T w e n t y S i d e d
This comic appeared on the Escapist way back in November 2010. Unlike most of my old comics, this one is still sort of visible. The navigation is broken, the comments are gone, there are missing images, and the formatting is a mess, but at least the comic is still visible. Which is good, since I think this is the most popular entry in the entire strip.
The original text was as follows:
Yes, I realize that BioWare made both lists. For the same thing. If you’ve ever played a BioWare game, then you know what I’m talking about.
This is actually a takeoff of an old joke: Heaven is Where the Police are British, the Chefs are Italian, the Mechanics are German, the Lovers are French and it’s all organized by the Swiss. Hell is Where the Police are German, the Chefs are British, the Mechanics are French, the Lovers are Swiss and it’s all organized by the Italians.
I’ve never been to Europe, so for me the joke is as true as the European stereotypes on which it’s based. But I like the symmetry of it.
Looking back… are “French Lovers” a good thing? According to the tropes I’m familiar with, French lovers are jealous to the point of being possessive, prone to infidelity, fickle in their affections, and fond of picking fights when they get bored of all the sex. In movies, the trope is that our hero[ine] is getting over an intense, short-lived, tempestuous love affair with a French person of questionable availability. But I don’t know. Maybe that sort of firecracker romance is appealing to some people?
It’s been a dozen years, and for the most part I think this comic still holds up. The big changes are that I don’t think Capcom is such a reliable source of terrible cutscenes, and BioWare can no longer make the list for dialog in Heaven.That one was a cheat anyway. BioWare’s dialog wasn’t all that special. It was the vibrant characters SAYING the dialog that made it great.
This joke was actually quite a puzzle to put together. To assemble the joke, we need:
- Five attributes of a AAA game / studio: Here I used Story, Dialog, Cutscenes, QA Testing, and Release Schedule, but I could just as easily have gone with Performance, Graphcs, Pricing, Stability, and UI. Or whatever.
- Five high-profile developers.
- Each developer must plausibly serve as the pinnacle of one category and then be infamously bad at another.
- The five developers must cover all five categories in both the best and worst lists.
- As much as possible, the rankings should be based on broadly understood trends. For example, don’t choose a love-it-or-hate-it game series to occupy a spot on the list. Partly because the joke won’t work for half the people, but mostly because it will just start a stupid fanboy flame war in the comments.
Footnotes:
[1] That one was a cheat anyway. BioWare’s dialog wasn’t all that special. It was the vibrant characters SAYING the dialog that made it great.
Push the Button!
Scenes from Half-Life 2:Episode 2, showing Gordon Freeman being a jerk.
Charging More for a Worse Product
No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works. Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.
Fixing Match 3
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
A Star is Born
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
The Opportunity Crunch
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
I think the joke doesn’t mean ‘lovers’ but lovers. As in, between the sheets, whatever happens in the wider relationship be damned.
Also, your comic was funny! I wonder if there were any other categories you could have used…
In heaven, the story is written by Bioware and the puzzles are designed by Jonathan Blow.
In hell, the story is written by Jonathan Blow and the puzzles are designed by Bioware (panel caption: “what about the Towers of Hanoi? Have we used it in this game yet?” / “Twice.”)
Oh, Blow vs. BioWare. That’s good!
Is Blow known to be bad at stories? I know The Witness is a little infamous, but the twist in Braid seems to have been very popular.
The bit at the end where
you’re not rescuing the girl, she’s running from you, you’re just seeing it backwardsis clever, but is probably the only thing most people remember about the game, that was otherwise filled with bizarre writing and symbolism, such as the epilogue which explains that the game is actually about the nuclear bomb, or something.I’d argue that “the princess is the nuclear bomb or something” is actually perfect at the specific task of getting a specific type of person to love your work.
I’m not that type of person.
Personally I thought the metaphor in Braid really worked. Either as the girl coming into his life and blowing it too complete bits one way or the other with the time stuff being ‘just’ his mind spiraling around what he could have done differently… or with the girl being a the metaphor for the seductive AND destructive nature of meddling with time for something that seemed to be worth it… well, at the time.
Open to interpretation which one is the right one, of course, but I… well, liked it, and thought it was clever.
Having just played The Outer Worlds and having been bored for a good 4/5 of the game, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with any studio that I want doing the writing these days. The only game I’ve played recently with good writing is Horizon: Zero Dawn
SuperGiant perhaps?
Well, you can throw indie devs into there. What about Toby Fox? Then in Hell he can be in charge of release schedules and development updates.
