What Once Was Lost . . . (Patreon)

Hey folks,

I've been playing some retro games that I missed out on in my teen years, specifically BloodRayne 1 & 2 (Revamped). Funny enough, what slewed me onto it was seeing one of its old magazine ads. Playing the game and looking at some of the marketing, it made me slightly depressed realizing how much we lost to the woke iconoclasts.

When I was a kid, my grandparents took me to Cyprus. There I saw firsthand the destruction iconoclasts have had on art and artists - centuries of early Christian murals and statues lost forever because miserable moral busybodies took it upon themselves to apply a purity test on their world. They did it to signal their piety and virtue, which is a phenomenon that should be familiar to us all as of late.

I know it sounds weird to apply such a historical parallel to the modern soyification of gaming, but these things are my murals. Games raised me more than my parents did - I became the man I am today because of the lessons I learned through play. I learned about doing good from Sierra, about humor from LucasArts. I even joined the Army partly because of Halo - I wanted that adventure with fellow brothers driving shotgun in a humvee (my Warthog). And my life turned out rich and full because of this hobby that my generation brought into the mainstream.

I just wish we can be catered to again. If guys wanna make games with busty vampire babes in them, they should be able to market it to other guys wanting to play them. As a guy, it was tantalizing to pick up a gaming magazine and actually have your attention grabbed. Somewhere in the past twenty years, the idea of "target audience" seems to have exited the Western Hemisphere. Now shit needs to be diluted into inoffensive corpo slop out of California.

But I'm glad the pendulum is swinging back, especially with Asian and Eastern European devs who know what players want and are not allergic to money. Playing BloodRayne is a ton of retro-fun (like playing Max Payne again for the first time). And it reminds me how far we've come when you switch to Bayonetta or Stellar Blade. I'm glad there are studios out there that're still carrying the torch! 🫡

Anyways, all this stuff's been on my mind which made me miss the "good ol' days". I guess that just comes with being an unc now. 😅See you guys around! This month's comic is going well. Cheers, folks!