into this guy’s stuff, then you’re a lucky duck.

Ending on a Great Note

I read one or two books by several people for a while, all with varying degrees of success. The last hard SF media I’d consume would be the best of all of those previously discussed. It was written by Cixin Liu, a Chinese SF author. I know, controversial little China.

Yep, I’m talking about the Remembrance of Earth’s Past Trilogy, better known by the individual novels: The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End. THIS was a thing! Remembrance of Earth’s Past is a simple first contact story, but with none of the tropes and all of the innovation. It begins when a Famicom-style adventure game is released, and is meant to test people on how to solve the titular Three-Body Problem. Those who solve it are roped into a secret first contact cover-up that ends up being publicly revealed anyway (I forgot exactly how). I will be spoiling the rest of the trilogy from here!

It starts off slow, but gets REAL crazy. In the second volume, the aliens have more-or-less announced their presence, and the government—in desperation—assigns five random people, offering all the resources that can be provided to stop the aliens. These people cannot actually communicate what they come up with, or else the aliens will know. Almost every single person comes up with something unethical, like destroying or brainwashing humanity along with the aliens. The one guy who spends most of his money on a summer home with his girlfriend (I think he actually bought the girlfriend too I.I.R.C.) comes up with the best solution. The basis for the solution is the Dark Forest theory, which I think deserves to be recognized as the best hard SF theory since Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. From what I recall, the Dark Forest states that all civilizations are hunters in a dark forest; they try to keep themselves hidden, and indiscriminately pick off any sign of life they see. In galactic terms, this means that aliens will not attempt first contact in the grandiose way you see in movies; no, they will fire a probe and end it stealthily. No peace, no war. The guy’s solution is a thing that will alert other aliens to Earth’s existence, which will scare off the current aliens, but doom mankind.

It’s cynical, and if you’ve read a lot of my blog, you’d know how I feel about cynicism. However, Liu does cynicism in a way that’s almost beautiful, and Death’s End shows it. It does start off confusing at first, because its main protagonist is a diplomat sent to the aliens during the events of The Three-Body Problem. All this time, he’s been schmoozing the aliens. But in the meantime, the aliens have pulled a 2112 and assumed control over humanity. A butt-ton of the human race gets killed off (by androids or something), and it’s at this point that the Dark Forest Flaregun thing is used. After a series of reality-bending events, we learn that the weapons that various alien civilizations have been using on each other have been slowly reducing the universe to nothing, one dimension at a time. Again, it’s cynical, but beautiful. This is hard SF at its finest. You should be able to see why I miss this genre so much. 

But… Do I Really Miss It?

I’ve been thinking of getting back into hard SF. But at the same time, I don’t know if I can. Since finishing Liu’s books, I have become fully immersed in the otaku world of manga and light novels, while also focusing on kids’ and teens’ literature in general. 

As an example, I already made an attempt to return to the genre as recently as 2019. I read the self-titled opener of Peter F. Hamilton’s newest series, Salvation, only a few months after it came out. I did not like it. It started out with your usual premise: aliens send spies to live among humans, yadda-yadda-yadda, and some ship crashes in Antarctica or something. I know that setup is a thing, but Salvation is 99% the backstories of the main characters with 1% alien intrigue, and only two of the characters’ stories are actually plot relevant I.I.R.C.! The reviews on GoodReads were smarter than usual, and they mostly checked out positive. As such, I blamed myself. I was dumbed down by otaku culture, and could no longer enjoy hard SF. I no doubt would have loved it if I had read it as a teen, but ironically, I didn’t love it as an adult.

The way I look at things from a writing perspective has changed. I attribute long bits of dialogue as infodumping, for example. I’ll criticize lack of action, too. Also, ever since reading stuff like Monogatari, I probably would attribute any themes explored in hard SF as pretentious bullcrap. But most importantly, I have realized that those books contained an excessive amount of… sex. People say ecchi is bad, but there’s entire markets here in the good ol’ US of A that revolve around sex. I hate confessing this, but, er… this is how I first learned about the process. It wasn’t like watching “that video” in health class, but it was pretty close. I recalled not being disgusted as much as confused.

