weatheryear

[weatheryear]

Thinking about the post, it comes off as overly critical of C&C. The original, (Tiberian Dawn), Red Alert, and Renegade were all completely unique things that had never been done before. RA2 introduced some really good elements, but couldn't hold the focus. Tiberian Sun tried to push the technological envelope without really improving the gameplay.

The real problem isn't really C&C, but the scale of real combat. So, I'm making this post to explain that.

A platoon is roughly 30-40 infantrymen, and is the smallest unit you'll see engage in direct combat. Smaller units might be say, guarding a base, or engaging in reconnaissance, or logistics, but actual combat, boots on the ground, you are probably not going to see much less than a platoon. The maximum size of a platoon is approaching the maximum size we actually have in online multiplayer. Both in technical and social limitations.

I mean, it's hard enough getting a few people together for an OTT night, nevermind getting a PLATOON to work with.

And that's just one side. Like a full raid in WoW. Each platoon will have 2 or 3 platoons around them to guard their flanks or are held in reserve. And each platoon is likely to only have a troop of tanks attached, unless it's a special operation. Tanks are very good at concentrated force, so you might have a lot more on a breakthrough operation, but out of the ideal, you probably aren't going to have much more than a troop.

And a battery or three of artillery in range that you can call upon. And air cover. And potential naval support. And long range strategic assets. And logistics and supply chains. And Electronic Countermeasure Warfare Systems.

And every time you call in fire support from a battery, they open themselves up to counterfire, and will likely have to move after the fire-for-effect.

And the whole thing is organized in a strict, but decentralized hierarchy, with everyone well trained in their role.

Even worse, a single battlefield can cover kilometres. To put this in perspective, Death Stranding 2 has massive, wide open terrain of all types. Very realistically done. The longest distance to objective I've seen in the game, which is procedurally generated, is just over 6km.

Even the smaller 105mm Howitzers can accurately hit targets at 11km, and 15km with rocket-assisted ammunition.

The average rifleman is effective up to 200m. With section fire, they, and light machine guns, have an effective range of 600m. Snipers and medium machine guns can be effective over a kilometre.

Alright, let's take C&C into consideration. There is Tiberium, which literally sprouts from the ground. It has valuable minerals, but is also radioactive. This makes it easier to build machinery while making it's basically impossible to use light, (unattached). infantry.

This justifies C&C's accidental overuse of Tank Rushes. The real reason is that a 0.5m bump in the ground can provide an infantryman with enough cover from sight to make them effectively invisible to a tank, and make direct small arms attacks almost completely ineffective. The other reason is that the basic infantry, (minigunners, because they honestly did not know any better), cost 1/8 the cost of an Abrams tank.

Alright, alright, the world's population is devastated, and say the War Factory is completely automated. This would make it far more justifiable. But, tanks are typically crew by 3-5 people, and in Canada, they all use Carbines for self-defence. And that can still be difficult to get in a video game.

Looking up the capabilities of Helldivers 2 servers, we COULD implement this now, if we wanted to. Assuming that every gamer has a headset for audio communication, and speaks the same language, and the game implements a system that makes undirected audio communications work in even a semblance of the real world, (i.e. you can just talk without having to establish a connection with everyone you want to talk to), and get enough people together, and direct and organize enough people, AND have them agree on a hierarchy to have someone responsible for the supply chain.

The ONLY game I've seen enemies use Hull Down for tanks, (the equivalent of an infantryman hiding in a gully), is MGSV.

The best firearms mechanics I've seen is Titanfall 2, or Death Stranding 2, depending on your perspective.

The only games that understands that machine guns have a linear AoE are Space Marine, Boltgun, and Bloons Tower Defence 4+. Rogue Trade has a simplified by effective spread mechanic for automatic weapons.

The only of anything that deals with pistols and grenades properly is the 40K OTT.

I can't think of a multiplayer combat game that deals with supply chains, other than really Fat Princess.

Renegade was released 7 years after Dark Forces created the first actual 3 dimensional first person shooter. Until then, we only had DOOMclones that played pretend with 3 dimensions, when most weren't even 2d.

This is the scope of what C&C tried to do. In a time when we had the FIRST Pentium Processor, (66MHz vs. the current 6.2Ghz)

(66,000,000Hz vs. 6,200,000,000 Hz)

P.S. I want to play Renegade again.

Command & Conquer

Nowadays, for at least decade, C&C has been known for two main things:

Wacky Shit

Tank Rush

Originally, C&C was... original.

The two creators of the Real Time Strategy:

Command & Conquer

Warcraft

Like DOOM was originally Wolfenstein, Command & Conquer was originally Dune II, (Dune was not made by Westwood, but published from the same publisher).

Of the two, C&C pushed the technology, while Warcraft focused on the highly polished gameplay and lore.

Being an inheritor of Dune (II) explains why C&C focuses on harvesters. In Dune II, you sent out harvesters to harvest Spice, and used the money to produce units. This is basically an attempt to combine strategy and tactics. Did it work? Fuck no, but literally no one had ever done anything like this before.

Warcraft I focused on tactics, village building, and RPG's. Did it work? Also no. In Warcraft I, you literally had to build a road to every building. When the Orcs are literally a few hundred yards away.

The two are the reason why we have the Command and Conquer Economy. This is something that rarely happens in real life. You don't want your tank factory to be within artillery range of your enemy, because that's a good way to destroy all of the infrastructure, and skilled workers. But, like I said, no one had every done anything like this before on the computer. Ever. There were strategy games, but nothing that tried to simulate real time combat.

Now, you can't use Spice, so they invented Tiberium. It came from a meteor that landed near the Tiber river. Tiberium is a rock that grows, absorbing minerals from beneath the earth. It's destructive, radioactive, but valuable. As it starts ravaging the world, the UN decides to create the Global Defence Initiative. The Global Defence Initiative is a fat, bloated bureaucracy that is also the shining pure of pureness.

The other faction is the Hand of Nod. They are lead by Cain/Cane/Kane

Nod means wandering, and Cain settled "In the Land of Nod", i.e. he never settled down. Nod is a combination of Antichrist-level villainy AND helping the oppressed and abandoned rise up against the fat, bureaucratic Global Defence Initiative.

Like I said, Storytelling was Warcraft's strong suit, not Westwood's. While Dune II had largely identical factions, C&C made both factions completely different.

GDI's weakest tank is the Medium Tank, which is actually an M1 Abrams.

Nod's only tank is the Light Tank, which is actually an M2 Bradley.

GDI then gets the iconic Mammoth Tank, which is one of the most viable fictional tanks ever created.

Nod instead gets the Recon Bike, Stealth Tank, and Flame Tank. The recon bike is a bike with a basic glacys as it's only armour, and a pair of missile launchers. It also has machine guns, but like most vehicles in the games, rock/paper/scissors prevents them from actually being used. These would be absolutely incredible for asymmetric warfare against tanks, i.e. hide and seek. In the game, they act kind of like really fast infantry, being able to dodge cannon fire. And the predecessor of RTS micromanagement.

