Gormongous

Well, I've seen it more or less confirmed on the internet that Rebuild of Evangelion 3.33 is indefinitely delayed for DVD and Blu-ray release in the English-speaking world not because FUNimation wanted to give it another spin in the theaters, as most people had thought, but because the Japanese distributor T-Joy, which replaced Klock Worx for the latest movie, is seeing poor sales for it in Japan and is worried that reverse-importing will gut them completely. Therefore, until T-Joy is satisfied with their numbers, they'll continue to make FUNimation sit on their hands — and by extension Manga UK and Madman, both of which license FUNi scripts. In that case, I don't even blame FUNi for running the movie through theaters again, just to keep interest and revenue up. Anime industry politics! Japanese interpretations of western fantasy are some of my favorite anime! Moribito, Scrapped Princess, and Record of Lodoss War all come to my mind, although they all have flaws that you might find bothersome (Moribito also has heavy Asian influences, Scrapped Princess has some sci-fi trappings, and Record of Lodoss War is... dated). Are there any other ones of which you know?

I told myself I'd try to stop dominating all input in this conversation, but I react very strongly to the idea that any distinction can be drawn between Hitler and Stalin. Stalin was incredibly successful in promoting the image of Papa Stalin. In class this week, my students read accounts by several refugees from Soviet Russia that focused on their enduring love for Stalin as abstract father figure even though they now hated him as genocidal maniac. Many of the Nazi economic strategies were the same as in the US and many of the Nazi political strategies were the same as in the USSR. It's the combination of the two, in the mess that the victorious powers created in postwar Germany, that made the Nazis, not some special sauce of which we don't know the recipe today. Moreover, the methods of executing genocide are immaterial next to the execution itself. The Holocaust, while the most infamous genocide of the twentieth, is particularly exceptional neither in number or nature, except that it is a genocide in which the free world successfully intervened. That is the most important difference, I am almost certain.

It's the best thing. It's done more to sell me on Bwave Wave than either of the clips (which, since both of the clips are awesome, is saying a lot).

Doesn't Japanese culture, with the whole kusoge movement, have a conception of this? As I understand it, kusoge are holistically bad games, but their badness is such and so much that there's some sort of charming or memorable experience to be had from playing them.

I am going to respond to the rest of your awesome post after I take a shower and a walk, but for now I just want to point out tangentially that the most popular academic work from the traditionalist "catastrophe" school of late antiquity, Bryan Ward-Perkins' The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, makes the claim that German scholars want and are working for the barbarian migrations into Western Europe to be accepted as peaceful in order to provide a stepping stone for effacing their blood guilt in the Holocaust and Second World War. He also says that American scholars are helping them with this plan because they hate the Roman Empire, on account of still being mad about their oppression under a certain other empire only a few short centuries ago. The relationship between the (often artificially) timeless constructs of nationality and ethnicity, the people who currently have those constructs as part of their identity, and past acts committed under the auspices of those constructs is so goddamn complex. Okay, I'm back, although I didn't get the inspiration for which I was hoping. Saying that Soviets are the bad guys but Nazis are evil is probably the best point that's been said thus far. I don't think it would even have been possible for Luftrausers to push their aesthetic into Red Alert territory (which is precisely what I was wondering in an earlier post) because bad guys can be made comical but true evil can only ever be evil. I guess that maybe plays into how conflicted I am about this entire conversation being had. I certainly don't think all Germans became evil when Hitler became chancellor in 1933 and stopped being evil when he shot himself in 1945, so that leaves me wondering where I draw the line. I intentionally brought up Company of Heroes because the Wermacht and Luftwaffe were two staples of the Nazi state that weren't necessarily Nazis themselves, so I don't want to draw it there, even though I could (and sometimes do) for the reasons you gave. Really, I could go on with more examples, but it just feels like I personally am caught between wanting to historicize Nazism as a very specific if fluid phenomenon in interwar Germany and wanting not to confine it to something only possible in those circumstances. That's mostly why I didn't like Vlambeer's statement. You're right, they should have just said, "It looks that way, but you're not a Nazi. It wasn't our intention, but we're very sorry." Painting some specious "alternate history between World War I and the Cold War" just seems like a cowardly way to excuse a lack of historical context, when the important thing is really that there are no Nazi symbols and no Nazi acts, just a feeling that they should own when people bring it up. In general, I just don't like that things can't be about Nazis. I don't like that Elizabeth Simins can tweet about how gross it is to play an implicit Nazi in Luftrausers and be totally justified. It's the same in other mediums. A good anime, The Cockpit, will never get distribution outside of Japan because it shows a Nazi pilot, devoted to his ideology, in a non-critical light. The show that isyourguy linked, Generation War, has to take repeated pains to point that its main characters are German soldiers but not Nazis, because we can't have a TV show starring Nazis. Like I said in my first post, all this feels like a taboo and we all know how taboos turn out in the long term. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I wonder how can we say "never again" if the only unobjectionable mode of discourse about Nazis is caricaturing them as inhuman and evil monsters tricking the greedy and ignorant into committing unspeakable acts. That's not how Nazis came to power and it's deeply problematic to want an expression of that in every piece of media about them. At the same time, games that borrow the historical or aesthetic baggage of Nazis could use more voices like yours and Rob Dubbin in order to keep their game from just using said baggage as a totem of evil or coolness or power or whatever the 1890-1945 Austro-Germano-Prussian thing is standing in for. I don't know, I'm definitely not saying that Luftrausers wanted to be, is, or should be the game to overturn or even address this taboo, but the conversation's happening now, so here we are. I'm really just demonstrating my ability to talk myself in circles, maybe I should shut up and let the smart people who are avoiding my walls of text talk instead.

