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The Errant Signal Thread
- Thread starter Infinitron
- Start date
sbb
Learned
- Joined
- Jun 21, 2014
- Messages
- 541
He discovers me some pretty neat games from time to time. That In The Kingdom game looks cool (but I'll be fucked if i can find a download for it), and CoJ Gunslinger totally flew under my radar until I saw his video for it.
sbb
Learned
- Joined
- Jun 21, 2014
- Messages
- 541
Phage
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2010
- Messages
- 4,696
I used to watch Errant Signal. I always thought he was a tad pretentious windbag, but had good intentions. I'd say around the time that his "Keep your politics out of my game" video came out, combined with his Patreon that I realized that he either had an agenda of his own to push or was milking the generosity of deluded SJW's. By the time he started tweeting about Zoe Quinn I knew it was time to pull the plug.
Honestly, between RPGcodex and other forums, combined with youtubers like TotalBiscuit and BunnyHop, I find that very few noteworthy games fly under my radar. He hasn't really shown that many 'hidden gems' until recently, and even then a lot of it is complete shit. (I specifically checked out Depression Quest and The Novelist due to his videos and they were actual garbage)
Honestly, between RPGcodex and other forums, combined with youtubers like TotalBiscuit and BunnyHop, I find that very few noteworthy games fly under my radar. He hasn't really shown that many 'hidden gems' until recently, and even then a lot of it is complete shit. (I specifically checked out Depression Quest and The Novelist due to his videos and they were actual garbage)
tuluse
Arcane
- Joined
- Jul 20, 2008
- Messages
- 11,400
Well maybe I didn't mean what I wrote. I like it when he breaks down how well a game explores it's themes and uses mechanics to back it up, I don't like it when he complains that he doesn't like the themes.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 97,425
http://www.errantsignal.com/blog/?p=717
The problem at the core of Beyond Earth is that it suffers from a bit of an identity crisis. Is it an offshoot of contemporary Civilization games, or is it a spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri? Is it a game that wants to look at pressing issues that affect our real future, or is this a campy scifi romp? Does it want to have the same gallows humor about a vaguely dystopic world that Alpha Centauri offered, or does it want something a little more in line with Civiliation’s incessant adulation of mankind and our collective achievements? Beyond Earth doesn’t have good answers for these questions, and the result is a game that straddles the line on all of them – attempting to always be both, but struggling to really achieve either.
Mechanically the vast, vast majority of the game plays like Civilization V. Unfortunately, the mechanics of civilization – and the ideas they represent – begin to lose their mooring in deep space. For example, Beyond Earth is ostensibly a spin-off of the Civilization franchise, but calling the things you manage in the game a “civilization” never feels quite right. Civs have (typically) shared culture, history, and values. The word “Civilization” may have its baggage, but it implies at least a loose construct most people can picture to one degree or another. But Beyond Earth has colonies named after their financial sponsors – names of corporations and national allegiances, like the American Reclamation Corporation or Pan-Asian Cooperative. And unlike Alpha Centauri, the ideological divides that force the different colonies to butt heads don’t preexist but get discovered along the course of the game, like religion in previous Civs. And most of the game has you fighting the planet just as much if not more than the other settlers. So often, especially at the beginning of the game, it feels like everyone are just colonists and the only differences between your colonies and the others are the colors of the tiles you own and who paid for your trip. Yet these colonies harbor a sense of antagonistic competition that doesn’t make sense if these are supposed to be exploratory colonies. They’re concerned about their borders being encroached; have individual cultures with unique identities, claim planetary resources for their own, refuse to share scientific breakthroughs, and even go to war with one another. That is to say, they operate much like the state-based civilizations of old. Your communities… colonies… civilizations… whatever, end up feeling like they have the outward veneer of an enlightened mission of scientific discovery when really it’s just engaging in the same old nation-state based tribalism on a new battlefield.
