I may get around to talking about the rest of gaming news, but it’s going to be hard to get past this first. In my GeekyDomain gig I’m obligated to talk about game trends. Recently when I browse Steam, one game kept shoving itself into my face over and over. Judging from its top-rated position, it seems to be the hottest (oh God stop the puns already!) free casual game lately.
I’ve been tricked into playing a game about seducing demons
So I tried it, beat it even (it takes minutes), and found out what the big deal was. Helltaker is an indie dating sim about assembling a harem of demon girls, after some obligatory puzzle and bullet hell elements. And you, all you depraved people, you wretched goblins made me play that just to see what all the fuss was about.
So now we know why half the fanart base has been taken over by devil girls eating pancakes lately. And honestly, even if I’m not down with this particular scene, I get it, I really do. I even analyze why in that post.
But that doesn’t mean that I quit finding all things concerned with Satanism and Hell to be side-splittingly hilarious. I love how Zdrada has a cross necklace. It’s amazing how well one indie Polish developer managed to capture Western humor so adeptly. That’s vanripper if you want to follow him to see what devilment he gets up to next.
Seriously, I “get” the demon thing
I point out in that post why people are pre-wired by our culture to associate wickedness with a perfectly healthy biological function like sex. It’s because the oppressive Fascism of the Religious Right, a boot stamping on all our faces forever, pretty much backs us all into a corner. This keeps up until we have no choice but to throw the heavy metal horns and yell “Yo Satan” if we choose to believe in science, progress, civilization, civil rights, human rights, common sense, or simply not being a braying jackass.
It’s why the Satanic Temple had to declare abortions a sacrament protected by religious freedom. That’s it, we no longer have a choice to just be rational, logical beings in this demon-haunted world. The only way to escape persecution in the name of one made-up invisible sky goblin is to throw in your lot with the opposing one.
I just dunno if having a fetish for demons upholds the whole spirit of the ideal, but you people do you. I’m not kidding about the fanart, which I found at first on Pornhub:
The YouTube video is edited to conform with Google’s enforcement of standards set in place by the oppressive Fascism of the Religious Right, which dictates that even cartoon BEWBZ R LE SIN. See what I mean?
As I point out in my gallery about Satan in pop culture, I was raised Baptist Christian and grew up with every adult around me telling me THIS shit was for real:
It’s just stupidly hilarious how we let the Nazis run away with Jesus when literally everything in the Bible about Jesus Christ is the exact opposite of everything an American Christian professes today. Gandhi himself pointed this out years ago. There are no American Christians. There are only bigots who believe in a glowing white bigot in the sky who hates the same people they do.
Something something Dr. Stella Immanuel…
Anyway… I digress…
Ahem. Gaming.
I examined the Sega Dreamcast chapter of the 1990s console wars
In what is probably going to stand as the most thorough post-mortem of this forsaken console, I explored the story of Sega’s Dreamcast and why it failed through nearly no fault of its own.
Pardon me for the PC-master-racism, but this is exactly why I avoided dedicated game consoles throughout the later half of the 1990s up to the present day. Sure, I got the kids their PS2 and Nintendo DS, when they lived with us, but that was mostly for them. I got them PCs too, and eventually phones, and then they never looked back either.
Which is how we dodged nightmares like the Sega 32x:
PCs are just so much easier to upgrade, so much more versatile, and so much easier to adapt to what you need them to do. Not to mention, you can’t feasibly (yes I know it’s possible) install Linux on a Sega.
I also dove into the misunderstood history of Tetris
Why was Tetris so popular? Well, it does tickle some brain switches which hook us on a monkey dependency of revolving dopamine hits, but that’s beside the point. At that time in history, the Western world really wanted a symbolic cultural olive branch to seal the end of the Cold War, and we were going to have it if we had to rip off the efforts of uncredited Soviet computer lab workers to do it.
Not that it turned out that bad for everybody concerned. The story behind the pirate licensing of Tetris stands forever as a good moral to bring up when software companies climb onto their intellectual property high horse. I tie it into the way Bill Gates helped himself to the efforts of the home hobbyist movement in marketing a BASIC interpreter he had no right to claim and sell. Who am I to pass up an opportunity to post the Photoshop of Bill Gates the Borg?
Billy G is now canonized on the web as a living saint, and I don’t have that much of a problem with that. I was witness to the bloodbath which transpired so he could get the money to become this Randian superhero now (some of that blood being mine), but I am a pragmatist after all. Better the ex-supervillian trying to get into heaven now than to have no reform at all.
Not that this has anything to do with BeeGee anymore, but y’all remember the turn-of-the-century browser wars, which Microsoft lost to the tune of an antitrust action or two? They didn’t learn dick from that experience. It’s almost comforting to see them fall down the same manhole twice.
Bonus Buck: Bell Labs in the ’60s
Since we’re ending on a techie note, here’s a beautiful photo essay on Bell Labs in the 1960s. I’m saving it for my next attempt to pound history into the cement heads of the Millennial generation who refuse to believe that they didn’t invent technology themselves immediately upon birth.
“What do you mean you had Internet in the 90s? THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!” I get so sick of hearing that. I also get sick of hearing “How do we get more women into technology?” We tried that:
Women, I tirelessly scream, were the first hackers. I’m into my second half-century on this planet, goddammit, I was THERE!
Watch this space for this irritation to come boiling out in a long rant where I exorcise the demons of ignorance from the population once more and put the demons back in our sexual fantasies where they belong.
