Games Journalism General

[guiltyspark85]

edit: Something else about this game. It's called "mixtape" but the characters have discmans? In the mid 90s a CD burner would have cost a couple grand, and no kids would have had access to one. Even by 1999 they were still $150+ and the price didn't plummet to nothing until a few years later. But then there's also basic looking portable cassette radios sitting around that wouldn't be right either for the mid to late 90s.

The explanation for the burned CDs from the main character is the school has a burner that cost thousands of dollars and she sneeks into the computer lab to use it. I can remember an older kid on my school bus, I think in 96, having a burned CD filled with games and a hand written listing of them in the cover. My understanding was it was a friend of a friend that burned it for him and he paid something like $20 for it. It would have been 98 or 99 that my dad purchased our first CD burner and we weren't wealthy.

80s skateboard instead of 90s skateboard

I don't know anything about skaeboards, but the main character comments about disliking the trend towards narrower skateboards.

 

[p1138]

The explanation for the burned CDs from the main character is the school has a burner that cost thousands of dollars and she sneeks into the computer lab to use it. I can remember an older kid on my school bus, I think in 96, having a burned CD filled with games and a hand written listing of them in the cover. My understanding was it was a friend of a friend that burned it for him and he paid something like $20 for it. It would have been 98 or 99 that my dad purchased our first CD burner and we weren't wealthy.

No school would have blown the money on a burner like that in the early to mid 90s(not to mention burning an audio CD at 1x or 2x would have taken well... 1x or 2x the duration of the audio which is also absurd use for a school. As the price came down, sure. The late 90s, sure they would have been readily available without being exclusively for the wealthy, and by 2002 they were dirt fucking cheap as IDE devices.

So if we assume this is the late 90s...

I don't know anything about skaeboards, but the main character comments about disliking the trend towards narrower skateboards.

And this is part of the problem of the game not knowing what era its in. That skateboard transition happened in the late 80s and very early 90s. By '92 or '93 you'd only see skateboards like that in the toy aisle of a k-mart and nobody wanted them. The trend away from them had already been done and over with for years by the late 90s, at which point if anything more longboards were floating around. Even ignoring that the game doesn't know what time period it wants to be set in, this still makes the character an anachronistic hipster. But even still, the 3 main characters are ALL hipsters riding around on older style skateboards because... reasons?

Meanwhile there's no mid to late 90s boomboxes, cars, or anything else to be seen. Outside of companies like Volvo, the boxy 80s-early 90s vehicle stylings had been largely abandoned. Even companies like Cadillac and Buick were rounding off their boomer-mobiles with the floaty suspension by then.

The portable stereo thing. Shit had already been trending by the late 90s to end up looking like a Sony CFD-510 or similar. Meanwhile everything shown looks more like a Realistic SCR-3 from the early 80s.(they actually look more like modern "retro" bullshit with crappy tape transports than anything actually from the 80s but that's beside the point).

This game is fake nostalgia slop for reviewers that don't know wtf they're talking about. They went out of their way to license a bunch of songs from the 70s through mid 90s, but then also licensed a Mitch Murder track from 2011?

Oh, it's more synthwave faux retro bullshit

 

[Judge Dredd]

The explanation for the burned CDs from the main character is the school has a burner that cost thousands of dollars and she sneeks into the computer lab to use it. I can remember an older kid on my school bus, I think in 96, having a burned CD filled with games and a hand written listing of them in the cover. My understanding was it was a friend of a friend that burned it for him and he paid something like $20 for it. It would have been 98 or 99 that my dad purchased our first CD burner and we weren't wealthy.


I don't know anything about skaeboards, but the main character comments about disliking the trend towards narrower skateboards.

That's not really the problem. The problem is best explained by this meme.

It's not so much that this stuff couldn't have existed, it's that it's a random mishmash of random shit from movies and TV.

eg. The wireless headphones worn backwards. It could be an oversight. Rendering wires can be hard, and putting on headphones backwards could be easily done.

If it was just the headphones, it could be forgiven. But the game is full of these anachronisms. From the tech, to the clothes they wear, and the way they talk.

 

[p1138]

It's not so much that this stuff couldn't have existed, it's that it's a random mishmash of random shit from movies and TV.

eg. The wireless headphones worn backwards. It could be an oversight. Rendering wires can be hard, and putting on headphones backwards could be easily done.

If it was just the headphones, it could be forgiven. But the game is full of these anachronisms. From the tech, to the clothes they wear, and the way they talk.

Exactly. I ignored the missing wire for the headphones because I could see not bothering to want to render that. And the headphones backwards is a minor issue. The clothes seemed alright, it was already the grunge era so nothing really stood too out of place. They're supposed to be kids from some suburb, not urban kids wearing jnco jeans or something, or are they hardcore skaters at a skatepark.

But yeah, there's just so much little shit that's just not right. Hell, just making everything look like it fell out of an episode of Saved By The Bell would have at least kept shit more consistent.

edit: Fuck, this is like watching the movie Hackers(1995) and saying that was representative of the 90s, instead of using an example of something like Mall Rats(also 1995) or even fucking Encino Man(1992) that would have been a better representation of "normal" at the time.

edit again: There's a word for these shilling journos. Anemoia. "nostalgia" for shit they never experienced, or never even happened. Another word, Hagioptasia would be assigning special-ness/sacredness/reverence/etc. to shit rather than someone's own memories or experience with it. Sound familiar? At the end of the day it's basic soy consoomerism. Like some retard born in 1995 pining for the 1950s or something and just consooming 1950s shit as if they have any connection to it.