Tales of Yesteryear

I realized many of you younglings were not there in the old times, in the long long ago.

This goes back to the ancestor of the EU, the EEC - European Economic Community. This was a trading union. And this is where the dichomy of Britain to the EU comes from. Britain has always been one of the strongest voices for the EU, while being one of the most Euroskeptic. This is because Britain was a trading power, and long before they became the largest empire every created, (back when they were a backwater), they had the most trusted currency in the world. Most countries trusted the pound more than their own currencies.

What Britain was not looking for was a massive, antidemocratic fascist bureaucracy controlling every aspect of your life.

And this is something that pro-EU people simply cannot comprehend, that Britain wanted trade but not fascism. How can you support trade but not fascism? How can you support human rights without fascism?

And these are thoughts that pro-EU people genuinely have in their heads.

Well, the EU project was never democratic, and several powerful individuals kept expanding it's powers, while always avoiding any democratic scrutiny. To this day, the Members of the European Parliament, have no powers. They have the power to recommend changes to laws. They cannot draught laws, they cannot retract laws, and they cannot force any modifications for laws in progress.

As the EU got more and more powerful, Britain got more and more skeptical of it. The problem is that the unelected technocracy was preventing them from creating any change. Britain went through several phases where they voted for the most Brexit party. It got to the point it could not be ignored, and then...

kind of happened. Britain did not decouple itself from the EU technocracy, including the European Court of Human Rights. Now, the EU, under Angela Merkel decided that the EU had the obligation to accept every - single - person in the world, and their enforcement vehicle was the European Court of Human Rights.

This meant that Britain got to enjoy the benefit of diversity. And this happened under the Conservative Government. The only one in the government that tried to do anything about it, and her most token efforts were quickly stopped by the technocracy, and she was ejected.

This lead to the collapse of the Tory/Conservative party.

Labour was the next biggest party, and while they lost as well, they lost less, and so now have the government. But, the problem is their voter base, the British working class, have completely abandoned them, as they more and more started to feel the benefits of diversity.

To put this into context, a teacher was refused a job teaching because of a criminal background check. He honestly had no idea why this was, and so asked the police. The police had received a non-crime-hate-incident report against him, and recorded in his file, without telling him. The hate incident reported was that he had a St. George on car, (the flag of England). He actually had a Union flag, (the Flag of Britain). You could not speak it.

Nigel Farage was at the head of the Brexit movement, but in truth, he is hated. He's a swamp creature that was just being opportunistic. His current party is literally picking up former Conservative politicians, the party that had so wholly betrayed them. They refer to the Boris Wave, whereby Boris Johnson, a conservative prime minister elected on anti-immigration promises allowed more low-skill aliens into the country than any previous government.

And then Restore Britain shows up, and doesn't care about being called racist. They care about actually Britain, and are willing to do things to fix the country.

And when they campaign in the streets, all of the disillusioned Brits had something to believe it. It's only a few months old, and is polling as well as the two previous main parties, Tory and Labour.

At first, the establishment wanted to defame them without acknowledging them, which I will admit, was hilarious, as they could not acknowledge what they were speaking against. But now, they are attacking Restore. And the attacks against Restore are the most successful campaign ads, because Restore's policies are cut off welfare for foreign illegals and deport foreign rapists. And removing the unelected technocacy, (Quangocracy*), that is crushing them under their iron boots.

We'll have to see how this goes, as the war is not yet won, but they've accomplished more in a few months than most parties have done in decades if not centuries.

This closed down last, but people need to understand what it was.

Canada few a Red Ensign, and this is because it was a British colony establish for trade. The primary things it traded in was wood and beaver pelts.

Britain had long-since depleted it's woodlands, and the mainmast of a tall ship had to be a single piece, which were even harder to find.

Beaver pelts because beaver felt was the best material to make top hats out of, and the European Beaver was driven to extinction. This meant that Beaver Pelts were one of the most valuable commodities you could trade for. The valuable commodities were valuable enough to basically justify the trade for themselves. Other goods, like goods you cannot source locally also justify the trade.

So, what was the best way to trade with natives for their beaver pelts?

To hire Frenchmen.

The French had a colony already established, and one of the main rules of European colonialism is that you don't need to justify attacking another European colony. One Battle of the Plains of Abraham later, Britain is now in charge. But, you see, the thing about Frenchmen is that they are French, the only ones that hate the French more than the English are other Frenchmen.

The Frenchmen trying to escape from the horrible heritage of being French took to the wilderness. The Coureur du Boix, and the Voyageur.

The Voyageurs made trips from the main colonies, (Montreal and Toronto), up and down the great lakes, and attached rivers.

The Coureur du Boix met with local tribes, and traded with them. They then came back to the waters and traded with the Voyageur. The primary method of transport was the holy Canoe. And the primary way of measuring distance paddled was by smoking.

Did I mention they were French?

The British came to an existing trade, and so what did they do? Buy in.

The British Empire was a trading Empire, of course. The next thing they did was improve the regulation to make it easier for the Frenchmen to do their thing. The various groups consolidated, until one company was left, and it was given a trade monopoly over the watershed of Hudson's Bay.

Like Brazil, it was bigger than expected, and the Hudson's Bay Company controlled 2% of Holy Terra's land area.

When Canada really started to grow, it grew along the train lines.

Canada was giving land on the prairies away, for free. And so people came in from Europe for the promise of free farmland.

So, you have the industrialized Ontario and Quebec, (upper and lower Canada), and agriculture on the Prairies. Food came from the Prairies, and manufactured goods came back, and the company that brought the goods back was HBC. The companies that built Canada were the railways, and Hudson's Bay Company. HBC had forts on the Prairies, that the RCMP worked out of. As the country developed more, HBC setup stores across the country. Bigger cities had HBC, while smaller cities had The Bay. The Bay was THE department store, whereas the full HBC had full floors with suits and other finery.

So, what happened?

World wars? No.

American competition? No.

Other Canadian competition? No.

The American companies took up the thrift market, but the regular market was larger than the thrift market had ever been, so they didn't really lose any sales.

What happened was the death knell of many Canadian companies.

They were bought out by Americans. Compared to it's competitors, HBC had higher prices, but higher quality. The kind of clothing that could last 20 years. Because it did last 20 years. I still have a real felt fedora that snow won't melt on, and it's been 30 years. So, what does the American company do? Keep the price point, but lower the quality to that of it's competitors. And remove the outside sizes, leaving only the ones that sold the most. And dramatically shrink the men's section, because women's clothing sells more. And bring in useless trinkets that the cashiers are confused about what they are for.

All of the things every other major company was doing that made them hated. This, naturally, cost them sales. So, what is a company going to do? Reverse the changes that caused the drop in sales?

Of course not. The answer is obviously to make life worse for employees, to the point they basically became McDonalds, only sustained because of cheap, immigrant labour.

At the end, the stores were empty, and people were honestly confused if you actually set foot inside one.

And then, guess what? The company closed down. After three decades of enshitification, it had to close down, only to have idiotic politicians talking about how we need to save it.

Tim Hortons was bought out by Americans, and instantly lowered the quality of it's donuts, and now honestly has no idea what their business plan is. The NHL is no longer shown on CBC, which, why the hell do we have a CBC if it doesn't show NHL games? Molson Brewers, the company that produced Molson Canadian

Video Games started as a luxury product. You needed a computer, which wasn't just expensive, but you needed a solid power supply, a place to buy software from. This could only accessed by the upper classes in the richest countries.

The first game market crash happened because the market tried to expand, but could not, as there was simply not a market to expand into. People just didn't have home computers.

