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SemiAccurate was down for about a week, what happened? And what if anything do I need to do?
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This morning is yet another where we have woken up to the news that the far right continues to riot across the UK, and it is anxiety inducing. For the first time in my 35 years of life, I feel, like many other, unsettled in the country we call home. Disinformation, dishonesty, and dishonourable acts have led to the violent disorder perpetrated by a loud, violent, minority, and it is time that there is a reckoning against all of this.
Growing up, I was told by my family members who were born here in the 60s and 70s, of the violence they faced due to groups such as the National Front, and after decades of hard work to stamp this prejudice out and make our society more equal and equitable, it seems that we are sliding back to those dark times. To see the reports of the far-right and – let’s not beat around the bush here – of racists co-opting a tragedy as an excuse to attack anyone who is not white is disgusting and rage inducing. But we did not get here in a vacuum.
For years, we have seen traditional media, social media, and algorithm-led platforms pushing far-right figures to the fore on a regular basis. This is despite warnings from individuals and groups that doing so emboldens these figures and spreads their message. Challenging them in the social media space does not work, especially if some of those spaces are owned by those that agree with such views. I point to the traditional media groups, both broadcast and newspapers, that have have barely challenged far right talking points, and instead used them to validate their own messages instead. We have seen headlines from the likes of the Daily Mail and The Sun constantly attack those from non-white and non-Christian backgrounds, fuelling hate. Even the likes of the BBC have not helped in this matter, platforming Nigel Farage a record 32 times on Question Time under the pretence of providing balanced opinions, while ITV featured him in I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, which might have made him seem more affable to some.
All of this has led to massive changes to our society, most significantly propelling us toward Brexit, and now in the most recent General Election, to Reform snatching 14% of the vote, and attracting members of the far-right to it in the process. Even now, reporting on the riots is still being framed as protest across the media landscape, conflating legitimate protest with actual violent disorder and thuggery. Every single reporter and editor in our media should have a frank and open discussion on how they report on issues that affect people from minority backgrounds, and how their reporting over the years has fuelled what has now happened, instead of acting surprised at the result. Will it happen? That is unlikely.
Our politicians have not helped either. Over the last 14 years, all we have really had is culture wars and divisive politics. Asylum seekers have been othered by the very highest of offices, and now are under violent attack. What is worse is a lot of this rhetoric has come from people who are from minority backgrounds, pandering to the far right for a grip on power. They think that moving even further right will get them in the top jobs again. The reality is that once the far right is done with them, they will be discarded and grouped in with the rest of us as an other. Social media is also to blame, allowing constant disinformation to spread faster than the truth and featuring algorithms that push far-right content. On my own Facebook feed I am constantly shown posts from such groups even though I am not a member of any of them, nor do I want to see them. Social media companies need to be held to account and disinformation needs to be stamped out at the source.
Reversing this trend will take a huge amount of effort, and our education system has a large role tackling the narrative that people from minority backgrounds are only recent arrivals to this country or that they are not British. The British Empire lasted hundreds of years and saw people from all over move across it. The first Indian MP elected to the UK Parliament was Dadabhai Naoroji in 1892, something that is not taught in schools. Britain has been quick to show pride that it was the leader in abolishing slavery, while not giving credence to folks like Ottobah Cugoano, Mary Prince, Olaudah Equiano, and Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, all of whom are Black Britons that lived during the 18th and 19th centuries. Our education system skips over Empire, ignoring the hard truths that at one stage in this country’s history there was a huge dark period that saw millions suffer, while a few benefited.
We have to remember that the far-right is loud and often violent, but it is a minority. That lesson needs to especially be learned by those that platform them regularly. Even though they are a minority, the far right has to be guarded against and pushed back against over the long term. This morning I signed up as a member to ROTA – Race on the Agenda and Amnesty International Anti Racism Network, to better educate myself and to get involved in ways to counter the racism that perpetuates across our society. I would ask that, if you are tired of racism rearing its head again and again, you do the same.
A final thing in case any disinformation is spread by the far-right about me. My family settled in the UK 70 years ago. I was born and raised here. I work full time. I come from a Punjabi Sikh background. I am British.
This is partially a review of No Man’s Sky/partially an editorial. No Man’s Sky just had its 5.0 update, Worlds Part 1. And I went back to it on my Xbox. And I marveled at how good it has become. But it still isn’t perfect, as it has a fatal flaw, one that sunk Starfield. It is that because No Man’s Sky is nothing but procedural-generated content, its wide as ocean, but puddle-deep. I have 160 hours on my save, and the only worlds I remember are the ones I have bases on. The rest have faded from memory because they weren’t distinct. Sure there are awesome vistas, because there isn’t much to do on any particular world. Land, catalog minerals, flora and fauna and move on. Each world is larger than some open world games, but there’s nothing to do on them. But let’s back up.
