We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

I feel like the discussion here's basically already done but I conveniently stumbled upon a developer interview about how what you'd imagine is Tomodachi's main competitor dealt with the same issue, while simultaneously becoming the literal best-selling PC franchise that has ever existed.

https://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/e...games.html
(The article name's a little overly dramatic though)

In early 1999, before E.A. had a chance to kill the design, Barrett was asked to create a demo of the game to be shown at E3. The demo would consist of three scenes from the game. These were to be so-called on-rails scenes—not a true, live simulation but one that was preplanned, and which would shake out the same way each time it was played, in order to show the game in its best light. One of the scenes was a wedding between two Sims characters. “I had run out of time before E3, and there were so many Sims attending the wedding that I didn’t have time to put them all on rails,” Barrett said.

On the first day of the show, the game’s producers, Kana Ryan and Chris Trottier, watched in disbelief as two of the female Sims attending the virtual wedding leaned in and began to passionately kiss. They had, during the live simulation, fallen in love. Moreover, they had chosen this moment to express their affection, in front of a live audience of assorted press. Following the kiss, talk of The Sims dominated E3. “You might say that they stole the show,” Barrett said. “I guess straight guys that make sports games loved the idea of controlling two lesbians.”

After The Sims’s successful E3 showing, the game’s future seemed secure. But Barrett and his teammates had a new problem to solve: how to decide the sexual orientation of individual Sims. “If you created a household with two same-sex Sims, they would always become gay just from the fact they were around each other the most,” recalled Barrett. “That’s when I came up with the system that determined a Sim’s sexuality through user-directed actions.”

In the game, players were able to interact with Sims in different ways, inspiring them to take a bath, eat food, go outside, and perform other actions. “Certain social interactions were tagged as romantic,” Barrett said. “The game kept track of whether these were performed by same-sex or opposite-sex Sims. The formula was a little more complicated, but, over time, as a Sim developed a relationship, his or her preference was set.” If the player was careful, a Sim could even become bisexual. “The system worked so well that the same-sex support was invisible and seamless. It is rare that something works exactly as you intend it to. A lot of my other simulations in the game fell apart. This one worked perfectly. Once the team saw it in action, they decided I could keep same-sex support, and the topic didn’t come up again.”

It doesn't really sound like it was all that hard, does it?

It's potentially harder in a country where anti-discrimination laws based on sexuality have only been passed in particular cities? Same-sex relationships have no legal recognition and no legal protections offered to hetrosexual couples in Japan. Also your example still is problematic because (it would appear) part of the reason EA kept it in was because all the brogamers thought "fuck yeah, lesbians"?

I mean I fundamentally agree that it's yet another shitty symptom of society at large still seeing homosexuality as "other", and Nintendo ending up making that into a Federal Fucking Issue is another shitty symptom.

i think jac meant from a programming pov more than another one, and thats also why i made sure to keep my criticism to Nintendo of America although im noticing now that in one of the retypings of that post i neglected to mention that i was specifically upset about that whoopsie

Yeah I was focusing more on the "it's super easy mechanically for this to happen, in a way that wouldn't need to upset people who want all their characters to be het for some bizarre reason" rather than that same sentence but replacing "mechanically" with "socially"
That might have been clearer if I left off the first two paragraphs, which weren't really relevant, but I left them in because I thought it was a fun story and I was really only linking it because it was an interesting tangentially related article than because it was incredibly relevant to what we had been talking about

the thing is, i've seen them selling the sims in japan, so

yeah but nintendo is a japanese company and EA is an american one so schazer's point still stands?

The fact that it's a Japanese company is largely irrelevant from the perspective of whether or not it's disappointing to see the company choosing to ignore/deliberately disclude homosexuality; if anything, it is even more frustrating, because Nintendo is in a position to help contribute to the changing climate (as demonstrated by the increasing number of municipalities with anti-discrimination laws) simply by including the option to pair up same-sex miis. Instead, they bowed to either the threat of external backlash (bad) or to internal prejudice (worse).

Again, not surprising, but upsetting; the sort of actions consumers should make clear will not be profitable in the long run.

e: And even if lesbian sims only got their foot in the door because of hypothetical dudebros, the end result is same-sex relationships in a hugely popular game from a major mainstream studio; it would be problematic if it fetishized that sexuality or was sold or advertised as "Hey look lesbo simulator, dudes" but... it didn't. It was just a game that organically included homosexuality, in the nineties, and suffered no serious negative press and continued to include that feature in every iteration of the game they churned out for the next two decades.

Why things happen ultimately doesn't matter except in how they affect how things happen; in this case, it did not. If using fetishization as a tool to present homosexuality in a non-fetishized way to a mass audience, so be it.

so, it's okay for EA to put the sims on the same platform that tomodachi life is on, but since EA's name is on it, nintendo is not responsible for it despite them making the release in japan possible in the first place?

loopholes!

Yeah, I phrased my point badly. I'm not using different background levels of societally ingrained homophobia in two different countries as a justification for why you can get same-sex marriage on the Sims but not on Tomodachi Life; it's an [i]explanation[/u] as to why we see what we see in the finished products. It's an explanation and it's a shitty one that results in a shitty outcome.

Sometimes you get a "why" and you need to look at it and ask "is this bullshit". If yes, then it's necessary to point out that it's bullshit so people don't use it as precedent when trying to twist an explanation into a justification?