Nintendo solved this problem by making a Family Computer, FamiCom, that you didn't need to know anything about computers to use. Because, in this day we used DOS, which was entirely command-line based.

This opened a new market, which other countries followed.

And now almost everyone in the world has some sort of computer to run games on.

Reminder that the simplest modern phone has more processing power than the computers that went to the moon. So, the potential gaming market is that big.

BUT, this is not a luxury market, which - explicitly - most people cannot afford to take part in. For many people, the proper pricepoint for games is $0/month. For a lot of people it's $20/month, or $20/2 months, or something. And, for many of these people, they CANNOT pay more for games.

But wait, there's more.

Indie Games are better than AAA games, and cost $20. So, people can afford to drop $20-40 a month, and still consistently play good games. And that's excluding games that they already own.

As an RPG player, why should I drop $100 on a Squeenix game that hates me as a person and views my controller input with contempt, when I can play Ara Fell and Rise of the Third Power? For, at most $40? As such, the luxury market, the market with the most profit, is collapsing into ruin.

And nothing is replacing it. AAA studios are panicking, because apparently making full-priced games that actively hates their players was a bad idea. Maybe, just maybe, EA shouldn't have kept buying up studios and taking them out behind the woodshed to shoot them.

So, is the video market collapsing? As we have more people playing games than at any other point in Human history?

The luxury one is. It's gone. It might never come back. We have a few studios that might be able to become AAA games, but there's no guarantee that hiring that many employees will produce enough money will be justified. Because we don't need to pay luxury prices anymore.

Back when I was young, the Space Age was the Future, not the Past.

Literally. For the record, the Space Age is 1950's to 1990's.

After the Space Age, we got the Information Age, with the advent of the Internet.

And the abandonment of Space Travel. They lined up really well.

The start of the Space Age was the fallout of WWII. During WWII, Germany has the most advanced Rocketry programme in the world. Wernher von Braun was the father of modern Rocketry. He wanted to go to the moon. The Nazis agreed to fund him, but only if they got to point the rockets at England.

At the end of WWII, both the US and Soviet Union rushed to lay claim to the German intelligencia, and the US has the great power or promising the US instead of Soviet Russia. Soviet Russia was... without getting into it too much, they declared war on farmers, starved to death, and then put an insane idiot in charge of science, and anyone that challenged him was shot.

The second major event was the cancellation of the CF-105 Arrow by A. V. Roe Canada. This was a fighter/interceptor that would be better for Canadian requirements than any existing fighter. And it was cancelled in 1959. A consequence of the cancellation was the destruction of 1/3 of Canada's industrial sector. Guess where they went?

So, the US got a second wave of the best engineers in the world.

Early rocketry was... extremely, extremely crude by modern standards, or should I say artisanal? Modern rocketry has extremely precise computer modelling, which is then manufactured as close to the computer models as possible. Back in the day, rocketry was all made by hand, with everything being interactive. This means that when the knowledge is lost, it's lost forever. All of the rockets used during the Space Age are now lost technology.

First off, what makes a rocket? As distinct from a jet? Rockets have their own oxidizing agent. Jets used the natural oxygen in the atmosphere.

Different atmospheric pressures needed different nozzles. What they came up with was the Multistage Rocket. The rocket was built in several separate stages that were stacked together. The bottom stage would burn until it burns out, and then it was dropped. This would allow the next stage to have a nozzle for it's level, while also dramatically reducing the weight of the following sections.

This worked, and worked well, but this meant millions of dollars of hardware was just cast off every - single - launch.

There was a dream, single-stage to orbit spaceplanes. Spaceplanes could - glide - back to Earth, allowing the entire craft to be reused.

They didn't quite get there, but the Space Shuttle was built in four sections.

The Space Shuttle itself, a colossal fuel tank (hydrogen + oxygen, which is extremely energy dense, and yes, technically makes the space shuttle a steam engine). Then two solid fuel rocket boosters were added. This wasn't perfect, but it was a generational improvement over previous rockets.

We also got the Canadarm, because Canada designed the arm used to maneuver pretty much everything in space.

Of course, the Space Shuttle was never meant to last forever. The forces involved are incredible. And they weren't building a new ship every - single time.

So, they worked on the replacement for the shuttle, the VentureStar. The VentureStar used aerospike engines, these are engines that use the atmospheric pressure to control the plume size, effectively creating auto-adjusting rocket nozzles. With this, there was no longer a necessity to use multiple stages. The entire thing could work as a single-stage to orbit space plane that runs on hydrogen and oxygen.

Making them more environmentally friendly than electric cars.

So, what happened to the VentureStar? We never saw them, so, they didn't work?

Not in the least. They had fully functional, somewhat smaller scale test models making suborbital flights. Suborbital is a ship that reaches space, but doesn't reach a stable orbit, and as such, will inevitably plummet back to Holy Terra. This means that it suffered all of the stresses of the flight, without the risk of it just sailing off to space.

What happened, was much like the Arrow, it was simply - cancelled.

And then space shuttles started blowing up. Well, not the shuttles themselves, but their booster rockets. Still, killed everyone.

So, how did the US react to this? Find another way to get to space?

As told by someone older than the Internet.

Part I: Slashdot

When the internet was first created, everyone saw potential. Geeks saw potential to geek-out with other geeks. Businesses saw potential in $.$ Perverts aw potential to pervert with other perverts.

The early internet had websites on your HOME COMPUTER. Port 80 and Port 8080 are set to feed your internet access, if you should so choose. Most people have too much porn on their computers to want to let the internet have access to it. Before the WWW, what you would do is go to your friend's computer, on their BBS. Bulletin Board Service, which were pretty much e-mail lists. Which, usenet also was.

Okay, yes, people would put up naked pictures, because Pamela Anderson, but they would take minutes for an individual picture to load. If you wanted smut, it had to be written.

The largest site on the nascent internet was Slashdot, which still exists

It would post news stories that with links to original sources, and would direct so much traffic to these sites, that they would accidentally DDOS it.

But, news companies flat-out refused to go online. Both because, ew, geeks, and because they wanted to gatekeep the news. They wanted the power to control what you see and what you say.

This makes it difficult to TALK about the news online, and so people had to start reposting articles. We ended up with the tradition of people not paying for news online, because there was no way to.

News companies eventually tried to join the WWW, but they felt the giant backlash that people had never even thought of paying for it before. News onlines became bigger and bigger, meaning news offline got smaller and smaller, but they were still making their money off of physical media or broadcasts. And this is why we have influencers that get 1,000x the views of the biggest offline news agencies.

The tradition online became to demand sources for things, because you can literally link the original article.

Part II: The Doom of Blockbuster

Back in the day, if you wanted to see a video, you needed someone to physically give it to you. Either by buying it in a store, or renting it from a video rental stores. The biggest of which was Blockbuster.

Netflix arrived was a completely disrupted concept for video rentals. Instead of going to a store, that had to carefully manage how much physical media they had at any time, you could online, pick a movie, and have Netflix mail it to you. They would include a return envelope with pre-paid postage, so when you are done, you mail it back. Instead of having to have it back in a week, or having to pay late fees, you simply could not rent anything else until you returned what you already had.

This allowed them to centralize their warehousing, instead of every - single - store having to manage it's own inventory, and tailor it to their own demand. So, what do you do with this success?

Try and sell it to Blockbuster.

I mean, seriously, they had a fantastic idea, and were growing at an incredible rate, but they weren't used to managing a large corporation.

So, what does Blockbuster do with this system that would completely destroy their entire business plan?