Eight Years ago, No Man’s Sky was released, and it was hated. Sean Murray of Hello games made lofty promises about what the game would be, and it was all a lie. No multiplayer, no base building and planets didn’t rotate. But a funny thing happened, Hello Games didn’t make many excuses, they went silent and got to work. And over the last eight years, made No Man’s Sky into a juggernaut. with a team the fraction of the size of most AAA games. There is multiplayer, deep base building and the star systems acts like star systems(though you do have to warp between them). There’s also settlements, pirate battles, pirate systems, pet breeding, a new secret robot race, sentinels, ship building, expeditions and the list goes on. Because its so free-form, Hello Games can cram random stuff in, and it works. And none of updates cost extra.
Its easy to label No Man’s Sky the greatest game comeback in history, even eclipsing Cyberpunk 2077 IMO. Cyberpunk’s comeback is certainly impressive, especially with the Phantom Liberty expansion, but CD Project Red stopped development after four years as its vision for the game was completed. Hello Games has been at it for eight year and sees no signs of slowing.down. But even if they continue for another eight, there’s one problem they can’t fix.
As I said in the opening paragraph, No Man’s Sky has an infinite universe, but not that much to do on any particular world. There are missions you can do, and there are navigation points on each world. But each giant planet ultimately fells hollow and generic. The Worlds update certainly helps, and I can’t wait for part 2, but does the universe need to be nearly infinite? Once you leave the starting Euclid Galaxy, good luck finding a star-system that has already been discovered. I haven’t seen a single other player outside of the Anomaly. Maybe that is the point, a feeling of solitude on an alien planet. And on certain worlds, there is that feeling. But after 100 star-systems everything feels the same.
What is the solution? I’m not sure there is one. Procedural-generation just can’t match hand-crafted content, Just ask Bethesda how well relying on it went with Starfield(hint: it didn’t go very well). But Starfield is an RPG, No Man’s Sky is an exploration sandbox. Flying into the unknown is the point, even if what is there doesn’t exactly wow most of the time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying No Man’s is a terrible game eight-years on, just the opposite. It is just that there’s a limit to how far things can be refined in a game like this. And that’s alright. Now if you excuse me, I have to find this underground rare creature…
The post No Man’s Sky in 2024: Great but Flawed appeared first on The Game Slush Pile.
I’ve touched on RedDeer Games, or Red Deer.Games, before, namely in the Midnight Works article. But I’m going to rag on them specifically because they’ve perfected a method of crapping up the eShop, especially the version of Switch. You see, on the Switch eShop, a bundle of game and DLC is counted as a new game. Nintendo has done a decent job of filtering them out of the Web eShop, but the Switch eShop is the Wild West. SwitchStars has done a video on them where he says, at the time of the video release, that RedDeer Games is most prolific publisher on the eShop, constituting 3% of the total games released. I believe it.
The most insidious thing about the practice is that the bundles are the exact same packages repackaged over and over again. The Complete and Definitive versions of Hentai Golf above are the exact same bundles, but counted as a new game. RedDeer Games really has no shame, though if you think about it, there’s a logic here. If you keep releasing the same game over and over, it keeps it at the top of the heap and never sinks into gaming slush pile, never to be seen again.
But if you thought RedDeer was alone in this, you’d be wrong. Baltoro is also notorious for this, among others. Though in Baltoro’s defense, the games they keep releasing tend to be of a higher quality often than RedDeer Game’s stock, and generally released at a slower rate.
Nintendo needs to fix the Switch eShop, it is damn near unusable at this point, and the bundles are a huge portion of the reason why. But here’s the thing, they wouldn’t be doing this if it did not work, Still, like all the other scams, asset flips and AI generated garbage, this stuff clogs up the eShop, and pushes the worthwhile indie games off the page. Its gotten so bad I have to rely on Keymailer to find worthwhile games to review, unless I stumble on something like Epyx Rogue. RedDeer Games and the others won’t stop unless Nintendo changes the eShop, but at this point, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Probably it’ll only change when the Switch 2 comes out.
The post RedDeer Games and the Degradation of Nintendo eShop! appeared first on The Game Slush Pile.
