Victim of Communism

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • It would have been goated if it wasn’t a gacha game and battlepass timesink

    I really loved the primary storyline and the artistry of the world.

    I absolutely despised the grinding, especially the dungeons, where it feels like they just gave up on anything being fun. You’d walk through those big double-doors and be in some endless hallway full of slightly-too-difficult encounters. Then you’d get “Pay2Win?” dangled in your face.

    Definitely understand how they made so much money. But fuck, what a waste of art assets.


  • I think DOTA2 came quite a long way from the cheese factory that was the original WC3 map packs.

    I actually went with a friend to a tournament, and was genuinely impressed at how the game felt watchable in a way you’d hope for a football or basketball game to be entertainment. The gameplay was fast-paced and full of reversals. The announcers helped fill in what a newb wouldn’t immediately know about different builds and strategies. You got a steady buildup of excitement into those final minutes, when a timely save or kill could swing the match. Even the creep farming had a bit of tension, as you watch the teams race for the upper hand.

    MOBAs were a natural fit for eSports. I get why it took off. Shame it hasn’t endured.


  • There was an incredibly steep learning curve with Elden Ring. But once I got to the Midgame, I was having a good time.

    I didn’t actually ever finish it, because I kept fucking off for 20 hours at a time just looking at all the pretty buildings and exploring dungeons. And I absolutely agree, it’s really hard to pick up on what even constitutes as “Quest” in the traditional RPG sense. You just kinda find stuff and talk to people and hope you’re moving in the right direction.

    But I kinda consider that its charm. I feel like FromSoft can keep moving in this direction, shedding more and more of the interface, and eventually end up with a game where you’re just a fucking person in a world who gets to do things. And maybe one of those things is to save the world. Or maybe you’re just in this incredibly rich and deep sandbox, full of wonder and beauty, and you have a good time until you’re done.





  • Really deeply disappointed by Claire Obscura: Expedition 33

    The combat is semi-turn based, so it feels unnaturally slow and clunky. But then it requires you to respond to the boss animations with twitchy reflex commands if you want to have any hope of beating even the first couple of levels. So, I’m supposed to strategize on offense but twitch-defend on defense? Bleh.

    The game also took a hard turn into gratuitous gore very quickly. And the gore didn’t really add anything to the story or even the atmosphere. Especially when the opening scene is people turning into flower petals, implying the much more romantic melodrama. The scene on the beach is this sharply contrasted pile of mutilated corpses that took the game from sweetly sad to needlessly gross.

    Like, if you want to do an Elden Ring knock off with some French flair, cool? But this got a zillion awards. It shouldn’t feel so derivative and hack.




  • I’d go one further and note that environmentalism isn’t exactly endemic outside the capitalist sphere of influence. The USSR was dirty af. Chinese Communists were openly antagonistic to environmental movements until the early '00s, when air quality in Beijing got so bad that the national leadership was forced to reconcile with it.

    The real virtue of socialist policy is in it’s ability to adapt democratically, while capitalists are bound up in authoritarian modes of production. But if the public at-large doesn’t see the benefit of a good policy, there’s nothing inherent to the mode of production that makes it cleaner.

    Regulated capitalism may actually work if we regulated it fairly and didn’t have megacorps writing the laws.

    Regulated capitalism is just a tiger by the tail. As soon as you lose you grip, it eats you.

    The only way to keep mega-corps from writing policy is to abolish them. Otherwise, why wouldn’t wealthy people try to beg, browbeat, or business plot a state government?

    At some point, you need to eliminate the bourgeois class entirely. It’s us or them, over a long enough timeline.



  • The Democratic Party has its Gavin Newsoms and Joe Manchins and Michael Bloombergs and Anthony Weiners aplenty.

    No shortage of Democrats on the Lolita Express. No shortage of liberal billionaires hungry for another war in the Middle East, another trillion dollar data center spend on public land, or another Bay of Pigs on Cuba.

    None of Trump’s politics are unique to Trump. We’ve got shitty little fascists crawling all over the country, from the bluest cities of Washington and Minnesota to the reddest oil fields of Texas and Wyoming. If anything, the latest wave of Silicon Valley “Network State” fucks have been more concentrated in liberal districts. And their money has produced a wave of horrifyingly bad liberal politicians who are as much responsible for the Obama->Trump party slump as any QAnon club.