I honestly loved the writing of Strangeland, but as a linear adventure game, it’s not in the same ballpark as Obsidian and Bioware’s game.
I think Cyberpunk 2077 had good writing, but that may be just me. CDPR’s writing has usually been pretty solid for me.
Cyberpunk’s writing is more of a mixed bag, I think. There are wonderful character bits, and there are extremely heavy handed exposition lines that insult the player’s intelligence.
But I liked the Towers of Hanoi puzzles. They were quaint.
Thank you for sharing! I never caught that joke. At that particular time on the Escapist I was only interested in Yahtzee, MovieBob, and Critical Miss. It wasn’t until 2012 or so that I began reading your stuff on there, too.
Once I began reading the blog, I l’ve since made my way through the entire archive (some stuff I’ve even read more than once).* The only thing I haven’t been able to read is Stolen Pixels. Which is still not very easy to do (and believe me, I’ve tried!). So it’s nice to see at least some part of it here.
*The only thing I haven’t done yet is watch Spoiler Warning; and I still haven’t listened to the vast majority of the podcast with the old crew. I’m just so used to you and Paul that I’ll need to dedicate a couple of episodes to readjust to the “new” voices :D
The potentially more familiar version of the joke is “The Tragedy of Canada”, something like:
Based on its position and roots, Canada could have been a combination of American technology, British culture, and French cuisine. Instead it is French technology, American culture, and British cuisine.
Interesting. I’m in the US, and I’m familiar with the original version Shamus references and have never heard the Canada version.
I’m Canadian and I’ve heard the Europe but not the Canada one.
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard both versions exclusively through this site.
May I offer another axis for this joke: genres VS. time. Something like in heaven shooters are created in the 90s and puzzles in adventures are created in the 2010s in hell it is the other way round.
Just some weird idea.
Not bad :)
The modern version:
In heaven, the Stories are written by Microsoft, the Dialogue is written by Microsoft, the Cutscenes are designed by Microsoft, the testing is performed by Microsoft, and the release schedule is set by Microsoft.
Did I say heaven? I’m not sure why I said heaven.
Thanks, Satan!
(Wreck-It Ralph joke)
It’s pronounced, Sat-in
Wait a minute… this is the Bad Place, isn’t it?
Ah, you figured it out!
I was trying to show a friend the “Chime” comic last month and was horrified to see that it wasn’t online.
The internet is forever, but maybe not in the right ways. Thank you for creating these, and preserving them.
I was reading some old posts (from around 10 years ago). and while doing they I tried around 20 different links to big, popular sites. None of them worked. It acctually made ma a bit sad, I think the Internet is much less permanent than we think, it just moves so fast that we rarely have any use for older content.
This is an interesting trip back a decade for a few reasons, one of them being that I’m not even sure the story being written by Obsidian is considered heavenly anymore. In addition, Square Enix is so huge and inconsistent that you have to account for which specific creators. In fact, I’m sure you could just pull out icons like Tetsuya Nomura and Yoko Taro and play around with that. Additionally, Capcom’s release schedule itself has slowed considerably. Last year was their busiest, releasing four or five games with… the last being towards end of summer, I think. Their next release? An expansion for Monster Hunter Rise this summer. After that? Two games slated for 2023. Clearly, their release schedule is not what it once was.
Valve is probably the only thing that hasn’t changed, especially since their last releases until Half-Life: Alyx a decade later were… Left 4 Dead 2 and Portal 2? Did they release anything else? I feel like there was a smaller release somewhere in there.
I remember when the Vive came out, Valve said they were working on three “real games” for VR (the implication being that The Lab was a mere tech demo). It is exactly six years today since the Vive’s release and we have one of them.
Seconding that Obsidian no longer wins on story. Back in the day they had KOTOR 2 (great but unfinished), NWN 2 (decent), New Vegas (fantastic). These days they have South Park, Pillars, The Outer Worlds… not as much of a fall as Bioware but I don’t see these titles making anyone’s Best Story lists.
Pillars 1 has very interesting deep ideas, basically what I was hoping Numenera would have. Tyranny deeply deconstructs the ideologies we consider “evil”. Pillars 2 is a fun pirate adventure, sailing the high seas, chasing a wandering god statue.
Don’t know anything about Outer Wilds, so I can’t comment on truly Modern Obsidian (i.e. post Microsoft takeover).
Outer Worlds you mean. ;) Outer Wilds is a very different game.
