What are you referring to specifically?
There are 10k+ indie games being approved on Steam every year (sometimes a lot more than that, like 14k+ in 2023).
You're aware of maybe 0.5% at most, some of them will probably take years to get discovered, some maybe never will get discovered, some are selling decently enough but you still haven't heard of them because there's no marketing campaigns for them.
There's gold in them there hills and dismissing it all because a small fraction of them are made by trannies is silly.
I've seen shills go on about how "relatable" the supposed protagonists are, which probably says something since from the bits and pieces I have seen the "protagonists" are obnoxious dickheads.
A lot of the people complaining are coomers and everything is sexual to them.
They see a child in Pragmata, they immediately think of child sex and they're convinced that the devs and the playerbase also have these thoughts.
Even here on KF, I've seen some threads where weird coomers were certain that almost nobody is hetero anymore and everyone jerks off to furry shit daily because that's what they do and most of their creepy online friends do.
We have now reached the "You aren't supposed to like the characters" stage of cope. I've never seen this level of insecurity surround a "10/10 game" before.
A lot of modern headphones have buttons on them for pausing and volume control. The problem is, I don't know if that was a feature headphones had in 1999.
They didn't have controls, but when they did, it was a black plastic dongle that was just volume control. It was where the wires meet and would often catch on things.
Obvious answer. They were bribed. The game has the right politics. It appeals to their brand of degeneracy.
A more complex answer likely above a game journos pay grade is that this a deliberate plan as part of a wider goal. Demonize family, make normal straight relationships evil, promote specific kinds of degeneracy, as part of a wider goal to push their ideology, which is usually communism, marxism, or feminism.
Weren't these the same faggots going "THEY'RE JUST LIKE ME FR FR, SO RELATABLE ON GAWD SLAY GIRL" shit?
The retarded point of this cope is the game frames these teens as the PROTAGONISTS of the game and does everything to 'Empower' their 'rebelliousness', here's a lesson boys and girls, if you WANT your protagonist to 'Not be liked' they have to be framed as bad by the story and characters around them, whilst also facing some form of repercussions for their actions to highlight "Acting like this/being like this is a negative thing".
Again this is all astroturfed to hell and back, the moment I saw those "Gift packs" to influencers which were "Look how totally 90s and retro all this stuff is wow guise". This is the problem with most critics today and influencers in general, they're not going to risk pissing off a potential paypig like this (Or other paypigs) so will endorse sloppy shit which follows CURRENT POLITICAL AGENDA and definitely has oodles and boodles of THE MESSAGE and STRONG DIVERSE CHARACTERS, rather than videogames which have something unique, interesting, fun and enjoyable to bring to the table.
I guarentee this game will be forgotten about within 6 months and noone will speak of it again.
We have now reached the "You aren't supposed to like the characters" stage of cope. I've never seen this level of insecurity surround a "10/10 game" before.
When Flopsaken turns out better than this shit......
Watch, they'll commission a sequel taking place in the 90's. Oh boy get ready for them to taint Nirvana, No Doubt, Garbage, Liz Phair, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, and Run DMC! With bonus Suzanne Vega just because!
I'm surprised the journos are now going with the narrative that the characters are horrible and unlikable on purpose. If you aren't supposed to empathize with the characters, what's even the point when the characters is all the game has going for it? A generic coming of age plot? Give me a break.
The only decent character in that piece of shit masquerading as a game was the cop dad, which the game paints as a villain for the crime of... not wanting his daughter to fuck up her future, by associating with delinquents who commit petty crime. I say "was" because at the end of the game, said daughter threatens to burn the town down if she doesn't get her way. Instead of disciplining his brat, he gives in to her temper tantrum and lets her do whatever she wants.
There's no character growth, there's no plot, it's just teenagers coping about their boring lives by imagining a bunch of bullshit that didn't actually happen.
A lot of modern headphones have buttons on them for pausing and volume control. The problem is, I don't know if that was a feature headphones had in 1999.