The Stealth Tank was the GDI name, Kane preferred to call it the Ezekiel Wheel. 10 year old me did NOT now how epic that reference was. It's not a tank in really any sense. It does have tracks, but they are small track sections independent suspension legs, (think Christopher Nolan's Batmobile, but with small tracks forward and back.

This can also turn invisible. It has to drop the cloak to actually fire. Realistically, it would be attack from great range, and would likely cloak and relocate before counter fire could even be countenanced. In the game, however, tanks can attack 5 cells away, and artillery 6.

The Mammoth Tank, Recon Bike, and Stealth Tank would all be game changers in real life. GDI also has the Orca VTOL.

This is probably the first ducted fan as a replacement for helicopters in fiction. There were plenty of attempts at it in real life.

After C&C, which would later, retroactively be dubbed C&C: Tiberian Dawn, they decided to do something completely different:

Red Alert

Einstein created the Chronosphere. The Chronosphere temporally displaces things, but there is also a snap-back, which is energetic to say the least. He goes back in time, shakes Hitler's hands, timing it for the snap back would kill Hitler, thereby obviating WWII.

This ignores the other causes of WWII, but if WWII didn't happen, then the Western Allies and Soviet Union would have fought. Pretty much guaranteed. The Soviets think they have a mandate from heaven to save the world from Capitalism... regardless of how many hundreds of millions it kills.

The allies are disparate, each with their own specialist units.

The Soviets have a strong tendency to Big Stupid Villain Tanks. The allies have have heavy cruisers while the soviets have submarines.

Why? Because Rock/Paper/Scissors Supremacy. The same reason tanks don't use their machine guns. The Soviet Union also completely lack ports that were both deep water and warm water, i.e. they freeze, i.e. submarines are viable when surface ships are not.

The Allies have the Chronosphere that lets you temporarily teleport your units, while the Soviets have the Iron Curtain, which temporarily makes a vehicle or building invulnerable.

They even had morse code in the manual. If you translate it, it tells you how to unlock an alternate called It Came From Red Alert, where you fight giant ants.

Summary

The sad truth about Command & Conquer is that no matter how incredible the design were, they were completely dogshit at stories, and the actual gameplay is far less interesting than you think it is during the campaigns. I honestly spent more time playing with the .INI files to unlock secret units.

After Red Alert, they had no idea what to do. They also threw a hissy fit. People kept comparing them to Warcraft, which had heroes, and stories, and lore. Don't you know that Westwood had heroes first?!

Did they? No. In name, yes, but they never actually succeeded.

They created a sequel for the first C&C, which added aliens, but not enough to actually be interesting. And they attempted to have the last two games, (excluding Sole Survivor, which is a multiplayer version that lets you control one unit; was it fun?, yes; was it good?, no), be part of the same continuity, and just failed at it.

They added Michael Biehn and James Earl Jones in attempt to create a heroic narrative, but it really didn't work. Tiberian Sun also introduced Voxels and terrain destruction. This was interesting technology, but did not actually make the game any better. It was fun for a play through or three, and that's about it.

I'll talk about the side story after, but when it comes to strategy, Red Alert 2 was the ultimate failure of their attempt to make anything cohesive. They had some really great unit ideas. The problem is that they tried to take themselves seriously. It didn't work, and the plot was complete dogshit. Red Alert 2 was the last game they actually tried to make interesting. Afterwards it focused on it's strength, tank rushes.

You see, modern infantry are far more complicated to make a game of them simply building a bunch of tanks, and sending them over to curbstomp the enemy. RA2 put effort into making infantry useful, but they didn't really succeed. And this was the last time they really put any effort into infantry, even if keeping the same mechanics. Instead, they focused on serial tank escalation, because bigger is obviously better.

Renegade

in the first C&C, you had a few missions where you could play as the Commando. He had a sniper rifle, and could C4 buildings. The problem is that infantry were by-and-large useless, (except dropping engineers into the enemy base).

Renegade made a FPS playing as the Commando. But, it used the same mechanics of the RTS. You had the unit construction buildings, and with them you could make the units - from the game.

Basically, Team Fortress with tanks, and buildings you can destroy temporarily disable. This was something that no one had done anything similar to. Starcraft: Ghost was trying, but was cancelled, (and probably would have done a much better job).

Renegade also added a wider variety of infantry, and since they nixed the RTS element, they made infantry incredibly important.

Did it do anything especially well? No, but for it's day it was absolutely incredible. You could hijack enemy tanks, plant C4 on a console to destroy a building, (THEY WERE TRYING, DAMNIT). Every building had standard layout, and if you grew up playing C&C, it was absolutely incredible to be able to explore them.

And these weren't just generic tanks, these were C&C tanks, i.e. these were tanks from a franchise that specialized in cool tanks. Or hop on an Orca and attack your enemy from the skies.

It also wanted to call the Commando "Havoc" but didn't really sell it.

And to be entirely fair, this is something that games STILL fail at. Both making the characters memorable, and adding vehicles well into a FPS game.

To be fair, Death Stranding does, but we can't compare most games to Hideo Kojima. It's like comparing anime to Hayao Miyazaki.

[weatheryear]

Command & Conquer

Nowadays, for at least decade, C&C has been known for two main things:

Wacky Shit

Tank Rush

Originally, C&C was... original.

The two creators of the Real Time Strategy:

Command & Conquer

Warcraft

Like DOOM was originally Wolfenstein, Command & Conquer was originally Dune II, (Dune was not made by Westwood, but published from the same publisher).

Of the two, C&C pushed the technology, while Warcraft focused on the highly polished gameplay and lore.

Being an inheritor of Dune (II) explains why C&C focuses on harvesters. In Dune II, you sent out harvesters to harvest Spice, and used the money to produce units. This is basically an attempt to combine strategy and tactics. Did it work? Fuck no, but literally no one had ever done anything like this before.

Warcraft I focused on tactics, village building, and RPG's. Did it work? Also no. In Warcraft I, you literally had to build a road to every building. When the Orcs are literally a few hundred yards away.

The two are the reason why we have the Command and Conquer Economy. This is something that rarely happens in real life. You don't want your tank factory to be within artillery range of your enemy, because that's a good way to destroy all of the infrastructure, and skilled workers. But, like I said, no one had every done anything like this before on the computer. Ever. There were strategy games, but nothing that tried to simulate real time combat.

Now, you can't use Spice, so they invented Tiberium. It came from a meteor that landed near the Tiber river. Tiberium is a rock that grows, absorbing minerals from beneath the earth. It's destructive, radioactive, but valuable. As it starts ravaging the world, the UN decides to create the Global Defence Initiative. The Global Defence Initiative is a fat, bloated bureaucracy that is also the shining pure of pureness.