Also, Outer Worlds was too far in development for Microsoft’s take-over to mean anything. Nonetheless, from everything I’ve seen by YouTube critics of a verbose nature, it’s…. fine? Tyranny does seem like where their A-List writing team went, as people still tell me about some of the difficult choices you’re forced to make in regards to choice in video games. It’s not about “good” or “bad” but how you, personally, rationalize the least evil choice to make, and not realizing which ones have certain consequences down the line.
The Outer Worlds definitely feels like it has a far more… mainstream approach to “clever” writing, in that it’s not all that clever at all. Also seems way too heavily influenced by Joss Whedon, whom I have grown to curse the fame of more and more as people try to imitate his wit without ever grasping the arcs that made many of his characters work so well.
I liked Tyranny but it was more unfinished than KOTOR 2. The art book reveals that they planned five acts vs the three we got, and my reaction to learning that was “Ohhh, that makes so much sense.”
The Outer Worlds feels like a mediocre New Vegas in every way: the world is less open, the skill system is shallower, the dialog and situations less engaging… well I guess I have to give them credit that mediocre gunplay is an upgrade on NV.
Wow, they cut two acts? I guess that explains why I have no idea what the overlord’s motivations were.
From this excellent Let’s Play that I will absolutely shill for again, I gathered they’re mainly “stay alive and on top of a fundamentally broken system, which can only ever be self-destructive, by playing all the pieces against each other in hopes of coming out on top”.
Yes, that LP basically summarizes most of my thoughts, the minor points where I differ are not important enough to talk about. I really recommend anyone who can’t get themselves to play Tyranny to give it a read, it may change your mind.
The main thing I didn’t understand was her intentions for the player character; she seemingly deliberately hands them a lot of power of a type that’s an incredibly direct threat to her regime and then turns on them after they’ve with her apparent blessing effectively disabled her trump card throughout the Tiers. She’s had knives put in the ribs of lots of considerably less dire potential threats. I can’t understand her sending the player to the Spire and not having them shanked immediately after finding out they’ve activated it as anything other than trying to set up a lieutenant, but then (until a big content patch) turns on and attempts to kill you regardless of your actions.
I have read part of that LP and somewhat disagree with it; my take was that Kyros had loyal and reliable Archons back home, and had been using Ashe and Nerat for offensive operations, and she’s out of external enemies and there’s no longer any reason to tolerate their excesses. So she opens the game by basically attempting to straight-up murder them via Edict, then tells them to murder each other (and Tunon, who is too obsessed with the letter of the law and not the spirit of “anything I say goes”) and tells the Archon of Plagues to murder the survivor.
I guess my main problem is
it seems like the Edicts are Kyros’s primary personal power, and indeed she might even not have any other significant personal abilities. Also, the Edicts are explicitly one per region due to the flow of magical power between Spires or something, so the player raising an Edict locks Kyros out from using one in that area. Given that, it seems incredibly foolish for Kyros to permit anyone else to obtain the power to wield them unless she’s absolutely certain of their loyalty. But the game opens with her sending you to pronounce a second Edict, which is highly unusual, and puts you in a position to gain power by breaking it in a way that will activate the Spire, which seems a hell of an unlikely coincidence. Even if it was, once you actually break it and obtain the Spire she definitely knows what’s up and you are not at this point capable of throwing down with the Archon of Shadows. If you were Archon of Tides or whatever introducing you into the free-for-all to eliminate her liabilities and clean up with the Archon of Plagues would make sense, but you’re Archon of Spires. Even just people knowing you can issue Edicts is a liability because it compromises her legend and that’s a very real source of power.But the quests you get send you to places with Spires and make it necessary to break Edicts, which bolsters your power and unlock Edicts, and you’re given a pass on trespassing in the Oldwalls, which is generally a death sentence even with your Imperial Inquisitor style freedom. I find it hard to see it as anything other than her wanting a subordinate Edict-issuer for whatever reason, possibly because like Ashe and Nerat using her Archon powers is wearing on her mind, and then changing her mind when Act 3 comes along. Only, on my first playthrough I did everything I was told, snitched on people, and was generally flawlessly loyal. I didn’t give her any specific reason to distrust me, and if she’s paranoid enough to distrust me anyways why hand me all this power?I like to think that the fictional, finished, 5-act version of Tyranny is a glorious masterpiece – one that we’ll never see. It was certainly building up to something, and that something was dropped in favour of wrapping up the story quickly. Farewell, fictional completed Tyranny. You were almost great.