The vision of humanity on display here really hasn’t learned anything since Civilization. Nowhere is this felt more profoundly than the game’s mixed messages about resource consumption. The trailer for the game shows pyramids in the sea, a New York suffering from gross overpopulation, smog smothering Rio de Janeiro. I’m convinced that someone at Firaxis wanted this to be a game about our relationship with the planet, or that some early draft focused on it a lot more. After all, this is a spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri, a game which probed your personal relationship with the planet – it would make sense for Beyond Earth to carry that theme forward in a different direction. And the game does focus a lot of energy on it – one of the biggest mechanical changes from Civilization V is that the planet itself is one of your biggest enemies. From miasma that chips away at the health of units to impossibly powerful aliens that can destroy units and even cities, the geography and biology of the planet is one of the primary things on your mind at all times. It really cements the idea that your colonies are on a frontier where simply making a life of it on the land is its own accomplishment. It asks how you plan to deal with the struggle to survive on and interact with this newfound world first and how you’re going to deal with your enemies second. And one of the three ideology alignment paths, harmony, is all about embedding yourself into your new ecosystem and becoming part of it rather than trying to subdue it or turn it into earth. So there are all these ideas being kicked around about how we ruined Earth for ourselves last time, and now we’ve got a fresh start on a new planet we don’t even belong on – can we find a better way?
The problem is that Civilization as a game is… fundamentally ill equipped to deal with the real problems it skirts with. Global warming, overpopulation, mass pollution, deforestation… these are things that the core mechanics of Civilization are sort of designed to promote. The whole idea of Civilization is that you keep expanding in all directions and consuming every resource you can until you reach a victory condition, and Beyond Earth does nothing to change that. My harmony run through the game had my capitol completely surrounded by mines toward the end. Does this look at all harmonious with the planet? Or does this look like we’re back to smog-filled Rio? The game opens with us leaving a ruined Earth only to arrive and continue with the same systems that caused Earth to fall in the first place.
Compare this to something like Fate of the World, which is a strategy game about addressing global warming. What makes that game work is that it sees the moral ambiguity of its resources – it sees that industry is both a good thing for stability and economic growth, yet it’s also something causing irreparable damage to our atmosphere. We can’t just kill industry or economies will suffer and governments will fall, and human suffering will generally increase but we can’t let it run wild to cause harm, either. The game is largely about nudging big systems or massaging the relationships between systems to get what you want with minimal damage.
But in Beyond Earth – as in Civilization – your resources are nothing but good, and you want nothing but more of them. More money. More research. More people. More, more more. You hunger for it. You need it. And that’s literally the same mindset that got us here. Which would be fine if the game was going for some sort of morbid fatalism; pushing the idea that human beings really are just this virus that brings war and conspicuous consumption on a planetary scale with them wherever they go in the universe. I mean, that sort of stuff forms the basis of most of Fallout’s gallows humor. But bitter dystopias were never in Civilization’s wheelhouse; this is a series that loves to adulate how great we are. So they don’t commit to anything quite that harsh. Instead we get just get an occasional slice of cynical humor that falls flat, and we never really address the reality that the endgame of Beyond Earth leaves the planet looking a lot like the one we just left.
Those cynical jabs are one place where Alpha Centauri’s influence is felt, and it’s a little awkward. Alpha Centauri had a sort of dark edge to the whole thing – it was a game that had society divided into drones and talents, which is a wonderfully dystopic way of describing how the colonies in that game function. And if drones got a little unruly you could nerve-staple them to stop a riot. It was also game where every one of the leaders was contemptible in a sort of awesome way, and you would get little quotes from each of them as you discovered new technologies or built new buildings – occasionally highlighting the dark sides of their fanatical ideologies. Like, listen to how the extreme collectivist Chairman Yang talks about what is euphemistically called a recycling center. Then listen to how Beyond Earth tries a similar attempt at that sort of cynicism.
Do you see how one sort of takes a character’s known personality and uses it for humor, and the other is just… flat? Part of the problem is that the leaders are basically cardboard cutouts this time around. I mean, props to Firaxis – they have a fairly diverse cast, and I have to give the thumbs up to that. But it’s a diverse cast of nothing characters. In Civilization you have the historical context to ground the leaders in, right? You know who Atilla The Hun is and his buffs to mounted units and attacks on city-states make sense. And Alpha Centauri’s leaders were caricatures; cartoonish manifestations of their respective ideologies. Chariman Yang has a communal utopia built on lots of 1984-style doublethink Morgan was a narcissistic, ruthless capitalist interested in exploiting resources as hard and as fast as he could. Pravin Lal insisted he was carrying forth the UN’s unified directive while ostensibly going it on his own. They were all over the top and completely two dimensional, but if nothing else their extreme ideologies made them memorable. But here I struggle to just remember the names of these characters. They’re so flavorless that one person reads all of the flavor text even though a lot of it stems from in-universe documentation. We have neither the historical context of Civilization nor the clever writing and voice acting that made Alpha Centauri’s leaders come to life. They’re just an icon with some default menu barks. And if I have to hear “No village has ever been ruined by trade” one more time….
