We Are The World

The trailer for the Sonic the Hedgehog movie came out today, which I thought was important enough to warrant a post, so that I could capture and document this moment in my life forever. Sometimes you just get a sense that something so momentous is happening that you’ll want to look back on this years from now so you can revisit it as honest to gosh history. I can’t imagine anything else that has happened in my life over the last seven months that would qualify, which hopefully explains the long duration between posts.

I don’t know if I have a new take on it that hasn’t already been splattered all over the internet already, but mainly I just want to emphasize the core sentiment here, which is…why? I’m struggling so much to make sense of the reason that this exists. Has Sonic recently spring jumped back into collective pop culture consciousness to justify any of this? Presumably some people needed to pay some money to some other people to make this. Are they trying to tap into the nostalgia of today’s 30 or 40 year-olds, in the hopes they want to bring their young children to watch this…? But it doesn’t seem like that type of movie…?

What a terrifying and senseless world we have created for our children to inhabit.

Moving onto other business…

– This is True Detective Pikachu, which still isn’t half as horrifying as that Sonic…although still very horrifying. It’s those Asian eyes. Amazing McConaughey impression though, to the point where I thought it was originally audio pulled straight from the source.

– Then a short hop over to The Matthew McConaughTree which visualizes the top 100 permutations of 10,000 attempts to spell Matthew McConaughey’s last name. I personally fall off the double-N branch every time, and have yet to do it without confirming from a Google search first. The tree data is pulled from The Gyllenhaal Experiment which is another excellent way to waste your time and at the same time feel bad about your spelling of celebrity last names.

– This continued Anthem drama is absolutely delicious to me, even though I don’t really have a dog in the fight, as I don’t believe in dog fighting as a metaphor for disagreements. We shouldn’t have any dogs in any fights. Unless it’s a dog fighting a bear in defense of its family in a life or death situation or something, I don’t know, I’m not saying 0% of dog fights are acceptable. That’s an absolute statement I’m not ready to make yet.

After the fascinating Kotaku article alleging all sorts of creative and cultural issues with Bioware’s development of the game, it doesn’t seem like anything’s really corrected. This whole thing is like a No Man’s Sky level disaster, with reports of a broken loot system, general loading screen and logistical issues, and even stuff like how due to oversights with level balancing the default starting rifle remained the best weapon in the game. Updates and fixes promised to be delivered post-launch have been indefinitely delayed, and allegedly a dwindling playerbase is causing matchmaking problems.

That Forbes article by the way, is pretty garbage, just one guy’s opinion phrased in a way that resembles news. No references to sources or anything, just some guy saying some stuff. It’s not hard to link to some stuff to justify it either. Anyone can check the list of most played game on Xbox and see Anthem is currently ranked 45 out of 48 games, behind clunkers like Fallout 76 or previous iterations of Mortal Kombat and NBA2K. So you can only imagine how well the PC gamer crowd is taking it. Additionally, taking a look at the Twitch category for the game, there are currently rougly 300K subscribers and 350ish active viewers at time of writing. Compared to similar loot shooters like Destiny 2 (3.3 million subs and 4K viewers) or the newer Division 2 (comparable 340K subs but 2K+ viewers), it doesn’t seem great. I mean I bet they would even be happy with Farming Simulator 19 numbers at this point.

I take no joy in watching one of my favourite companies take such a bath with now a pretty bad second misstep, but I think the accepted reality is that the Bioware that we remember from such games as Mass Effect or Star Wars: The Old Republic, is no longer. And maybe we should be actively rooting against the success of these types of games. With a falling playerbase on a pseudo-MMO games as a service platform, I think we’re seeing the usual MMO-drain-spiral, where less players means less incoming money which means less resources to dedicate to fixes or updates which means repeat from less players. At this rate, Anthem will be on the streets turning tricks for their next hit, free to play within months. Considering they pulled the plug on Andromeda patches and DLCs less than six months after launch, you really couldn’t fault Anthem fans for looking at Bioware’s initial claims of stories “for years to come” with skepticism. This entire scummy industry trend with GaaS is disheartening, with either incomplete games like Anthem getting pooped out with empty promises of improvements to follow later, or games like Star Wars Battlefront II or Mortal Kombat 11 initially launching with predatory monetization elements that are eventually backtracked due to public backlash. This is a major game release from a major publisher, this shouldn’t be happening. And if it takes a few studios bombing with some sucky releases to change that, then so be it. Yes, I bought some skins for Mass Effect 2 a decade ago because I thought they were cool and I thought it was a fair exchange for the number of hours of entertainment and alien lesbian relationship role playing the game provided to me. I didn’t know I was opening the floodgates to all of this!

– From the department of videos named literally what they are that still get you, here is Making chainsaw noises while cutting cheese and Watch A Woman Tell Her Husband She’s Pregnant While Conan O’Brien Pours Good Milk Down The Sink. I can really sympathize with the sentiment of the latter. Sometimes you just want to destroy something beautiful and like…pour a lot of perfectly fine milk down the drain.

Think of the hubris it must take to, yank a soul out of non-existence into this…meat. To force a life into this…thresher.