As I said back in May 2024, I really suck at writing Editorials, lol. The plan back then was to write an Editorial at the start of each month. Well, here we are after three months with only one Editorial. Damn, I’m good at this. Anyway, before we continue, here’s a Shoutout to all our … Continue reading DSOGaming Editorial August 2024 – Patreon Shoutout, Censorship, Google, Comment Policy & BlahBlahBlah →
The post DSOGaming Editorial August 2024 – Patreon Shoutout, Censorship, Google, Comment Policy & BlahBlahBlah appeared first on DSOGaming.
Pakotime has been shitting up the Eshop for the last 5 months with generic Hentai Girls games like Sweet Doctor. Today, it released a game called Sugoi Girls Lovely Wife, same game just with bare boobs. Pakotime has been releasing the games every two weeks. They all have the same game play and UI. How does Pakotime get fifty images so fast? By generating AI images. But for the longest time, I never knew where. Now I do. It’s a site called OnlyWaifus.Ai, where you can generate unlimited waifus. It is a paid site, and for this editorial, I went ahead and bought the platinum plan for $23 to get the maximum quality images. I think its worth it, because I have Pakotime’s number now.
Let me show you a random Onlywaifus image I generated.
Now let me show you a pakotime image from a game called Hentai Girls: College Crush!
The key here is to look at the chin, its identical in both images. It is quite obvious to me that Pakotime is using OnlyWaifus to generate its images. But let me do this: I will take an image off the eShop site for Hentai Girls: Naughty Gamer and compare it to an image I generated. I’ve never played Naughty gamer, but look at the results:
Pakotime’s Image is on the left. My Image is on the right. They’re made by the same engine called Onlywaifus!
Why should you care if Pakotime is using OnlyWaifus to make its images? You should care because there’s no reason to buy their games, not when you can make infinite identical Waifu images tailored to your liking for fourteen or twenty-three dollars a month. The Eshop is already cluttered with trash, I have already covered Midnight Works and Artem Kritinin. Now it is a Pakotime’s turn to get the hammer dropped on it. This company should go out of business for being cheap lazy assholes. Never buy their games, ever. You know their secret. You can create the identical artwork. I sincerely hope their days are numbered!
P.S. I was not paid by OnlyWaifus to write this editorial!
The post Pakotime and the Degradation of the Nintendo eShop! appeared first on The Game Slush Pile.
Dr. Ratio is a 5-star character that was given to all Honkai: Star Rail players for free from Version 1.1 until Version 2.1. If you redeemed the Doctor during this time, you likely tested out his follow-up attack-focused kit. Dr. Ratio follows the path of The Hunt, making him a single-target damage dealer who specializes in decimating most bosses. To help you dominate some of Honkai: Star Rail’s hardest content, we compiled the best Light Cones, relic sets, traces, and team comps for Dr. Ratio.
As a DPS character, Dr. Ratio’s best Light Cones are going to enhance his ATK or CRIT DMG/Rate to help him dish out more damage. Naturally, a lot of Hunt Light Cones will offer these stats and effects, although some work well with his kit — particularly his follow-up attack.
The post Best Dr. Ratio Build in Honkai: Star Rail appeared first on GameSkinny.
For the record, I do not own a PS5, so I am unable to play Stellar Blade, but I’m here today to talk about the discourse surrounding it, which can summed up as “If you like sexy women, you are a creep.” All you have to do is look up the comparisons to Hades 2 that can be summed up as “hotties for straight men bad, hotties for woke weirdos good.” But I am going to focus in on an article by Gamesradar entitled, Stellar Blade puts Eve in some incredibly stupid sexy outfits that hurt the game’s story, but despite the forced sex appeal I actually love her detailed design. It can be summed up as “Eve is a well designed character, but since she exists to appeal to the male gaze, she is bad.”
The author of said article about Eve from Stellar Blade, Austin Woods, is an asexual male who has spent his life unlearning the male gaze. That’s not me talking, that’s him talking:
Oh it gets worse:
This article is not about me, but I should explain where I’m coming from. For me, romantic and sexual attraction are not only foreign but utterly undesirable. So more than with your average person, games like Stellar Blade bark up the wrong tree when they assume that I, as a man, am eager to gawk at and fantasize about characters like Eve. She’s hot! I like her! I’d consider myself sex-positive, but I truly, from the pit of my gut, do not care. I’m not put off by Stellar Blade’s ham-handed sexiness or its assumptions about me, but I am sensitive to and critical of tone in storytelling, and Eve’s treatment undeniably hurts the game’s voice.