The other faction is the Hand of Nod. They are lead by Cain/Cane/Kane

Nod means wandering, and Cain settled "In the Land of Nod", i.e. he never settled down. Nod is a combination of Antichrist-level villainy AND helping the oppressed and abandoned rise up against the fat, bureaucratic Global Defence Initiative.

Like I said, Storytelling was Warcraft's strong suit, not Westwood's. While Dune II had largely identical factions, C&C made both factions completely different.

GDI's weakest tank is the Medium Tank, which is actually an M1 Abrams.

Nod's only tank is the Light Tank, which is actually an M2 Bradley.

GDI then gets the iconic Mammoth Tank, which is one of the most viable fictional tanks ever created.

Nod instead gets the Recon Bike, Stealth Tank, and Flame Tank. The recon bike is a bike with a basic glacys as it's only armour, and a pair of missile launchers. It also has machine guns, but like most vehicles in the games, rock/paper/scissors prevents them from actually being used. These would be absolutely incredible for asymmetric warfare against tanks, i.e. hide and seek. In the game, they act kind of like really fast infantry, being able to dodge cannon fire. And the predecessor of RTS micromanagement.

The Stealth Tank was the GDI name, Kane preferred to call it the Ezekiel Wheel. 10 year old me did NOT now how epic that reference was. It's not a tank in really any sense. It does have tracks, but they are small track sections independent suspension legs, (think Christopher Nolan's Batmobile, but with small tracks forward and back.

This can also turn invisible. It has to drop the cloak to actually fire. Realistically, it would be attack from great range, and would likely cloak and relocate before counter fire could even be countenanced. In the game, however, tanks can attack 5 cells away, and artillery 6.

The Mammoth Tank, Recon Bike, and Stealth Tank would all be game changers in real life. GDI also has the Orca VTOL.

This is probably the first ducted fan as a replacement for helicopters in fiction. There were plenty of attempts at it in real life.

After C&C, which would later, retroactively be dubbed C&C: Tiberian Dawn, they decided to do something completely different:

Red Alert

Einstein created the Chronosphere. The Chronosphere temporally displaces things, but there is also a snap-back, which is energetic to say the least. He goes back in time, shakes Hitler's hands, timing it for the snap back would kill Hitler, thereby obviating WWII.

This ignores the other causes of WWII, but if WWII didn't happen, then the Western Allies and Soviet Union would have fought. Pretty much guaranteed. The Soviets think they have a mandate from heaven to save the world from Capitalism... regardless of how many hundreds of millions it kills.

The allies are disparate, each with their own specialist units.

The Soviets have a strong tendency to Big Stupid Villain Tanks. The allies have have heavy cruisers while the soviets have submarines.

Why? Because Rock/Paper/Scissors Supremacy. The same reason tanks don't use their machine guns. The Soviet Union also completely lack ports that were both deep water and warm water, i.e. they freeze, i.e. submarines are viable when surface ships are not.

The Allies have the Chronosphere that lets you temporarily teleport your units, while the Soviets have the Iron Curtain, which temporarily makes a vehicle or building invulnerable.

They even had morse code in the manual. If you translate it, it tells you how to unlock an alternate called It Came From Red Alert, where you fight giant ants.

Summary

The sad truth about Command & Conquer is that no matter how incredible the design were, they were completely dogshit at stories, and the actual gameplay is far less interesting than you think it is during the campaigns. I honestly spent more time playing with the .INI files to unlock secret units.

After Red Alert, they had no idea what to do. They also threw a hissy fit. People kept comparing them to Warcraft, which had heroes, and stories, and lore. Don't you know that Westwood had heroes first?!

Did they? No. In name, yes, but they never actually succeeded.

They created a sequel for the first C&C, which added aliens, but not enough to actually be interesting. And they attempted to have the last two games, (excluding Sole Survivor, which is a multiplayer version that lets you control one unit; was it fun?, yes; was it good?, no), be part of the same continuity, and just failed at it.

They added Michael Biehn and James Earl Jones in attempt to create a heroic narrative, but it really didn't work. Tiberian Sun also introduced Voxels and terrain destruction. This was interesting technology, but did not actually make the game any better. It was fun for a play through or three, and that's about it.

I'll talk about the side story after, but when it comes to strategy, Red Alert 2 was the ultimate failure of their attempt to make anything cohesive. They had some really great unit ideas. The problem is that they tried to take themselves seriously. It didn't work, and the plot was complete dogshit. Red Alert 2 was the last game they actually tried to make interesting. Afterwards it focused on it's strength, tank rushes.

You see, modern infantry are far more complicated to make a game of them simply building a bunch of tanks, and sending them over to curbstomp the enemy. RA2 put effort into making infantry useful, but they didn't really succeed. And this was the last time they really put any effort into infantry, even if keeping the same mechanics. Instead, they focused on serial tank escalation, because bigger is obviously better.

Renegade

in the first C&C, you had a few missions where you could play as the Commando. He had a sniper rifle, and could C4 buildings. The problem is that infantry were by-and-large useless, (except dropping engineers into the enemy base).

Renegade made a FPS playing as the Commando. But, it used the same mechanics of the RTS. You had the unit construction buildings, and with them you could make the units - from the game.

Basically, Team Fortress with tanks, and buildings you can destroy temporarily disable. This was something that no one had done anything similar to. Starcraft: Ghost was trying, but was cancelled, (and probably would have done a much better job).

Renegade also added a wider variety of infantry, and since they nixed the RTS element, they made infantry incredibly important.

Did it do anything especially well? No, but for it's day it was absolutely incredible. You could hijack enemy tanks, plant C4 on a console to destroy a building, (THEY WERE TRYING, DAMNIT). Every building had standard layout, and if you grew up playing C&C, it was absolutely incredible to be able to explore them.

And these weren't just generic tanks, these were C&C tanks, i.e. these were tanks from a franchise that specialized in cool tanks. Or hop on an Orca and attack your enemy from the skies.

It also wanted to call the Commando "Havoc" but didn't really sell it.

And to be entirely fair, this is something that games STILL fail at. Both making the characters memorable, and adding vehicles well into a FPS game.

To be fair, Death Stranding does, but we can't compare most games to Hideo Kojima. It's like comparing anime to Hayao Miyazaki.

[weatheryear]

Mass Effect 3 - Multiplayer

Bioware was a storied company before the original Mass Effect was even announced. Mass Effect wasn't a surprise, other than the fact it was as good was expected.

Now, good needs to be explained. It used a shitty, weird knock-off FPS engine, and tried to give a FPS a full, D&D-style skill system WHILE combining it with a video game skill tree.

It was - ALL - shit. Not terrible enough to stop you from playing, which is a crucial threshold. Not ever part of a video game has to be perfect, but it has to at least be unobtrusive.

The reason the game was good was the story, setting, world building, and characters.

