as an author you're the puppet master behind the curtain, attempting to maintain the illusion that the puppets are real people acting in real events. But the moment the audience becomes consciously aware of your presence, you've failed as an author.
Well put. I watched a bit of this game earlier and this sort of thing bleeds through all over the dub (and practically any western dub in general, which is why they're intolerable to me). The VAs, particularly the female ones, never sound like they're performing a real character. Instead they always sound like they're intoxicated by the cool novelty of voice acting itself, which they milk for every bit of quirkiness, ostentatiousness and bossgrrl assertiveness, trying to reinforce their own egos as people outside the game.
The performances and the English script for this game are some of the cringiest I've ever heard. Instead of actors in a story, they feel more like some knockoff Critical Role session performing to a twitch chat.
dublin-based group recently acquired by TransPerfect
TransPerfect... With the business they're in, the 'trans' is meant to refer to translation, but I can't help but feel it resonates with my own edit note. In any case, when it comes to tech companies, people should think of Dublin like they think of Ottawa. Likelihood of pozz is very high IMO.
Full agree. It's just sticking in slang code words to signal to fellow ideologues.
Tangentially, /pol/ seems to have appropriated 'chud' as a self-descriptor of pride nowadays, like blacks with 'nigger'. But that doesn't make it any less of a hyper-specific piece of factional net slang.
Interesting. Do we know who handled localisation?
I've been casually interested in this game from afar, so it would be disappointing if it's been tainted. While localisation is cancer and it's beyond dispute that many localisers deliberately set out to undermine the source material, this state of affairs has put everyone on a hair trigger and there is overcompensation going on where innocuous stuff is getting flagged. This Elron guy does seem to get a couple of things wrong. For instance in the full version of the pictured post, there's this part:
In English Lian states "Its so nice to meet you, ma'am. You might say im Nowas... oh, whats the word? Well, lets just say I occupy a special place in his life. But you can call me Lian. The aunty then runs off to tell the entire village Nowa has a girlfriend and hes embarrassed.
Lian state to the Aunty In Japanese Dōmo hajimemashite Noa-kun no sono nan teyuuka tokubetsuna sonzai tte iu ka. Nice to meet you! Noah, you are, how can I say, special. (conveying how much hes loved)
I'd say that in this case, the official translation gets it right and the poster just mistranslates.
"Let's go embarrass Nowa in front of his people" seems like more of a red flag since there's no trace of that in the Japanese. But if, in context, there's a pattern of this character behaving that way towards him already, it might fall in the category of 'flavour' - which I know many people are against, but some translations tend to be heavy on that sort of thing as a style choice, not necessarily an ideological rewrite. Yakuza games have always been full of it, for instance. Needs more examples and eyes on it to see for sure.
EDIT: reading further, 'chud' has apparently made its way into the localisation. This suggests it was worked on by terminally online trannies.
So... they're saying all the same stuff they said about the first game, which also had “a wide range of ethnicities”? All the contrast is inserted by Kotaku. None of the direct quotes suggest a change in direction.
See where the quotation marks end in the article:
“a wide range of ethnicities” this time around.
Notice how they didn't speculate on whether black people will be in KCD2. They're too pussy for that fight just yet, plus everyone's grown way more sick of blacks since KCD1, so it's a losing question. However, they're acting like it's been asked and answered by contrasting Warhorse's milquetoast PR against the statement "back during the lead-up to the first game, Vávra insisted there wouldn’t be any Black(sic) people in it" - as if there is a clear change.
DT990P is right, this is FUD D&C bullshit. They are still seething about DEI rewriters like Sweetbaby being uncovered so they want you to be seething too and to think of their presence as normalised, in every last patch of the industry. Quick search shows the entire blogger warfront, pcgamer etc. all the usual suspects, are running this exact line: 'KCD2 will be diverse this time, what now racists!' They haven't told you a single thing that wasn't in the game reveal or prior PR, but they're acting like there has been some ideological confrontation that has worked out in their favour. The fact that at this stage they're too cowardly to have pushed the issue as strongly as it was pushed last time, suggests maybe the opposite.
That's not to say KCD2 won't be pozzed. Warhorse got acquired by Koch media and who knows if Vavra still runs his own show. I don't know, but neither do Kotaku et al. They are a lousy irrelevance, let them die.
If you like this show on any level, I've lost any and all respect for you. In fact, I don't think I even view you as human any more if you like this show.
lmao now that's the kind of strength of feeling we need more of. I tuned into Synthetic once when he was playing FF7 Rebirth and was put off with how mild he was and how much he seemed to be pulling his punches, but maybe that's necessary in the moment, when you've made the commitment to sink tens of hours into one of these terrible games. In light of this, I'd take his opinion over Critical Drinker any day.
Hit Detection
'Hit' as in, if you don't conform we'll put out a hit on you and hitpieces from our journoblog cocksuckers will rain down. Pay our protectio- I mean, detection fee and we'll detect any of these upcoming hits.