Not buy it. Blockbuster was also notorious for censoring movies, without disclosure, and without and option to instead rent the uncensored version. Over the next ten years, their stock price dropped from $10.65 per share to $0.18 per share.

Part III: The First Steaming Service

Netflix figured out that they could put their system entirely online. This meant they would not have to manage physical media at all. This gave them a global reach.

Now, if you are going to run a streaming service on the cheap, how do you do it?

Beating a dead horse.

Every show on Netflix was 20 years old. They had gone through their first run, 20 years of syndication, and at nearly that long of physical sales. Basically, a show that the owners had fully monetized. They really cannot make more money off of this property. This meant that Netflix could pay them extremely little money, compared to their viewership, and the rights holders were happy to take it.

With early Netflix, I could never find what I was looking for, but I always found something I could wanted to watch.

They have scores of documentaries, that could never actually make money with theatrical releases. They have niche shows and movies. The kind of thing where there are enough people in the world that want to watch it, but not enough to get a single theatre to show it.

They also had every Star Trek, (before the dark times of New Trek), every Star Wars movie, Simpsons, Futurama, Family Guy.

They had movies like Black Snake Moan. Absolutely fantastic movie that I still don't know what I think about it.

Part IV: Fate is Fickle, but Netflix is Fickler

Netflix created an entirely new industry. And every single movie and tv studio saw $.$ in their eyes about how much money they could make it.

Of course, they didn't bother to find out how Netflix made it's system work. How Netflix could charge so little and offer so much.

But, when Netflix is the champion, how do you get people to use your shitty streaming service? Exclusivity. Instead of just charging a minor fee for the right to use a (financially) dead property, they wanted to make more money, and keep a lot of what they have as an exclusive.

Netflix's business model only works if they can get good, but old, shows for cheap. So, what does Netflix do?

Make their own exclusives. For a time, Netflix has the absolute best shows being produced in the US. There was a little woke, but it was, how do you get Americans to watch a show about Asians.

Ignoring Anime, obviously

The answer was Marco Polo. And it was FANTASTIC. Maybe not historically accurate, but still fantastic.

But, the seed of progressivism was there.

Part V: The Mousehold Betrayal

Disney did something that should NEVER have been approved, Disney bought Star Wars, Marvel, and FOX. This made Disney the greatest force of mass destruction in 2 universes.

And Disney wanted in on the action. Again, they didn't actually look into the Netflix business model. But, they had a ridiculous vault of shows and movies, going back over a hundred years. Almost. 3 years until it's a hundred.

So, what does Netflix do?

Make their own shows worse.

Charge more while adding ads, (the things people were paying Netflix to avoid).

Full page banner for Cuties.

Disney, that was so wholesome whole families would gather around the TV on Sunday after church to watch their movies:

Remove their old shows.

"queer" all of their new shows.

Care more about progressive politics than the quality of the show.

Some of their older shows and movies would have a warning about how evil and racist it is. The movies people are LITERALLY paying you to watch.

They also started putting their shitty shows on Disney+ as a way to get viewership.

What are people going to do? NOT pay them money to watch their shows? Well, there was a third option I have so far avoided:

There are so many streaming services, each with their own exclusive content, that people would have to pay hundreds of dollars a month to actually see them all.

What they could have done is charge people for the licence, and let streaming services compete with each other. You can pick your favourite steaming service, and the rights holder STILL GET THEIR MONEY.

The N64/PS1 era was the era where we COULD make 3D games, but had no idea how.

Dark Forces (1995) was the first game to have truly 3D environments, but was before mouse-look.

Ocarina of Time was a game so good that Nintendo has spent 25 years trying and failing to replicate. Not even the remakes could match it.

The PS2 era is the era where 3D games truly came into their own. FFX was absolutely gorgeous, even better than modern FF games, but had a fixed view point. MGS2 would go onto become the FOX game engine, but was also a fixed camera game.

There were three revolutions in this era:

Mouse-Look

Dual Stick

Devil May Cry

Marathon was ironically the first game to use Mouse-Look, and it is only remembered as a way to insult Bungie.

Terminator: Future Shock is the first credited with Dual Stick, and is a game most people probably did not know existed.

Devil May Cry was, and still is, a genre. Just like how Dark Souls is a genre.

Devil May Cry was originally an control system they were playing with for Leon S. Kennedy from Resident Evil. The control system did not work for Resident Evil, which is, at it's heart, a B-movie horror game.

Resident Evil features puzzles where you have to collect medallions from statutes to unlock the police station. Now, this makes absolutely no sense for a police station, but if you create a world where Devils are unknowable, powerful, and unfathomably ancient, then it makes more sense. The story of the original game is... incongruent, but what it really excels at is atmosphere.

Dante is recruited to investigate an island that is slowly being sucked into hell. The iconic organ music makes sense at first, as you start near a cathedral, but continues on for the entire game. Subsequent levels have you come through earlier areas, and they are darker and more haunted. There is a gladiatorial arena guarding ancient Daemonic gauntlets, powerful demons, a ghost-ship to the Netherworld. Until you enter Hell itself, bloody and strangely organic.

Dante is a Half-Devil / half-Human. The daemonic side grants him great power, while the Human side offers him growth and choice. He is also just naturally good at instantly using new weapons, which you will see Dante experiment with the moment he chooses it.

Despite his power, the game is framed as an investigation. He takes notes. The game is divided up into missions that not only allow replayability, (and the ability to die, repeatedly, without losing your game), but they are always framed with his objective. Whenever you encounter a new enemy, he will give a brief summary, but then expand upon it every time you discover a new facet or move.

The gameplay was the single best action game every made, and created a new genre that has not been seen before, and rarely competed with. But, that said, Dante's complex character is what keeps you in the game.

The gameplay uses cinematic shots, dynamic combat, and EVERYTHING is telegraphed. Any ranged attack has an audible telegraph, which you can time to dodge without even having to see the attacker. It is entirely possible to beat a level without taking damage, and is almost required to get a good score. The game would then go on to add Heaven and Hell mode, where Dante, and most enemies, have one HP. Everything is framed in STYLE, which you are ranked on, which demands an aggressive, but versatile combat style, with no damage.

No other game, not even a single other Devil May Cry did it this well, and the remake does not even let you remap the controls to the original scheme. It instead copies everyone else, which would make sense, UNLESS YOU LITERALLY INVENTED THE GENRE. This is like Metallica, in an interview, asking if guitar solos were cool anymore.

YOU - ARE - FUCKING - METALLICA!

Anyways, what does Capcom do when they have a fantastic video game?

Make a cheap knockoff to quickly cash-in. Which got us Devil May Cry 2, which every other game has tried to exclude from continuity.

The chronological order is:

Devil May Cry 3

Devil May Cry

Devil May Cry 4

Devil May Cry 5

Devil May Cry 2

And this was done for the primary purpose of not having to include anything in Devil May Cry 2. The only good thing that came from DMC2 was Dante's inclusion in Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne, (/maniax).

DMC2 basically destroyed the entire franchise. Now that the franchise was worthless, they could bring in developers that actually cared about it, and we got DMC3.

DMC3 actually managed to surpass DMC, and is still my favourite of the DMC franchise. That, it did not quite have the visceral impact of the original. DMC3 was a prequel, which allowed incredible character growth for both Dante and Vergil. And Lady.

Still Dante x Trish shipper, btw.

This was fantastic. It revived the franchise. It make the game so successful that executives have to get involved and make everything by committee. They decided to replace Dante with Nero. This is the same company that decided to replace X in Megaman X with Axl. Which they did 5 years earlier, and did not learn from their mistake.