You could land on ANY planet that would not immediately be fatal to do so. And I do mean immediate. You normally deployed in a cool tank. Some planets have environmental warnings, and you would die if you spent at most a minute on foot, (a bar appears and quickly drops, followed by an immediate angry screaming siren to warn you of the danger.

Now, while it spanned the whole galaxy, the in-universe justification had precursors leave Mass Effect Relays. They could launch you across the galaxy in seconds. Space faring species typically have a cheap knockoff of this that makes it difficult to jump a few systems over.

But, no one is going to fault them for not having trillions of planets to land on.

Half of the game was simply exploring.

The world was as hard as you can get science fiction while still being able to do planetary romance. And then it turns out it's a cosmic horror. The only thing you can do in the first game is stop the god-machines, (angry yellow colour from space, each a nation unto itself), asleep in the dark space beyond the galactic rim, from waking up. And it takes the combined firepower of all of the major powers to kill ONE of them.

Oh, and even fragments of them can brainwash you into becoming a Lovecraftian cultist.

I have no seen anything do anything near as impactful. Most things that try to deal with galaxy-wide civilizations get stretched too thin, (as doing a whole galaxy is extremely difficult).

Onto this they added complex characters that you can love and hate, and these stories carry on between games, with your choices carrying on between them.

---

And, then what happened? Bioware sounds like the perfect video game studio. What could possibly?..

EA. EA happened.

EA forced them to use the same engine as the other EA FPS games, which dramatically improved gameplay, even if it made it dramatically more cliché.

In Mass Effect 2, your start the game working with space racists that you could optionally fight against in the first game. To be fair, they put so much love and care into this questionable faction that even if I still hate that they did it, I would never want to see it changed.

Also Miranda's ass, which is just as perfect as her backstory makes it out to be.

One of the things the first game lacked was sexiness.

Well, after a lot of soul searching, I fell in love with the new setting, because of how much love and care was put into it's design.

And then they added a late game DLC. The DLC, Arrival, has you war crime, and your moral choices are maybe being sad about it.

Mass Effect 3 starts with you being charged with a war crime. The war crime you committed in the DLC. Didn't download the DLC, or didn't play it? Well, don't worry, the game

*waves it's hands about, implying how bad you were, even if playing a perfect Paragon playthrough*

In Mass Effect 1, you investigate what you think is a rogue agent, only to discover he's trying to wake up Lovecraftian horrors. You stop him, and prevent the alarm clock from sounding to wake up the Lovecraftian horrors.

In Mass Effect 2, no one believes you, despite literally having a space battle with one of the Lovecraftian horrors right outside the space capital. So, the renegade Human organization lead by Mr. Space Racist, gives you a ship and gives you information it founds out about missing Human colonies that might be tied to the Lovecraftian horrors. Which, they did a good job of showing how distasteful a Paragon Shepard would find this alliance. You end up fighting an species that has been genetically engineered and indoctrinated into husks of themselves to act as fingers for the god-machines between the rim, in the dark space between galaxies.

In Mass Effect 3, you fight an open war.

Wait, what? You... you fight Lovecraftian horrors? HOW?

Good question. Don't look for answer. In fact, mute the sound for the first part, and look away during cutscenes until you get into space

Okay, are you space now?

Alright, now, you're not actually in space. Keep the sound turned off, and look away for cutscenes until the one cutscene with a quicktime event, and then you get in space, for real. You can even choose where to go. If it's on the short list the game lets you visit at this current time.

Alright, Mass Effect 3 is an absolutely FANTASTIC GAME. Except:

Beginning

Middle

Ending

Main Plot

Main Villain (it's not the one you are thinking, unless you are brilliant enough to piece together that the main villain is EXACTLY who you think it is)

His main sidekick.

etc.

The really fun part is that I'm not exaggerating, at all.

Mass Effect 3 is an absolutely fantastic game, despite the fact that the main story is completely dogshit. It even knocks it up a notch, by making these cutscenes unskippable, because nothing says your boring henchman is a mary sue like making him unskippable. Oh, and HE'S JUST LIKE YOU *dum dum dum*

The reason it's such a good game is shear inertia, because the world and characters are still here from the original. The characters you fell in love with, and the ones you hate.

The Arrival DLC was so terrible that I refused to buy any DLC, until The Citadel. This is a gift to the fans. You bring back your entire team, from every game, (if they are still alive), throw a rager, on go on a mission, with everyone on board. You are team Shepard, naturally, but the other two are Team Mako and Team Hammerhead, the tanks from Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2, and the teams argue about which is better. You then unlock a simulator, where you can play with all of your old team mates.

So, play through the end game once. You don't actually have to beat it, and it's probably better if you don't. But at least find out EDI's orgins. From then on, playthrough the game to the Citadel, throw your party, and then either play online or in the simulator.

---

Mass Effect Online is an absolutely fantastic experience, with a wide variety of unlockable characters that all feel unique. It also has tangible benefits to not just the main game, but every - single - playthrough of the main game, allowing you to get more of the absolutely terrible ME3 endings.

Unfortunately, they take the unlockable thing a little WAY too fucking far.

You start with a small selection of playable characters, that are each stripped down versions of the characters you play in single player. Every other character is gathered through, you guessed loot boxes.

But wait, there's more!

Every single character can be unlocked multiple times, and you get slightly more customization. So, what this means is that even after you get the common characters THAT YOU LITERALLY START WITH, you can unlock them again, and again, and again, and again, with no guarantee of ever getting one you wanted. Not even gatcha pulls and a mercy system, but literally just random chance.

But wait, there's more.

Core aspects of the original game were farmed off to loot boxes, so you can you spend your money just to play the game.

I played through Bronze, and the Silver, and then Gold, and then Platinum. And while I can play Platinum, and honestly prefer to play Platinum, it uses up too much combat consumables to actually be sustainable. Before I realized it, I had depleted the consumables I had built up by playing the easier difficulties. But now I had to spend most of my money on consumables, and so the lower, less fun difficulties were better ways to farm money.

But, I did get the N7 Paladin, and Geth Juggernaut, and Geth Trooper, etc. all, so I can't be too butthurt, other than the fact they made the game pointless to play.

---

And then they made Andromeda, who's very existence violates the world, story, and principles of the original trilogy. Of course, it wasn't Bioware that made Andromeda. EA wanted Bioware, famed for their RPG's, to make an Overwatch Killer, (Anthem). They then hired a new team of woke retards, called them Bioware, and had them make Andromeda.

For the record, this is how EA took the Titans out of Titanfall.

And killed of Maxis.

And so many other gaming studios.

EA just buys them, takes them out behind the woodshed, and shoots them.

[weatheryear]

Kirk/Spock

Kirk (slash) Spock

The originator of Slash, (and thence Femslash).

I've made posts about how the Internet was created BY porn.

But this was the World Wide Web, i.e. the publicly visible and accessible internet.

But, there was an internet before that. Now we would call it the Darkweb, but it was someone's home computer set to respond to HTML requests.

