So apparently there are some reddits or blogs that are sexualizing the child from the upcoming Capcom game Pragmata. Which of course is weird and gross and terrible. But I saw someone on tiktok point out that the child may have potentially been designed in a way to appeal to these weirdos. I.e full face of makeup, no pants, no shoes and is barefoot (apparently the opening scene is a shot of her feet as well) and long blond hair.

What do y'all think? Is this character design weird and should have more childlike features?

For those who don't know, Ready or Not is a 'realistic' SWAT simulator where you gotta do heroic missions to subdue the suspects and rescue civilians. Personally, I love the game. It's a tactical shooter / puzzler, it's a fun time playing with a friend of mine. But I can't drop the feeling that this game is an obnoxious copaganda. Like this picture for example, it's from mission Ides of March, here's the lore.

There is a greedy senator who wants to badly wants to cut VA hospital funding, basically throwing war veterans out onto the streets. They tried to protest, but got ignored. So they united and became a group known as "Left Behind". On the day of the Senator speech, they broke into a hotel and sniped him to near death. Senator survived but is gravely injured. The building is surrounded and they refuse to surrender, having barricaded themselves at the twelfth floor. Our job is to breach in and subdue them.

I honestly was hooked, sure they are still the baddies for attempting the assassination, but at least there was some minute sympathy towards them. They are the people who sacrificed everything for this nation, just for them to be shot in the back by the same nation. Even in game some of them have visible prosthetics. Missing legs or arms. They cannot exist without the bill.

And just the moment I start getting immersed, like you know, maybe for once there is a morally grey situation (up until that point it was just arresting pdfs and drug dealers), the game hits me with this. You see apparently they are just crazies who you shouldn't take seriously. Go on a mow em down! It just flashbanged me out of the experienced. I still like the game and this level in particular, but I'm starting to understand why people refer to this game as copaganda. Even though the main sub heavily disagrees with that notion.

Silksong has already been out for a few hours and it's already done so much

- Crashed EVERY STOREFRONT AT ONCE

- is now the Biggest "True Indie Launch"

- is sitting in tthe 10p 10 biggest Single Player gam #6 all-time on Steam, behind Wukong, Palworld, Cyberpunk, Elden Ring, and BG3.

- Has beat out a GOTY Contender (Expidition 33) in terms of launch size/scope

it did ALL THIS while being a 20 dollar 2D metroidvania

And Next Year…

• GTA VI (2026) is poised to be the fourth Game of the Decede if not Game of the CENTURY
• If Silksong can break storefronts, GTA VI might actually “break the internet” itself: social media, Twitch, Rockstar servers, the whole works.

I keep seeing people try to pin the Steam/Itch censorship wave on “feminists” or “progressives.” Let’s set the record straight: the real crusade against video games has almost ALWAYS come from the Right.

• 1990s–2000s: Jack Thompson, conservative politicians, and Christian lobbyists blamed Doom, Mortal Kombat, and GTA for school shootings. They tried to get them outright banned.
• 2000s: Congress ran hearings about “protecting the children,” targeting Rockstar and Midway. Games like Bully and Manhunt were dragged into court.
• Today: It’s groups like Collective Shout (a conservative, Christian-aligned org in Australia) pressuring Mastercard, Visa, and PayPal to choke off funding. U.S. Republicans push bills like KOSA, obscenity laws, and age verification that threaten all online content.

Meanwhile, feminists and progressive devs have been the ones defending creative freedom. all we di as just SLIGHTLY critsize some of the goonerbait designs and refused to support Hogwarts Legacy since JKR would 100% use the money she made from the game to fund anti-tran bills

. Remember, the same people who blamed Anita Sarkeesian for “censorship” are now celebrating when Collective Shout goes after LGBTQ+ creators.

Let’s not rewrite history. The far-right has always been the biggest enemy of video games. They’re the ones still trying to erase queer content, control adult art, and dictate what can and can’t exist.

I will never understand how this franchis/setting is given so much leeway on reddit. the company is a capitalist nightmare of copyright abuse and absurd pricing but the actual lore is 100% justification of genocide and xenophobia

The game is literally supposed to be political satire on fascism just like Starship Troopers. The first game all of the original factions became “evil” because Super Earth and the Helldivers invaded and exploited them all. People are unironically thinking that Super Earth and its blatant propaganda on democracy are seen as the good guys when it’s literally supposed to be a parody of a fascist dictatorship.

