Recent reviews by Salty Spitoon

Actually great. Wish they would polish this up and release it.

Excellent and informative. I had tears in my eyes. "The question is, is this the end of history or its start?" Half-Earth Socialism expands our notions of what is possible and reminds us that there is no fate but what we make.

Most flaws are actually features - it's hard (impossible?) to win without veganism, some ideas barely do anything (sorry, rotational grazing), and the people will kill you even if you're on a path to a no-warming utopia because they don't like their present conditions.

The biggest actual flaw is lack of polish, but the game is incredibly polished. There are some quirks and possible outright bugs (production shortages appeared to be *adding* satisfaction). But it's extremely playable.

I wish it had mod support to add new solutions. I also want to tweak the beliefs feeding into the model. That speaks to another issue - the game is very entertaining, but at times I wish it was just a flowchart + spreadsheet, with all the mystery removed. It can be hard to juggle the 6 resources and the 4 currencies, and the game doesn't always show a clear cause and effect, though it does admirably most of the time. Apparently it makes green hydrogen look on par with the less-clean grey and blue hydrogen, when the game and scientists agree that it's better.

It was hard learning the game at the start. I didn't understand how political capital related to contentedness. These are two discrete currencies, though contentedness earns political capital. Basically, completed projects gain some political capital but might cost contentedness if they are unpopular (vegan mandate, ban cars). Until they are completed, you don't get anything - so if you overspend early, the people may assassinate you before your utopia is reached and they see the benefits. You have to keep contentedness constant or rising to earn a political capital bonus on it.

You spend political capital on initiatives, ranging from technology, infrastructure, and social projects. The social projects cost the most capital, with highly contentious projects like a 1-child policy or adding iron to the oceans costing more than a vegan curriculum or composting. The game takes place in a post-revolution socialist world, but I still feel the cheap cost of the curricula might be too optimistic. Although you have to admit that educating children the right way is much easier than teaching old dogs new tricks. (If we all got vegan propaganda from birth, we would not eat as much meat.)

The developers are more fair to their ideological opponents than most. I think they give most ideas about 80% of their best-faith projections for their success. I.e., there's no world where rotational grazing stops climate change, but a 1-child policy and keeping the Global South poor might actually reduce consumption at the expense of morality. The authors don't agree with these policies but they've included them as real, fair options in their game.

At worst though, you can feel railroaded. I can only ever win with veganism, but I eat meat in real life. It's hard for me to imagine a vegan world without artificial substitutes. I would have liked to see an option between "flexitarian" (cut animal calories by 20%) and "vegetarian" (cut animal calories by 60-70%). Also, I don't agree with a 1-child mandate for the world, but I'm open to it in areas with high consumption (USA, Europe, developed parts of Asia). The authors stake a moral claim in favor of veganism and non-human animals (and they make it known several times in the game), but don't seem to care much about the children born today into awful lives. Half-Earth Socialism takes place post-revolution in what appears to be a transitional state from capitalism into an equal communist society, as Marx predicted. From events in the game and context (wildfires, flooding) it seems that a child born in today's poorest areas will still suffer even in the game's post-revolution world... until the player cleans up 10-40 years after 2022.

I don't want to run down my list of how I'd achieve utopia, but another example is a transition to pedestrian-friendly cities and mass transit. This costs a lot of political capital and provides only twice the contentedness as better recycling and litter control. I would have liked to see this come in stages to provide partial emissions benefits every 5 years (20 -> 60 -> 90% emissions reduction).

I did a casual run of the game and got shot in 2035. My next run was nearly a win, getting to +1.1C by 2080. But at the end of my tenure I had not gotten the temperature below 1.0C. This was frustrating, especially my end message being "failed to make the world a better place in time". But I finally got down to +0.9C with negative 60 Gigatons of Carbon per year and a mass utopia. Unsurprisingly, successes and failures compound - you want to invest early in preventing consumption and green energy. It's impossible to catch up if you're only getting serious in 2050. You win in the game by doing what we need to do in real life.

The aesthetic is awesome. The graphics have a dithered early-90s computer / zine look. The political parties are represented by genderless sleek human faces, with touches evocative of the party. (I.e. the Global South-loving Fanonist wears a hat reminiscent of Fidel Castro). You select policies by dragging cards to a scanner. The music is good too, though I turned it off after an hour or two because there's only 2ish tracks in the main gameplay (possibly a third at the ending).

I wish there was a paid DLC or something (possibly with an e-book) so they could give you Steam backgrounds to evangelize the game.

Overall, it's addictive and starts a conversation. I'm going to get the companion book from my local library, where I assume the arguments of the game are fleshed out with citations. The left does not have a vision of utopia, but the right does. The game and book aim to correct that balance, and they have succeeded beyond anyone's expectations.

I'm actually on the far left and want nothing to do with most of the people complaining about the recent changes. But the stated rationale for desexualizing characters is incoherent. There's no reason some aspects are still in the game while others were removed. The devs assume the only people who like sexualized women are straight men.

I'm not big on the nazi removals, just because I think the original designs were meant to tell a story. However I take no issue with removing the single bit of fanart that went down the "nazis are sexy" route. In 2012, nazis were a joke, but they have been organizing in ways not seen since the 40s. I would have liked to see it replaced with some other fanart, to avoid feeling like the devs are making the game I bought less valuable. The other fanart removals make no sense to me.