Now, in the early internet, pornographic pictures were difficult to transmit, but short text stories with no special characters other than space and newline, are incredibly cheap. So, they setup websites who's job was to put you on an e-mail list, and people would submit stories to these e-mail lists.

Why?

Broad categories, men like porn with pictures, women like porn with emotions, and so the EROTICA category, (which is often lyingly called the Romance category), is by and large the purview of women.

And what was the most popular category?

Incest? BDSM? No.

Kirk/Spock.

Gay stories was something most publishers would NOT touch. Nevermind gay fanfiction of one of the largest franchises in the world.

Now, Gene Roddenberry caught one of his female staffers writing Kirk/Spock fanfiction. What did he do?

Get mad at her for having zippers. In the future, they would have clothing that just sticks together like magic.

Which is how you see the clothing work in TNG. They would just stick the phaser to the clothing, and something like electrostatics would hold it in place.

This is quite important, as every time they bring back a shiny rock it turns out to be a hyper-intelligent transdimentional being, or something.

Star Trek, however, was owned by NBC, one of the biggest media corps in the world. And no one wanted to get sued.

But, the internet was wild and free. The perfect place for proto-fujioshis to spread their smut. It created a lot of the standards for information transmission. It's different from broadcast, as it's peer-to-peer, and so doing so efficiently is/was difficult.

Note: If you are wondering why incest was included, it's because any site that includes it as a category has it as one of if not THE largest category.

[weatheryear]

Expansion Pack

Back in the day, before the internet, or even when we had the internet but it wasn't doing anything other than Slashdot and gay Star Trek erotica, you could not update your software. You went to the store, bought a box with shrink wrap around it, (unless you had the millions to commission something custom), put the disk into your computer, installed it, and played it. If a game was published with problems, they were permanent.

We literally had shareware, which were disks that you were explicitly told you were allowed to spread, in order to get information passed around through Sneakernet.

Sneakernet is another story.

Anyways. So, the game was published, and initially, you only one two options, tell the player how to fix your game, or sell a new game.

If we take DOOM, DOOM 2 was basically an expansion pack, but the concept didn't exist yet. It was decided afterwards that an iteration of a game, a full version number increase, should have mechanics built from the ground up.

Reminder this is what happened with Super Mario.

Left: Super Mario Brothers 1 (released 1985)

Mid: Super Mario Brothers 3 (released 1988)

Rght: Super Mario World (released 1990)

This is how fast computers were developing back in the day. This was called Moore's Law.

But, there was a middle ground. You could make an Expansion Pack. Xpacs were normally priced at half a normal game, and would add a full new campaign plus a few new units or weapons.

And life was good.

With the proliferation of the internet, games could now be patched. Initially, what they did was either:

Bug Patch: Fixing problems.

Balance Patch: They change the small numbers in the background to improve the playability of the game.

Content Patch: Free content.

But then they figured out that with the internet they could make patches as often as they wanted. Instead of a the great sigh of relief being able to fix the one major problem from the game, it turned into routine. Games no longer had work out of the box, to the point that it sometimes takes years of patches before a game is video game is viewed as even playable.

And then they realized people could pay for individual content. Instead of paying $40 for a whole new campaign that was as good as the original, and a few new playable classes, and a whole new set of items, you could now charge $2 for the dozen items, $10 per character, and $20 for an extremely short campaign that can be beaten in a few hours. Instead of paying half the price for the same amount of content as the original, you pay the full price, if not more, for much worse content. Each item and character is completely separate and not meant to work together, the campaign is about as long as the tutorial was, and every - single - separate piece gets fucked over the next time Microsoft updates their DLLs, and has to be patched, individually.

And we get WoW, that carved out 95% of the original mechanics to make the game easier for casuals, and destroyed the world's lore from the very first expansion pack, that you have to pay for, along with the monthly fee, and then if you want to have anything good, you need to pay real money for it.

For the record, Vanilla WoW spent ridiculous amounts of time and effort to stop any real-money transactions. If you got caught even offering, your account would be banned.

Back in the day, if you had a disappointing expansion pack, (usually on the third+ one), you just... uninstalled it.

to put this into context, the only reason I got rid of my NES/SNES/N64 was not because the games didn't work, and was not because the games were less fun then current names, but because I had played them through so many times that I wasn't even thinking while playing. If you get a working console and working cartridge, (because barbarians cannot take care of their electronics), THEY WILL STILL PLAY.

The only reason I can't play my Windows games, (other than giving them away), is because I realized how much superior Macs are.

And now we have governments discussing how loot boxes are casinos for kids.

[weatheryear]

For those that don't know the history here, this as part of the weeb history where fansubs were made before major translations.

Hell, the studios would see what was being pirated to know which anime to translate.

Fansubs don't know what the final, commercial, translated name is going to be, and so we called it Onegai Sensei.

Then the translated title came out, and we decided to keep the Onegai but translate the Teacher. This is because while Please Teacher is the literal translation, it's not a functional one. It sounds... suggestive, when their love was pure and holy. It wasn't until a decade later that people started to use the full translation, largely because they were first introduced to the proper, commercially translated release.

[weatheryear]

Paycheck Protection Plan

A long, long time ago, Donald Trump shocked the world by being elected President of the United States. Something not seen since Regan.

During this time we have a little world-wide coughing fit. Donald Trump, following his constitutional mandate, did everything in his power to make resources available to states.

A lot of states decided to lockdown their entire economies. Which is the second worst thing they could have done, as sunlight killed COVID, and obesity was the primary comorbidity.

During this time, most of the Democrats hid at home.

But funny enough, that's not how democracy works. Every parliament has a Quorum, this is the minimum number of members needed for a vote to count. This leads to some of the most entertaining shenanigans is that the one thing an under-quorumed assembly can do is force members to come to the assembly. This is also why there are "yes", "no", and "present". "Present" is abstaining from the vote, but is still being counted for Quorum.

Members are normally given a lot of privileges primarily based around allowing them to appear in the assembly, but they do not have to until the assembly calls them. If they do not come when called, they can be compelled.

This can lead to Quorum Busting. This is where members deliberately get as far away as they can. They usually can't leave the assembly's jurisdiction, but they can hide in the mountains. They can then be compelled to come, where they have to be tracked down and dragged back.

Quorum Busting is perfectly legal until they are compelled to come back, and is far more entertaining than a Filibuster.

So, the Democratic Party was the majority party in the house. The shadowy cabal of Satanic paedophiles party leaders went and hid in their mansions as their states and districts utterly collapsed under the weight of, you know, food, or at least the lack of it.

Trump worked with the sitting congress, the remaining Democrats and the majority of the Republicans on the Paycheck Protection Program. This was a program to pay businesses to pay their employees while they were shut down. There were programs to pay people laid off, but this would allow business to keep their employees while everyone was locked at home.