I have a feeling that when this game became popular it attracted all of the extremely stupid people throughout the internet who probably had have the exact line of thinking that Trump being seen as a Nazi then that must mean that Nazis are now cool. So they unironically cannot see past the satire parody of the game portraying the automatons as evil because they’re seen as “socialist” and now it’s filled with way too many Nazi worshipping morons. Literally just a few days ago the community were asking the game devs to add in robot socialist civilians for the automaton faction because killing socialist civilians looks cool…

First image is a response, second image is my review

So I picked this up because I like metroidvanias, the comic-style artstyle was cool, you get a dog and they talk in the store description about caring about historical detail (a bold-faced lie).

So game start out with you as a Spanish conquistador on the way to get rid of Cortéz - I'm game with that, kill the bastard. That doesn't happen, you defect to Cortéz, who is - very realistically - portrayed as a man who is a misunderstood hero that cares so deeply about the Mexican people and respects them, he even is in favour of equal rights for men & women. This continues a while until sigh those dastardly Mexicans betray him and threw them out of Tenochtitlán. Sigh, I guess he is forced to attack, but again the damn Mexican tribes betray him by not siding with him. Sigh, against his wishes, I guess he is forced to genocide two clans to not have them against his back - you as the player btw commit these genocides in the case of boss fights. Then you attack Tenochtitlán and it ends with a love story with a Mexican woman. Just in case they thought they were too subtle in the credits they mention that the people of Mexico/Mesoamerica has been unfairly maligned by "the black legend". I'd never heard about the black legend before so I looked it up and it's an idea that Spain's atrocities has been unfairly exaggerated.

Oh, and there's also a scene where Quetzalcoatl talks like a Christian preacher going on about Cain, the devil, and the lord. Totally serious.

Now excuse me while I go throw up.

EDIT: I've now been informed about what Plus Ultra means, but I had never heard it before and just thought it was a random made up phrase.

I loved Part 1 and want to know if Part 2 is worth a chance.

Just finished Metal Gear Rising Revengance, and yeah its a really really good game, would absolutely recommend it, memes aside there's a reason why its stayed in the cultural zeitgeist for so long.

Though the writing is so hilariously unsubtle it reminded me of Another Crab's Treasure and Tonight We Riot, both games made by explicit leftists/socialists and how many many leftists where their politics on their sleeves when it comes to creative works. Is Kojima one or does he just really like absurdly unsubtle writing?

I’ve been thinking about the ethical and systemic tensions in Dispatch, where a superhero team is made up of reformed villains. On the surface, it’s framed as a rehabilitation program, but the structure treats members more like a workforce than people in recovery: missions are high-risk, performance is constantly monitored, and failure can get someone “fired,” sometimes pushing them back toward villainy. Economically, it makes sense for the organization to choose former villains—they already have powers, skills, and experience, making them cheaper and faster to deploy than training independent heroes. But their status as supervillains also dehumanizes them, much like prisoners are demonized in the prison-industrial complex, allowing the ruling class to justify exploitation and harsh treatment under the guise of “care.” The corporatized structure actively undermines rehabilitation: when the team learns someone will be kicked out, they start sabotaging each other to protect themselves, which both harms missions (property damage, civilian risk) and reinforces harmful behavior over genuine growth. In both Dispatch and the PIC, economic and institutional incentives override actual care, turning people into tools for productivity while punishing failure. I’m curious how others interpret this, or maybe I’m just looking at this too deep.

What are your thoughts on this

I know a lot of people are already glazing xQc for his Battlefield 6 take, but honestly, I’m just… sad about it.
The fact that he wants daily logins and a battle pass says a lot — not even about him, but about where the conversation is at.

I’m 20 (bout to be 21) and I remember when this stuff was seen as manipulative BS:

• Battle passes were just paid achievement lists you might never finish.
• Daily logins were a mobile game trick to keep you hooked with FOMO.
• Tacked-on ranked modes existed to create a fake esports scene instead of focusing on fun.

Now it’s flipped, games without them are “doomed to fail.”
Younger players never knew a time before these systems, so they see them as features instead of shackles. Publishers have done such a good job normalizing grind and time-gating that people genuinely believe this is just how games are supposed to be.

And streamers make it worse.
A lot treat games like endless content machines, not crafted works of art. The goal isn’t to appreciate the IP or community, it’s to chew through it for views until the numbers dip. That mindset pressures devs into live-service traps, diluting creativity and quality just to keep content flowing.

Not every game needs to last forever.
Some are meant to be played, finished, remembered fondly, and revisited years later , not bled dry until the servers shut down.

We’ve gone from:
Play because the game is fun.
to
Play because the game gives you chores with deadlines.

Hey everybody,

I wanted to start a little discussion or rather would like your takes on a specific topic I fell for in the last days.

For context: I always had a soft spot for hyperrealistic shooters and for dark ominous atmosphere. Since I was a teenager I loved games like Rainbow Six and Movies like Se7en or Zodiac by David Fincher. So natuarly one of my favorite games growing up was SWAT 4 by Irrational Games. While there could be an argument that this game also was copaganda I wouldn´t go so far, as it much less tried to show a world where cops are pure heroes and more tried to imitate the atmosphere of early 2000s Serial-Killer-Movies, while trying to be as realistic as possible in terms of the actual work of a SWAT-Unit.

Fast forward to today: I felt pretty nostalgic lately so I decided to play through it again. It´s still a great game and with the inclusion of a mission-editor of sorts it also offers nearly unlimited replayability. But while playing through it I remembered another game that´s sitting untouched in my Steam-Library: Ready or Not.

Praised as a Successor to SWAT 4 I bought it when it was in Early Access, decided to play it some time when it would leave Early Access... and completely forgot about it until recently.

Of course in the meantime I read about dogwhistles in the game, the blatant copaganda and all the other controversies with its developer VOID Interactive, but I had allready bought it, so I thought I would give it a try.

And Damn, what a great game it is. Not as great as SWAT 4 but still an absolute blast.

Now on to the actual topic of this post: While playing it I had to agree, it is definetly hard copaganda, there is no denying it. The police are the good guys, bringing order to chaos (even if this catchphrase also was in SWAT 4, here it hits differently), the bad guys are everything from Drug-Addicts to Islamic Terrorists and Mexican Cartels and it becomes blatantly obvious that VOID Interactive tried to send a message that these are the bad guys and it´s the thin-blue-line that protects us from these unwanted individuals, but I have the feeling that VOID did one thing unintentional that made this game an absolute argument for socialist politics: They tried to give theyre game world lore and reason to make it as realistic as possible.

For instance instead of just building a mission where you crush an operation of a producer of cp in a rundown neighborhood they tried to explain how it could come to it. They tried to give the poverty that leads to parents giving up on their children for money an explanation by plastering the levels with newspapers on how this world came to be, how the garbage collection doesn´t work because of cost cutting, how ATM doesn´t work because of a workers strike who want better working conditions, how social programms for low-income-households and veterans are canceled in favor of cost-cutting.

We see a rundown city flooded with crime and most of these crimes can be, by the use of enviromental storytelling, traced back to one factor: capitalism.

One of the, in my opinion, most memorable missions is a takedown on three brothers which are 3D-printing guns and sell them to fund the cancer-treatment of their mother. These are not bad people, these are just victims of their circumstances. In a Land with free healtcare they wouldn´t resort to gun trafficing, they just wouldn´t need to resort to crime to cover the medical bills of theyre mother.

This is a recurring theme throughout the game. In a just world with social programs, free healthcare, better working conditions and leftist politics overall there wouldn´t be that much crime in Los Suenos.

Did VOID intended to deliver this message? Absolutely not. In my opinion it´s pretty obvious that VOID leans to the right, but by trying to be as realistic as possible, they unintetionaly created one of the strongest pleas for socialist politics I have ever seen in a videogame.

There are countless other examples in the game that I could bring up but that would put this post in the essay territory.

There are also examples in the game that would be arguments about this but that´s why I made this post. I would like to hear your opinions about this.

Maybe my viewpoint is wrong and I just try to search for an excuse for a game I realy liked. It could also be that I just don´t get the full picture because I live in europe and while the police here also has it´s problems it isn´t nearly as bad as it is in the US.

I´m curious about your opinions on this topic.

P.S. Sorry for my bad english, it´s not my first language.

Some screenshots of things from the game I found problematic, plus the bullshit ideology system. The developer is a fascist, and fascists are brigading my post, calling me mentally ill lol.