But there is one glimmer of hope, that I probably shouldn’t bother hoping for, and that is the impossible union of hard SF scope with the youth and accessibility of children’s media. As far as I know, it has been attempted thrice. The first time is the famous Time Quintet, starting with the iconic A Wrinkle in Time. It’s kind of… something. While the application of hard science is good enough, it has some of the usual bullcrap. The main protagonist, Charles Wallace, is one of those “special-for-no-reason” characters, and good ol’ nakama power ends up winning the day. Other than that, there’s the usual ham-fisted commentaries against Communism that show that the author grew up during the Red Scare. I think the series has aged relatively poorly, overall.

However, the glimmer of hope shown once more in two obscure and modern series, the first of which is called Randoms. It was a trilogy that started off like a typical wish-fulfilment fantasy, but ends up going into Star Wars Episode I-levels of space politics. I was very interested, but a lot of very arbitrary and forced drama scenes would come up starting in the second book and make me really livid. I actually haven’t finished the series, but since book three is the shortest, I might just push myself for the sake of discussing it in more detail.

There was also hope in The Chronicle of the Dark Star Trilogy. I read this one to completion only a few months before starting this blog. It had scope, it had hard science, it had youth, it had ethical quandaries; this one was a winner! It handled the ideas of time travel and multiple universes in ways that made it easy for kids to grasp. It only had two problems, the first of which was that the main protagonist was just as special as Charles Wallace (the characters literally say stuff like “Wow, you’re the only human who can time travel without exploding!” and it never gets explained). I also did not like how the series resolved. In the final book, the plot basically becomes a Star Trek episode, where the characters find this weird thing, and endlessly discuss how weird the thing is. In the climax, it ends up being almost a clone of the climax of Wrinkle. And similar to that, the main character ham-fists those American values of “individuality is more important than survival of the whole race!”, and leaves no room for debate nor interpretation. And of course, everything ends happily for all those involved. This could’ve been something to raise ethical debates, but like in The Giver and Arc of a Scythe, it reinforces the same viewpoints that readers have grown to understand instead of making them question those viewpoints. I know of no other hard SF series for young’uns, and if there are any, tell me in the comments!

In conclusion, I—to this day—have no idea if I want to try hard SF ever again. It takes me all of my free time just to keep up with manga and light novels, even after I get more gung-ho with DNF’ing stuff. This is something that will haunt me to my dying day, that’s for sure. In any case, if you’ve made it here, you’re amazing! If you’d like, leave a comment on your sci-fi experiences and tell me if there’s anything in this ballpark you’d recommend.

Why It’s Okay for Disney to be Mainstream: A Rant

by macksamson, posted in Disney Stuff, Miscellaneous, Rants, Western Media

I’m not one to enjoy massively popular media, so you’d naturally think I’d despise the Walt Disney Company, at least in their current, mainstream-savvy form. Despite that, I ended up giving Frozen 2 and Onward overall positive scores, in complete disregard to how much I criticized them. Why is that? Get ready for a rant!

The main reason for my claim is that most of their movies- at least the good ones- have a lot more substance than most mainstream content. There are a lot of popular things I’ve consumed that basically go down a checklist of what people inherently love and don’t do anything remotely inventive. One manga example is Kimetsu no Yaiba, which barely gets the benefit of the doubt because the author ended it when it was at its peak (relatively speaking) instead of milking it.

Although their main demographic is children, Disney at least saw ahead and made sure that those same viewers would enjoy their movies in adulthood. This is something I learned five years ago, when I watched The Incredibles during a Movie Under the Stars event at Walt Disney World. As a kid, I had seen it so many times, I basically had the movie memorized. However, when I saw it at age nineteen that night, I saw it for the first time ever. As an adult, I was actually able to understand what makes it one of the best Pixar movies of all time, in ways that I couldn’t have comprehended as a kid. It was an amazing experience, and it stays across most core Disney movies (MOST of them; Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, you haven’t really aged well, narratively speaking…). 