And then, just before the vote, the shambling (near) corpses of the Democratic Party's leaders came back, and said, Ah-Ha! This program doesn't have any safeguards.

They then made themselves in charge of who gets the money, because that's how Congress works, and then gave it their friends, which is also, unfortunately, how congress works.

But the thing is, the original bill had stronger, but simpler safeguards. They had Poison Pills. In legal parlance, a Poison Pill is something to sink the deal. Like a corporation's board creating new shares out of the ether to make a buyout far more costly, as a way to avoid a hostile takeover. For the Paycheck Protection Plan:

No stock buybacks while the loan is outstanding.

No increases in executive income while the loan is outstanding.

Being used for pay would allow partial grants.

Executive positions are highly, highly competitive, and every year they get inflation adjustments, cost of living adjustments, additional performance bonuses, etc. Basically, at least an extra few hundred thousand dollars a year.

Stock buybacks is where the majority stock holders buy back stock, so it would basically allow them to increases their own profit shares and control of their business.

So, basically, the majority owners/board, and executives, could not get paid a dime more than they did the year before. This is unthinkable. Uncountable. No corporation would EVER consider this if they had a choice. It's so horrible that only COVID lockdowns or the brink of liquidation would cause a company to do this. These were of course removed by the returning Democratic Party leaders. If executives did this without a viable excuse they would be fired or even sued. This is because business executives have a fiduciary duty to make as much money as they can for their shareholders. If they fail to do something reasonable that would make them money, they can be sued. Personally. For the losses.

And the Paycheck Protection Program kept running dry, for some reason, without every actually accomplishing what it was created to do.

Unfortunately, this is how politics works.

[weatheryear]

The Melancholy of Season 2

The first real broadcast anime was Astroboy, created from a comic of the same name. And I say comic and not manga, because manga had not really been created yet. Astroboy was arguably one of the first manga.

The Astroboy anime introduced the concept of time wasting and frequent reuse of shots. This made it cost effective enough to be made every week. And by made every week, I mean EVERY WEEK, for years.

And this created a concept in anime. You had three choices, one run, every week, and direct to video. Some of the best anime of all time was produced direct-to-video, so, it means, or meant, something completely different.

They decided that 12 was the appropriate length. This makes sense, 2x12 = 24, with 26 being half a year. This left you two weeks to do something special.

And so you had 12 episode anime, 24/48 episode anime, and 20,000 episode anime. Because once the anime finished it's run, it was over, forever. The studios were often created for a specific anime run, and they would often join another studio at the completion of the anime.

And this is why if you watch an anime, it will be brought to you buy: something directly related to the anime.

In order to change this, as the Japanese are incredibly risk-averse, they needed a phenomenon. You needed that every - single - anime fan could agree with, could join in.

Anime had fractured into a dozen genres, and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya straddled all of them. It had horror that was deep, but manageable, navel gazing that could be ignored, it had fun and joy, it had romance to the point of True Love's Kiss is a major plot point. The entire anime fanbase called out for a Season 2, and a catastrophic change happened in the anime industry. They got the original crew back together and made an absolutely beautiful second season.

And anime as a whole shifted to the Cours template. Anime is made in 12 episode Cours, and if it does well, they can produce more Cours.

It literally took the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya to get the anime industry to take the incredible risk of giving popular shows a second season.

For Haruhi's second season, they wanted to do Endless Eight. This is a groundhogs day arc. In the light novel you only see the final run, but in the anime, they decided to make it 8 episodes. Each episode was almost identical, BUT, they did not reuse anything. Every episode was animated from different angles, with different clothing, and different weather. And most of it's watchers did not make it passed the Endless Eight to see the rest of the second season.

The anime that gave us second seasons committed sepuku.

So, Haruhi Suzumiya died for your second season.

[weatheryear]

DO NOT WORRY ABOUT FLAMEWARS

One of the oldest rules of the internet.

The old internet was a wild-wild west. Back in high school, my high school was next to a university, so we had access to the internet before... pretty much anyone else did. I was told that it was impossible to search for porn on it.

Before this, I had found a way to hack the library's computer system. I didn't do anything with it, but it gave my computer access to more network power and priority.

So, when I found out about the internet thing, my first instincts were to try and break them. Impossible ended up being 3 clicks from the schools webpage. Did I ever do this again, at school? No. But this was my introduction to Pamela's Andersons's implants. It was later on that porn figured out the business model for online businesses, so most websites were:

hosted on someone's computer

entirely volunteer

works of passion

Before porn, the most used website was Slashdot, "News for Nerds, stuff that matters."

This was home to the Slashdot Effect. Which was an accidental DDOS. Like I said, most websites were hosted at home. A megabit connection was something epic, that only the biggest corporations had. The average clock was so slow that increasing the clockspeed would ruin games, we had a button to slow it down.

When a news site with thousands of users links to you, your usage rate increases several thousand times. The world wide web was so small that you could - literally - visit every - single website on a topic.

So, what did nerds do on a worldwide communication tool?

Well, what do you think?

e-mail/bbs

Computing Science

Nerd Out

Dodge Nuclear Weapons

We argued, about anything and everything. One of the biggest topic was gay Star Trek erotica, because women have to ruin everything.

in a nerd environment, arguing is not just considered normal, it's considered good. If you don't have an impassioned argument on the internet about (nerd topic), do you even care about it? The answer is no.

Thanks to the near exclusivity of the nerd, (ior erotica), community, there was no fear about people bringing stupid human emotions into your passionate nerd debate.

Well, then someone put Pamela's Anderson's implants on the internet, and all of a sudden normies had a reason to come here. And now when you call someone a paedo gayfag who doesn't know the meaning of xor, and they go crying to the police. And then gayfags made it against the law to call them gayfags, instead of pulling up their goddamn big girl panties and arguing about which Star Trek ship is better.

To be fair, we now have vtubers. So, silver linings.

[weatheryear]

Starcraft: Ghost

Back in the day, we have major game companies.

That were loved.

And known for the highest quality of production.

Blizzard, which is a laughing stock, had created Starcraft, which was a game so well refined it basically created competitive video game leagues.

Before that, Warcraft was one of the two games that created Real Time Strategy as a genre, (the other being Command & Conquer).

They also had Diablo. Which was another genre-defining game.

They decided to branch out and create Starcraft: Ghost. You play as the Ghost operatives in the game. The Ghosts are stealth psychic sniper commandoes.

To announce this game, Blizzard's main page would flash. These flashes were morse code, many people, including me, stayed up all night translating it.

This is how much we loved our game companies. Instead of the megacorps nowadays, the industry leaders were artists.

It turns out that it was being outsourced, and when it got to around 75% completion, (including competitive online class-based combat a year or two after Team Fortress Classic (mod) was created. And, funding negotiations broke down.

It turns out that Blizzard wanted a contract that would not allow the subcontractor to make money, and get demanding the game be more and more made for the general audience, which meant more big, stupid, action sequences.

