{"id":54175,"date":"2022-04-05T06:00:19","date_gmt":"2022-04-05T10:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=54175"},"modified":"2022-04-10T18:52:41","modified_gmt":"2022-04-10T22:52:41","slug":"gaming-afterlife","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=54175","title":{"rendered":"Stolen Pixels #241: Gaming Afterlife"},"content":{"rendered":"

This comic appeared on the Escapist way back in November 2010. Unlike most of my old comics, this one is still sort of visible<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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The original text was as follows:
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Yes, I realize that BioWare made both lists. For the same thing. If you\u2019ve ever played a BioWare game, then you know what I\u2019m talking about.<\/p>\n

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><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never been to Europe, so for me the joke is as true as the European stereotypes on which it\u2019s based. But I like the symmetry of it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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?<\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

This joke was actually quite a puzzle to put together. To assemble the joke, we need:<\/p>\n

    \n
  • 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.<\/li>\n
  • Five high-profile developers.<\/li>\n
  • Each developer must plausibly serve as the pinnacle of one category and then be infamously bad at another.<\/li>\n
  • The five developers must cover all five categories in both the best and worst lists.<\/li>\n
  • 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.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54175"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54221,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54175\/revisions\/54221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}