Still, the thing I’ve always found amazing is the way that the game was so clearly unfinished and yet someone had the gall to sell DLC separately anyway*. But that, apparently, is just standard for Paradox Interactive…
*One of them makes sense, since it was a stand-alone side adventure, disconnected from the plot. But then you get to the extra companion quests…
The ending is pretty abrupt, yeah, and requires Kyros to do two very dumb things.
So Kyros has, for whatever reason, cancelled her plans for you and replaced them with murder via the Archon of Plagues. So you unleash an Edict on her capital. Which is a good plan, except that it’s really obvious and Kyros could’ve countered it by proclaiming some benefical Edict first. Then the army of the Archon of Plagues is recalled across the entire continent for relief efforts, which they probably aren’t very good at, instead of rushing in to kill you before you grow even more powerfulIt is a tragedy that the best obsidian works are always the ones they get screwed out of finishing.
I always derp at those two games, their release timing was very unfortunate.
Clever writing can only be as clever as the writer, and in terms of writing teams groups of people can be very smart… but also very dumb.
I felt like Outer Worlds was attempting to be an Old World Blues absurdist sendup of capitalism, and it was very successful at that except for the fact that it was mostly not funny.
Found my Discord comment about Outer Worlds:
Honestly, Outer Worlds is… fine, but I think that game’s biggest flaw is that that (as far as I played, second ‘planet’) there’s just… Nobody you actually want to root for or help.
EVERYBODY is a mega-capitalist snarky ass-hat. With one or two scientifically leaning mega-capitalist snarky ass-hats that’s extra bummed, because they get how doomed the current system is, but they put all their points into Science instead of Speech so they can’t do much to actually enact change.
It’s just one of the plain least likable & endearing worlds in a game I’ve ever seen, and considering Obsidian have made games in blasted nuclear hellscapes, paranoid espionage nightmares where ww3 nearly caused by pure greed, and literal freakin’ hells where your soul might get devoured by the will of the good & evil gods alike, that’s… honestly a twisted achievement.
I get that was part of the ‘Capitalism Bad’ point, but there’s just… no redeeming parts of Outer World’s world/s left to save. Even freakin’ Tyranny at least let you choose between being a cog in the machine stomping the boot down with glee, or a white-mutiny rule’s lawyer trying to do the best they may within a literal empire of evil.
My problem with it, as far as I recall, is basically that the whole thing felt like a parodic exaggeration of corporate greed. A comedy with basically one joke, which was old hat before the game opened and mostly wasn’t well-delivered. The only joke that I recall landing was being sent into a big dungeon crawl full of enemies to obtain the BOLT, which would allow us to score a great victory over the Board on this world, and you find it and it’s… a legal form.
If it’s intended to be a more serious examination through the lense of satire, well, it still doesn’t have anything innovative to say and doesn’t say it very well.
The actual gameplay was… all right. Satisfying enough I beat it once and eventually came back for the DLC, but not terribly special.
Yeah, exactly. It’s such a one-note game & world.
Like… even the rebels slash strikers in that greenhouse on the first world? They’re completely as hyper capitalist as the folks they’re rebelling against, and they genuinely seem more concerned with the breaches of contracts in not having been paid compared with, you know, slowly starving to death.
Freakin’ hell, Mr. Crabs from Sponge-Bob is a beacon of subtlety and labor rights compared with most of the characters in Outer Worlds! It’s like… trying to laugh at a caricature that’s literally JUST a large nose without anymore recognizable features.
Very much this. I was fully expecting to meet the board members and for them to be as disconnected as the Think Tank but nothing really came of it. I actually quite liked the mechanics but it felt like the story was all setting up and never really delivered, not to mention the resolution by asspull.
It also was largely a surface level criticism
In 2020 Valve said they had to temporarily get rid of their ‘anyone does anything they want’ structure to actually get the updated source engine finished. And that with that out of the way it should be easier to make new games.
I guess they have a year or two left before that’s proven false.
Artifact, I guess?
Poor Artifact. I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt, but I don’t really like card game video games. Pokemon Trading Card Game (brilliant title for a video game), Etherlords, Hearthstone, Astral whatever,… just don’t grab me; neither does Artifact.
I love card games and Artifact was too much for me. I mean good lord, the main gameplay hook was that you were basically playing on three separate Hearthstone boards at once, and had to allocate resources between all three. I’m deep into Magic: The Gathering and even from the fans of arguably the most complicated major cardgame the primary reaction seemed to be “Jesus Christ this is complicated”. There was a gameplay phase which felt like it could have been cut from the game entirely, where you killed minions to get gold to buy additional cards from an in-match shop on top of “draw cards from your deck”.
