celeste
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It feels like companies like this eventually become vehicles for like 5 people to make lots of money. You can’t let go the guy making these mistakes - lining his pocket is the purpose of the company! It’d be ridiculous to fire him! Unless some of the other 4 people making money decide he’s keeping them from lining their pockets.
Raft was kind of interesting, and chill if you turn off “sharks keep attacking for some reason” mode.
I watched someone play Satisfactory and they had a blast.
Dinkum was fun and not stressful, but the characters have big heads and it’s got some typical farming life sim elements that were inspired by harvest moon and animal crossing.
I get reminded of this quote from their studio exec:
“You can say, ‘Okay, we are exploiting, you know, child labor,’ right? Or you can say: we are offering people anywhere in the world the capability to get a job, and even like an income,” Corazza said. “So I can be like, 15 years old, in Indonesia, living in a slum, and then now with just a laptop, I can create something, make money, and then sustain my life.”
When I read that quote a few weeks ago, I thought about how that’s the kind of argument people who travel abroad to rape kids use to justify themselves.
It feels related to this, somehow. Maybe something about how children are treated like a disposable resource or an object to be used unless the person who owns them (parents?) are powerful, well to do, white, etc, etc. And that’s because their owner is those things, so they’re valuable property. I’m not sure if I’m articulating myself well. Too much sun.
In a post on X last year, the studio asked that players spend what they might have on the game giving to a trans-inclusive charity. A couple you might consider are the Trevor Project or TransActual.
nice! I also recommend finding what local charities exist near you, if you don’t want to donate to those. There’s also TransLifeline and Mermaids.
I thought they were more interesting than average, even when I disagreed with a take. The kind of site there should be a ton of, with varying takes for people to despise to a baffling degree. Sad to see it gone, or “gone” and turned intp a slop factory with known terrible working conditions for the people left.
Regardless of feelings about the people themselves, it’s awful that they fired the union members probably deliberately at this point in the sale so they wouldn’t have to go along with their contracts.
iirc, there was one old harvest moon game where you played as a woman and you could marry a guy OR live forever with your female bestie. i don’t remember if that one made it to the english speaking world.
stardew valley really upped the game when the guy who made it decided it’d be no big deal if you wanted to pursue a same sex relationship in it. now it feels like a standard of the genre to let you do that, and it really wasn’t always like that. other games did it, too, but it still felt exceptional back then.
(but, yeah, the gay thing was a big deal for me personally, especially at the time sdv came out. i don’t know if it was generally a big deal for most players, but that’s definitely a reason for it to catch a certain sort of player’s eye back when it was first becoming popular.)
it’s a shame because the basic gameplay is pretty fun, but i can’t recommend it to people without worrying about triggering someone’s gambling addiction. for whatever reason, i’m immune to spending money on microtransactions. i even think that it wouldn’t be bad to put an amount of money in every month like a subscription if i’m enjoying a game enough. i just don’t.
The initial appeal for me was that I enjoyed harvest moon, except for how the old tech made the experience of playing it suck so bad, I couldn’t replay it. It was annoying doing any of the basic tasks like switching tools iirc. so there was a huge opening in the market for a new harvest moon that wasn’t annoying to play. And where you were allowed to be gay.
So the initial buzz came from that, imo. the people who wanted a new harvest moon game were like ‘wow, finally!’ and then word of mouth did its thing. these days, nostalgia for it specifically drives people back to play, along with extensive modding and occasional free updates keeping things fresh.
i think other people can explain better why the harvest moon formula itself is so appealing, but i just think it’s interesting how an indie game can get so popular by just being like "what if i made this big corporation game people want a new entry from, but fixed the stuff in it that sucks?’
had an ‘oh shit what did they do’ moment about the game since i own it on steam, but then i realized the game company is participating in the anti-xbox boycott and is fine
they know microsoft is huge and difficult to escape using for some people, so the boycott is targeting specifically microsoft videogames and related services, is my understanding of it
I’ve heard of it before and considered playing it, but I have a tough time committing to play a game with sexual violence as a theme. It’s nothing against the game, which looks interesting. If anyone knows of a good let’s play for the series, I’d love to experience it in some way, even if it’s a dulled experience.
Game cube, if I’m remembering right.