The game was eventually cancelled, even though it was 75% complete, and was the beginning of the end for Blizzard. They would end up creating Diablo II and Warcraft III, which were great games, but the upper levels were already moving towards megacorps. The initial release of WoW was created by people that genuinely loved the game.

Afterwards, however, they kept doing everything they could to destroy the game to attract a new audience. People who joined WoW after Vanilla even complained about how the little bit of lore they knew was being destroyed. And the game got simpler and simpler.

And opened a real-money auction house.

For those that don't know, Blizzard spent a lot of time and energy to prevent ANY real-money transactions, to keep the purity of WoW.

[weatheryear]

Gamestonks

There is a huge gulf between how stocks work, and how stocks are supposed to work.

The way stocks are supposed to work is that a company wants money, and so sell tiny portions of the company. At the end of the year, any money that the company made (gross profit), over costs, (net profit), that they decide to not hold in a war chest or reinvest in the company is distributed as dividends, based off how much of the company you own, i.e. stocks.

So, you look at the company, and it produced x-dividends the last couple of years, and so you decide, say, to buy it for 5x earnings. So, on the sixth year, you make 20%, which then climbs by 20% every year. (percent of initial purchase). For pretty much everyone, that would be a great deal.

Too good.

Instead, corporations work of projections, lies, damned lies, and statistics. The stock market value ends up with little to no connection to actual earnings. It's all derivatives of estimations of projections of lies.

Alright, how the fuck are you supposed to make money off of this.

Well, for one thing, YOU are not supposed to make money. THEY are.

And the way to answer the question is through arbitrage. Commodity markets always fluctuate. You have quarterly earnings reports, international currency fluctuations, speculations, short sellings, etc.

You have have one person make a typo and sell 10x what he meant to sell, and this creates a panick that upsets the market index funds, and the market index fund creates more disruptions.

This causes the market price of a stock to increase and decrease, several times over the course of a single day. This leads to day trading, where you buy and sell the same commodity in a single trading day.

Some terms:

Arbitrage: Change in the price of a good, without any change to the good itself.

Commodity: Interchangeable products. Say you buy a 1oz gold coin, and sell it, and buy another 1oz gold coin of the same type, and it would have the same price. If you do it for stocks, it doesn't matter which set of stocks you have for a company, as they are all interchangeable.

Speculation: Literally guessing. If someone thinks a stock will increase in value, they will buy up a lot of that stock. If they are a big enough of a broker, this might be enough to actually change the marker price of the commodity. Effectively creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Panick: If the price of the commodity drops enough, it could make investors worried, which will cause them to sell the stock. This can lead to a cascade of selling, which lowers the price of the stock further, and further, and further.

Leverage: Take debt out on a product that you then invest. So named because it acts like a lever, applying a much larger effect to the initial product. You can stand to make AND lose a lot more money. You can leverage other debt products.

Short Sale: You borrow a commodity with a specific date of return. You sell the commodity. You then buy the commodity later and return it. If the commodity's price drops in the interim, then it's cheaper to buy the commodity later, and so you make money.

Short Squeeze: With a short sale, you are required to buy the product back. If you are required to buy enough of the product back you can cause a short-term increase the market price. The opposite of a panick occurs. Short sellers see the price increasing, and so buy the commodity they shorted now, rather than waiting, when it will be at a higher price.

Now onto Gamestonks. A group of redditors wanted to stick it to the rich hedge funds.

Now, because the government inflates your money away, you CANNOT save for retirements. As your money would lose so much value in that time you might die from the stress of it. You have to invest it in the stock market.

Gamestop is a terrible video game retailer. The only reason they survived as long as they did is because they bought out the competition.

Their stock was dropping. And when a stock drops, you get a lot of short sellers. And the Redditors were ready to strike.

There was a new app on the market, called Robinhood. The obvious implication is that you get to rob the rich. It allowed the average person to play the stock market without brokerage fees. They used this to collectively buy a lot of Gamestop stock. If you have a large buying spree, this increases the price of the commodity. This caused the price to increase by around 30x in a single month.

This caused a lot of financial damage to hedge funds, who complained, because only THEY are allowed to manipulate the stock market. Who do these plebs think they are?

Oh, Robinhood?

. . .

If you don't pay for the product, you ARE the product. The software turned out to have been built by people who built High Speed Trading infrastructure. Everyone thinks High Speed Trading is bad, but it's much worse than most people could imagine. See the Addendum for details. But, the point was basic to gather information from users.

Robinhood, being the Robin Hood they are, FORCED the sale of Gamestop stock. This pushed it back onto the market, and pushed it back onto it's downward spiral, to save the hedgefunds. Or their own liquidity, which means they were trading beyond their means, and decided to NOT meet this commitment.

Addendum: High Speed Trading

Stock trading happens on exchanges. You say put in a buy or sell order for a commodity on your exchange. If there is a compatible order on the exchange, the commodities are traded.

If there is not, the exchange sends the order to other exchanges.

High speed trading has a much faster hardline between exchanges. So, they see an order on an exchange. They see it not be fulfilled. They know it will be sent to other exchanges. They send their own orders to these exchanges, faster. They reach the new exchange first.

So, let's say Able puts a $15 buy order on an exchange for X.

Hilariously, I can just use X.

Anyways.

So, Able puts $15 buy order for say, 10,000 of Galen stock on X exchange. This will buy any stocks from Galen at $15 or less.

There are is one $10 sell order on the exchange, for 5,000 Galen stock. So, they exchange it for $10.

But, there are still 5,000 units missing.

So, X exchange sends out calls to Yankee and Zulu exchange with the orders.

The $15 buy order for 5,000 Galen stock hits Yankee exchange, a split second faster than Zulu.

Bravo High Speed traders have a faster hardline between X and Yankee. So, they send their own $15 buy order for 5,000 Galen stock to Yankee exchange, which arrives before Able's does. They find a Sell Order for $12 for 5,000 units. They buy these 5,000 units and then immediately create a sell order for $15. So, when Able's order gets there, he buys 5,000 units for $15 rather than $12.

P.S. One of the best part of this is that the financial analysts quickly learned the gamestonks lingo so they could properly advise on it.

[weatheryear]

Dark Ages

What if I told you we had a global communication system that required no electricity.

And to sweeten the deal, if you didn't know what you were doing, at any time you can call for help, and then would answer within 30sec.

You'd probably call me a witch. But it's true. It happened. I was there. In the long, long ago. In the before time.

We called in -

Telephone.

No, seriously, this was all true. It's not as cool, as fashionable, nor as accessible as cellphones. It also required a lot of infrastructure. But, with all of that infrastructure, it was still dirty cheap. Every - single - family had one.

And now we don't. We do not have this thing.

You see, telephones were analog. Crystals turn your voice into electricity, and more crystals turn it back. Dialing was done by pressing ACTUAL buttons. Each button used the physical force of pressing them to induce a current.