Nero is the vapid, shallow conception of Dante that everyone that has not played DMC or DMC3 have of Dante. I.e. they took away all of Dante's good qualities, and make him more extreme. Like Batman did with Knightfall.

The best part of Devil May Cry 4 is the parts with Dante, but they are a pale imitation of DMC, nevermind DMC3. The worst parts are the parts with Nero. But Dante is so much more powerful that he goes through the same areas and just blows through them in short order, and then you get Nero back for the ending.

But, luckily, there was enough people that actually liked the franchise to give us this, which I consider to be Dante's most defining moment.

Dante always embraced his humanity. Maybe too much, but he abhors anyone that gives up their humanity in exchange for power.

Including his brother.

Especially his brother.

So, did Capcom learn their lesson? Of course not.

DmC: Devil May Cry - a reboot that changes everything about the world for the worse. It was so bad that when DMC5 was announced, people started to remember how great DMC4 was.

But, memory is fallible, afterall.

DMC5 then arrived, which was a savings throw / coda for the series. It makes Nero likeable, lets Dante came into his true power, and was a wonderful end to the series.

Dante and Vergil are trapped in hell in a perpetual sparring match.

Which for them is heaven.

Favourite Weapons:

Cavaliere (5)

Agni and Rudra (3)

Alastor (1): they keep replacing Round Trip, making all of the other swords inferior.

Ebony and Ivory (all): There is never a firearm that can replace them.

Honourable Mention:

Cerberus (3). What Cerberus needed was Air Hike, not the bullshit we got in 5.

Nevan (3): If they gave it a basic attack, it would have been fantastic.

Pandora (4): Fantastic in concept, disastrous in implementation.

People think this might be too soon to fondly remember, but these are rambles covering society wide patterns.

Silksong released at $20, and made $50M in less than a week, only using Steam metrics.

A lot of people are saying this PROVES that EVERY video game could be $20. But, Team Cherry is in a historically unique position.

All of the AAA game devs started as tiny developers. We simply did NOT have gigantic mega-corporations for video games. It had not even been conceived of.

We need to start with the Dot.com Bubble.

Basically, with the internet, everyone and their brother had a great idea of how to make money of the internet. Okay, great might not be the right word. Or idea.

The Underpants Gnomes from South Park are based partially off the Dot.com bubble, and partially off of corpo-bullshit.

None of them, except porn, had any idea how to actually make money on the internet. And video games were also a burgeoning industry that had not found it's market.

Video games are a great idea, if everyone has a computer.

Nintendo decided to create a Family Computer, Famicom, that became the first video game console. Video games were for kids, or at least that's the excuse Nintendo used to get computers in every living room. Mario is the first recognizable Video Game character. Before, the character might look vaguely humanoid, but you had to read the instruction manual if you wanted to know what was actually going on.

The entire industry had to be built from the ground up, but Nintendo had a great model, let companies make video games for your platform, and take a bit of the money they make off of it. This allowed anyone that can afford the SDK to make a video game. With strenuous corporate oversight, of course. Don't want people to remember that Nintendo used to sell gambling paraphernalia to the Yakuza. It was still extremely primitive, but we got Mario, Link, Kirby, Samus Aran, and by SNES, we got Mortal Kombat, and because of Mortal Kombat we had video game ratings.

We had single game companies make genres.

Dark Forces was the first First Person Shooter. Before that we had DOOMclones.

C&C/Westwood and Warcraft/Blizzard created Real Time Strategies.

Maxis created the Sim genre. SimCity, SimEarth, SimAnt, SimTower, SimCopter, SimGolf, etc. Then they created The Sims, and the worst thing that could happen, did. Girlfriends started stealing their boyfriend's gaming computers. *PTSD flashbacks*

X-Wing and Wing Commander created space flight sims, and was the main reason computers had flight sticks.

Sierra created Adventure Games while LucasArts perfected it.

Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat popularized the fighting game genre.

And then the Playstation Era hit. The market was large enough to justify larger teams, and we got AAA games. And then they bloated even larger, and AAA games became AAA slop. This was largely because of That 80's Guy.

In the 80's, they removed a few rules from major corporations.

Officers of a company have a fiduciary (legal) duty to make the company money, but this used to be counteracted by a requirement for the longterm survival of the company.

Removing this rule is is what created corporate raiding and offshoring. Which is literally Mitt Romney's fault. I mean, literally, specifically, him and his investment company.

We also used to have a rule that kept deposit banking legally separate from investment banking. The removal of the rule is one of the things that caused the Great Recession.

AAA games became all about alternate revenue streams and not... fun, or challenge, or story telling.

But, after the Flash Boom, we had Steam, and the (current) golden age of Indies. Online distribution became almost trivial, (when amortized over the entire industry). In this industry, you don't need to do anything for a large corporation in order to get published.

So, we had an explosion of, let's be honest, mediocre games. They weren't any worse than AAA games, and cost a tiny fraction of the price. Many of them were incredibly fun, if in a limited way. Some Flash game companies even managed to make the transition.

And then Hollow Knight released. Hollow Knight had expansive worlds, tight controls, and beautiful/horrifying story that let's face it, no AAA game had ever achieved. It was the first platformer to pass Megaman X4. 1997-2017. And yes, it 100% was built on the shoulders of giants. But, that's literally how progress works.

And it was released at a time when video gaming had reached massive, worldwide penetration, allowing Hollow Knight to make $141M. A 3 dev team. Playtesting and distribution definitely took some of that, but it allowed them to spend the next 7 years dedicated to Silksong.

It had the pedigree is a AAA game without it's massive production cost, along with worldwide market penetration.

In the age of sail, the power of a ship was entirely based off of money. Most countries didn't have dedicated warships, they had ships. Ships were meant to carry cargo, and you carried cannons to protect yourself, (or steal another ships's cargo).

The first revolution was by Henry VIII. He brought in blast furnaces, which allowed cast iron cannons. Cast iron cannons were 1/3 the cost of bronze cannons. And now you could carry as many cannons as you wanted to. Buoyancy turned out to be a serious issue, largely with the need for a large freeboard to survive the roiling seas.

By the 17th century, ships carrying cannons were commonplace, and tactics around warfare started to develop. And just like every other form of warfare, the best strategy was to have a strong, cohesive group and just hit the other party until they fall down list. The Man O' War was a pretty generic term for any ship designed to fight, but like I said, they were all still cargo ships. Even if that cargo was sometimes troops. But, with the Line of Battle, came the need for ships designed to survive in the line of battle.

Ship of the Line

Ships, by necessity, are narrow and long. Because of air/water resistance. This means your front-to-back is longer than your side-to-side, which means you can put more cannons there. This meant your strongest side was your broadside, while your weakest was your front or back. Since ships cannot stop, ever. Even when you anchor them, they move to and fro with the tides. This meant that having your ships moving in the same direction was even more advantageous. Especially advantageous was Crossing the T, where your broadside hits an enemy coming at you in enfilead.

Since you can have as many cannons as your buoyancy will allow, bigger ships are better. Bigger ships can also survive more cannon fire before succumbing.

Ironclad

With the development of steam engines, you finally had a ship that could be reasonably protected. A tall ship's sails have to cover a much larger area than the ship itself, and without them, you are stuck in the water. This lead to the Ironclads, which were proven during the American Civil War.

Ironclads were typically low to the water, because 1) they could, and 2) the closer to the water your deck is, the less iron you need.

