Day three has dawned! That means it must be time to open another door in the RPS Advent Calendar! Put your ear to the keyhole. It’s quiet, and the metal is very cold.
We already knew that League Of Legends developers Riot Games had agreed to settle a class action gender discrimination law suit against them. Last night, the Los Angeles Times reported the figure (pending court approval) will be $10 million, or roughly 7.7 million. Once the lawyers have all been paid, this amounts to over $6 million ( 4.6 million) that will be shared between female employees who’ve worked at the company during the past five years.
It’s a win of sorts, but still comes in the wake of Riot Games refusing to acknowledge they have a systematic discrimination problem. As well as, you know, having a systematic discrimination problem. Some of those responsible still work for the company.
I love shooting zombies in the face in Left 4 Dead, and I love uncovering the histories of characters through stories like Gone Home. I m also a big fan of seeing different versions of the end of the world.
As such, while Hope; Or How We Survived doesn’t look> like either Left4Dead or Gone Home, it still felt like it’d be a bit of a box-ticker for me, given that it seemed to share some thematic similarities. And it certainly did tick boxes, in the end – just not the ones I was expecting. It’s actually a game about making friends, and I dig it.
You’ll possibly have guessed from the general leaning of the guides I write that I rather enjoy playing Battle Royales. PUBG, Fortnite, Apex Legends, CSGO: Danger Zone… But if you’ve played any of them for any stretch of time, you’ll inevitably have encountered what I consider to be the biggest problem with the genre as a whole: third-partying. There’s no feeling so hollow as having your epic 1v1 duel cut short by a third party coming in while you’re both distracted, and killing you before you even notice that player three has entered the fight. It’s the most frustrating part of games like this, because it always feels like you weren’t given a fighting chance. You didn’t see them coming.
I think that’s partially why I was so taken with ZombsRoyale.io. Its refreshing top down and 2D-ness meant I could always see the third man coming, and prepare for them. It allowed me to feel more like John Wick steadily overcoming insurmountable odds, and less like some guy in an honest tavern brawl getting suplexed by an irate bouncer with forearms the size of tree trunks.
You’re supposed to stay detached from people in the apocalypse because caring about other humans gets in the way of looking out for number one. Overland, the strategic survival game about road-tripping West during an alien infestation, makes it tough to stop caring about them because each one (dogs included) has a randomly chosen name and backstory. Apparently I’ll be getting emotionally attached to my cars soon too because Overland wants to name them as well.
Life in the West has been difficult on PC mostly because I keep steering my horse into NPCs by accident and starting an unintended dog pile of humans and horses. On the upshot, I haven’t personally had any issues with Red Dead Redemption 2 itself crashing, just my horse. Plenty of other players have though and Rockstar’s new update for PC players today aims to fix even more persistent stability issues.
Starship Troopers – Terran Command will be the latest addition to the Starship Trooper series following the original novel, 1997 movie, an RTS from the year 2000, and so on. It’s a get-crushed-under-giant-arachnid-legs-em-up which most people call an RTS because there are always giant things trying to crush you in RTSes.
There is an equal and opposite to the internet’s Rule 34 which says that if you can imagine it, someone has made it in Minecraft. Players have built castles, Legend of Zelda maps, Westeros, and plenty of very grand cathedrals. Now one of the original cathedral creators is putting its mark on Minecraft: the Catholic church.
The time of year has arrived where I continually look out my window hoping for a permanent blanket of snow the way holiday movies always promised me there would be. As usual, it’s boring and bleak out there and I look to games like The Long Dark to escape the drabness of my actual surroundings. Nothing says holiday cheer like building a fire of twigs in a survival game to avoid dying of exposure so I’m glad I’ve been given a reason to boot up The Long Dark again this season with the upcoming update called Errant Pilgrim.
Last Day Of Spring by npckc is a short visual novel set in contemporary Japan. It tells the story of a cisgender woman, Erika, and her attempts at organizing a birthday for her trans woman friend, Haru, whom she had met during the events of npckc s previous game, One Night, Hot Springs (npckc recently announced a third game in the series will be out at the end of the month). While Haru served as the player character there, Last Day Of Spring is told entirely from Erika s perspective, even as it focuses on Haru.
This, in itself, should raise some alarm bells. It has been a longstanding criticism from trans activists and creators that not enough trans people are allowed to be the stars and speakers of their own stories. There is a tendency for depictions of trans lives made from a cisgender perspective to lapse into insensitive exoticisation of a strange person (a man who was a woman!), voyeuristic fascination with misery perceived as a trans fate, or an objectifying treatment of the trans life and body as a sexual fetish. At the end of the day, such representations end up being more about cis issues – anxieties, fascinations and desires as projected onto a trans person – than about lived experiences of trans people themselves.
And yet, Last Day Of Spring shows that a story of a trans life can be told through cis eyes without privileging them and their gaze.