There were a bunch of Sony models that included them in the 90s you'd just plug your headphones into the remote so you could use whatever headphones you wanted. These have LCDs, others didn't.
It's an ego projected funded by the daughter of a billionaire who has been wasting millions of dollars for years on shit like this. Industry plant? I don't think the gaming or journo industries as a whole planted this game. It's just shit and the journos were obviously paid off and were too stupid to give it normal looking reviews. If this game had been rated a 7 or even 8, no one would have given a fuck and the game would have been forgotten about within a week.
Hell, you could even say that the entire thing was manufactured outrage bait to draw attention to an otherwise cringe "game" orchestrated by Megan Ellison, but I still wouldn't call anything coming out of Annapurna Interactive an industry plant. Now if say... EA/Ubisoft/Microsoft(their tweet really didn't help things, but I assume their community manager also got a free package of toys in the mail)/Bethesda/Activision/etc. published this shit and the same result happened then yes.
We have now reached the "You aren't supposed to like the characters" stage of cope. I've never seen this level of insecurity surround a "10/10 game" before.
If you're not supposed to like the protagonist in a narrative driven "game" for 3 hours when there's no fucking gameplay, what ARE you supposed to like about it?
Yes, Stacey Rockford is unlikable. She’s selfish, judgmental, and condescending — a lot of teenagers are. She does not leave Mixtape without confronting that and, hopefully, learning from it. Maybe we can too.
But she doesn't learn anything or change her attitude by the end of the game. We've seen the ending!
Mixtape occasionally plays with that in its splashes of interactivity. While a few of its minigames have scripted endpoints, a handful of them give players some agency. You can bail out of Rockford’s first kiss quickly, missing a Steam achievement awarded if you smooch for 60 seconds. One of the game’s best scenes, where Rockford skips rocks on a lake, ends when you decide you’ve had enough. You can similarly rush through a memory of the gang breaking into a dinosaur park, barely taking any photos of the moment as you’re meant to. If you’re too impatient, time has a way of slipping away from you during Mixtape’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it runtime.
Oh, so you get an achievement for not exiting out of the minigame early and nothing you do actually has any impact on the narrative whatsoever? That just makes it all the better I guess!
Some of the stronger criticism levied against Mixtape is that it weaponizes empty nostalgia to win players over. There’s validity to that; the overly romanticized ‘90s landscape, full of cool music that will make any Gen Xer’s ears perk up, can sometimes come off as disingenuous. It’s a sanitized vision of the past built for people who sit around talking about how much cooler and freer the ‘90s were, a sometimes conservative whitewashing that ignores the political unrest of the era. But nostalgia also serves a function within the story, because Rockford resists the present. She is rarely in the moment with her friends, always using a hangout as an excuse to prattle on about ‘70s music or ‘80s movies. She escapes into memories of bygone teenage antics. All of Mixtape’s low-hanging nostalgia tries to drag its players into that mindset too, drawing on the familiar sights and sounds of days gone by.
What are you referring to specifically?
There are 10k+ indie games being approved on Steam every year (sometimes a lot more than that, like 14k+ in 2023).
You're aware of maybe 0.5% at most, some of them will probably take years to get discovered, some maybe never will get discovered, some are selling decently enough but you still haven't heard of them because there's no marketing campaigns for them.
There's gold in them there hills and dismissing it all because a small fraction of them are made by trannies is silly.
I don't mean indie games themselves, but the indie scene itself, at least in the west. To list some complaints:
1. Close knit developers, reviewers and influencers signal boosting each other.
2. Very little originality in games that do get media attention - ie "indie roguelike about depression".
3. Government funding, sometimes as literal propaganda.
4. Millions of dollars of budget, but using contractors to "technically" be considered a small studio.
A lot of modern headphones have buttons on them for pausing and volume control. The problem is, I don't know if that was a feature headphones had in 1999.
It definitely was not. Unless this was like some several hundred dollar headphones that only the richest of people had. Later on we had them built into the wires but that was early 00s as bulky controller.
They didn't have controls, but when they did, it was a black plastic dongle that was just volume control. It was where the wires meet and would often catch on things.