But it’s not all bad! Perhaps the best aspect of Beyond Earth is its role playing element. It’s pretty abstract, high-level stuff, but it’s certainly more interested in letting you feel like you’re guiding the society and advancement of a people than Civilization has been recently. There are optional quests to carry out that can either provide resources or let you choose how to upgrade your new buildings. For instance, you might find your electronic walls are actually operating at better than engineered levels – you might be able to then either risk extending the parameters of the walls for additional defense or redirecting the extra energy towards your credits. And like Alpha Centauri there are upgrades to your units based on technology, letting you sculpt your units to fit your combat style. And your choice of three alignments are reflected in the way your units and buildings look, and it has consequences for diplomacy when dealing with those whose alignments differ. There’s actually a fair bit of expressiveness here, and I feel that you can really make an expansionist harmonizing people and have that feel different than a militant society obsessed with supremacy or a trade-heavy group interested in human purity. I talked about the slow loss of role playing in my Civilization video, and if there’s one genuine success story to celebrate in Beyond Earth it’s this return to it, this ability to say: “You know what, I think our people are really into technology and don’t care about native life” or “Well, these people I’m playing as are going to stay human even if it means we don’t research that technology.”
The technology system itself has changed to accommodate this role playing element, though I’m not how I feel about the results. Instead of a linear technology tree like in old Civilization games, technology now has branches and leaves. Unlocking a technology gives you access to the other technologies that branch from it, but also to the child technologies it can produce. Child leaves cost more than branches, and the further from the center you go the more expensive to research technologies get. The result is that technology is no longer a measure of forward progress – you no longer feel like you’re moving from the bronze age to the classical age, but exploring a space of technologies in a way that benefits you. You could go broad but shallow on branches or focus on deep knowledge of more core ideas. And that’s a really cool idea because it lets you role play while also sculpting what technologies your people would want or be interested in having.
Or it would be if the victory conditions didn’t mostly subvert it. So, there are five victory conditions. One is the bog standard conquest victory of taking everyone else’s capitals. The Contact victory consists of making contact with an alien race which is sort of this game’s economic victory – you need to build multiple wonders and spend a thousand energy to achieve it. But the other three are initially tied to affinity level in the three alignments, and the surest way to raise your affinity level is to research specific technologies. So even though there’s this broad expressive space you always feel pressure to march as fast as you can to the technologies that grant you access to whatever winstate you’ve decided to go for.
Not only that, but by dismantling the linear nature of the tech tree you no longer have a quick and easy gauge of where the game is. That comparatively tight game arc I talked about in my Civ video is a lot less structured now; you still have the same phases but depending on how hard and fast the AI rushes to its victory conditions you may find yourself looking at a game over screen in what feels like the mid game because you wanted to build up and slowly go for a harmony victory while some other jerk got lucky with a ruin find and made contact with an alien race first, completely invalidating your entire people because… that’s how civilization views the way different peoples interact. So checking the victory condition tracker every couple of turns is a must, and you more or less have to declare war on anyone who looks like they’re getting too close to victory before you if you want to win the game. And in fairness, they recognized that, which is why it’s not a big button on the main GUI instead of hidden under a menu like in Civilization. It’s not that the victory conditions themselves don’t work – I like that they’re way more unit oriented now. The harmony victory requires building an object and defending it for a certain number of turns, the supremacy victory requires sending your military units back to earth and leaving yourself vulnerable, and the purity victory involves setting up immigrants from earth with new homes in contention for space and resources with everyone else. Having a war when trying to achieve these carries some real consequences, and it makes that last march to the finish tense. But that’s if you’re going for the victory. If someone else starts those bits then it becomes a mad rush to bomb someone you might actually like out of existence before you get a game over, and that’s where this pointless competition between people thing falls apart for me. You spend so much time fighting the planet itself just to eek out an existence on the edge of space, then go to war because someone else is almost running a successful SETI program.