One of the things that makes Disney movies enduring is that they have strong supporting characters besides the cliched main ones. I don’t really like Snow White or Ariel as much as some of my actual waifus, but the Seven Dwarves and Sebastian are timeless. There’s also characters like Olaf, the ultimate Disney husbando. And of course, there’s nothing like a good Disney villain. They have iconic personalities and exude intimidating auras thanks to their brilliant animators. The Evil Queen, Maleficent, Lady Trumain, Ursula… and also Hades and Yzma, who have gotten a billion times more popular in recent years; they are among the most memorable antagonists of all time (except Hans in Frozen). These days, most people are probably looking forward to them more than the good guys (who actually watched The Little Mermaid Live for any reason other than fangushing at Queen Latifa?).

And of course, there’s the MUSIC. Disney has had master songwriters that don’t get talked about too often, but they’re real geniuses, writing songs that people still sing to this day. I don’t think the ENTIRE Disney discography is perfect, but a lot of it—especially the newer stuff—is really, really good. The other important factor is that ever since they had the brilliant Howard Ashman work for them, the songs also contribute to plot progression in a very Broadway-esque manner. I still listen to songs from Frozen casually (PS: ‘Let It Go’ deserves all the praise it got, fight me), and that’s just the tip of the iceberg (no pun intended). And just when you think they’ve run out of ideas, something like ‘Lost in the Woods’ from Frozen 2 comes up. I remember thinking, “Oh boy, a bad, melodramatic Krifstoff song shoehorned into an already shoehorned subplot”, at first. But when you hear that eighties guitar riff out of nowhere, it’s like, “What the crap?!” It’s safe to say that Disney would have not made it this far if they didn’t turbo-charge their films with amazing music! 

I also love the Walt Disney Company itself, more so than the movies. For starters, they are pretty much one of the few bastions of goodwill left in the world. I’m sorry, but that’s how it is. Most other companies are too selfish and/or corrupt to even try to do better for the world, and others have pretty much given up on even trying. They don’t just make movies, they help animals and the earth through the Disney Conservation Fund, the use of environmentally friendly buses, and massive solar panel farms. To accomplish so much, they need a LOT of funding. These people don’t just need movie budgets, but they need to be able to manufacture merch of literally ALL kinds, as well as paying the millions who are working at several theme parks AND cruise ships. So, yeah, some of their movies might be riskless cash grabs, but they kinda need it once or twice in a while. If it weren’t for their vision, I would probably accuse them of pandering just as easily as any crappy hack writer.

And as much as I hate to say it, I must acknowledge the value of being able to relate to the main protagonists. They’re generic to a fault, but they definitely had an impact on cultures around the world. Their arcs (and the narratives of the movies in general) are not marred by any sort of cultural barrier, making them lovable to anyone. I also can’t deny that they have saved a lot of young’uns from torment, especially in the case of Frozen. They also handle wish fulfilment themes in ways that are genuinely good, at least recently. Most of the time, the tropes say, “You’re special for no reason now go be a wizard Harry.” Disney merely says “You’re you,” which is a lot better. In fact, as much as I said I loved good Disney villains, they seem to be moving towards complete abandonment of main antagonists in the favor of developing their protagonists, which I’m interested to see moving forward. But you know what, if you only love Disney movies because of the relatability aspect, then I feel genuinely sorry for you; you’re missing out on some really well thought-out, detail-oriented media.

And seriously, they are detail-oriented, in a way that transcends OCD. It’s made readily apparent if you go to Epcot and look at the architecture. Everything is authentic and accurate right down to the last brick. That same attention applies to their movies. If you watch the behind-the-scenes of some of this stuff, you’ll see them have board meetings over a three-second shot. It sounds excessive, but they need to do it because they know that those details make or break the whole picture, even if it’s stuff that no casual viewer would even think to look at.

So, in conclusion, I’m willing to bet that most people really do just enjoy Disney movies because of their eye-catching visuals, and the audience’s innate desire to see “themselves” in the narrative. But from a professional standpoint, they’re decent movies, with great soundtracks, from a team that’s constantly moving forward. While I still don’t entirely enjoy the wish fulfillment themes that they perpetuate, they at least have substance, and that’s something that makes them stand out from the rabble.