Iron Hull

The step from Ironclad to Iron Hull seems logical, except for the fact that iron rusts extremely easy. I honestly cannot find anything on the history of anti-rust. We know how we do it now, but now how they tried it.

But, the British succeeded. Iron Hulls were a thing. They were stronger, allowing much bigger ships that could carry more cargo.

Well, what happens if you make them for warfare?

Britain came up with the Two-Power Standard. The Royal Navy was to be stronger than the second and third largest navies in the world, combined.

And thus the Battleship was born.

So, the Royal Navy invented cast iron cannons and iron hulls, and then created big honking bastards to pulverize their enemies, but why stop there? Battleships still had the principle of the most cannons wins. But what would happen if you take away the small cannons and replace them with REALLY big ones. Like, ridiculously big. Bigger than anything that had ever been done before.

These cannons could strike targets dozens of kilometres away, and could hit with enough power to... well, destroy battleships.

Naval Warfare was once again completely redefined, with the HMS Dreadnought.

Unfortunately for Britain, while a marvel when designed, it was actually simple enough to copy. The HMS Dreadnought invalidated EVERY - SINGLE - BATTLESHIP that existed before. All was brought to nought. And now it depended on who could build them the fastest.

Air Power

Once heavier than air flight was made practical, every military was struggling to add heavier than air craft to their arsenal. They had been using scout balloons since the French Revolution. The first airplanes were not good for anything other than scouting. They were unarmed, and the first aerial combat happened when one pilot rudely pulled his pistol and fired at the other.

On the water it was discovered that you could use a crane to drop a seaplane into the drink, and as long as the seas weren't too bad, you basically had unlimited runway.

And and new arms race was developed, to make the most use of naval airpower.

The first ever ship-to-ship was by the US, but the first ship-to-ship flight while embarked in the roiling seas rather than tied in the harbour was aboard the HMS Hibernia.

Britain is very good at making disruptive technology and then... dropping the fucking ball on it. Well, they had the first air raid from a Naval Ship, and the first dedicated aircraft carrier. The Battlecruiser HMS Furious was still in production, and was given a runway and hangar instead of the main guns.

While Aircraft Carriers were more expensive than Dreadnoughts, (and that's saying something), as they also have to maintain their aircraft, they could find enemies much further away, and bombers were much more likely to hit the enemy. Battleship guns were so powerful, that navies that used them often prevented anyone from being outside the ship while they were being used. Firing calculators were just being created, and could barely work, but hitting a target that wanted to not be hit at several kilometres was difficult, nevermind when both the shooter and target were in sea states of several metres, or even dozens of metres.

The biggest dreadnought ever built was the Yamato. The second and third were the brother-ships Bismarck and Tirpitz. The Bismarck and Tirpitz were so big, they were the only battleships ever referred to as He in the West. The Tirpitz was hiding in Norwegian fjords and taken out by Dambusters.

The Birmarck sunk the HMS Hood, and was then set upon by the entire North Atlantic Fleet. The only reason they caught up, however, is that the Bismarck's rudder was damaged by WWI torpedo bombers, the Fairey Swordfish. The planes were too slow for the German firing calculators, and their cloth skin was effectively impervious to explosion shells that would simply through-and-through.

Like I said in C&C, there were two main progenitors of the Real-Time Strategy genre, the two franchises that - quite literally - created the RTS genre.

C&C's mechanics are based off of Dune, and in Dune you have to mine Spice in the field, and this is where much of the military actions would take place.

So, what was Warcraft's core concept?

You have at town. You basically play the lord of a small town. You have to even build ROADS to build anything. Now, this is not remotely how medieval towns were built, but it's fun.

Warcraft focused more on story and playability. While C&C focused on how cool tanks were, Warcraft always made sure every unit was useful for the entire game. You also need food for your armies, meaning that larger and larger armies become less and less practical, and even adding a hard limit.

Warcraft II did away with the roads, and added more focus on characters. It was known as the most balanced game to have ever been produced. Unfortunately, this was because the difference between units as entirely cosmetic. The only real difference between the factions was the magic spells.

Oh, and Warcraft II explicitly states that Priest have the invisibility skill because IT MAKES THE CONFESSIONAL EASIER TO BEAR. Later Warcraft would focus on the extremely generic Holy Light, but Warcraft I and II was EXPLICITLY Christian.

And now for something completely different. And now to take the franchise in a completely different direction.

Starcraft

Starcraft started off using the WarII engine during Alpha, they focused, heavily on pushing the technology. They then pulled back from pushing the technology in favour of playability, and like Warcraft, STORY. They added detailed backstory for factions you would only see for a single level in the xpac. I've spent days just reading through the novel-length instruction manual.

They also created a basic principle. If two factions did something one way, the third faction would have to do things completely different.

They also decided that Zerg were the cheapest, Terrans were mid, while Protoss were expensive.

Terrans were masters of turtling, but also had buildings that could literally lift off and relocate. This is because most of the Terran worlds are, or at least started as, mining planets.

Zergs were masters of the Zerg Rush.

Protoss had regenerating shields, and had power, and magic psychic units.

But, because the Protoss were so naturally powerful, they would avoid using machine to do the fighting for them. They only used Dreadnoughts Dragoons for crippled Space Marines Zealots. Their "Scouts" were single-occupant space fighters, literally used as scouts, but were almost as powerful as the Terran's Behemoth-class Battlecruisers, that were used as command ships by admirals.

Terrans had infantry in powered armour, but, almost uniquely, they actually ACTED like infantry. The only other time this has been done was in Starship Troopers, the first use of military science fiction, the first use of powered armour, and written by one of the Big Three, (progenitors), of science fiction. They had the Goliath walker that was better against armoured enemies and aircraft. Close-combat infantry with flamethrowers. A combination of Tank and Artillery that is the goal of pretty much every tank, while being wonderfully useful in both roles, equally.

The Zerg were basically a more rational Tyranids, which GW still has absolutely no idea how they work, what they are, what they are trying to do, or even HOW THEY TRAVEL THROUGH SPACE. The Zerg were created to have "purity of spirit", and as such had a unified Overmind, decentralized chain of command, and without sufficient psychic control turned into rampaging beasts. This was even represented in the gameplay, if only during story missions.

The Terrans were very obviously based of Mobile Infantry (Starship Troopers), Space Marines (40K), Colonial Marines, (Aliens), and the Confederated States of America.

Blizzard had the balls to make their main Human faction Confederates, complete with the Rebel Flag.

Oh, and the reason for the use of the Rebel Flag

This is something that has been scrubbed from the internet, but much of the worlds doesn't understand the ideological nature of the US Civil War, (nor do Americans, to be fair), they just understand it was the flag used by the rebels, and around the world is often used to represent fake rebels for wargames.

Starcraft made everything so fun and balanced that it LITERALLY created e-sports. Especially in Korea, where matches was/is literally broadcast on television.

They also a feature that allowed you to customize and publish maps that turned Starcraft into completely different genres.

There are few games to have the seismic impact of Starcraft. Among them are Warcraft II and WoW.

WoW was one of the two games, the other being The Sims, to bring a large female audience to a mainstream game. After the success of WoW caused $.$ in the executives, and they thence went onto systematically destroy every - single thing that was good about the franchise, with Starcraft II doing the same to Starcraft. The original Starcraft still has a stronger cultural position than Starcraft II, despite the massive efforts of the company to ret-gone the original through oppressive SEO.

Seriously, Blizzard killed the Starcraft fandom in the effort to draw attention to Starcraft II. Just like Disney killed the Star Wars fandom.

There was also the ill-fated spin off that I still mourn, to this day.

