I really do like this cast, and you can tell there’s a punch-up guy in the mix (or two, or three) who are either coming up with sweet lines or doing a good skim of the comics (I wouldn’t know.)

To the extent that we’re just talking about appearance options, I guess anything goes. Artistic prerogative related to worldbuilding might prevail sometimes, which is fine, but otherwise there’s really no issue (except budget and workload and predicted ROI, all already mentioned.)

Huh.

I could suggest quite a few things about generic white dudes IRL, vis-a-vis D&D, CRPGs, and paying full price to be beta testers for a video game.

The previous episode had Archer and Barry tag-team emotionally torturing him, and they showed Cyril breaking down completely from it by the end. I’m not sure how much more one thinks they’d need to show?

With an attrition-heavy system like D&D, it’s not a good fit. You’re constantly getting bombarded by turn-one AoE bullshit, and it’s chipping at your health, which is a much rarer resource here. Then, in turn, unless you exhaustively exploit the “carry around barrels of everything” strategy, you’re also going to be…

Ignorance is one of the key privileges of the imperial civilian. I mean, sure, it’s also a key reason why empires decline and fall, but hey - that ain’t my problem. I’m in it for the privileges. I deserve those privileges! Look at all these rich guys, with their jets and yachts! I ain’t giving up a single one of my…

No offense to any of these guys, but basically every time I hear a studio announcement like this, my brain immediately writes at least two paragraphs of the Jason Schreier article that’s going to come down the pike between 5-10 years later, using these blandly inspirational quotes as the massively ironic introduction.

Okay, but what about The Super Sexy Young Boys? See, the “super” in there clearly shows that they’re referencing the powered aaaaaaaand my lawyer just called.

Well they had to stop sooner or later, because in the year 3001 his image gets rehabilitated!

NMS is somewhat unique in that it shoehorned in an entire plotline of repetitive missions to impress upon the player that everything is in fact pointless, nothing you do is special, and there’s absolutely nothing new or cool waiting for you at some future point.

The Elysium tricolor becomes situational as well. If your health is low or you’ve lost too many DD’s (if you don’t take SD instead,) you gotta take it. Otherwise, I’d strongly consider taking any permanent boon over it, and most absolutely a Daedalus upgrade, or a particular god I’ve been fishing for.

There’s no reason to endorse or pattern-reinforce other people’s racism, but religion, racism, and tribalism have enjoyed a horrid symbiotic relationship for thousands of years. It’s one thing to say “this is all fiction anyway so we’re gonna do what we want.” That’s great. It’s another to suggest that the cultures…

The new HQ show is very much of its time, which is usually a put-down, but in this case is not. It’s been about 15 years of cooling off, and the 90's vibe is coming back, except now shows can use shitloads of swear words if they’re not tied to network broadcast.

The problem is that the main character ain’t got no soul. There are hints here and there that she’s generally having a good time, but she’s not going so far as to impose her soul, groove, and funk onto a set of adversaries who don’t get it. That’s your play if you’re going to choose a song like this for (an ad for) a…

Warburton’s eyes are all wrong, but we can fix that in post.

The writer missed some stuff, but other stuff is dead-on-balls, and really frustrating in a game that could be looking at literally 30 years of similar titles as inspiration for how to make its systems smooth and transparent.

The grand irony of using fiction as a vehicle for tackling real-world oppression is that you’re empowered to engage in the institutionalized real-world oppression of focusing the spotlight on shinier, sexier, younger, whiter people. Hell, it’ll probably make you more money!

The article’s mostly correct that Hulk doesn’t really belong in any kind of “pick your waifu/cosplay” multiplayer beat’em-up game as a playable character. The Ultimate Alliance games kinda got away with it by being *so* transparently simple and crunchy that it just seemed weird to care at all. Hulk wasn’t unstoppable…

It’s a pretty damning commentary that I usually lower BGM/Effects to somewhere around 60-70% in every video game that lets me, relative to voice being kept at 100%. Not *once* have I ever said to myself “woah now, them’s voices are too loud!” and gone back and changed it. Not. Once.