Granted, but now some of your dearest people in life are afraid of you.

I wish I could learn things effortlessly.

I always wanted to write a blog article about how GTA Online was obviously meant to be a completely different (and really awesome) game before it launched, but bad decisions turned it into the mess it is today.

I believe that originally it was supposed to have much more of an emphasis on building a criminal empire, role-playing, and making both low life and high life characters viable and fun in their own way, but the cash shop, free things you got with every DLC, and constant power creep ruined it. Originally you had a story line, and contact missions, and it was very much aimed at asymmetric multiplayer -- some people were supposed to be high-risk-high-reward, and others would do the ground action.

Just rewatch the original trailers and you can clearly see that they wanted you to be able to show off in front of people without getting shot. They wanted you to build a crew which was more than just a glorified friendship request, but an actual gang with its emblem and rank system. Killing a high level player would make you a mark on their allies' heads, stuff like that. Originally, weapons were rank locked, so going against a high level crew of three people would be a death sentence even if you had like three low level people on your side, since all you could afford were old cars and simple pistols. But the free DLC weapons always stacked so the rank system was completely meaningless. There was so much potential but they squandered it at key points until it was already locked in as a griefers' mayhem open world.

Theatre

05th of September, 2022

Bohren & der Club of Gore: Dead End Angels (Doom Jazz)

Billard

Okay your GTA take I have to disagree with.

I think GTA V had terrible writing overall, including Micheal and Franklin, but at least the two were likeable. It felt like Trevor was only there to appeal to people who still think random and edgy equals funny. Michael and Franklin both didn't really feel like they had any story worth telling though, or at least it wasn't pulled through all the way. Franklin's story for example was getting out of the hood and into the high life, but it kind of happened a fifth into the game and after that he was basically only the son of Michael without any character development or purpose. I wish they explored more of his hood life, also as a nod to San Andreas fans like me. Franklin was the most likable of all characters, though.

Michael had a decent backstory but I thought he was an abusive dad and husband in a way that was clearly intended to be funny to the gamers playing it. He was written as a misogynist aggressive and abusive wife beater, but not as a troubled protagonist of a crime drama, but as a way to point and say "wow, finally someone showed that bitch!" when he did something fucked up. Overall, the entire game has a very mean spirited and unrelatable way of handling narratives and "satire", which only culminated in the bigotry.

Apologists online always say that the GTA games have always been satire and made fun of everyone, but they either did that in a way of poking fun at things that deserve to be poked fun at (NRA parodies, police brutality, Scientology, American nationalist fanaticism), are entirely harmless (69 jokes, the anime parodies, the entire GTA 4 internet jokes), or are clearly written to be the opinion of a character who is wrong (sexism or racism from various characters throughout the series). GTA V however wrote their satire very obviously to make people agree with it, albeit through exaggeration. They wrote trans women as tall hairy crossdressing sex-obsessed men, not as an isolated opinion of a character but as a statement by the devs "hey, laugh at them". They wrote Michael being abusive to his daughter and favoring his son not as a way of showing he is a bitter old man who hates his family but for you to agree with him that his daughter deserved being physically assaulted for... participating in a TV show and having a boyfriend. And when she is upset, it is played for laughs. Even in a game where you go around committing felonies and murdering people left and right, there is a difference between pandering to gamers who want to see their bigoted world view confirmed in their games, and portraying things no rational human being has a different opinion over (e.g. murder).
And the less said about Trevor the better.

The story was meh. You spent most of your time obsessing over things the three-letter-agencies did, without you ever feeling like a criminal building a criminal empire. You always felt like the lackey of some FIB or CAA dude, not in control of your own narrative. In general, it was far too clean and upper class for my taste. Where's the mafia? Where's gangs? Where's any kind of organized crime beyond one or two forgettable antagonists who only showed up for like two missions? All of the game was fetching favors for government agencies, doing some heists, and in the end killing off everyone as if we remembered any of the people. The entire game kind of felt soulless like that to me. The layout of the map made it so every single area had some highway through it, so you never truly felt lost or in the wilderness. The "rural" towns felt like afterthoughts, which I hated. It felt unfinished, the satire bleak, and none of the characters felt like real people; all felt like caricatures. Hated the game. They even dumbed down the driving, ragdoll and shooting physics!