I don't think I'm joking; these companies know what they're doing and they pick brazen branding. The less said about what Sweet Baby were hiding in plain sight with their branding, the better.
PSX and Saturn, yeah, I played SS on the Saturn. Saturn usually had the inferior versions of 3D games, but sometimes was superior when it came to 2D. [EDIT looked it up and apparently the Saturn version was the later, superior version, due to bugfixes and additions. Although I have my doubts about that when it comes to frame rate] I've been on a bit of an emulating kick lately, so I'm tempted to go back and revisit the series. Nuclear never made it to Saturn.
The game Future Cop: LAPD also supposedly started life in development as Future Strike, a final unreleased Strike game. I've never played it.
Soviet Strike was underrated imo. The 3D was a bit jank and jerky, but you got used to it in that era. They made up for it with the effort that went into the mission presentation. Every campaign and every mission had their own little bit of live acted FMV featuring your team of helper operatives. But not only that, even every enemy and resource pickup had their own FMV vids explaining them and those changed every mission, eg. on a mission in russia you might get 15 seconds of general grizzleface warning about the soviet chopper fuel you'll have to resort to picking up. 45 minutes total of fmvs, I loved shit like that back in the day.
Escapism maybe undersells the thing they're trying to attack and the thing we're trying to exercise in all this. I would frame it as they're trying to destroy and warp the human imagination.
Imagination is the thing we 'escape' into when we indulge in escapism, so it seems like a frivolous attribute for kids playing cowboys and indians, but imagination is also what we engage when we tell eachother stories of any kind, or are moved by meaningful art, or when we plan cities, or when we remember the past, or when we talk about culture, or preserve any of the timeless values we conserve as a species. We use real concepts of human values, which we have to imagine in order to grasp them, since they are mostly not apprehensible to our physical senses. We then share them between eachother in the form of works and culture. I suppose I'm also talking about Jungian archetypes and myth, for those who are versed in those reference points (ie. not me).
Our political and cultural opponents are waging a wholesale war on our imaginations, in wanting to ensure we can only engage in the realm of the imagination on their terms. Their aim is to ensure we can only exercise our consciousness in a way that propagates their ideology. Some of them do this intuitively, because they simply sense that this is the route to ideological domination.
Others - utopianist, end-of-history types - have an over-rationalised, materialistic view of creation, which creates an imperative to prevent their adversaries (us) from engaging with self-indulgent, 'childish' stories and 'harmful' superstitions. This imperative is somehow an objective moral one, even though this mindset can never be reduced down to any absolute morals. They're waddling in a 'Baby's First Atheism'(tm) brand nihilist paddling pool which young people splash into when they find out that the trusted figures in their lives have been lying to them.
This view finds some sympathisers even on the right, who transplant their religion into the empty moral core of this philosophy and use it to say we should leave behind our 'childish escapism' and face reality, be it the obligation to vote harder or to worship God or whatever. However, entertainment culture is reality too. More often than not, culture dictates all the parameters of our most material realities. The life of the mind is part of life itself. Giving up on games like they want you to is like giving up on fiction novels, cinema or theatre at the inception of those media, which were all disparaged as frivolous diversions in their day too. Here in 2024, we can look back at the ground lost to cultural opponents in those other pursuits and think 'if only...' - but gaming is still relatively young and gamers gave culture warriors a bloody nose, firm and early.
'Escapism' often gets you closer to the truth of life, not further away. You'll find far more truth about what it is to be female in a classical painting of a non-existent woman, than you will in the gender ramblings of the modern medical establishment. It's hard to see those who deter us from imaginative escapism, by saying 'grow up' ,as anything other than slimy subversives, since it's the same shaming tactic at both poles - either 'grow up and go lift weights innawoods' (ok most milquetoast conservatives won't go as far as innawoods, innasuburbs is fine) or 'grow up and be on the right side of history'.
Basically I'm just not gonna stop it (the gaming!!).
I know... UGH I KNOW!! I'm sorry etc...
Kudos for mentioning the Strike games. Soviet Strike was also excellent but I never got to play Nuclear Strike.
EA was largely a byword for quality in the 90s, publisher or in-house.
for what equality means to me I'll stick with 'N'
Never seen a fat, black, lesbian, double amputee archer before?
I haven't played it in a good while but I have 4 figures in hours of playtime over the years. I'm by no means a master of it and never beat it on any difficulty beyond Nightmare, but have plenty of wins on Normal.
Every time I remember it exists, it steals a few hundred hours of my life until I get burnt out or frustrated. Last big frustration point was that I can't get the random drop which unlocks the extra class in the last xpac I bought.
Try Tales of Maj'Eyal. It's free or about a fiver on Steam. The first thing you do after making a char is go to the skills screen so you can see how the different points affect the skills. There's stat points (mag, str, etc), talent points, category points and generic points, and they all interact somehow to produce your dmg values and skill effects. Everything in the character sheet has info on mouseover or you can just check the formulae for everything on the wiki.