It’s not that Beyond Earth is a quote-unquote “bad game.” It feels a lot like Civ V in that with an expansion or two to flesh it out, it could be a robust entry in the series. If you wanted to play Civilization V with some small Alpha Centauri influences or a bit more role playing, this more than scratches that itch. It’s a game about consumption and expansion and conflict, and if running a mighty empire in pursuit of those goals sounds enjoyable this game offers a wonderful sandbox to do so. But where Civilization V ignored the downsides of consumption, expansion, and conflict in an attempt to write a love letter to all of human history from the statist worldview of the 20th century, Beyond Earth is just confused. Hesitant. It wants the ignorant optimism and progress narrative of its namesake and the piercing cynicism and occasional insightful commentary of its spiritual ancestor. And it spends so much time trying to figure out if it’s an Alpha Centauri game that has Civilization in the name or a Civilization game that draws inspiration from Alpha Centauri that it never makes any effort to find its own identity. But in its own way, I think it may have stumbled on to one by accident through its depressing vision of the future – a future that has us doing everything we do now, just somewhere else. A future where we carry forward the mistakes of old without thinking about how things could be different, how we could structure societies and economies in more sustainable ways or ways more free and equitable for its citizens, or to debate what equitable and free societies even are. Both thematically and mechanically this is a game that can’t move beyond the shackles of the past.
Mechanically the vast, vast majority of the game plays like Civilization V. Unfortunately, the mechanics of civilization – and the ideas they represent – begin to lose their mooring in deep space. For example, Beyond Earth is ostensibly a spin-off of the Civilization franchise, but calling the things you manage in the game a “civilization” never feels quite right. Civs have (typically) shared culture, history, and values. The word “Civilization” may have its baggage, but it implies at least a loose construct most people can picture to one degree or another. But Beyond Earth has colonies named after their financial sponsors – names of corporations and national allegiances, like the American Reclamation Corporation or Pan-Asian Cooperative. And unlike Alpha Centauri, the ideological divides that force the different colonies to butt heads don’t preexist but get discovered along the course of the game, like religion in previous Civs. And most of the game has you fighting the planet just as much if not more than the other settlers. So often, especially at the beginning of the game, it feels like everyone are just colonists and the only differences between your colonies and the others are the colors of the tiles you own and who paid for your trip. Yet these colonies harbor a sense of antagonistic competition that doesn’t make sense if these are supposed to be exploratory colonies. They’re concerned about their borders being encroached; have individual cultures with unique identities, claim planetary resources for their own, refuse to share scientific breakthroughs, and even go to war with one another. That is to say, they operate much like the state-based civilizations of old. Your communities… colonies… civilizations… whatever, end up feeling like they have the outward veneer of an enlightened mission of scientific discovery when really it’s just engaging in the same old nation-state based tribalism on a new battlefield.
The vision of humanity on display here really hasn’t learned anything since Civilization. Nowhere is this felt more profoundly than the game’s mixed messages about resource consumption. The trailer for the game shows pyramids in the sea, a New York suffering from gross overpopulation, smog smothering Rio de Janeiro. I’m convinced that someone at Firaxis wanted this to be a game about our relationship with the planet, or that some early draft focused on it a lot more. After all, this is a spiritual successor to Alpha Centauri, a game which probed your personal relationship with the planet – it would make sense for Beyond Earth to carry that theme forward in a different direction. And the game does focus a lot of energy on it – one of the biggest mechanical changes from Civilization V is that the planet itself is one of your biggest enemies. From miasma that chips away at the health of units to impossibly powerful aliens that can destroy units and even cities, the geography and biology of the planet is one of the primary things on your mind at all times. It really cements the idea that your colonies are on a frontier where simply making a life of it on the land is its own accomplishment. It asks how you plan to deal with the struggle to survive on and interact with this newfound world first and how you’re going to deal with your enemies second. And one of the three ideology alignment paths, harmony, is all about embedding yourself into your new ecosystem and becoming part of it rather than trying to subdue it or turn it into earth. So there are all these ideas being kicked around about how we ruined Earth for ourselves last time, and now we’ve got a fresh start on a new planet we don’t even belong on – can we find a better way?