Nowadays, for at least decade, C&C has been known for two main things:

Wacky Shit

Tank Rush

Originally, C&C was... original.

The two creators of the Real Time Strategy:

Command & Conquer

Warcraft

Like DOOM was originally Wolfenstein, Command & Conquer was originally Dune II, (Dune was not made by Westwood, but published from the same publisher).

Of the two, C&C pushed the technology, while Warcraft focused on the highly polished gameplay and lore.

Being an inheritor of Dune (II) explains why C&C focuses on harvesters. In Dune II, you sent out harvesters to harvest Spice, and used the money to produce units. This is basically an attempt to combine strategy and tactics. Did it work? Fuck no, but literally no one had ever done anything like this before.

Warcraft I focused on tactics, village building, and RPG's. Did it work? Also no. In Warcraft I, you literally had to build a road to every building. When the Orcs are literally a few hundred yards away.

The two are the reason why we have the Command and Conquer Economy. This is something that rarely happens in real life. You don't want your tank factory to be within artillery range of your enemy, because that's a good way to destroy all of the infrastructure, and skilled workers. But, like I said, no one had every done anything like this before on the computer. Ever. There were strategy games, but nothing that tried to simulate real time combat.

Now, you can't use Spice, so they invented Tiberium. It came from a meteor that landed near the Tiber river. Tiberium is a rock that grows, absorbing minerals from beneath the earth. It's destructive, radioactive, but valuable. As it starts ravaging the world, the UN decides to create the Global Defence Initiative. The Global Defence Initiative is a fat, bloated bureaucracy that is also the shining pure of pureness.

The other faction is the Hand of Nod. They are lead by Cain/Cane/Kane

Nod means wandering, and Cain settled "In the Land of Nod", i.e. he never settled down. Nod is a combination of Antichrist-level villainy AND helping the oppressed and abandoned rise up against the fat, bureaucratic Global Defence Initiative.

Like I said, Storytelling was Warcraft's strong suit, not Westwood's. While Dune II had largely identical factions, C&C made both factions completely different.

GDI's weakest tank is the Medium Tank, which is actually an M1 Abrams.

Nod's only tank is the Light Tank, which is actually an M2 Bradley.

GDI then gets the iconic Mammoth Tank, which is one of the most viable fictional tanks ever created.

Nod instead gets the Recon Bike, Stealth Tank, and Flame Tank. The recon bike is a bike with a basic glacys as it's only armour, and a pair of missile launchers. It also has machine guns, but like most vehicles in the games, rock/paper/scissors prevents them from actually being used. These would be absolutely incredible for asymmetric warfare against tanks, i.e. hide and seek. In the game, they act kind of like really fast infantry, being able to dodge cannon fire. And the predecessor of RTS micromanagement.

The Stealth Tank was the GDI name, Kane preferred to call it the Ezekiel Wheel. 10 year old me did NOT now how epic that reference was. It's not a tank in really any sense. It does have tracks, but they are small track sections independent suspension legs, (think Christopher Nolan's Batmobile, but with small tracks forward and back.

This can also turn invisible. It has to drop the cloak to actually fire. Realistically, it would be attack from great range, and would likely cloak and relocate before counter fire could even be countenanced. In the game, however, tanks can attack 5 cells away, and artillery 6.

The Mammoth Tank, Recon Bike, and Stealth Tank would all be game changers in real life. GDI also has the Orca VTOL.

This is probably the first ducted fan as a replacement for helicopters in fiction. There were plenty of attempts at it in real life.

After C&C, which would later, retroactively be dubbed C&C: Tiberian Dawn, they decided to do something completely different:

Red Alert

Einstein created the Chronosphere. The Chronosphere temporally displaces things, but there is also a snap-back, which is energetic to say the least. He goes back in time, shakes Hitler's hands, timing it for the snap back would kill Hitler, thereby obviating WWII.

This ignores the other causes of WWII, but if WWII didn't happen, then the Western Allies and Soviet Union would have fought. Pretty much guaranteed. The Soviets think they have a mandate from heaven to save the world from Capitalism... regardless of how many hundreds of millions it kills.

The allies are disparate, each with their own specialist units.

The Soviets have a strong tendency to Big Stupid Villain Tanks. The allies have have heavy cruisers while the soviets have submarines.

Why? Because Rock/Paper/Scissors Supremacy. The same reason tanks don't use their machine guns. The Soviet Union also completely lack ports that were both deep water and warm water, i.e. they freeze, i.e. submarines are viable when surface ships are not.

The Allies have the Chronosphere that lets you temporarily teleport your units, while the Soviets have the Iron Curtain, which temporarily makes a vehicle or building invulnerable.

They even had morse code in the manual. If you translate it, it tells you how to unlock an alternate called It Came From Red Alert, where you fight giant ants.

Summary

The sad truth about Command & Conquer is that no matter how incredible the design were, they were completely dogshit at stories, and the actual gameplay is far less interesting than you think it is during the campaigns. I honestly spent more time playing with the .INI files to unlock secret units.

After Red Alert, they had no idea what to do. They also threw a hissy fit. People kept comparing them to Warcraft, which had heroes, and stories, and lore. Don't you know that Westwood had heroes first?!

Did they? No. In name, yes, but they never actually succeeded.

They created a sequel for the first C&C, which added aliens, but not enough to actually be interesting. And they attempted to have the last two games, (excluding Sole Survivor, which is a multiplayer version that lets you control one unit; was it fun?, yes; was it good?, no), be part of the same continuity, and just failed at it.

They added Michael Biehn and James Earl Jones in attempt to create a heroic narrative, but it really didn't work. Tiberian Sun also introduced Voxels and terrain destruction. This was interesting technology, but did not actually make the game any better. It was fun for a play through or three, and that's about it.

I'll talk about the side story after, but when it comes to strategy, Red Alert 2 was the ultimate failure of their attempt to make anything cohesive. They had some really great unit ideas. The problem is that they tried to take themselves seriously. It didn't work, and the plot was complete dogshit. Red Alert 2 was the last game they actually tried to make interesting. Afterwards it focused on it's strength, tank rushes.

You see, modern infantry are far more complicated to make a game of them simply building a bunch of tanks, and sending them over to curbstomp the enemy. RA2 put effort into making infantry useful, but they didn't really succeed. And this was the last time they really put any effort into infantry, even if keeping the same mechanics. Instead, they focused on serial tank escalation, because bigger is obviously better.

Renegade

in the first C&C, you had a few missions where you could play as the Commando. He had a sniper rifle, and could C4 buildings. The problem is that infantry were by-and-large useless, (except dropping engineers into the enemy base).

Renegade made a FPS playing as the Commando. But, it used the same mechanics of the RTS. You had the unit construction buildings, and with them you could make the units - from the game.

Basically, Team Fortress with tanks, and buildings you can destroy temporarily disable. This was something that no one had done anything similar to. Starcraft: Ghost was trying, but was cancelled, (and probably would have done a much better job).

Renegade also added a wider variety of infantry, and since they nixed the RTS element, they made infantry incredibly important.

Did it do anything especially well? No, but for it's day it was absolutely incredible. You could hijack enemy tanks, plant C4 on a console to destroy a building, (THEY WERE TRYING, DAMNIT). Every building had standard layout, and if you grew up playing C&C, it was absolutely incredible to be able to explore them.

And these weren't just generic tanks, these were C&C tanks, i.e. these were tanks from a franchise that specialized in cool tanks. Or hop on an Orca and attack your enemy from the skies.

It also wanted to call the Commando "Havoc" but didn't really sell it.