The devs likewise assume that fiction with power dynamics is wrong/perverted. There's a difference between fantasy and real life, and I don't appreciate the developer going out of its way to demonize completely fake interactions between demon women. Now I know immobilizing someone except for their mouth is wrong, thanks to Skullgirls. Always leave their eyes unobstructed to remember the human as you're dominating them. The devs have also implied that any interaction with nonconsensual sexual contact cannot be depicted in fiction, which is just silly. The people doing it are shown in the story mode to be incorrect, so I don't understand why that now needs to be cleaned up.

Overall, the devs did not do a good job explaining themselves, because if they did, people would call them out even more for their inconsistency and poor logic. If the changes were good, they should have been able to show a side by side and explain the harm done by the old art. If they had done that, there wouldn't be a problem with e.g. making the beatdown art less racially charged. The logic would collapse on stuff like changing the panties of a character arbitrarily chosen to be 16. If I were making that game, I might opt to make her 18. I don't understand how they can draw frame by frame fighting animations for a busty 16 year old with constant panty shots then call me perverted for buying the game without even knowing she was in there or she was 16. The best defense is that the people making those decisions are not at the company anymore, but that just gives more reason to make two versions of the game.

Who is this for? Are women saved by this? Are we saving the children? Skullgirls, with its huge cast of empowered women, would not be the first fighting game I take to task for misogyny. And fighting games in Japan have no issue with under-18 characters. What's the positive outcome of removing this stuff after it's been out for a decade? If you're a real perv, you can just get an old version of the game.

Because of all this, I'm think they're not done making changes, and more and more of the delightful edge of Skullgirls will be removed. I did buy the game, and I don't like my games crumbling in my hands. If they want to make the current version the canonical tournament edition, I'm fine with that, but I don't get why they couldn't have left the old version available to existing owners and made the new one the version of record. They also could have made the old version a "beta branch" like some games do.

The Iceborne dlc starts after the main game (50-100 hours according to HLTB). So by expected value, if you think there's <50% chance of beating the main game, the discount must be >50% to compensate your risk. Example: you might not hitchhike across the US for $20, but you might do it for a billion. I hope I someday finish Monster Hunter World and get to play this, but I got a bad deal. You pay $10 for Iceborne as part of Digital Deluxe, or $20 if you buy it standalone. I think there's a >50% chance I don't beat MHW, like the rest of my library. The 50% discount is too small.

I feel like I'm missing something. The grinding, knocking out cars, and driving all don't seem to fit together. The driving is especially a disappointment; I'd rather play Outrun, Burnout Paradise, Crash Team Racing, Mario Kart Wii, etc. It took me a while to figure out the timing on killing cars but even then I didn't find the depth.

Look up CAWTHON, SCOTT SALADO on OpenSecrets and realize that this guy saw four years of that Republican clown and wanted more. He's a die hard right wing enabler and should be avoided. This game is free, but don't buy his other stuff.

Gets way closer to the Super Monkey Ball experience than it has any right to.

Halo 2 improved on Halo 1 a lot. Halo 3 sort of splits the difference. The missions are much better than 1, mostly, but the last 2 missions are callbacks to Halo 1 in the worst way. Graphics are much improved from un-remastered Halo 1 and 2, but Halo 3 can't break out of the failures of the entire franchise. Everything about it is kind of blah. The story is nonsense yet takes itself very seriously. They think they're so clever with twist #10 when twists 1-9 were exactly the same. Keep a running count of how many antagonists there are in the series. Nobody in the entire franchise has ever been on an airship that landed safely.

I'm sure these were great games in their day. Though sacrilegious, 343 would've been wise to make a "best of" or "abridged" playlist for these games. 9 missions in Halo 3 and the last 2 just tanked my enjoyment and tinted my opinion of the entire game. Looking back the biggest difference from a modern game is the length. Be more judicious with cuts and the problems are less apparent. There are definitely moments, missions, and plotpoints that work, but they're usually bookended with absolute garbage and nonsense dialog.

Also, I have to say Cortana and the rampancy subplot is one of the worst sci-fi plots/subplots I've ever seen. It's embarrassing and bad, and it appears in half of the missions. By design, it takes you out of gameplay for some crap that the writers thought was profound.

If Halo embraced its B-movie nature it could be an enjoyable shooting gallery. But it gets so up its own ass so often I can't handle it.

This hurts to write. I've been following the development for years. The devs gave lip service to Endless Ocean so I was hoping for another game in that style. But Beyond Blue is shamelessly, emphatically realistic. Here in reality, the oceans are ****ed. The game takes great pains to let you know how bad they are. The documentary film clips are breathtaking. Parts of the game are good too. But the story is very restrictive, and layers the sad story of the oceans with the sad story of the main character.

(I actually have another 2 unrecorded hours of playtime that I played offline.)

Slightly janky. The first 6ish missions at the first dive site, and the first mission of the second dive site is just fetch quests. You go to a location, interact with an object, and go back to your mission giver. (You can teleport back).

Would be nice if the devs unlocked the whole game instead of making me slog through it. Something tells me they are never opening up the real money store again. Is there even enough money in the game to buy everything?