You are correct the indie you see is not real for the most part with the west.
Its abused and a clique. They even control the artists out there.
Anyone you see defending mixtape just assume is in on the payroll or knows the people who made this game on some kind of clique way.
This is why I like people pointing out Mixtape. There literally are no politics and if you try to put politics into it the left has to defend one of the Israeli Defense Force's biggest donors.
The whole hate of this game is because its fake, nothing about it is real. The scores, the indie status, the fact it is treated as a game itself. It is all fake.
Because it is so blatant the only people who don't see it are the people in on it / being paid to not see it. Mixtape is the accumulation of a lot of people's frustrations for quite a while with fake indie games.
Thank fuck for Elon's twitter though. We would have never had this discourse if this happened before Elon bought it. I'll give him credit there.
That's what I was getting at. The only headphones I used were the cheap ones sold at Riteaid/CVS. In the late 90's that meant the ones with a thin flat metal band. In the 2000's I got the plastic wrap-behind ones with the volume control wheel on the wire. But, as was pointed out a while ago, the girl's speakers in her room are modeled after what would have been top of the line. So despite having been a teenager in 1999 myself, I'd have no way of remembering what the cutting edge of consumer technology would have been like the child of a software billionaire would.
This I have no issues with.
You have to somehow let people know that you've made a game and if you don't have the cash to buy ad space, this is how you do it.
This actually bothers me.
Like in movies, when that Valerian thing by Luc Besson came out, it was labeled as indie because it was made outside of the LA studio system... but the fucking movie had a $200 million budget and was funded by several corporations and a billionaire, that doesn't count.
A lot of modern headphones have buttons on them for pausing and volume control. The problem is, I don't know if that was a feature headphones had in 1999.
If you're not supposed to like the protagonist in a narrative driven "game" for 3 hours when there's no fucking gameplay, what ARE you supposed to like about it?
I thought about this point long and hard, it hit me very quickly there IS a game with an unlikable protagonist with little gameplay and is story driven (But lasts longer I believe) and that's Mouthwashing.
That, at the least, writes a "Protagonist (or ists in this case) you're supposed to hate who never gets any form of punishment or realisation" which is 'satisfying' and feels on beat, at least seeing his journey you understand why he is like that and the game makes a good job of portraying him as a fucking monster and allows the player to come to that without just outright saying it. You absolutely can make a "You aren't supposed to like this character" but they also have to be someone who's actions have cause and effect, that WHEN it's high-time to get punishment they get it, in MW's case one of them commits suicide to escape punishment (But hey, dead so I guess) and the other is locked away as a literal nugget with the game being open ended as to what happens to them, allowing one to imagine what might occur as a result.
Modern writing from astro-turfed nepo babies is shit, let's be fucking real. They don't understand character growth because the ultra rich don't need to grow at all in their life, they use money to sort out all their issues or clout from everyone around them to sweep, they endlessly try to tell the 99% of ordinary people how "The working man lives" without any idea of what it's like to live on the breadline, have to work an actual job with a fear of losing it. They got everything in their life through virtue of being rich, or being part of a "PROTECTED MINORITY" and it shows in their writing when they cannot produce characters worth giving a fuck about and are memory holed within a year for whatever shiny new LBGT+ fagfest character hits the market.
You are correct the indie you see is not real for the most part with the west.
Its abused and a clique. They even control the artists out there.
Anyone you see defending mixtape just assume is in on the payroll or knows the people who made this game on some kind of clique way.
If Mixtape was part of the clique you wouldn't see nearly as much talk about it, it's more of a clique vs. clique warfare, mainly trannies vs. nepo babies. Honestly I'd rather have the nepo babies win.
This I have no issues with.
You have to somehow let people know that you've made a game and if you don't have the cash to buy ad space, this is how you do it.
Like Mixtape the issue is that the game will get good reviews despite its actual qualities, and anyone who criticize it will get massive backlash. The best example is Yahtzee lightly criticizing Selaco got him brigaded so bad he was forced to apologize.
