I guess the folks at Ubisoft didn’t get the memo that only dudes hunted mammoths.
(Maybe because it’s not true. It may be that no one did. But a video game about people looting already dead mammoths probably wouldn’t sell many copies.)
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Was just going to mention it. One of the most underappreciated games of all time.
Cue “Feminazis are ruining our fantasies.”
@makroth:
I have yet to come across anyone who claimed to be a “#GG neutral” who wasn’t very happy to engage with gators the moment everyone’s backs are turned.
@ignorantianescia
Wait, Beyond Good and Evil is Ubisoft? How have I never noticed that, I love that game.
http://teacherweb.com/WQ/ElementarySchool/EarlyMan/caveman1.png
Related to mammoth hunting: the video game, anyone play Ark: Survival Evolved? You get to hunt, tame and ride fucking mammoths, saberkitties, wolves, raptors, megalodons, T-rex’s and pretty much any badass pre-historic beast you can think of. I’ve been enjoying the hell out of it.
@Zero Punctuation discussion
I use to watch his videos until his MGS4 review when he complained about how easy the game was because you have this tranq gun with infinite bullets and how this totally ruined the game.
I should also point out that this gun he is talking about is the “EZ Gun” and is only available on the “Very Easy” setting.
Then his Sims 3 video came out and, ugh, yeah I was done. It was so uncomfortably sexist and this was well before I had any knowledge of feminism.
TW for blatant sexism, childish insults and maybe some other stuff. I’m going off memory as I have no desire to re-watch this:
He has some good ideas and criticisms (his call to fame was justly pointing out the massive flaws in Halo 3 while so many were praising it), but he’s so obviously trying waaaaaaay too hard to be cynical and negative, a trend I see a lot in video game reviewers (I attribute this to Angry Video Game Nerd, since he was the first “pissed off gamer reviewing games” shtick).
I haven’t payed any attention to him out of spite but he’s a #GamerGater now? Wow, how utterly shocking and totally surprising.
@SFHC
Wow, did you see Yahtzee’s “apology” for his trans-phobic comments?
http://fucknovideogames.tumblr.com/post/59513715654/yahtzee-issues-fauxpology-for-transphobia
Fuckin’ a. I dislike this guy even more than I previously did.
His MGSV review is also awful juat complaining that he can’t hear the audio right and oh look that wacky kojima again. It was seriously lacking in substance.
@Yhaztee discussion
I have a weird… relationship with Yhatzee’s content. He is whiny, often acts entitled and grossly offensive almost all the time but I still somehow find his content entertaining, when he’s not beating minorities into the ground with a large stick with “artistic freedom” etched into it.
Despite being a trans girl I still can’t help but enjoy his content after that whole Papers Please mess from a while ago, even if it did upset me. I dunno. I just like his content enough to let the bad stuff slide.
Am I a bad person?
I’m not surprised about Yahtzee. He just screams “brogressive.”
as an archaeology student, I absolutely think some women hunted large Pleistocene animals (and conversely some men did not). