Ethan, you’re criticizing the game for something that it’s not and doesn’t have any moral obligation to be. Not every game needs to give us an history course on eras or artistic ideas it borrows from.

In the case of cuphead I’m fairly certain they just wanted to make a videogame tribute to a era of animated art style without having to deal with any politics since they’re a pain.

I hate to use this card; but ‘as a black man’, articles and arguments like this (especially written from would be white saviors) are the worst.

New title:

Ok well we better make sure tap dancers wear blackface during a portion of their performances or else! These game creators don’t owe anyone some education addendum. I mean this would be insane. Classical music performances with a speech about orphans forced to work building musical instruments? Romance era paintings…

If they kept the racist undertones, they’d get a worse response. If they ignore them, they get this response. No win for the dev either way.

As a “gamer of color” I’m immensely glad they removed the “garbage” and kept the technical mastery and attention to detail. My eyes can’t roll far enough back in my skull at the (largely) white critics complaining (!!!) that they adhered to the artistic style and removed the racist overtones. I can’t thank them…

Were you really expecting a 2D platformer with almost no dialogue to have a stance on racism and to make an important statement on it? I don’t know how people can take articles like this seriously. Making a big deal about nothing and getting offended for no reason is the epitome of white people shit.

What the hell? Do you want them to have a disclaimer that says:

There’s no winning here.

Or that you can borrow from the past in ways that don’t try to pretend the bad stuff didn’t happen or wasn’t a part of it.

NEWS BULLETIN:

To be honest. This is similar to the cylinder you have to air jump over in the tutorial.

Dumb article that only exists for a click, which in turn references a dumb essay that itself only exists for a click.

“Hey guys, some people used this art/historical moment/idea for racist/sexist/etc. purposes, and it is wrong wrong wrong to reference the art/historical moment/idea without referencing (read:…

Everything from that era was racist. We don’t need a modern video games to cover that, we can just watch/discuss old media. Also, you should watch old cartoons! EVERYONE must know of Cab Calloway.

Obviously keeping the racist undertones would be bad. But not having them is also bad? Should everything ever that references something old have a disclaimer that says ‘in this era people were racist/sexist/etc’? Hell, considering how shitty people still are, even that could be considered whitewashing by suggesting…

“It’s not correct if it does not have this.” “But that is frown on by today’s world” “Then it is not TRUE era art.” ...I guess?

Not saying this to dispute the point of the article, but I’d wager the vast majority of people who like this animation have no idea it had racist associations. To them it’s a beautiful game with an old art style.

There’s also a section inside the New Donk City Hall that’s essentially 3D Donkey Kong Jr. More subtle than the 2D section already mentioned, but it was definitely pretty cool.

I mean, they kind of did in the celebration portion, where you turn into 2D retro Mario and play through a sort of remixed version of Donkey Kong. But I’m assuming you mean in the world itself, in full 3D and all that, and yeah that would be frickin sweet.