You can switch Obsidian for CD Projekt Red in both heaven and hell and the joke works.
I might be missing a bit of sarcasm over the Internet, but…DOTA 2 (2013)? The most played game on Steam (often by a significant margin) for 4 years? (Currently in second place with over half a million concurrent players as I write this.) If the joke was calling that “a smaller release” then I apologize for missing it.
I wasn’t sure DOTA 2 was that late in the game, and I rarely hear it mentioned alongside other Valve releases unless it’s to compare it to something else. I am, admittedly, more console gamer, and though I game more on my PC these days it is always with a controller connected… even for shooters!
Audible gasps were heard.
Ultimately, DOTA flew by me since it’s not my sort of game, and even then, League of Legends was the game I was uninterested in that kept getting shoved into my periphery by those that played. So even if it wasn’t smaller, it certainly failed to make the same splash that Valve games typically do to the greater gaming consciousness.
Granted, I’d be surprised if there are many games capable of having that impact at all anymore, given there’s just so much out there and the audience seems to have diversified into their comfortable sub-cultures.
If you get paragon points for getting punched in the dick I’d do it.
There’s also a Renegade choice to get punched in the dick, but Shepherd yells that its all the fault of aliens.
Either way, the person doing the punching is Kai Leng.
In Heaven, it’s John Irenicus punching you in the dick, and you can punch him back.
In Hell, it’s Kai Leng, and he walks away laughing.
In wrestling, they try to punch your dick and you grab them with it and flip them on their back.
You win the internet today
In Heaven, it’s John Irenicus, and you can punch him back… and you get three different dialogue options to choose *why* you punch him back.
This is Bioware, you’ll do it regardless.
In Purgatory the games are made by Ubisoft.
Oh that’s clever. When the minimap objectives have thus been completed, a single day of eternity will have gone by.
In hell the quests are designed by bethesHEHFIHBEgzzz-C?????????????R??????I??????????T????I?????????????????C???????????????A?????????L????????????????? ???????????????M???????????E?????????M???????O????????R???????????????????Y????????????? ????????L?????????????E???????????A????????????K????????????????????
(Comment.exe has met with an unexpected but entirely surprising error. Send a report to Bethesda’s spam folder?)
Ha, I tried to creepify my text, but I like the end result too!
Something like this?
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Done with a little Python script I wrote:
https://github.com/dudecon/python/blob/main/TextOddifier.py
EDIT: Darn. Those characters get sanitized too. On the upside, I added the diacritics from https://lingojam.com/CreepyZalgoTextGenerator so the python script does those now as well as the foreign character substitutions it was doing before.
I feel there should be a version of this joke about US states, but maybe they aren’t different enough to get these kinds of stereotypes. Although I’m sure weather and scenery would make a good start.
I couldn’t tell you anything about the states except for broad political stereotypes, which is just asking for trouble.
Washington State has apples, Idaho has potatoes, Oregon has… trails? Alaska has salmon. Detroit used to have cars*. Texas has oil. New Jersey has… envy, I think.
*(I guess Detroit’s in Michigan, and I guess Michigan has lakes.)
Maine has lobsters and terrible weather?
And Nevada has casinos?
Casinos and Cacti, my new D20 pen & paper RPG.
Legalized prostitution is probably more fertile ground for derisive jokes.
California has incredible weather, and intolerable traffic.
Alaska has intolerable weather but… um… really affordable housing maybe?
Florida is stereotypically full of crazy people. )”Florida guy” meme.) But it’s a popular vacation spot. (Spring Break / Disney.)
Yeah, this is hard without poking political topics.
HAHAHA no. A family friend tried to move up here recently and couldn’t find anything under $400,000. The housing market is out of its mind.
And, potentially political.
There is interesting rumint when it comes to people moving around, but that may simply mostly be the shift to tolerance of telework.
Hearsay is that there is a correlation to some of the places where the real estate market is interesting.
It does otherwise make sense for Alaska’s real estate to get LOL. a) the oil monies going to Alaska (I think) residents. b) It probably takes a more expensive form of construction to safely cope with the weather.
I would expect size and scarcity to have a lot to do with it: Alaska is huge, so it might be easier to have a huge property, but someone will still want you to pay for that land. While it’s also much lower in population so you don’t have dense cities with the numbers to support more housing churn, leaving only so many available.
There may also be hidden costs- zomg Alaskan Wilderness tv shows I’ve seen in passing suggest that lots of people (presumably those on the big remote properties) actually use/need boats and planes and whatnot, which take a lot of fuel, as do simple off-road quality vehicles driven over long distances.
