Total Playtime: Extremely Online Beef People
Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them and we'll be posting new episodes each week.
It is once again time for Total Playtime, which this week sees Alice, Brendy and myself gather to pick over the major news topics of the moment: AI-based hardware shortages, the ongoing mishaps of Highguard, and the political implications of asking a lot of people to make cat noises. I must warn you that this is preceded by a lengthy preamble on parents injuring themselves, the absolute bullshit that is being middle-aged, and Big Pharma's devious attempts to distract you from the altogether more affordable health solutions of Medium Bee.
These matters dealt with, we can move on the major issues. First up: the insatiable demand for vibe coding, fake girlfriends and plagiarism is sucking all the RAM out of the market and that problem is spreading from PCs to consoles and also everything else, because everything has a memory chip in it now because how can it possibly show you targeted advertising without one. The future: indisputably a mistake, but we are here now and must make do, possibly by RETVRNing to the backlog where system requirements are lower.
In other news, the developer of Highguard had to lay off staff and one of them posted on Twitter about it, which besides being a terrible idea just in general also revealed that internal playtesting suggested the game would be a hit. This reflects a problem that has persisted since the first group creative enterprise, viz. you can't reliably judge your own output and should get somebody else to sense-check it for you. It is not known if Wildlight skipped this step or simply got an insufficiantly miserable bastard to issue judgement, but either way lots of people got laid off and nobody is happy, which continues to be the enduring games industry vibe.
The other issue of the moment is Mewgenics and its baffling cast list, which stretches from dank-meme shitpost icons through to broadly popular Youtubers, the lead singer of Weezer and Bobcat Goldthwaite. Edmund McMillen has attempted to justify this to RPS and Alice is of the firm opinion that he shouldn't have, and her attempts to explain why demonstrate the impossibility of describing extremely online culture to anybody who doesn't know what 4chan is. Still, at least festering videogames culture war bullshit will never break out into global politi-presses finger to ear you know what, never mind.
We have at least played some videogames this week, though, so there's a brief discussion of South of Midnight and and even briefer one of Relooted that means we once again scrape into qualifying for the Gaming category on iTunes for another week. Maybe this Jank partnership is going to be good for us.
You can listen to the episode via the embed above or this link here. You can subscribe via the links below, where you'll also find all previous episodes.
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/total-playtime/id1790845149
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1jPv8y9BRzqATFT7zXRxKW
RSS: https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/6786cf573ceecdbe85eac067
Acast: https://shows.acast.com/total-playtime
The art is by Marsh Davies, the music is by God Ribbon and the entire podcast is by the generosity of our Patreon backers. You can send feedback and additional conspiracy theories to totalplaytimepod@gmail.com.
Links!
AI is eating all the RAM. Component shortages are coming for routers. If you want to read 10,000 words about OpenAI being a scam then Ed Z has you covered. Rob Fahey on how consoles left families behind. Lots of Highguard devs got laid off. Do not post on X. Some industry lessons from the Highguard launch, one of which is that the world can change a lot over the course of a game's development. There are some wildly disparate voice actors in Mewgenics and Edmund McMillen swears that's intentional. He also went on Post Games.
Games!
Mewgenics. Super Meat Boy. Relooted. South of Midnight.
Recommendations!
Glen Baxter. This game engine is from the 90s. Columbo is on Channel 5 in the UK and a number of episodes are up on YouTube.
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