You could press 0 at any time, and have an operator help you.

When you had a disaster, you could still probably call your family to see if they are safe. Or call the government to ask for help.

[weatheryear]

World Wide Web

The internet was created to give the US military a communication system that could survive a nuclear war. The idea was to have an interconnected network of computers without hardline routing. Instead it was handled by variable heuristics. This means that even if half of the nodes were destroyed, the system could find a way to route along different paths and still, eventually, reach it's destination.

It was a brilliant form of asynchronous communication.

Academia had created it, and quickly found great use in networked communication and remote data processing.

And now we use it to view porn. So, what happened?

The World Wide Web. Before the WWW, you had to know the IP address of your friend's computer, be given permission, and then log into his bulletin board service.

The World Wide Web was a system of protocols that created a public internet front. ANY person could find it through HyperText Transfer Protocol, use a public log-in, and access the web site. The HTTP was designed to be crawled by search engines, allowing them to effectively index the entirety of the public-facing internet.

One of the first real search engines was call WebCrawler, because it - crawled - the HTTP of the WWW.

They would load page, then open and index every - single - hyperlink contained in the document, storing and indexing meta tags.

We also ended up with MetaCrawler, that would index multiple other search engines, allowing it to provide a far more comprehensive system of results.

Nowadays, most search engines are meta crawlers, and because of the prominence of Google in searching, Google results are over weighted, meaning that there is almost no way to escape the dogmatism of Google's biased search algorithms.

And the reason we use it for porn is that this was the first viable online business plan.

[weatheryear]

Dune

We are finally getting good, true adaptations of Dune.

Other than Zendaya destroying another red head.

But Dune was first published n 1965. With the Big Three, (Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke), Dune is the biggest progenitor of modern Science Fiction. It was so foundational that it would be difficult to list all the intellectual properties based off it, but J. Michael Straczynski explicitly stated that Babylon 5 was an idea to create a long-arc driven space epic, like Dune. Warhammer: 40K stole half of it's premise from Dune. Hayao Miyazaki cited Dune as inspiration for Nausica of the Valley of the Wind, and this was the Manga that turned him into the famed movie director we all admire.

It's roughly equivalent to the Lord of the Rings of Sci-Fi.

[weatheryear]

The Lie of Rosie the Riveter

Considered a cultural icon, and a symbol of Feminism, Rosie the Riveter was actually a propaganda campaign to get women to work in factories during WWII, as the men were off fighting in a war.

The actual model was a musician, and quit within a couple of weeks to marry rich.

The brassière was introduced, as the corset was impractical for factory work. Contrary to popular imagining, wearing a corset normally, as most women did, causes no health effects, other than maybe better posture. What people think of when they think of corsets is Tightlacing. We know about tightlacing because it was scandalous at the time. Before the corset, women wore a Bodice, which is basically a corset with less support. It required less material, and was not fitted, instead the support was provided with lacing.

This is also when women stopped wearing skirts. Because they are impractical - in a factory. Outside of factories, and going on long hikes, skirts and dresses are incredibly practical for everyday life. There's a reason women wore them for centuries, there's a reason ancient cultures wore tunics.

[weatheryear]

DOOM

Most people probably know DOOM from the memes. And of every video game in Human history, DOOM is perhaps the most worthy of this. It is one of THE video games that created the modern video game industry.

I don't mean contemporary video game industry. I mean having recognizable characters and stories in video games.

A step before DOOM was Wolfenstein 3D. Wolfenstein 3D was perhaps the first successful pseudo-3D game. The transition to 3D was not something that was done especially well until the PS3 era, (OoT-excluded), but Wolfenstein made you think it worked.

DOOM was made by the same company. It took everything Wolfenstein did, and ran with it. We didn't have a name for First Person Shooters, so we called them DOOM clones. DOOM was the game you brought to LAN parties. DOOM was a game that every - single gamer played.

Even further, DOOM was deterministic enough that you can learn to play it blindfolded. DOOM is light enough that you can play it by daisy chaining shoes with chips, it's light enough to play in coffee makers. This was helped by the fact DOOM was spread as shareware, (the rough equivalent would be free downloads).

Star Wars: Dark Forces was the first truly 3D game, and it wasn't until Half-Life that the FPS genre was crystallized. Until then, most people just called them DOOM clones.

[weatheryear]

Mario

In the early age of video games, you had to look at the box art if you wanted any clue as to what was actually happening. The problem was how to make a few pixels a recognizable character?

Well, you comically over-exaggerate their traits, of course. And this is why Mario is over the top. Of course, in the end, all he is, is a man wearing a red shirt and overalls, with a monogrammed hat.

Monograms were the sign of chic, and most people only had 2 or 3 sets of clothes. My father was raised with the tradition of dressing up to go to the doctor. He couldn't explain the tradition to me, but it makes a lot more sense when you have 1 set of clothes not covered in shit from hard work.

But we also need to focus on the great lie about Italians, that they are "White". People for most of Human history, didn't hate people because of the colour of their skin, but because of their ethnicity. Most people hated their neighbours, whom they likely warred against, often for centuries if not millennia.

The Italians who settled in the US and Britain were poor, and would often come over as low-skilled workers. They didn't share the same values, culture, or work ethic of the WASPs. And that is what mattered the most for discrimination. Italians were treated incredibly poorly, along with the Irish.

And in fact, a fat Italian plumber from Brooklyn was the least likely person to be the hero. We've had female heroes, in Ellen Ripley, and Wonder Woman. We've had black heroes, as their civil rights march was well publicized, and so people actively worked to help them.

Italians? Yeah, well, the main attitude was fuck them. Until Nintendo decided to make one their hero, and likely the first recognizable video game character, of all time.

Well, what about Princess Peach? Isn't it demeaning for a genuinely sweet woman to need to be rescued?

You say the princess because she's a princess. Yes, she is more valuable than you, (man), because she's a princess. This is an incredibly simple way to set up and emotionally wrought narrative. Because, again, early video games had near zero resources to work with. It's really hard to compare them, as it's 10,000 times weaker than an apple watch.

As for why the man should be the hero and not the woman?

Men have more muscles for their height, higher muscle density, higher bone density, higher volume of oxygen, higher lactic acid tolerance, higher stamina, they run faster, and have arms that are roughly twice as strong. They not only have more testosterone, but are at least twice as sensitive to it. Peach should not be a hero. Unless you go the Super Princess Peach route.

Addendum

A year after Nintendo created Mario, they created Samus Aran. The twist of the first Metroid was that Samus is a Girl. Which every - single - feminist commenting of video games has to ignore. Samus was likely the second recognizable video game character, ever, and remains a fan-favourite to this day.

Doesn't this contradict what I said about Peach?

Well, Samus is genetically engineered, and given super-advanced technology, including power armour. Dread actually animated a jump pack, to explain why she can jump so high.