Playing it yourself to actually see the values pan out would probably require you to get past level 10 or so, when your char feels like less of an empty generic shell and you start amassing some points.
Yahoo comments are often hilarious based, but it also goes the other way
News article comment sections warrant more research as a phenomenon and method of narrative control. There's a good reason why they're practically extinct, a process which started in 2014 or so. Of the few that are left, in the instances where they suddenly skew massively pro-narrative in defiance of sanity and common sense, it's hard to believe they're anything other than a staged and manipulated enemy PR action.
For someone who hasn't seen this yet, would you recommend watching the theatrical first and comparing them? Or is this good enough to serve as a total replacement?
Nice. I had a quick skim, not expecting much, but what little I watched made me feel more positive towards it than I do to the new series. I don't hate that one either, but it's a stretch to say I've liked any single moment of it either. Maybe the best thing I can say about the new one is it hasn't completely killed my curiosity to see how it turns out.
The old one seems well-acted, less dependent on scenic gimmickry and the scenes I saw seem like they capture the spirit of the book more. This key scene about the acceptability of rebellion clearly understands the book better than the same scene in the new one. It's a pivotal scene and even slop-chugging redditors concede the new show got it wrong. Old version of Toranaga (mifune?!) is a cold, austere presence from moment one rather than some squinty sympathetic Ken Watanabe style bullshit. Mariko is demure rather than some maudlin, scene stealing feminist mope. Gimli is the portuguese captain Rodriguez and seems to do his scenes just as well as the new guy (who was probably the best part of the new show from the miniscule amount he features). Looks good! Just impressions from a few minutes of skimming though.
Not used any more (at least not in my living memory) but it used to be a verb, 'fagging', to describe senior kids getting junior kids to run menial errands for them, such as sitting on the school toilet seat to warm it up for them.
From wikipedia:
"The senior, sometimes called the fag-master, was the protector of his fags and responsible for their happiness and good conduct."
Note for Americans: no really, it is April 2nd.
That's what I mean. It shows 4 pieces of original dialogue and only 1 from the reload so I was wondering if it meant the whole thing was deleted. Sounds like it was, making it the most egregious example of the lot.
Looks pretty bad. Aside from the fact that I don't know what's going on top right - why are 4 pieces of dialogue being contrasted with just 1? were they all deleted? even worse if so - the rest are pretty obvious examples of politically correct self-censorship, faithfully exhibited.
I was about to cautiously say 'I'd keep my money in my wallet for this one' until I checked the steam store listing. $70 for a 2008 game in a P5 skin, denuvo-diseased, with $35 dlc which falls outside the $100 premium edition package, as well as being pozzed?? Honestly whoever actually shelled out cash for this deserves to have all their favourite chars tranniblackified and stuffed full of gay dicks. Show some goddamned restraint whoever you are...
Extremely limpwristed. The idea that this or any such case was ever about the FDA's freedom to keep old social media posts online is a joke and they know it, which is why the FDA now spin it as exactly that. The settlement allows them to limit it to that. But how can there be no damages or punishment inherent in the idea of FDA posting misleading medical information?
I've been sceptical of FLCCC for a little while now. Pierre Kory is a bit flakey. FLCCC advice on blood oxygen levels during covid prompted Scott Schara to bring his daughter to hospital where she was later killed under their Midazolam and Fentanyl based covid protocols. I wouldn't necessarily ascribe FLCCC's part in this this to bad faith - any more than I would accuse JJ Couey in the clip of bad faith, despite the fact he's equally flakey sometimes - but there's a lot of flakes around. ICAN and CHD seem more reliable than FLCCC for institutional change. Your own judgement and resistance is more reliable than anything.
'Violet', she fucked James Deen 3 times on camera. Findable but been scrubbed to some extent.
Not just the journoids. This dangerhair was one of the women in the game industry who tried to join in the pathetic metoo of Chris Avellone, and has done multiple actual porn shoots (ironically with a pornstar accused of rape). They are broken trash.
...And I just discovered now in posting this that she once worked for Take This. Yes, SBI institutional partner, Take This. lmao. Because of course she has.
Constantly imply the game is early access. Make the build number 0.80something on the title screen. Include a build select somewhere in the options, with a parody '0.91.01a beta branch', which if selected changes the style of combat to something totally different and shitty, with only the "Female Presenting Non-Binary" player character as selectable, sweet-babified tumblr char portraits etc. Doesn't have to be more than a joke, have it fake crash early on with a dev note about bug reports and V1.0 releasing soon (dev note dated 2018).
Blatant pretending. He says 'Japan is known for scaling down difficulty' while linking to some obscure shit about the original FF7, acting like he doesn't know the much more recent and bigger story about Squenix's Ethics Department getting involved with Tifa's tits. He just has no idea what any of it's about...! gawsh.