I am playing a hack-and-beam game while listening to Genesis' Invisible Touch. It's the best thing ever. It (the hacking drone) takes control (of their shields) and (the beam) slowly tears you apart.

Paradox does handle it pretty well, although they've expressed on their forums the fear they have of bad press over making anything that could be construed as a Holocaust simulator. Victoria 2 has dynamic "ethnic cleansing" events if your nation flips to a radical ideology like fascism or communism, along with a few somewhat more generic anti-Semitism events. The older Hearts of Iron games had event pop-ups recreating the escalation to the Holocaust, but I haven't played Hearts of Iron 3 to know if they're still in there. I'd almost be inclined to say that Crusader Kings 2 handles its contemporary Jewry the best, since they're actual characters that are useful to keep around and useful to expel, which makes for a historically authentic experience. It is really interesting how invisible Jews are in so many otherwise historical games. I imagine if they began to appear too frequently, it'd mostly be another thing for the typical gamer to grouse about, like them wimmin issuez. And...? Is being the citizen of a nation once conquered by a foreign power seventy years ago sure proof against misuse of the symbols of that foreign power now?

Yeah, Kentucky Route Zero and its ilk speaks really strongly to me, having lived my whole life in the Midwest and the Rust Belt. I guess it would seem affected and insincere if you hadn't lived in a place that's just one or two shades less weird and surreal than the setting of the game. I am, too. I was howling "Nooo!" at my phone as Chris insisted that they wait at least a week to talk about it. Deep dives are what makes this podcast great. Every time you guys cut yourselves short on a conversation because of perceived podcast propriety, I cry a river.

What I wonder is, does the intimate association of twentieth-century German aesthetics, even absent any defining symbology, with Nazism serve to insulate people from the reality you bring up, that Nazism still has power today in places that aren't even remotely German? I blew past it last night, but sorakasumi was right that automatically tarring everything German as Nazi is a problematic if understandable response, not because Nazi scientific and economic achievements are so valuable, but because there were strong fascist movements in every Western country, because there were many enthusiastic collaborators with the Final Solution in conquered countries, and because neo-Nazis are a global movement today. Walling off Nazism as purely a mid-century German thing that can be evoked by German-sounding words and riveted steel but by not political violence or mass deportations is a phenomenon about which I don't know what to think. I understand that the former two are what's more often associated with Nazism (and I can't discount the emotional reaction to them, it being the strongest and truest kind of reaction) but there's a wider range of historical evil there that Luftrausers doesn't traffic in at all.

Dammit, that was poorly worded, wasn't it?

Kate Beaton posted a long-form comic about her time working at a mining company. It's called Ducks and it's pretty fucking incredible. Incredible as in beautiful, not unbelievable, although a bit of that, too.

Interestingly, the answer that the postwar American government gave to the "fruits" of Nazi science was that it wasn't worth the moral compromise, although they didn't have a problem hiring ex-Nazi scientists after the fact to keep them out of Soviet hands. Good point with Killzone, though. There's not even an attempt to evoke the aesthetics of a given historical period with the Hellgast, it's just to make them look evil and killable. I wonder if the people who'd have a problem with that just don't play Killzone. I certainly never have. The Cold War still isn't done as well as it should be in school. The professor with whom I work covers it reasonably well, but her colleague doesn't, because he assumes the students know all about it, even though none of them were alive at the same time as the USSR was around. I think the Cold War's only really beginning to be thought of as something distinct from our historical "now", which is part of what's giving us great new period films like Tinker, Tailor, so maybe I'm revising my initial statement to be that communism hasn't been digested that well either? There has to be a difference between two roughly similar ideologies of evil to account for their different places in our mental landscape, though. Maybe it is just that we fought a war with one and not the other? It can't be that simple, no. As for symbols, I remember seeing one guy comment on the CCCP codec pack forums with a request that they change their logo to be anything but a hammer and sickle, which represented to him the government that killed his grandfather. He was laughed off the forum, of course. Internet! Meanwhile, a streak of swastika-related vandalism on my undergrad campus shut it down for thirty-six hours while the police investigated. You're right, it's all so big and complicated that I don't know we'll ever be able to have any sort of satisfactory resolution until everyone who ever spoke to anyone who was there is dead, and only then because there won't be enough people left to keep the discourse going. I'm glad a small part of it is happening now. We're reading Goebbels, Comintern, and NSC-68 in my class on Friday, I hope it can happen there, too.