And to be entirely fair, this is something that games STILL fail at. Both making the characters memorable, and adding vehicles well into a FPS game.

Bioware was a storied company before the original Mass Effect was even announced. Mass Effect wasn't a surprise, other than the fact it was as good was expected.

Now, good needs to be explained. It used a shitty, weird knock-off FPS engine, and tried to give a FPS a full, D&D-style skill system WHILE combining it with a video game skill tree.

It was - ALL - shit. Not terrible enough to stop you from playing, which is a crucial threshold. Not ever part of a video game has to be perfect, but it has to at least be unobtrusive.

The reason the game was good was the story, setting, world building, and characters.

You could land on ANY planet that would not immediately be fatal to do so. And I do mean immediate. You normally deployed in a cool tank. Some planets have environmental warnings, and you would die if you spent at most a minute on foot, (a bar appears and quickly drops, followed by an immediate angry screaming siren to warn you of the danger.

Now, while it spanned the whole galaxy, the in-universe justification had precursors leave Mass Effect Relays. They could launch you across the galaxy in seconds. Space faring species typically have a cheap knockoff of this that makes it difficult to jump a few systems over.

But, no one is going to fault them for not having trillions of planets to land on.

Half of the game was simply exploring.

The world was as hard as you can get science fiction while still being able to do planetary romance. And then it turns out it's a cosmic horror. The only thing you can do in the first game is stop the god-machines, (angry yellow colour from space, each a nation unto itself), asleep in the dark space beyond the galactic rim, from waking up. And it takes the combined firepower of all of the major powers to kill ONE of them.

Oh, and even fragments of them can brainwash you into becoming a Lovecraftian cultist.

I have no seen anything do anything near as impactful. Most things that try to deal with galaxy-wide civilizations get stretched too thin, (as doing a whole galaxy is extremely difficult).

Onto this they added complex characters that you can love and hate, and these stories carry on between games, with your choices carrying on between them.

---

And, then what happened? Bioware sounds like the perfect video game studio. What could possibly?..

EA. EA happened.

EA forced them to use the same engine as the other EA FPS games, which dramatically improved gameplay, even if it made it dramatically more cliché.

In Mass Effect 2, your start the game working with space racists that you could optionally fight against in the first game. To be fair, they put so much love and care into this questionable faction that even if I still hate that they did it, I would never want to see it changed.

Also Miranda's ass, which is just as perfect as her backstory makes it out to be.

One of the things the first game lacked was sexiness.

Well, after a lot of soul searching, I fell in love with the new setting, because of how much love and care was put into it's design.

And then they added a late game DLC. The DLC, Arrival, has you war crime, and your moral choices are maybe being sad about it.

Mass Effect 3 starts with you being charged with a war crime. The war crime you committed in the DLC. Didn't download the DLC, or didn't play it? Well, don't worry, the game

*waves it's hands about, implying how bad you were, even if playing a perfect Paragon playthrough*

In Mass Effect 1, you investigate what you think is a rogue agent, only to discover he's trying to wake up Lovecraftian horrors. You stop him, and prevent the alarm clock from sounding to wake up the Lovecraftian horrors.

In Mass Effect 2, no one believes you, despite literally having a space battle with one of the Lovecraftian horrors right outside the space capital. So, the renegade Human organization lead by Mr. Space Racist, gives you a ship and gives you information it founds out about missing Human colonies that might be tied to the Lovecraftian horrors. Which, they did a good job of showing how distasteful a Paragon Shepard would find this alliance. You end up fighting an species that has been genetically engineered and indoctrinated into husks of themselves to act as fingers for the god-machines between the rim, in the dark space between galaxies.

In Mass Effect 3, you fight an open war.

Wait, what? You... you fight Lovecraftian horrors? HOW?

Good question. Don't look for answer. In fact, mute the sound for the first part, and look away during cutscenes until you get into space

Okay, are you space now?

Alright, now, you're not actually in space. Keep the sound turned off, and look away for cutscenes until the one cutscene with a quicktime event, and then you get in space, for real. You can even choose where to go. If it's on the short list the game lets you visit at this current time.

Alright, Mass Effect 3 is an absolutely FANTASTIC GAME. Except:

Beginning

Middle

Ending

Main Plot

Main Villain (it's not the one you are thinking, unless you are brilliant enough to piece together that the main villain is EXACTLY who you think it is)

His main sidekick.

etc.

The really fun part is that I'm not exaggerating, at all.

Mass Effect 3 is an absolutely fantastic game, despite the fact that the main story is completely dogshit. It even knocks it up a notch, by making these cutscenes unskippable, because nothing says your boring henchman is a mary sue like making him unskippable. Oh, and HE'S JUST LIKE YOU *dum dum dum*

The reason it's such a good game is shear inertia, because the world and characters are still here from the original. The characters you fell in love with, and the ones you hate.

The Arrival DLC was so terrible that I refused to buy any DLC, until The Citadel. This is a gift to the fans. You bring back your entire team, from every game, (if they are still alive), throw a rager, on go on a mission, with everyone on board. You are team Shepard, naturally, but the other two are Team Mako and Team Hammerhead, the tanks from Mass Effect 1 and Mass Effect 2, and the teams argue about which is better. You then unlock a simulator, where you can play with all of your old team mates.

So, play through the end game once. You don't actually have to beat it, and it's probably better if you don't. But at least find out EDI's orgins. From then on, playthrough the game to the Citadel, throw your party, and then either play online or in the simulator.

---

Mass Effect Online is an absolutely fantastic experience, with a wide variety of unlockable characters that all feel unique. It also has tangible benefits to not just the main game, but every - single - playthrough of the main game, allowing you to get more of the absolutely terrible ME3 endings.

Unfortunately, they take the unlockable thing a little WAY too fucking far.

You start with a small selection of playable characters, that are each stripped down versions of the characters you play in single player. Every other character is gathered through, you guessed loot boxes.

But wait, there's more!

Every single character can be unlocked multiple times, and you get slightly more customization. So, what this means is that even after you get the common characters THAT YOU LITERALLY START WITH, you can unlock them again, and again, and again, and again, with no guarantee of ever getting one you wanted. Not even gatcha pulls and a mercy system, but literally just random chance.

But wait, there's more.

Core aspects of the original game were farmed off to loot boxes, so you can you spend your money just to play the game.

I played through Bronze, and the Silver, and then Gold, and then Platinum. And while I can play Platinum, and honestly prefer to play Platinum, it uses up too much combat consumables to actually be sustainable. Before I realized it, I had depleted the consumables I had built up by playing the easier difficulties. But now I had to spend most of my money on consumables, and so the lower, less fun difficulties were better ways to farm money.

But, I did get the N7 Paladin, and Geth Juggernaut, and Geth Trooper, etc. all, so I can't be too butthurt, other than the fact they made the game pointless to play.

---

And then they made Andromeda, who's very existence violates the world, story, and principles of the original trilogy. Of course, it wasn't Bioware that made Andromeda. EA wanted Bioware, famed for their RPG's, to make an Overwatch Killer, (Anthem). They then hired a new team of woke retards, called them Bioware, and had them make Andromeda.

For the record, this is how EA took the Titans out of Titanfall.

And killed of Maxis.

And so many other gaming studios.

Kirk (slash) Spock

The originator of Slash, (and thence Femslash).

I've made posts about how the Internet was created BY porn.

But this was the World Wide Web, i.e. the publicly visible and accessible internet.

But, there was an internet before that. Now we would call it the Darkweb, but it was someone's home computer set to respond to HTML requests.