The problem is that Civilization as a game is… fundamentally ill equipped to deal with the real problems it skirts with. Global warming, overpopulation, mass pollution, deforestation… these are things that the core mechanics of Civilization are sort of designed to promote. The whole idea of Civilization is that you keep expanding in all directions and consuming every resource you can until you reach a victory condition, and Beyond Earth does nothing to change that. My harmony run through the game had my capitol completely surrounded by mines toward the end. Does this look at all harmonious with the planet? Or does this look like we’re back to smog-filled Rio? The game opens with us leaving a ruined Earth only to arrive and continue with the same systems that caused Earth to fall in the first place.
Compare this to something like Fate of the World, which is a strategy game about addressing global warming. What makes that game work is that it sees the moral ambiguity of its resources – it sees that industry is both a good thing for stability and economic growth, yet it’s also something causing irreparable damage to our atmosphere. We can’t just kill industry or economies will suffer and governments will fall, and human suffering will generally increase but we can’t let it run wild to cause harm, either. The game is largely about nudging big systems or massaging the relationships between systems to get what you want with minimal damage.
But in Beyond Earth – as in Civilization – your resources are nothing but good, and you want nothing but more of them. More money. More research. More people. More, more more. You hunger for it. You need it. And that’s literally the same mindset that got us here. Which would be fine if the game was going for some sort of morbid fatalism; pushing the idea that human beings really are just this virus that brings war and conspicuous consumption on a planetary scale with them wherever they go in the universe. I mean, that sort of stuff forms the basis of most of Fallout’s gallows humor. But bitter dystopias were never in Civilization’s wheelhouse; this is a series that loves to adulate how great we are. So they don’t commit to anything quite that harsh. Instead we get just get an occasional slice of cynical humor that falls flat, and we never really address the reality that the endgame of Beyond Earth leaves the planet looking a lot like the one we just left.
Those cynical jabs are one place where Alpha Centauri’s influence is felt, and it’s a little awkward. Alpha Centauri had a sort of dark edge to the whole thing – it was a game that had society divided into drones and talents, which is a wonderfully dystopic way of describing how the colonies in that game function. And if drones got a little unruly you could nerve-staple them to stop a riot. It was also game where every one of the leaders was contemptible in a sort of awesome way, and you would get little quotes from each of them as you discovered new technologies or built new buildings – occasionally highlighting the dark sides of their fanatical ideologies. Like, listen to how the extreme collectivist Chairman Yang talks about what is euphemistically called a recycling center. Then listen to how Beyond Earth tries a similar attempt at that sort of cynicism.
Do you see how one sort of takes a character’s known personality and uses it for humor, and the other is just… flat? Part of the problem is that the leaders are basically cardboard cutouts this time around. I mean, props to Firaxis – they have a fairly diverse cast, and I have to give the thumbs up to that. But it’s a diverse cast of nothing characters. In Civilization you have the historical context to ground the leaders in, right? You know who Atilla The Hun is and his buffs to mounted units and attacks on city-states make sense. And Alpha Centauri’s leaders were caricatures; cartoonish manifestations of their respective ideologies. Chariman Yang has a communal utopia built on lots of 1984-style doublethink Morgan was a narcissistic, ruthless capitalist interested in exploiting resources as hard and as fast as he could. Pravin Lal insisted he was carrying forth the UN’s unified directive while ostensibly going it on his own. They were all over the top and completely two dimensional, but if nothing else their extreme ideologies made them memorable. But here I struggle to just remember the names of these characters. They’re so flavorless that one person reads all of the flavor text even though a lot of it stems from in-universe documentation. We have neither the historical context of Civilization nor the clever writing and voice acting that made Alpha Centauri’s leaders come to life. They’re just an icon with some default menu barks. And if I have to hear “No village has ever been ruined by trade” one more time….