Yeah, those are mostly my thoughts too, but would it really be better then to have a game where you're a low-level military officer doing logistics for the Final Solution in 1940? A lot of people hated Trains for not elucidating to their satisfaction the conscious guilt of the people packing Jews into boxcars headed for Dachau and Auschwitz. I think my point is maybe that Nazis are such a taboo in Western culture, for a variety of often correct reasons, that it's impossible for a game not to be perceived as disregarding the horrible things they're associated with. Actually, I'm going to go further than that. No one really complained that you could play comical bear-wielding Soviets in the Red Alert series. No one really complained that you could play as Stalin, enslave millions of people, and then build the UN in Civilization IV. Both those things are awful and very much weaken the cultural sentiment surrounding the multiple Soviet genocides of the twentieth century, but they aren't Nazis, so... I don't know. I don't know where I'm going with this. Like I said, I think "cool" Nazis are an understandable but sometimes incongruous sticking point when games love so many other equally problematic historical aesthetics. Luftrausers seems an even odder place to draw the line when you have genocide-free Nazis shooting at Americans in Company of Heroes and then at Commies in Company of Heroes 2. I really want to unpack this more. Are we having the conversation now because it's a great indie company making the game? I wish Vlambeer's response hadn't been so... nothing. Well, I'm glad the conversation (and the education accompanying it) is happening anyway, even without good input from them.

I'm glad you decided to make such a great first post, isyourguy. It's close to the same one I wanted to post. I don't really understand why Papers Please and Dear Leader escape mention, just because their mechanics force you to act out the reprehensible ideology that their aesthetics evoke. Would Luftrausers be getting less guff if you were bombing villages and strafing refugees in Spain and Eastern Europe? I doubt it, because you'd still be playing a Nazi, which was why many people disliked Brenda Romero's Train on principle. Why does the Red Alert series get a pass for evoking Soviet aesthetics without having mechanics that own up to the equally horrific mass killings under Stalin? Probably because Soviet symbology is seen as quaint and even goofy, although probably not to the Poles and Hungarians and Ukrainians who suffered under it, while Nazi symbology is seen as menacing, with good reason. To me, it just feels like the taboo attached to fascism for being defeated and annihilated in the Second World War rearing its ugly head. If an intelligent and sensitive person who happens to be Jewish can play Luftrausers — which has a very strong 1890-1945 Austro-Germano-Prussian aesthetic but no specifically Nazi symbols, I imagine quite deliberately so — and be made justifiably uncomfortable, it says to me that we haven't really digested it as a culture, like we have communism. Maybe fighting a war over it has made it a bit harder to swallow, to the point of being even more so than a fifty-year cold war with a much higher death toll? I just worry how we're supposed to have any living memory of, let alone discourse on, Nazism and its victims if people call reverent games like Train unfun and irreverent games like Luftrausers dishonest. I had a hard enough time getting my kids even to read Mein Kampf in class last week in order to understand how Hitler came to power (and how others like him could). I wish the discussion didn't also have to stigmatize everything evocative of early to mid-twentieth-century German militarism, which was a significant cultural and historical force before Hitler was even born. Of course, I don't think people are wrong for having a problem with the aesthetics of Luftrausers. Even beyond their fundamental right to feel anything about anything without having to justify themselves, the game does have a sense of whimsy that's out of sync with its apparent context, albeit probably on purpose. Just to be clear, the Nazis were evil and I'm not really invested in reclaiming them as a legitimate aesthetic choice. It's just frustrating for me to see Nazism singled out as the wicker man for a tolerant society, to the point that any aesthetic associated with it is invariably under debate, when a game from last year gets critical acclaim for setting the player up as a low-level bureaucrat totally complicit in another genocide. Not that Papers Please isn't a great game for me as well, but nary a peep! I also wanted to work in the calls on the internet to deny Miyazaki the Oscar for The Wind Rises because it contained no apology for the Rape of Nanking, but I couldn't find a place. Anyway, only the losers of World War 2 have to apologize.

Eh, I'm alright, Jack. Yes! I finally get to use it properly with an English person!

I kinda like the increased drop rate, but yeah, it's silly. The drop rate is zero if I'm too scared to play the game.