Now, in the early internet, pornographic pictures were difficult to transmit, but short text stories with no special characters other than space and newline, are incredibly cheap. So, they setup websites who's job was to put you on an e-mail list, and people would submit stories to these e-mail lists.

Why?

Broad categories, men like porn with pictures, women like porn with emotions, and so the EROTICA category, (which is often lyingly called the Romance category), is by and large the purview of women.

And what was the most popular category?

Incest? BDSM? No.

Kirk/Spock.

Gay stories was something most publishers would NOT touch. Nevermind gay fanfiction of one of the largest franchises in the world.

Now, Gene Roddenberry caught one of his female staffers writing Kirk/Spock fanfiction. What did he do?

Get mad at her for having zippers. In the future, they would have clothing that just sticks together like magic.

Which is how you see the clothing work in TNG. They would just stick the phaser to the clothing, and something like electrostatics would hold it in place.

This is quite important, as every time they bring back a shiny rock it turns out to be a hyper-intelligent transdimentional being, or something.

Star Trek, however, was owned by NBC, one of the biggest media corps in the world. And no one wanted to get sued.

But, the internet was wild and free. The perfect place for proto-fujioshis to spread their smut. It created a lot of the standards for information transmission. It's different from broadcast, as it's peer-to-peer, and so doing so efficiently is/was difficult.

Back in the day, before the internet, or even when we had the internet but it wasn't doing anything other than Slashdot and gay Star Trek erotica, you could not update your software. You went to the store, bought a box with shrink wrap around it, (unless you had the millions to commission something custom), put the disk into your computer, installed it, and played it. If a game was published with problems, they were permanent.

We literally had shareware, which were disks that you were explicitly told you were allowed to spread, in order to get information passed around through Sneakernet.

Sneakernet is another story.

Anyways. So, the game was published, and initially, you only one two options, tell the player how to fix your game, or sell a new game.

If we take DOOM, DOOM 2 was basically an expansion pack, but the concept didn't exist yet. It was decided afterwards that an iteration of a game, a full version number increase, should have mechanics built from the ground up.

Reminder this is what happened with Super Mario.

Left: Super Mario Brothers 1 (released 1985)

Mid: Super Mario Brothers 3 (released 1988)

Rght: Super Mario World (released 1990)

This is how fast computers were developing back in the day. This was called Moore's Law.

But, there was a middle ground. You could make an Expansion Pack. Xpacs were normally priced at half a normal game, and would add a full new campaign plus a few new units or weapons.

And life was good.

With the proliferation of the internet, games could now be patched. Initially, what they did was either:

Bug Patch: Fixing problems.

Balance Patch: They change the small numbers in the background to improve the playability of the game.

Content Patch: Free content.

But then they figured out that with the internet they could make patches as often as they wanted. Instead of a the great sigh of relief being able to fix the one major problem from the game, it turned into routine. Games no longer had work out of the box, to the point that it sometimes takes years of patches before a game is video game is viewed as even playable.

And then they realized people could pay for individual content. Instead of paying $40 for a whole new campaign that was as good as the original, and a few new playable classes, and a whole new set of items, you could now charge $2 for the dozen items, $10 per character, and $20 for an extremely short campaign that can be beaten in a few hours. Instead of paying half the price for the same amount of content as the original, you pay the full price, if not more, for much worse content. Each item and character is completely separate and not meant to work together, the campaign is about as long as the tutorial was, and every - single - separate piece gets fucked over the next time Microsoft updates their DLLs, and has to be patched, individually.

And we get WoW, that carved out 95% of the original mechanics to make the game easier for casuals, and destroyed the world's lore from the very first expansion pack, that you have to pay for, along with the monthly fee, and then if you want to have anything good, you need to pay real money for it.

For the record, Vanilla WoW spent ridiculous amounts of time and effort to stop any real-money transactions. If you got caught even offering, your account would be banned.

Back in the day, if you had a disappointing expansion pack, (usually on the third+ one), you just... uninstalled it.

to put this into context, the only reason I got rid of my NES/SNES/N64 was not because the games didn't work, and was not because the games were less fun then current names, but because I had played them through so many times that I wasn't even thinking while playing. If you get a working console and working cartridge, (because barbarians cannot take care of their electronics), THEY WILL STILL PLAY.

The only reason I can't play my Windows games, (other than giving them away), is because I realized how much superior Macs are.

A long, long time ago, Donald Trump shocked the world by being elected President of the United States. Something not seen since Regan.

During this time we have a little world-wide coughing fit. Donald Trump, following his constitutional mandate, did everything in his power to make resources available to states.

A lot of states decided to lockdown their entire economies. Which is the second worst thing they could have done, as sunlight killed COVID, and obesity was the primary comorbidity.

During this time, most of the Democrats hid at home.

But funny enough, that's not how democracy works. Every parliament has a Quorum, this is the minimum number of members needed for a vote to count. This leads to some of the most entertaining shenanigans is that the one thing an under-quorumed assembly can do is force members to come to the assembly. This is also why there are "yes", "no", and "present". "Present" is abstaining from the vote, but is still being counted for Quorum.

Members are normally given a lot of privileges primarily based around allowing them to appear in the assembly, but they do not have to until the assembly calls them. If they do not come when called, they can be compelled.

This can lead to Quorum Busting. This is where members deliberately get as far away as they can. They usually can't leave the assembly's jurisdiction, but they can hide in the mountains. They can then be compelled to come, where they have to be tracked down and dragged back.

Quorum Busting is perfectly legal until they are compelled to come back, and is far more entertaining than a Filibuster.

So, the Democratic Party was the majority party in the house. The shadowy cabal of Satanic paedophiles party leaders went and hid in their mansions as their states and districts utterly collapsed under the weight of, you know, food, or at least the lack of it.

Trump worked with the sitting congress, the remaining Democrats and the majority of the Republicans on the Paycheck Protection Program. This was a program to pay businesses to pay their employees while they were shut down. There were programs to pay people laid off, but this would allow business to keep their employees while everyone was locked at home.

And then, just before the vote, the shambling (near) corpses of the Democratic Party's leaders came back, and said, Ah-Ha! This program doesn't have any safeguards.

They then made themselves in charge of who gets the money, because that's how Congress works, and then gave it their friends, which is also, unfortunately, how congress works.

But the thing is, the original bill had stronger, but simpler safeguards. They had Poison Pills. In legal parlance, a Poison Pill is something to sink the deal. Like a corporation's board creating new shares out of the ether to make a buyout far more costly, as a way to avoid a hostile takeover. For the Paycheck Protection Plan:

No stock buybacks while the loan is outstanding.

No increases in executive income while the loan is outstanding.

Being used for pay would allow partial grants.

Executive positions are highly, highly competitive, and every year they get inflation adjustments, cost of living adjustments, additional performance bonuses, etc. Basically, at least an extra few hundred thousand dollars a year.

Stock buybacks is where the majority stock holders buy back stock, so it would basically allow them to increases their own profit shares and control of their business.

So, basically, the majority owners/board, and executives, could not get paid a dime more than they did the year before. This is unthinkable. Uncountable. No corporation would EVER consider this if they had a choice. It's so horrible that only COVID lockdowns or the brink of liquidation would cause a company to do this. These were of course removed by the returning Democratic Party leaders. If executives did this without a viable excuse they would be fired or even sued. This is because business executives have a fiduciary duty to make as much money as they can for their shareholders. If they fail to do something reasonable that would make them money, they can be sued. Personally. For the losses.

And the Paycheck Protection Program kept running dry, for some reason, without every actually accomplishing what it was created to do.