games

I've been playing GTA Online again after a couple of years away and the game chat is absolutely brimming with casual Russophobia. GTA Online has always been a giant trash fire due to the toxic nature of the game and the fact that the vast majority of its players are children and maladjusted adults, but it's interesting to notice how hostile Europeans have become to Russian players, randomly calling them orcs or animals and asking them why they haven't been sent to die in Ukraine yet.

Of course, because everyone playing the game is an asshole, most of the Russian comebacks are snide remarks about Europe having a lot of African immigrants, but it's almost always NATO-brained Westerners picking fights with players with Russian names and not the other way around.

I'm sure the situation is very similar in most other multiplayer games, but to me it's interesting how Russians have taken the place Chinese players used to hold in GTA some years back before they were region-locked into their own servers as otherised enemies whom you vomit random talking points you picked up on the news at

Relax with Dionysus

Homer's dramatic reading of the patch notes.

the woke mob cancelled typhlosion

In how well a late 90's early 2000's game could be. But I remember the Chinese pilots being sympathetic and had character and the machines manufactured in country were capable, kind of blowing apart the myth of shoddy Chinese construction.

https://x.com/Setzeri/status/1842944180282356091

"it's just a silly game about two plumbers and two babies fighting aliens"

Yoko Shimomura:

No assets, free for personal use. Good for archival purposes I suppose.

Truly dark times in Civ.

Here we go again, more of Someone's music. Yet to beat MoF, so I'm gonna be hearing the game versions of these themes a lot more in the future, good thing they're so good, eh?

It was apparently called Powerpuff Girls D: Battle in Megaville, and as I remembered it, it also featured Dexter from Dexter's Lab, and whenever you beat your opponent, they'd make this sort of echoey cry/scream. I remember finding the game both very fun and cool — despite not having much of a connection to either cartoon — yet also a bit "disturbing" because these characters are supposed to be each other's siblings, and yet here they are just beating the crap out of each other. I didn't quite understand what the deal with the art style was, but I still understood that it, coupled with the violence, made the game feel more teenage and edgy than the cartoon — and being a preteen at the time, that of course appealed to me. Yet I'm pretty sure I only played the game once and then immediately forgot what it was called, and so I would sometimes think to myself for years later "What was that game?" but simply never bother to look into it until today.

Apparently the D in Powerpuff Girls D stands for "Doujinshi", and the game was based on a Powerpuff Girls doujinshi called Powerpuff Girls Doujinshi written by someone called Bleedman. The game itself upon revisiting it was not nearly as good as I remembered, it was decently fun but the controls were still a bit clunky, and the art and music and sound design were not nearly as "uniform" as I remembered, either (add to this the visual bugs as a result of using Flashpoint). The things about Battle in Megaville that made the game stand out so much as a preteen are obviously just a whole lot of nothing now as a young adult.

It does make me curious about that doujinshi, though, because it looks like it has (or at least had) a pretty sizeable fanbase.