But it’s not all bad! Perhaps the best aspect of Beyond Earth is its role playing element. It’s pretty abstract, high-level stuff, but it’s certainly more interested in letting you feel like you’re guiding the society and advancement of a people than Civilization has been recently. There are optional quests to carry out that can either provide resources or let you choose how to upgrade your new buildings. For instance, you might find your electronic walls are actually operating at better than engineered levels – you might be able to then either risk extending the parameters of the walls for additional defense or redirecting the extra energy towards your credits. And like Alpha Centauri there are upgrades to your units based on technology, letting you sculpt your units to fit your combat style. And your choice of three alignments are reflected in the way your units and buildings look, and it has consequences for diplomacy when dealing with those whose alignments differ. There’s actually a fair bit of expressiveness here, and I feel that you can really make an expansionist harmonizing people and have that feel different than a militant society obsessed with supremacy or a trade-heavy group interested in human purity. I talked about the slow loss of role playing in my Civilization video, and if there’s one genuine success story to celebrate in Beyond Earth it’s this return to it, this ability to say: “You know what, I think our people are really into technology and don’t care about native life” or “Well, these people I’m playing as are going to stay human even if it means we don’t research that technology.”
The technology system itself has changed to accommodate this role playing element, though I’m not how I feel about the results. Instead of a linear technology tree like in old Civilization games, technology now has branches and leaves. Unlocking a technology gives you access to the other technologies that branch from it, but also to the child technologies it can produce. Child leaves cost more than branches, and the further from the center you go the more expensive to research technologies get. The result is that technology is no longer a measure of forward progress – you no longer feel like you’re moving from the bronze age to the classical age, but exploring a space of technologies in a way that benefits you. You could go broad but shallow on branches or focus on deep knowledge of more core ideas. And that’s a really cool idea because it lets you role play while also sculpting what technologies your people would want or be interested in having.
Or it would be if the victory conditions didn’t mostly subvert it. So, there are five victory conditions. One is the bog standard conquest victory of taking everyone else’s capitals. The Contact victory consists of making contact with an alien race which is sort of this game’s economic victory – you need to build multiple wonders and spend a thousand energy to achieve it. But the other three are initially tied to affinity level in the three alignments, and the surest way to raise your affinity level is to research specific technologies. So even though there’s this broad expressive space you always feel pressure to march as fast as you can to the technologies that grant you access to whatever winstate you’ve decided to go for.
Not only that, but by dismantling the linear nature of the tech tree you no longer have a quick and easy gauge of where the game is. That comparatively tight game arc I talked about in my Civ video is a lot less structured now; you still have the same phases but depending on how hard and fast the AI rushes to its victory conditions you may find yourself looking at a game over screen in what feels like the mid game because you wanted to build up and slowly go for a harmony victory while some other jerk got lucky with a ruin find and made contact with an alien race first, completely invalidating your entire people because… that’s how civilization views the way different peoples interact. So checking the victory condition tracker every couple of turns is a must, and you more or less have to declare war on anyone who looks like they’re getting too close to victory before you if you want to win the game. And in fairness, they recognized that, which is why it’s not a big button on the main GUI instead of hidden under a menu like in Civilization. It’s not that the victory conditions themselves don’t work – I like that they’re way more unit oriented now. The harmony victory requires building an object and defending it for a certain number of turns, the supremacy victory requires sending your military units back to earth and leaving yourself vulnerable, and the purity victory involves setting up immigrants from earth with new homes in contention for space and resources with everyone else. Having a war when trying to achieve these carries some real consequences, and it makes that last march to the finish tense. But that’s if you’re going for the victory. If someone else starts those bits then it becomes a mad rush to bomb someone you might actually like out of existence before you get a game over, and that’s where this pointless competition between people thing falls apart for me. You spend so much time fighting the planet itself just to eek out an existence on the edge of space, then go to war because someone else is almost running a successful SETI program.
It’s not that Beyond Earth is a quote-unquote “bad game.” It feels a lot like Civ V in that with an expansion or two to flesh it out, it could be a robust entry in the series. If you wanted to play Civilization V with some small Alpha Centauri influences or a bit more role playing, this more than scratches that itch. It’s a game about consumption and expansion and conflict, and if running a mighty empire in pursuit of those goals sounds enjoyable this game offers a wonderful sandbox to do so. But where Civilization V ignored the downsides of consumption, expansion, and conflict in an attempt to write a love letter to all of human history from the statist worldview of the 20th century, Beyond Earth is just confused. Hesitant. It wants the ignorant optimism and progress narrative of its namesake and the piercing cynicism and occasional insightful commentary of its spiritual ancestor. And it spends so much time trying to figure out if it’s an Alpha Centauri game that has Civilization in the name or a Civilization game that draws inspiration from Alpha Centauri that it never makes any effort to find its own identity. But in its own way, I think it may have stumbled on to one by accident through its depressing vision of the future – a future that has us doing everything we do now, just somewhere else. A future where we carry forward the mistakes of old without thinking about how things could be different, how we could structure societies and economies in more sustainable ways or ways more free and equitable for its citizens, or to debate what equitable and free societies even are. Both thematically and mechanically this is a game that can’t move beyond the shackles of the past.