And yeah, I know that grumbling about how it's only "socially palatable" progress that gets to enjoy progress is somewhat tangential, and I was really only interjecting there in particular because I fundamentally agree with the opinion that Nintendo (somewhat unsurprisingly, very disappointingly) dropped the ball and for some reason I wanted to stick my oar in. Kind of in the same vein, I shouldn't shit on progress when it happens (non-heterosexual orientations in the Sims) but I should be allowed to point out "here's another subtle, insidious bias at work"?

I dunno, I probably shouldn't be nitpicking when I do, at the core, agree with most everyone else about this.

It's not nitpicking when, even if you agree with the core of a point or argument, you take issue with some aspects of a thing. That's just a conversation, and you shouldn't feel bad for interjecting. I don't agree that the subtle bias in question is salient in this particular situation (hugely so in others, definitely), but, you know, it's okay for us to disagree even when we're on the same side. I'm not trying to shut you down or anything, just laying out my personal opinion in the general and the specific; nobody's opinion is winning. I totally reserve the right to be wrong, and somebody could point out why and how I am; I just don't feel that using bias towards socially-palatable progress (hot polgygonal sapphic action) as a springboard for socially-unpalatable progress (fictional faggots frenching) is in this case problematic. I think it's valuable for us to explicate our differences of opinion even when we agree overall: that's how you end up with a more nuanced, accurate viewpoint from multiple experiences; nobody has to feel cut off or shamed for disagreeing on smaller things.

I left FF7 on overnight a few times since I was away from a save point. I now have embarrassing numbers of hours on Steam. My recommended tags are JRPGs, RPG, classic, Final Fantasy, singleplayer.

In other news, I bought Electronic Super Joy, marking the first ever occasion of my buying a game's soundtrack first.

So recently I got FTL (yes, I am super behind when it comes to computer games) and I can't decide whether it's fun or absolutely infuriating. I haven't yet embraced pain so death (which is super common and I kinda still perceive as being totally arbitrary and independent of player agency) is really aggravating, but I can't stop playing.

Last run went kinda okay, though! I was admittedly playing on Easy, but I took the Kestrel A all the way to the second Flagship phase, which I guess I can feel reasonably proud of.

Some of the events are frustratingly arbitrary and don't really let you know that you're making an important decision until suddenly one of your crewmembers is gone forever, there's no indication that you're taking a risk
The Captain's Mode mod fixes that up pretty well I think but you might want to run it with the base game a bit longer before gluing bits on

I didn't like FTL much. Honestly I had no problem with the random events and enemies, they were extremely forgiving by roguelike standards (other than the mantis pod bullshit) and I've only ever died pre-flagship a couple times. My issue is with the flagship- it's just astronomically more difficult than anything else in the game, and that makes the goal of the game "get unbelieveably farmed up" rather than "survive", which ruins the feel for me. After playing it like a dozen times I got bored, because I felt like every event had to go perfectly for fighting the flagship to even be worth an attempt.

My main problem with FTL (other than the aforementioned ridiculously difficult flagship) was the fact that there were so few different events in the main game. It seemed like after I had played through the first few times, I was already starting to see more repeat events than original ones.

I don't know, maybe they've updated it somewhat in the last year or so since I've played it, but I don't really feel like it has much replay value at all, unless you're the kind of person who enjoys throwing yourself at a game over and over again in hopes of finally getting that 1-in-100-runs string of good luck where beating the final boss might actually be possible.

CB, they put in some DLC a couple months back? So now there's a couple new ship systems (hacking, mind control), a new species who can survive in zero-oxygen environs, and a bunch of new weapons and events and junk.

I wouldn't recommend it for a first-timer, just because more stuff reduces the odds that you'll find the particular thing you're looking for which makes for a more frustrating play experience, but if you got done with playing the core game it's a neat little expansion.

Playing the DLC was fun
The event pool was really small in the original, which also reduced replayability, so I played like another 10 games to check out the new content
Flagship experience was unchanged, of course :P

Most of the random events are a choice between "Stay out of it" and "do something risky that might pay off and might screw you over." I don't find that to be unreasonable.

I didn't find the flagship that much hugely more difficult than the rest of the game. Difficult, yeah - I'd have been disappointed if I'd gotten it on the first try. But it's not 1/100 odds and it's not pure luck. I think I've beaten it more often than it's beaten me.
If you play it safe through the whole run, then yeah, you're a lot less likely to die, and yeah, the flagship will be absurdly hard. 'cuz that's a bad strategy. Instead, push the edge of what you can get away with. There's more to this game than surviving. You need to take risks and go looking for trouble if you want to stand a chance against the flagship. You need to think strategically and play proactively.
That's not "farming". That's playing the game. If fighting ships is so repetitive and boring that you can call it "farming", you've got the difficulty too low.

tl;dr YOU'RE ALL WRONG THIS GAME IS AWESOME BLAAAGH

Personally I loved the Advanced Edition DLC; it really added several concepts that definitely resonated with my (admittedly slug-like) play style. For example, asphyxiating the crew of every enemy ship I come across, or maybe the majesty that is the CHAIN VULCAN *glorious sounds*

I know I couldn't play without the DLC anymore. I'm still having fun unlocking all the ships :B

I don't really have much to offer that hasn't been said already so I'll just say that I think the rock people are absolutely adorable and I like to fill my ships with them even though that's an awful idea

Yeah I have also always thought the boss was kind of shitty, there are plenty of ways to have a viable ship for getting to it but only maybe three for beating it, which kind of limits your choice a whole lot.

in FTL, the point is to start on Easy in order to learn enough to advance

I recently finished Shovel Knight! It's really good!
Like, 'It's probably one of my top 10 games I've ever played' really good.

i think I'm addicted to banished I don't even know why it's like super simple and there's not even like a story or challenge i don't even