I was at least expecting an out-of-place robot smiley stuck somewhere. Why isn't the iPad held to the pole with two small clips on the top and one long, curved lip along the bottom?

I agree. I'm actually watching this thread and the Dark Souls thread with great interest. About six months ago, I bought the game on a whim, played hard until ringing the first bell, and stopped dead. I was at a crossroads, but every direction seemed to take me to places that, using the knowledge I'd gained from dying to the Black Knight four times and to Havel the Rock six, looked to me like I shouldn't go. I softshoed around a weird vine-covered area for about half an hour, thought I should quit while I was ahead, and never came back. Now I want to start again, but I'm the same as you, Griddlelol. The game seems to disincentivize exploration with immediate death, but I don't know how else to find out where to go. It probably doesn't help that my character's shit. I started with the Pyromancer, but I keep tending towards a tank wielding as big a sword as possible. Hey, it may be feasible, but my reactions are terrible, with only maybe one parry in five landing, so he's certainly not great for keeping his distance and testing out bosses' weaknesses. The only time I did really well was the gargoyle, which I beat in just a few minutes after just one other try. Otherwise, I feel like I don't know what I want and don't want to admit it on an internet forum. I also had a weird glitch happen with my humanity after an invasion, so now I have nine humanity, more than I ever had before, and I'm terrified of death.

I was so pleased to see that the Advanced Edition allows for a different path to unlock the Crystal Cruiser. Still, if beating the game sixteen times is more appealing than your crazy unlocking quest, that might be a failure of design?

It's too deep for him.

Reading interviews, the family tree was deliberately removed for two reasons: first, to keep it from distracting players from the laughably buggy and broken "politics" screen of which CA was so proud; and second, to keep players from noticing how fast the game's timescale is. To expand upon the latter, I remember someone close to the team suggesting on the forums that the family tree got unreadably huge and sprawled after just a hundred turns, so they got rid of it and doubled down on "family" and "non-family" groupings in the UI instead. Why they weren't clued to bigger design problems by the fact that a game in large part about dynastic and clan politics didn't work with a family tree is really beyond me, but I assume it's got something to do with sunk-cost fallacy.

I agree that you're supposed to like Tony Soprano and Walter White and all those other "heroic" sociopaths. I mean, that's what I get from the carefully constructed cocktail of competency and charm that the writers slather all over them. Even though you never stop liking them, you're just not supposed to want to like them, gradually if not immediately, because the show is entirely about how your gut is wrong and these men are monsters. I'm actually not enjoying The Sopranos as much as I once thought, maybe because there are too many plot threads that don't go anywhere, but the triumph of the show is making you love and respect Tony, a brutish asshole who gets himself objectively in the wrong time and again until it kills him. I think the reason that Breaking Bad is maybe less of a success is because the fifth season follows Walt past the tipping point in an attempt to reach the closure for which The Sopranos didn't even try. I also agree that there's something of a trend here. For me, "Isn't it messed up how much you care for this amoral asshole?" is becoming for TV what "Isn't it messed up how many people you're shooting in this first-person shooter?" has been for video games the past couple years. I think there's more to do with charismatic antiheroes than just win audience sympathy for evil acts, but I don't know what it is. It's something I'll be thinking about now, though. Also, because of all the tequila. Seriously though, good post again, Tycho. You're on a roll this week.

I think that piracy is also an important factor, insofar as anyone with the tech and the know-how can watch whatever TV they want, but that's still a good point I didn't think of. It actually reminds me a little of that Nothing Nice to Say comic about how digital-only punk albums are anti-punk even though their distribution method is more "democratic"... Shit, the NN2S website is gone for good. Well, it was a good comic. I don't want to be that guy, but trying to quantify "cool" on the internet is probably an exercise in futility. Interestingly, at least with True Detective, the buzz bit it in the ass, because it ended up being a fairly average if competent character study and procedural, but people had hyped it into an impossibly dense and stunning masterpiece, so it's probably going to be consigned to the dumpster of history now. Unless the second season is magnificent, too.

I know what you mean. I think there are just too many characters and too many subplots, so the writers have to have a lot of walking-and-talking scenes to compress exposition and avoid cutting content. I wish they had cut more content, especially a lot of what surrounds (but doesn't directly pertain to the development of) Jon Snow, but I understand their hesitance, since they still don't really have much of an idea where the story's ultimately headed. I agree that the episodes could be written to be more self-contained and purposeful, although it never occurred to me that I'd want that until you said it. The chapters of the books are heavily anchored around a single character's perspective and a handful of specific events, so it wouldn't even be that hard to do, given a good writing staff, but I guess the show's already committed to the whole "Now we're in King's Landing! Now we're in Bravos! Now we're beyond the Wall!" style that just makes me feel tired, really.