Aha, now it all makes sense. He was taking those massive sums willingly (and could get away with it because he was sparing some for others along the way) despite it still making him look less than good, because he knew this day was coming. It was the long game. It wasn’t just money in his pocket, it was money in…

You might very much enjoy Escape From Tarkov if that’s your style. The learning curve is off the charts and it’s 50% of the game but that’s sounds your bag. Cheating is a big issue and it’s a pretty lonely game unless you play with friends, but otherwise it is everything these other games are terrified to be.

It is utterly bloody ridiculous that rather than do this, with is arguably their job more than anyone else’s these days, Microsoft have instead made 37 different versions of a game store that equally don’t function and various other flaccid products in the last few decades. Why we don’t have some sort of kernel-level…

Massive missed opportunity in the title image to ‘shop the “Definitive” cover in black and white with “WASTED” across it in red.

This is all proof that, from their inception, through the early days, getting big off someone else’s creation with extremely troubling portrayals of humans, to now taking down mods and even pulling the original versions of cult classics from sale, all to make their rereleases seem more palatable, Rockstar never…

The irony of a company that distributed games with unlicensed music and banned content, using DMCA and legal threats to me other people’s work to make their shoddy rereleases sell better is just so… 2020/21. The C-word era.

I’m going to skip forward a bit, just to highlight this part:

I absolutely agree with everything you said.

Which is an evolution for his character admittedly, even if it is a particularly disappointing one when he survived against all odds and has so much money and opportunity, exactly what he dreamed of.

As I previously stated, you can still have that. Better yet, it can end the only way such violent masculine bullshit should end, with both dying.

Firstly, I didn’t say it was only known for that or mainly known for it. But the Chaebol is a very real thing and there’s a reason that word is in Korean…

This is why single-player narrative driven (AAA or indie) games, as well as anything that’s just generally not some MMO FPS GAAS F2P or some other inane AAA acronym, struggles to get the support it needs to be made.

“Gi-hun doesn’t get a happy ending”

I think it’s a very cunning wordplay by the creator, that preys upon the language barrier, as much for Korean people as English. If you break it down from an English speaking point of view, it’s:

I absolutely will not argue with the most important takeaway here, that this was a global sensation from a tiny nation that represents a part of the world and people that are currently specifically being maligned and has historically been either ignored and appropriated or worse colonised and erased.

The show attempts critique without ever making any meaningful statements and then washes its hands of said critique by killing the women and fucking their corpses.

I have in fact watched it already! 😁 I would also recommend it, even if it isn’t perfect and does utterly comically things with its female representation. Some similar films I’ve enjoyed were The Platform, Escape Room, and then there’s the cult favs like Cube.

Well isn’t that the whole point? That he didn’t need to be the main character? Potentially, even shouldn’t have been. That the single minded male antihero is as tired as the macho man lead, and that this was and should have been an ensemble piece all along. But also, a direct response to those two tired tropes that…

One suggestion that I saw online which I think was a great idea, is that they could still have had the 1v1, but in the end they both kill each other instead. As an addendum to that, if by that time Sae-Byeok (only just noticed how her name reads in English…), hadn’t technically died, she would’ve won and they would be…

East Asian cinema is my jam, so I’m fairly well versed in it. I’ve also never been one for tropes or generic content, including happy endings. I watched Squid Game because my nephew could enjoy it with me and my partner.