Austin Wood, quite simply is the end result of Feminism’s attack on male sexuality, which can be seen through the fact this discourse over Stellar Blade’s Eve even exists at all(and is a diatribe that’d take up longer than we have here). Austin hates his own sexuality to the point he buries it and calls himself asexual. You can see that in this paragraph:
I like loads of details in Eve’s design. She has incredible brows and lashes. I love the little baby hairs by her ears, the subtly imperfect texturing of her skin, and the pores on her cheeks. I love that she has some natural belly fat while being slim. She’s a great-looking character, and it’s genuinely fun to put her in the many outfits, accessories, and hairstyles that Stellar Blade offers, some of which are plenty fashionable. I mean, of course it is; customizing characters is a video game staple. For my money, Eve is sexier and cooler in outfits that actually have enough material to embellish and accentuate her. She absolutely rocks a leather jacket and jeans, and that’s just the start.
He knows Eve is sexy. He even praises her sexiness, but he buries it and then proceeds to call it bad.call it bad because its divorced from the story or anything else.
The problem is that Eve’s sexiness is totally divorced from the rest of the game and her personality, and Stellar Blade wants to be taken seriously despite how strangely this comes across. I think this is why a lot of people don’t like how Eve looks. Characters like Bayonetta own and flaunt their sexiness, and games like Hades are inextricably sexy from corner to corner. That’s partly why they’re so beloved – this stuff is hard to pull off convincingly, and memorable when done well. Everyone being horny in, and for, Baldur’s Gate 3 comes to mind. But Eve’s amped-up sexiness is a weird outlier. She has next to no interest in her own appearance or sex appeal. At most, she mentions her hairstyle one time.
I read the rest of article and honestly, his argument only makes sense if Stellar Blade’s Eve’s sexuality is bad because it only exists to attract the male gaze. But Aphrodite from Hades 2 looks like this and is just fine because its the right sort of hot:
I looked up Austin Wood but could find little that wasn’t on his Twitter Profile. But I’m venturing to guess Austin went to a liberal arts college where was brainwashed into hating himself. He even more or less admits it in the article(“Unlearning the male gaze.”) I, on the other hand, am not a self-hating man. I like looking at attractive women. It pleases me. It is hard wired into my lizard brain. Male sexually, in fact, is partly how we got to eight billion people on Planet Earth. Reminds me of an online exchange I read once somewhere where some guy was like. “Nobody want to see my grandmother naked,” and someone replied, “Someone wanted to see your grandmother naked, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.” That’s right, men being attracted to women creates babies!
In essence, Austin is grasping at straws to justify Stellar Blade’s Eve being bad because he thinks male sexuality is bad. Eve was created to appeal to the male gaze, and that is bad because reasons. Honestly, who cares if she’s sexy? If people want to play sexy characters, let them. But games journalism is infected by woke people, like Austin Wood. They must adhere to the message, even if it doesn’t make much sense with any scrutiny. For example Austin praises Bayonetta, but her design was criticized heavily for being pure male-gaze.Why doesn’t Eve get that pass? Is it because its the current thing? Probably.
In conclusion, I know that if this blows up, I’ll be called a creepy incel pervert. But am I? Or am I just a self-aware man who doesn’t hate his own sexuality like Austin Wood obviously does. Male sexuality good, woke weirdos bad!
The post Stellar Blade and the Hatred of Male Sexuality appeared first on The Game Slush Pile.
This is a follow-up editorial to my Sweet Baby Inc editorial. A lot has happened in the days since I dropped it, and there hasn’t been a lot of new Switch games that caught my interest so I’ll write a follow up. Essentially, the Sweet Baby meltdown over the steam group exposing it has blown up into something bigger. And the friends of Sweet Baby Inc, namely Kotaku Writer Alyssa Mercante, decided to fire back with a fluff piece where she reveals she “infiltrated” the SBI detected discord, where she wondered why people weren’t using their real names and pictures so she could dox them:
But here’s the thing, while her tweet about the Kotaku article blew up, the article itself is largely irrelevant. It hasn’t dampened the backlash against sweet baby. If anything, it inflamed it. This is in stark contrast to the “Gamers are over” article slew that appeared after Gamergate in 2014(like this one). That slew had a major cultural impact, shifting that narrative away from what the backlash was really about(corruption in games journalism) to being about harassment. But now, it will have no effect because proper games journalism websites are dying, the focus shifting to actual gamers discussing games on Youtube and Twitch.