On the plus side, you get free money just for living there. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund
“Alaska: We Pay People To Live Here” is not the most inspiring state motto.
To be fair the housing market is in that state almost everywhere in the US. Lots of comparisons to 2007. It’s not hard to understand why.
In my area, for example, most houses are on the market for less than a week before going under contract. It’s becoming common for people to put in offers on houses sight unseen, forgo inspections, make cash offers, or put in offers well over asking price to get a leg up. I see a lot of this in my own neighborhood, too. I bought my house in 2016 for $132k, last year, a house down the block (of comparable size and age) sold for $180k, which is way outside the average value of houses in the neighborhood (at least for what it was back in 2016.) Other houses in the neighborhood are starting to go for $200k+. It’d be a great time to cash in on some of that equity, if you could actually find some place to live after selling.
I don’t know enough about any of this to have any helpful thoughts about WHY this is the case. I have suppositions, but that and $5 will get you a cup of coffee. But in case you were curious:
– COVID caused a lot of movement, either from people leaving cities, from people taking advantage of remote work policies, or simply from people looking to make changes in their lives (i.e. “Everything is already being turned upside down right now, so let’s just do that big thing we always talked about doing.”)
– COVID precautions/restrictions resulted in a slow down in new housing construction. Meanwhile, restrictions and stimulus/relief payments made it possible for people to pour lots of money into their homes.
– New home construction in recent years has focused on upper middle class homes, which is not necessarily the income bracket most in need of more new housing. Meanwhile, housing affordable to the lower middle class is aging enough to need very expensive repairs or updates, (My house was built in the 70s. There’s a lot of stuff that has to be replaced because things are too old for repair to be an option.)
Two main underlying drivers:
1) Low interest rates. Same issues as 2007. People buy houses based on what they can afford in monthly payment. Lower interest allows a bigger mortgage, thus higher prices.
2) Population growth without sufficient housing growth. This is very different from 2007. If you look up the vacancy data from the census office for 2021, you’ll see that (aside from COVID) it’s been in steady decline from 2008.
We’re running into the problem that the places people want to live are filled with single-family houses and not zoned to allow anything taller. More demand without supply can only lead to outbidding and shortages.
New Jersey has the Pine Barrens, a wonderful place, where nothing can possibly go wrong.
Maryland has a lot of universities and colleges, but apparently no schools where anyone has any grasp of Petroleum Engineering.
There are pretty significant differences between US states, and regions.
However, fifty is a little too many for stuff to be widely known. You generally get jokes about states that are close together, or who have extremes of different qualities.
Forex, Californians joke about California being ‘the land of fruits and nuts’, but that is not well known outside of California. It is mostly native Californians who have the background to know about the numbers of seriously mentally ill people from other states, that wound up moving to California because of climate and maybe also permissive laws. Likewise, native Californians, and also Oklahomans may be the only people who even remember the ‘special relationship’ between Californians and Oklahomans.
Another bit, those ‘Spanish’ Texans who get irritated if you ever call them Mexican. Not something you learn about growing up in South Boston.
Regions are a more reasonable number, but the full list with distinctions is an academic concern. There have been several books talking this stuff, I recall that one of the recent ones has reviews indicating that the older works are better, because the new one was by a guy who had gone round the bend, and had an axe to grind.
You do get jokes like the Yankee one. Which, very badly retold, goes something like, to foreigners, every American is a Yankee. To a Southerner, a ‘Northerner’ is a Yankee. To a ‘Northerner’, Yankees are New Englanders. Then it drills down, and the final category is defined by what kind of syrup they put on blueberry waffles in the morning.
One type of joke you see a lot, visitors from one state, in another state.
Another, labeled maps of the lower 48 states, plus Alaska and Hawaii to the side and out of scale. Like Moe Lane’s classic “causes of death that They don’t want you to know about”.
If Americans don’t like the state they live in, they move. So, they generally like where they live, and have other states that they don’t care for, partly because of customs that are not to taste. There are a fair number of grudges against other states, but rarely enough to kill over.
Why, Shortridge’s War, which resulted in the secession of South Dakota, only killed thirty seven million. (Previous sentence is completely false, and a joke.)
Anyway, Americans don’t really necessarily agree on whether the strong qualities of State X or State Y are good or bad. So, rarely will you find the consensus for A’s V, B’s W, C’s X, D’s Y, and E’s Z to work.
