The beginning of this headline had me mislead.

I read ‘creepiest publisher’, and with the state of the industry these days I immediately thought it was going to be some exposé piece on a toxic culture of workplace misogyny, and sexual harassment.

Glad it’s actually a cool studio doing interesting things!

I assumed they meant ‘baked potato’ because ‘baked potato’ is what they said.

Viewers have literally zero attention span, so if the talking isn’t super high speed back to back without even a single second to pause for breath, people click off or scroll past.

Same with subtitles that flash up rapidly, a single word at at time.

That’s the sorry state of affairs we are now living with.

Well yes that’s true.

The modern hobbyist resurgence is in vinyl, not cassette. I was only mentioning cassette to make the point that the same phenomenon occurs in other media too - of technologies getting worse over time. Especially true in cassette, in fact.

Good cassettes players are old ones.

I suppose it happened because from a mainstream perspective handhelds like the DS and PSP were far behind dedicated systems in terms of graphics, and so the expectation was never there to have “triple A” visuals - neither from consumers nor industry.

Made for very fertile ground in terms of games that had budget, but still had a long leash to go and get wacky.

Same thing happened with casette tapes and cassette mechanisms.

Most people think cassette tapes were terrible, because they remember the bargain basement iron tapes and no noise reduction. A top quality chrome casette when recorded well and played back on the right hardware is very difficult to tell apart from the digital original.

Similar story with VHS to be honest.

There’s a “minimum acceptable quality” which people were willing to tolerate, and manufacturers inevietably converge towards it in an effort to shave off a few cents here and there.

Audiophile now is very different, because it’s not a mass market consumer format any longer - it’s a niche hobby, and people are willing to pay top money for their hobbies.

Yeah, I agree the bots are genuinely "more fleshy"and with skin and such - just saying where my imagination was at - which thanks to the wonder of books can be quite different for different people.

I wish we knew what the motivation was for choosing the actor. The cynic in me thinks they opted obviously male lead to reduce friction and claims of “wokeness” but without some inside insight we can’t know.

In my imagination, Murderbot looked kinda like the player character from the game ‘Citizen Sleeper’, pictured below.

Which is to say, very androgynous and very obviously cybernetic.

There’s quite a bit of character similarity between them too, because the titular Sleeper is a human consciousness in a cybernetic body that has a lot of biological parts, and they are kept loyal to the company who owns them by a drug that will cause their body to break down if they stop taking it. Same intent as the governor module, but a different approach.

I found Murderbot’s physical appearance an important aspect of the books, not just for surface plot reasons (everyone knows they are a bot etc) but because it’s a large part of what people need to overcome from the perspective of seeing past their prejudices.

Wow yeah. That must have been a really infuriating gameplay issue, no wonder players were upset with it.

A shame the game was so rushed or I’m sure the dev would have fixed that in code.

What was the bug and workaround? :)

To me, the unspoken premise of the game is that you’re a kid in 1986 with a parent or cool uncle who went on a business trip to Japan and brought you home a Famicom and a copy of the original Zelda - months before the console even launched outside Japan.

The whole game is about replicating that sense of childish fascination and wonder.

The ‘Alien Language’ game manual is supposed to mimic the feeling of trying to read the Japanese manual that came with the game, muddling through as best you can with the pictures, and a few random English words they included just because English is ‘cool’ in a gaming context.

It’s a very fun mechanic, and my favourite thing about the game.

God literally used the scale-up tool on a seagull. I guess it was a Friday afternoon in the animal design bureau.

You are huge!

The ship was one of the best parts for sure. Once you are competent it feels super liberating how nimbly you can zip around a planet.

The other good parts of that game were progression, and death.

I love that knowledge is the only thing retained between loops - the only currency of value. And I loved the feeling of making new discoveries.

And with death as an expected mechanic, the game doesn’t have to put up any guiderails to save you from it. There are no training wheels. You want to go outside without a spacesuit? Bad idea but we’ll let you. You want to literally lose your ship so you can never get it back? Sure, go for it. You want to fall into a space anomaly and see what happens? Be our guest.

Masterpiece game honestly.

Beings of darkness have empathy for those who live far from the light.