Dim
Not sure if advertising plant?
"wait for addons" CAMPY!!?? well apparently you like campy. Fotw sucks get Dem3.
A horse of course
Guest
ban Infinitron
Metro
Arcane
- Joined
- Aug 27, 2009
- Messages
- 27,792
Brofisted until you referenced TotalBiscuit in a positive light.
Phage
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2010
- Messages
- 4,696
Is there something I'm missing? Dude just puts up videos that showcase random games of varying popularity for 20 minutes. Goes over the option menus and performance issues in-depth and gives some tertiary impressions on the game's mechanics.
What is so bad about that, and who else does this with such regularity? There have been numerous neat titles featured on his channel I've picked up that I would never have heard of otherwise.
Is there an actual reason for your dislike, or is hating TB some kind of epic codex meme?
buzz
Arcane
- Joined
- Apr 1, 2012
- Messages
- 4,234
YouTube people who get rich out of doing the same basic shit forums like this one have been doing for decades are automatically a turn-off for me. Especially if they're not particularly good at it, like Total Biscuit in question. TB blows more in special because of his ways of making said videos, giant-ass rants with bafflingly bad gameplay, unedited footage and poorly researched arguments and opinions thrown in there. At least he's a pretty decent orator.
He's not funny, he's not particularly informative nor thrustworthy. The only value I get out of that channel is the fact that he's popular enough to sway a giant population of idiots towards some decent and relatively obscure game once in a while. I learned about Frozen Synapse from his video on it for example.
He's not funny, he's not particularly informative nor thrustworthy. The only value I get out of that channel is the fact that he's popular enough to sway a giant population of idiots towards some decent and relatively obscure game once in a while. I learned about Frozen Synapse from his video on it for example.
Phage
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2010
- Messages
- 4,696
You pretty much proved my point to be honest. Seeing 20 minutes of average/below average gameplay of a title and an extensive look at the options menu is a surprisingly valuable service. There have been numerous games I've bought (and loved) and others I've avoided since I saw them in action on his channel.
Hating someone because they're doing well financially for making youtube videos is silly.
Anyway, this isn't a TotalBiscuit thread. I was just curious why Metro reacted so strongly. For what it's worth, I've never really touched TB's hearthstone/dota/terraria shit, I just watch 5-10 minutes of each first impressions video.
buzz
Arcane
- Joined
- Apr 1, 2012
- Messages
- 4,234
Point is, you can possibly get that service without having a particular name attached to it. Random gameplay videos on YouTube, screenshots and/or discussion about the options menu and so on.
I'm certainly not the only one in here annoyed by the fact you can't reasonably find small silent gameplay videos made by people who are actually good at playing video games, instead only finding retarded bullshit by people with annoying voices. And it's all because guys like TB made youtube gameplay videos a lucrative business.
I'm certainly not the only one in here annoyed by the fact you can't reasonably find small silent gameplay videos made by people who are actually good at playing video games, instead only finding retarded bullshit by people with annoying voices. And it's all because guys like TB made youtube gameplay videos a lucrative business.
Phage
Arcane
- Joined
- Jan 10, 2010
- Messages
- 4,696
Except, not really on multiple points.
First off, you make far more money if you can make actual middle schoolers laugh at you for screaming and/or doing south park voice imitations (see Pewdiepie, Tobuscus, Markiplier) Those guys are making so much bank that they emasculate TB. The likes of Pewd was around before TB anyway. At least TB offers some kind of service.
Secondly, obviously I can simply search for a game of my choosing and watch videos on it. The problem is I need someone I can simply be subbed to, boot up youtube while eating lunch and watch a video or two of. If you have suggestions of channels that do this, I'm all ears. Also, I'd take TB's commentary when it specifically comes to first impressions over silence, because as someone who is, in fact a PC gamer, things like port quality/optimization/options do actually matter to me - which you won't find really in silent gameplay.