You do have some alignment with location and some of the lifestyle factions, enough for those jokes to have some audience. Rural/urban, political, etc. Forex, jokes about fly over country. Forex, the BLM that isn’t the Department of Interior one, in places where people care about the Department of the Interior One? Planning to ‘grow food’ in a ‘community garden’ that is dirt thrown on top of grass, with no real prep? Laughed at by serious agriculturalists. (Rural is quietly confident that if the urban BLM traveled to, say, an Indian reservation, the result would be the never solved disappearance of everyone in that BLM group. Urban BLM is strictly urban in its direct impact. Ordinary travel in isolated sparsely populated areas is dangerous enough that urban ‘idiots’ routinely wind up dead without pissing anyone off. Urban typically doesn’t absolutely need to plan to minimize the risk of vehicle breakdowns, but if you are outside the city a breakdown can kill you, because it is too far to walk.) So these jokes have an audience, but Americans are generally so polarized, at the moment, that anyone trying to be civil to more than a single group will avoid such jokes.
Shamus is trying to be civil here, to people whose opinions are not his own, in accordance with the American culture that he was raised to follow. Right or wrong, I respect the effort.
USA breaks down more by region than individual states. Maybe something like:
In heaven:
The food is Southern…
The education is East Coast…
The hospitality is Midwestern…
and the National Parks are Western.
In hell:
The food is Western…
The education is Southern…
The hospitality is East Coast…
and the National Parks are Midwestern.
(A better version of this might include West Coast, which is really a distinct region from the West)
There is actually an old joke in a similar style. “Washington is a city of Southern efficiency and Northern charm.”
With the implication the reverse would be much better.
In Heaven, Thief is made by Looking Glass Studios. In Hell, Thief is made by Eidos Montreal.
Ooh one could make a Looking Glass, Ion Storm, id Software, etc. one of these.
Or even one with the famous people from those companies who have in some cases gone on to make other games of varying quality. Carmack, Romero, Spector etc. Coded by, level design by, story by etc.
Maybe it’s just the way my tastes have evolved, but I feel like big studios are less of a factor in the landscape of modern gaming, so this kind of joke doesn’t really translate into the present day.
In the ’00s, it used to be that a couple big studios made a significant chunk of the games that everyone played, so jokes about the proclivities of the various studios worked really well. And it’s not like most of those studios have gone away, but with the indie game boom and the general slower pace of development of AAA games, they’re just a lot> less relevant.
Of the developers listed in the comic, I’ve played (having started gaming a bit before the turn of the millennium):
1 game by Obsidian (KotOR2, which I loved)
1 game by Bioware (KotOR, which I borrowed from a friend and which crashed every 2-5 minutes throughout the entire game*, so any memories I have of it are…colored, let’s say)
0 games by Square Enix (that I know of)
6 games by Valve (HL2 + episodes [counting those as separate games], TF2, Portal 1 & 2)
0 games by Capcom
Though I still find the joke funny, because you don’t have to be familiar with the subjects to get the intent (the writing in each panel helps a lot).
*Except the underwater sections on Manaan, where it crashed about every 10 seconds, and no, I wish that was hyperbole.
I just find the big studios have gotten more and more homogeneous, while at the same time absorbing most of the middle-sized studios that would otherwise have distinct identities and be recognizable. Used to be EA made sports games, killed beloved studios, and had awful DLC practices, Ubisoft had insanely long-running francises and released them unfinished, and Activision made yearly Call of Duty, which was enough to get the Internet angry at them. Nowadays they’ve all sort of evolved to do all of the same things, check-list franchised open world games with DLC just not bad enough not to get people mad. There’s not really a distinctly EA thing that some other big studio doesn’t do.
And then the mid-range studios which would usually have distinct personalities (BioWare style RPGs, Bullfrog style sims, Insomniac style action games…) have all either been absorbed by a bigger publisher ala BioWare being eaten by EA (or even Bethesda being eaten by Microsoft now!). You sort of still have CDProjekt in that space (which is morphing into a big publisher), but most of the dev teams that are distinctly doing their own thing have become part of the nameless indie hordes. If I bring up The Game Bakers or Fulbright or Hanako Games (which are all among the more well-known studios in this sort of weightclass) there’s a decent chance you might know who I’m talking about, but there’s also a decent chance you don’t, even in a place for game enthusiasts. That wasn’t the case 10 or even 5 years ago – anyone on a random forum would understand if I cracked a joke about BioWare or CD Projekt or Insomniac or Pandemic.
It’s a weird case of the big players’ space getting way more homogeneous and the little players’ space getting way more heterogeneous in a way that’s not conducive to making fun of either end.