GTA IV however was a masterpiece. It was a classic GTA story the way it should be: starting off with nothing, working your way up the ladder, betraying and being betrayed, until you're the kingpin of the criminal world. Niko felt like a real person in that he struggled with emotions, anxiety, family. He starts off wearing trashy clothing working for a sexist mid-tier Russian mob and ends up in a suit with a machine gun in his hand running the town. The car designs weren't as clean and sterilized like in V, instead we had the real dirt and grime of Liberty City right at our fingertips. Throwing in windows, picking up trash and bricks, smoking packs. I only wish the game had a bit more of a rural area, a slightly bigger map, less muddy graphics and some side activities like in San Andreas.
IV was, in my opinion, only rivalled by said San Andreas.

San Andreas had a lovable cast of characters and I'm just a sucker for gang related narratives. I thought the map was absolutely beautiful with its art style, and it was absolutely amazing how it was constructed that despite being smaller than just GTA V's Los Santos, you felt like you were MILES away from civilization when you were out in Red County. The tiny towns with the backwater places were a wonderful contrast to Los Santos' detailed streets. They let me down a bit in San Fierro and Las Venturas, but those are details. The atmosphere -- again, beautiful. You had the trashy areas with all their grime and dirt, the rundown fast food places, but you also had towns like Palomino Creek or Montgomery, where you felt like you were in backwater OC. I spent days just exploring the map when I was young, role-playing being a sheriff in Bone County, feeling so far away from civilization. What they did with forced perspective and road layouts was absolutely insane.
I thought it was extremely satisfying to get expelled from the city, work your way up in the country and become a completely different person, and then coming back and systematically taking back the entire metropolis block by block. I felt like I was actually part of a movement in that game, even if it was "only" a gang. I cared for the Grove St. crews and CJ. You could genuinely feel your increase in power from the beginning where you just got a little piece off Emmet's to the end where you literally got a jetpack and rocket launchers and whatnot sporting a suit and a pimped out sports car killing off the people who supply your streets with dope. It was really, really fun.

kvlt

heavy

I have been in correspondence with the developer of wApua and reported a general bug (the one with valid DTDs not being accepted correctly). A new version is hence inbound! Also made him aware of our little hobby community here so perhaps there will be more features in the future? Who knows!

Body

Heade

I totally thought that "smeet" stood for "smelly feet".

But looking back on it now, I can see how the story very much had that patented ubisoft performative activism.

Thing is, I genuinely think that the people working on these games wrote a love letter to hacker culture and unlawful political activism through that, and there are more than a few subtler references to the subculture behind it all. Not just hackers, but the main cast was very reminiscent of who you would meet in a modern, say, somewhat mainstream socialist youth organization in the USA. Of course it's not actually revolutionary theory and practice, but hey, it's a video game and what they did is radical enough especially for 2016.

I sincerely believe the devs and the little guys involved in the work, in that they genuinely wanted this game to have a message. The artists, the writers, the lore people. I bet the weird change in political direction in Legion was 100% a marketing thing after the lukewarm reception of WD_2, and because Ubisoft Montreal made WD_2 while Ubisoft Toronto made WD_L, the latter being more conservative anyway.

Unfortunately, but somewhat ironically, none of the sites we build here are accessible by actual mobile WML browsers since they only support HTTP, not HTTPS. Just tried opening Cobra's website with my Nokia 6500 slide, and it doesn't know the SSL standard yet.

i spent two hours just now making libre.town somewhat usable on mobile

It was not that hard, honestly.