Unsurpassed Travesty
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Looking for game recs, and while im sure the genre is extensive im wondering good options what there is with my specific caveat: turn based tactical RPGs like xcom/mario rabbids, but with really nice styles, either really pretty art or really cute/fun art style?
after playing mario rabbids ive been craving more, probably wanna pick up xcom at some point since ya know. thats the inspiration and all, but yet to play it. So im wondering if you got any recs for that style of gameplay, just in a really cute package, or art directions you think are just really unique? bonus points for really good stories, but a basic just servicable story is fine too
(note on cute: anime is fine, but probably wanna avoid the genre of ya kno, "cute=big sexy titty boobs anime girls and did we mention boobs and sexy". cause yeah. yeah...)
I’m afraid it’s not a genre I have much experience with – most of the tactical RPGs in my library tend toward the Final Fantasy Tactics or Famicom Wars/Advance Wars end of the spectrum, rather than the turn based cover-shooter style of XCOM or Mario + Rabbids.
I do have one that I’ve quite enjoyed, though: Invisible, Inc. It’s basically a stealth-focused roguelike running on a turn based cover-shooter game engine; you play as a team of special operatives breaking into a series of corporate facilities and robbing them blind in order to gather resources for a final showdown. The story is bare-bones, and I’m not sure I’d call the visual style “cute”, but “unique art direction” it’ll give you! Notable for having a very extensive suite of difficulty options, allowing you to mess with everything from how observant the guards are, to how stealth takedowns work (e.g., whether you can take out a guard from the front before they raise the alarm, or whether only ambushes from the rear will do), to the fine details of how security responses escalate as you draw more attention.
Alternatively, you could check out Pathway. This one blends brief combat missions in turn based tactics mode with a semi-randomised narrative built out of choose-your-own-adventure style nodes. That element of the game has been polarising in reviews (I found it fairly tedious, myself), so it really depends on how much you think you’re going to enjoy playing out the minutia of travel and resource management between missions.
In terms of forthcoming titles, you might also keep an eye on Metal Slug Tactics, though that one might break your “no ‘cute = huge boobs’ stuff” rule, depending on you feel about the cutscene animations.
I’m sure it’s been mentioned, but Wildermyth sounds like it’d qualify?
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Two of my favourite things about animal behaviour studies:
1. It’s a recognised phenomenon that if you’re working with some of the more intelligent critters, sometimes they’ll figure out what you’re testing for and start deliberately providing the “wrong” response to every single test.
2. The researcher who’s writing up the paper is not allowed to say “clearly the little bastards are just fucking with us”, because that would be inappropriately anthropomorphising the subjects, but you can 100% tell that they’re thinking it.
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“It’s a boomer meme, but it checks out, sir” bro, that meme is four months old.
“Boomer meme” is kinda like “dad joke” - its more about style than age.
Honestly, I have the same peeve about the term “dad joke” – at this point its popular usage has been reduced to meaning “anything whose punchline involves a pun”, regardless of actual dadliness or lack thereof.
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Oh, hey, it’s another feel-good family movie where the parent spends 90 minutes repeatedly putting their kid in distressing situations while blithely refusing to acknowledge that the problem exists because they don’t seem to regard their child’s emotions as real, then the big cathartic resolution involves parent and child agreeing that they’re both at fault and resolving to make changes, which apparently instantly repairs their relationship in spite of the fact that it’s entirely an informed change on the parent’s side, as nothing about their subsequent behaviour is discernibly different. Fun!
This is at best tangential but was anybody else, like, DEEPLY uncomfortable with the whole “sure we’ll release you from the curse that will trap you in the land of the dead, just give up music because it offends us?” plot point of Coco and how that was resolved without anyone involved acknowledging that it was a shitty, shitty thing to do?
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I mean, technically we’re all living our best lives.
Everyone who brought up the many-worlds interpretation will summarily be fed to Schrödinger’s cat.
Or not.
(via prokopetz)
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Like, I don’t know why we’re constantly surprised when a popular media figure whose playbook is “claim that an oppressed visible minority are secretly responsible for all of my problems” turns out to be getting cozy with Nazis. I mean, if it steps like a goose.
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While it’s important to recognise where early cyberpunk literature is coming from with respect to its skepticism of body modification, it feels like a lot of folks are basically using that to excuse the ableism of modern cyberpunk.
Yes, it’s true that much of the chrome angst in first-wave cyberpunk literature is explicitly tied to the corporate state’s efforts to abolish personal bodily autonomy, and to the extent that having a robot arm is construed as dehumanising, it’s dehumanising because a corporation owns your arm, not because prosthetics are evil.
However, it’s equally true that the “prosthetics eat your soul” horseshit of later cyberpunk lit is something that popular cyberpunk authors were very much complicit in. They wanted to retain the chrome angst as an aesthetic trapping while dialing back its political dimension in order to better appeal to mainstream audiences; to this end, the idea that having cyborg parts is intrinsically dehumanising was enthusiastically embraced. This isn’t a pop-cultural misunderstanding at work – it’s a shift in attitude that’s present in the literature itself.
Furthermore, that transition happened relatively early in the genre’s history, and was probably the norm rather than the exception no later than the mid 1990s. For those keeping count, that was 25 years ago, which is considerably longer than first-wave cyberpunk managed to remain culturally relevant. Basically, cyberpunk sold out, and it sold out early!
The fact that literary cyberpunk had some interesting things to say about bodily autonomy in 1984 – and that the chrome angst is a core component of that commentary – doesn’t give the genre a free pass for all the subsequent “prosthetics eat your soul“ stuff, and it certainly doesn’t mean that the two thirds of the genre’s entire history can be excused as “not real cyberpunk” on that basis. If you want to constructively address that shit, first you’ve got to own it!
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“Two dumbasses and the voice of reason” is a fun relationship dynamic, but also consider:
It’s always fun to see a version of one of my own posts cross my dash uncredited.
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Fact: the real reason that Twitter and Tumblr’s respective populations must be kept strictly separated is because Tumblr sexymen and Twitter inanimate objects personified as anime ladies with big boobs are actually the males and females of the same highly dimorphic species, and under no circumstances can they be allowed to breed.
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How to mess with the text of any website for amusing screenshot purposes with no Photoshop skills whatsoever:
- Open your browser’s developer console (F12 in most Windows browsers)
- Click the “Inspect” icon in the developer console (it’s usually the icon in the top left corner)
- While in inspect mode, in your main browser window, click on the text element – paragraph, list item, etc. – you want to edit (note: in some browsers, you can shortcut steps 1–3 by right-clicking the target element and selecting “Inspect” from the context menu)
- In the developer console, expand the highlighted element if necessary (it’s the little arrow beside it), then double-click its text to enter edit mode
- Make it say whatever you want; remember to hit “enter” after making your changes to apply your edits to the main browser window
- Close the developer console
- Take a screenshot
(via prokopetz)
- Open your browser’s developer console (F12 in most Windows browsers)