I agree with your analysis.
It’s almost hard to remember a time when such aspects of gaming culture had so many distinct, recognisable, commonly-understood forms. We still have a few these days; everyone understands that an Ubi-game is going to have a big map covered in icon-vomit, Nintendo make great games but would rather be making weird toys, Valve make great games but would rather be making money from Steam. But there are less pegs to hang a joke like this on.
Activision hasn’t evolved to make check-list franchised open world games. Activision has evolved to make literally nothing but Call of Duty.
As embarrassing as it sounds, even though I loved Furi, and kinda liked Gone Home, I didn’t recognise the names Game Bakers and Fullbright. The only indie developers I recognise by name are Supergiant and Devolver. And Devolver aren’t even a dev – they’re a publisher!
I guess with so many games on the market, it’s really, really difficult for an indie to distinguish themselves. The only reason I can recognise the likes of Devolver, Supergiant, or Jon Blow is because they were there when the Indie Revolution started.
Not sure if it was mentioned already but the original comics are still available via archive.org.
Only tangentially related, but the best-of links led to me browsing some stuff from the archives, and I found what must be the most inaccurately titled page on the whole site.
Hahaha
I was just thinking about this strip a few days ago, what a coincidence!
It’s funny to think about the turnaround Capcom have made since the early 2010s when they couldn’t stop releasing duds to appeal to westerners. Now most of their releases seem to be acclaimed hits like the new Monster Hunter Rise, Resident Evil 7 and 8 and Devil May Cry 5
The comments are still there. Just click “view forum comments.” There’s 11 pages. Some of them are missing due to a bug from the migration that caused posts by banned users to be misattributed, so they were just deleted.
Thought of one that I’m sure will offend nobody:
In heaven, the operating system has the games compatibility of Windows, the design aesthetic of MacOS, and the stability of Linux.
In hell, the operating system has the games compatibility of MacOS, the design aesthetic of Linux, and the stability of Windows. (And the mandatory updates. And the forced restarts. And…)
I thought they used FreeBSD in hell?
It’s true! Checkout the mascot and also the games compatibility is worse than that of MacOS…
And it throws processes in jail!
At least it has ZFS.
I was trying to think of a way to include FreeBSD, but don’t know enough about it to come up with a fourth category.
If we’re doing ones that will surely offend nobody:
In heaven, the pets have the friendliness of dogs, the loyalty of dogs, the intelligence of dogs and the cuteness of dogs.
In hell, the pets have the friendliness of cats, the loyalty of cats, the intelligence of cats and the cuteness of cats.
Hang on a second…
In heaven:
– Games are published by Microsoft.
– The distribution is managed by Valve.
– The copyright protection is done by CD Projekt Red.
– The studios are managed by Ubisoft.
In hell:
– Games should have been published by Valve.
– The distribution is managed by Microsoft.
– The copyright protection is done by Ubisoft.
– The studios are managed by CD Projekt Red.
Hi Mister young, How can I reach out and have the chance to talk to ya? I’d be very happy to have your email address. thank you sir.
In the header image for the diecast, you’ll find an email that goes to me:
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/images/diecast_2022.jpg
I realize that’s a bit roundabout. I should add a “contact me” page one of these days.
There is also an e-mail address on the about page. Is that one still active as well?
Oh man. It SHOULD be, although now that you mention it… I haven’t gotten anything through that address in ages.
I’ll run some tests and see what’s what.
Well shit.
That address still works, but it got disconnected from my catch-all address and is now filled with 48MB of spam. So, yes. That address still works. But you might not want to send anything to it today.
Fun fact:
* My personal email gets lots of weight loss and get-rich-quick spam.
* The Diecast gets lots of “[attribute] ladies want to meet YOU tonight!”
You’d think both emails would get the same sort of crap, but no. I can tell which inbox I’m looking at by just looking at the subject titles. Weird.
Oh dear, I send an e-mail to that address last Sunday. I signed with my real name, pseudonym and used the e-mail address I use for comments here. It should be easy to find with search.
I can resend it to the diecast, if you prefer that.
No worries. I got it. Thanks.
On one of my old addresses I kept getting spam for athlete’s foot treatments for some reason. I didn’t know that was something people buy sketchy medicine for.
Are you still checking your gmail address? The one you used when I was testing the Mess Effect epub.
I’ve recently sent another e-mail to it. Not really important anymore, though. Your YouTube impersonator moved on to impersonating someone else. And I don’t think he’d have fooled anyone.