IIRC for GTA5 it was all satire aimed at mid 2000s Fox, both the trashy reality TV side of it and Fox News. I’m not gonna say it doesn’t revel too much in the spectacle of just taking something that’s already awful and dialing it up a bit, but it’s more in the style of the Onion where most of the bits are taking the mask off an institution or trend and having it honestly portray itself as what it is (like the Fox News expy literally having the tagline “confirming your prejudices” or an American Idol expy literally just being assholes reveling in cruelty) than South Park style nihilism - it has a point to make and that’s that American culture is reactionary and repulsively self-centered and consumerist, even as it is itself reveling in being trashy slop.

You’ve got to remember, everything after GTA3 was written in the context of the Bush era and none of it was written after gamergate: it has the sort of incoherent dirtbag quasi-left contemporary counter culture stance of recognizing the US as bloodthirsty, pointlessly cruel, and deeply unserious but also not having any sort of framework for understanding or addressing that and being entirely too libertine and chauvinist on top of that. It’s kind of alien to anything we have now, because that whole counter culture basically got wiped out by gamergate crystalizing the chauvinist libertines into open fascists baying for blood and forcing everyone else to stop tacitly tolerating them.

Perhaps they’re just airbrushed artwork on top of the armor. It seems like the sort of sardonic thing that character would do.

Matt Ward is such an awful writer that exposure to his prose is an actual psychic damage hazard.

I think it’s something from an old Rogue Trader article? So it may be more a metacommentary from an old writer sort of thing, that Gothic would have been descended from Mandarin with a bunch of English vocabulary mixed in, albeit all unrecognizable after tens of thousands of years of sound changes.

Also the Emperor is from somewhere in what is now Turkey and canonically the most common language the humans speak (“Gothic”) is descended from Mandarin and is just artistically portrayed as being Latin based because “High Gothic” is supposed to scan as archaic in the way that inserting incorrect Latin into English does.

Canonically literally every Space Marine (except for the Blood Angels IIRC) should have dark skin when exposed to sunlight and then (except for the Salamanders) flash to an unnatural pallor when they step inside, because one of the mutations they get is photochromic skin to protect them from getting sunburns while still ensuring they get enough vitamin D. That sounds incredibly stupid and like I just made it up but that is the actual canon from the lore, along with Space Marines eating their enemies brains to gain their knowledge and having acid spit like the xenomorph.

Warhammer 40K is a very silly franchise and the art direction does it a disservice by not leaning into it more.

A lot of people here are missing the funniest thing about this: SAI is floundering, has lost most of its tech talent, and suffered hard to the double punch of SD3 sucking complete shit and Flux showing up like a month later and being everything people had expected SD3 to be but better. SAI has also been pivoting away from the open source release model that got them literally all of the attention they’ve gotten in the first place.

So it looks like James Cameron’s role with this would be trying to use his reputation to grift more investor money to keep the company that now doesn’t have the engineers responsible for all the popular Stable Diffusion models anymore afloat. I wonder if he knows he’s hopping onto a failing grift or if they’ve successfully tricked him into thinking there’s anything of value left in SAI?

The Elder Scrolls series, flaws and all, is generally better about applying magic to its world-building.

For the most part its worldbuilding is like the one thing The Elder Scrolls actually did really well (that and Morrowind’s aesthetic/art direction), at least in terms of the lore. Where it fails is translating that intricate, weird, well-thought-out worldbuilding into gameplay and storytelling.

Everyone I’ve ever known who played The Sims 4 basically just played it because WW is a thing, yeah lmao.

It was weirdly complex and could basically be summed up as “imagine if all the little side mechanics Sims 4 got from DLCs were actually fleshed out into full fledged mechanics with at least some content to them, it actively simulated the entire neighborhood at once which was also bigger and had more stuff in it, and its difficulty was curved a little more towards actually having to try a little like in earlier games.”

It also took forever to load and would actively break without a community patch to regularly fix and clean up invalid background simulation stuff because of compounding errors with said simulation, like background-simulated sims glitching into invalid positions and spamming pathfinding errors - the community patch ran a garbage collection script every in-game day to detect and fix those before they could get out of hand and it worked great. But apart from that it was really good and an iterative improvement over The Sims 2 which had been an iterative improvement over The Sims. It would have been amazing if The Sims 4 had just sort of cleaned it up and kept building on that complexity instead of rebuilding something simpler from the ground up and switching into a minimum-viable-product content churn forever because it’s sitting in a niche where it has no real competition at all.

Not even then, really. Everything in it is just so completely and utterly shallow even compared to comparable things in The Sims 3. It has a huge variety of things that do basically nothing with a core gameplay loop that’s even more of just a “passively win” idle game than the earlier games. I’ve pirated it a few times over the years to see what’s been added and it’s always just sort of disappointing and the new content is less interesting than it sounded like.

It’s really disappointing that they just kind of stripped down 3 and then just treaded water ever since instead of building on any of the mechanics 3 introduced.

“That lobster’s got what it takes to go straight to the top!”

“It is like… they have a CEO too!”

“Nooo, they have an internet funny man! Stop saying it’s a business!”

“The fish are doing market research!”

Huh, I must have either seen it posted somewhere before or it’s just reminding me of a different, similar scene in something else, because I haven’t read that.

What is that from? I feel like I’ve seen that page before but I don’t recognize the characters.

IIRC the book was better in that regard: there the poacher team were just like a pair of random dipshits who wanted to sell a baby T. Rex and get rich quick and the research expedition was some trust fund baby paleontologist’s ill-advised pet project. Like a lot of the same pieces are there, but they actually fit together in a way that makes sense instead of what genuinely seems like a bunch of changes to make even more things to sell as toys.

They did make him way too quaint and charming instead of casting/directing him as a sleezy dipshit, and it’s way too easy to sympathize with him after the whole “I just wanted everyone to see cool dinos and be happy” dialogue.

Honestly I don’t think it did a good job articulating that because it kind of gets lost in the “wow cool dino!” spectacle and in amongst the hi-tech sci-fi stuff. Like I can’t remember the book too clearly but I do remember it kind of lavishing on how cheaply made everything was and how it was falling apart even before the park opened and how shortsighted and naive the park designers were.

The movie kind of just established some of the “doing it wrong” stuff InGen did in building the park as conventions of its worldbuilding, like how they were relying on “cool hi-tech gadgets” that were fragile and needed electricity instead of just hiring a zoo engineer to tell them “yeah just make like a ditch and some concrete earthworks high enough that the large, mundane animal can’t just reach out or something, don’t waste money and power on a fragile little electric fence for no reason.”

noooooooooooo