In the beginning, gaming websites were run by nerds for nerds. Then these websites were taken over by woke game journalists. We saw the early murmuring of the shift with Gone Home, where woke journalists propped a woke game made for them(read that review for a more in-depth discussion). Then gamergate proper hit in 2014, which was kind of a loss for gamers as things became much worse in the industry, as the wokeness seeped into the games themselves. But here’s what’s different: Kotaku and it’s ilk don’t have the power they once did. They are dying.
There are recent massive layoffs of games journalists, as sites fold and are sold. They just aren’t profitable and never really were. They were propped up with venture capitalist money, and that money has dried up. And when these sites have to be profitable they can’t survive(Full disclosure: This site is not profitable either, but this is a hobby for me, not my actual job). Kotaku has largely shifted away from wokeness(for the most part), because they have to. Nobody goes on websites looking for reviews or gaming opinions much anymore. I only get traffic because I’m in a particular niche where a gaming review of obscure games stand out in a google search.
Kotaku will probably fold sooner or later. They get traffic by using clickbait, but even that’s probably wearing thin. I give them another year or two, and they’ll be kaput. They’re running on fumes.
I don’t know where the flare-up over Sweet Baby will end up, but one thing is for certain: that Sweet Baby’s friends like Kotaku won’t have much effect. However, the rot goes deep. People need to speak with their wallets, otherwise this flare-up will have no effect. Don’t buy woke games. Put the companies who use consultants like Sweet Baby out of business. That is the only way change will happen. As Kotaku and the games media are no longer relevant, that message can be sent loud and clear. You know what to do. Do it!
The post Kotaku is Irrelevant: The Fall of Game Journalism appeared first on The Game Slush Pile.
Sweet Baby Inc is a gaming consulting firm based out of Canada. They exist to “tell better, more empathetic stories while diversifying and enriching the video games industry.” They have notable clients including most western AAA publishers including Microsoft and EA and a whole host of others. Take a look:
Sweet Baby Inc has worked on a ton of recent notable projects. Take a look:
Recently, Sweet Baby Inc has come under fire from gamers for “helping create woke games.”(they locked their twitter feed down as a result) When you get a Sweet Baby game, you’re essentially getting Gone Home, a game not made for the average person, but woke game journalists to slobber over. Now it is worth to stop here and define “woke.” Woke to me is adhering to far-left DEI and social justice principals and advancing those things through something in the name of an agenda. There is a meme floating around of a guy calling an engine woke.
Now, this meme misses the point. The engine cannot be woke. However, the company making the engine certainly can be. If an agenda can be pushed through it, it is woke. If it cannot, it is not. Now that we have defined woke, we need to talk about the modern audience.
What is the “Modern Audience?” Woke people would tell you the modern audience is what current people who make up an audience want to see. That society has advanced to the point they want to see fat disabled lesbians in the title role, for example. This is what Sweet Baby Inc seeks. The term doesn’t appear on their page, but its what they mean by, “We aim to make games more engaging, more fun, more meaningful, and more inclusive, for everyone.” The reality is, the modern audience does not exist. How do I know? Look at Hollywood and the Flopbuster. While not every flopbuster is woke, many are, especially the biggest ones, including Indiana Jones: Dial of Destiny and the Marvels. The Critical Drinker has a good video on it. He ends off buy saying the modern audiences are really what the woke people want to see, not what the average person does. He would be correct.
The modern audience is a myth. The audience hasn’t really changed, they still want what they’ve always wanted: Good stories and good characters. Having a fat disabled lesbian in the lead isn’t necessary a bad thing. However, they don’t make good action heroes. You need a strong capable person who embodies heroic qualities, and you generally don’t find it in woke things. So, this leads us to Sweet Baby Inc’s recent meltdown.
Recently Sweet Baby Inc went after a Steam Curator who created a group who alerts people to what Sweet Baby works on. They wanted him gone. It seems to have backfired, with the steam curator exploding in following. Why is Sweet Baby doing this? I think they’re no longer getting future work, and they’re getting desperate to convince suits to hire them. But once publishers get the cold hard numbers, and find out the modern audience not only does not exist, but the audience that does hates your product, they will change course. Many of the games Sweet Baby Inc worked were failures, including Saint’s Row, Suicide Squad, Forespoken, and Spider-man 2. Now in the case of Spider-man, that had to do with the budget more than wokeness, but I know the word of mouth was not great because of the wokeness. Studios have to be paying attention, and they can’t be happy.
In the end, Sweet Baby Inc is flailing and will probably fade away after the current crop of games they are working on are released, and invariably fail. The modern audience is actually the old audience, and the old audience doesn’t want them and what their pedaling. Good riddance.
The post Sweet Baby Inc and the Modern Audience appeared first on The Game Slush Pile.
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