Finally, like renegen said, there are in fact tons of people who make silent playthroughs of games, just do a youtube search of whatever game it is. Granted there aren't many silent playthroughs of "random obscure amiga RPG X" out there.
Dim
Not sure if advertising plant?
Why do ES and BH play the exact same games? And why did everyone review C:BE but not endless legend?
BelisariuS.F
Augur
- Joined
- Mar 23, 2010
- Messages
- 388
Did he really put gamergate next to terror threats, wars, economic collapse and rising economic inequity?
TheGreatOne
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 15, 2014
- Messages
- 1,214
After more than a decade of beign an adult/understading the world more like. Wars, what wars? The world is now more peaceful than ever before. Yeah I guess life in the modern days is looking pretty bleak for a middle class white kid who grew up in the 90s in some sheltered suburb. Back then life was all about playing games and not worrying about things. Now he's a full grown man who has to play video games for a living and worry about gamers who say misogynistic things on the internet.
Replace his SJW concerns with decline (of both games and Western civilization) and he sounds like many codexers 
Well, yes and no TheGreatOne. While you're correct that there are less wars and the world is more peacful than it's ever been during the existance of civilization, most people, when asked, feel like there are more wars than ever.
The reason isn't nostalgia either. The reason is that we're more well-informed about risk, adversity and global conflict. Or, if you prefer, we are bombarded with information (true and otherwise) about the negative going-ons of the world. Beck dubbed it the 'risk society'. We are very well-informed about a huge multitude of risks - and more important: democracy asks that we face and make decisions about those risks - so we tend to be more pessimistic about our existance than is perhaps warranted, relatively.
So while I agree that there is no merit in the modern philosophy of “Oh, so this is how things are changing for the worse from now on. Okay.”, it is pretty correct to describe the existance of a modern philosophy that is like that. Just look at the cultural output. The 90's was dominated by dumb action and even films with grave social realist themes tended to be optimistic. This is in contrast to today were even superhero movies need to be serious and dark (and yeah, no: I'm not saying "every piece of cultural output is like this", but there is clearly a difference in the dominating amount).
Anyway, long post to state the simple fact: Franklin is wrong that the world looks like that, but he is right that most people see it that way.
lol, ye
The reason isn't nostalgia either. The reason is that we're more well-informed about risk, adversity and global conflict. Or, if you prefer, we are bombarded with information (true and otherwise) about the negative going-ons of the world. Beck dubbed it the 'risk society'. We are very well-informed about a huge multitude of risks - and more important: democracy asks that we face and make decisions about those risks - so we tend to be more pessimistic about our existance than is perhaps warranted, relatively.
So while I agree that there is no merit in the modern philosophy of “Oh, so this is how things are changing for the worse from now on. Okay.”, it is pretty correct to describe the existance of a modern philosophy that is like that. Just look at the cultural output. The 90's was dominated by dumb action and even films with grave social realist themes tended to be optimistic. This is in contrast to today were even superhero movies need to be serious and dark (and yeah, no: I'm not saying "every piece of cultural output is like this", but there is clearly a difference in the dominating amount).
Anyway, long post to state the simple fact: Franklin is wrong that the world looks like that, but he is right that most people see it that way.
Replace his SJW concerns with decline (of both games and Western civilization) and he sounds like many codexers
lol, ye
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TheGreatOne
Arcane
- Joined
- Feb 15, 2014
- Messages
- 1,214
Yes, there's more (sensationalist&alarmist) media coverage of all the murders, wars and poverty, which are all declining globally despite the population growth of the last few decades (which is another phenomenon that will stop at some point and start declining as fertility rates start to plummet in stabilizing third world countries).
weird awesome mix of 80s over the top XTREME radness and grimdark, edgy&cynical stuff. Antiheroes were big (comic&wrestling boom) and "alternative" culture became mainstream (Nirvana, Daria etc), even if the latter was just part of corporations jumping on the bandwagon of people who made fun of said corporations and bandwagoners in the first place.
You could also argue conversely that 90s was the decade of cynicism and edgyness, where as modern culture is very PC and hug-boxy. 90s was a
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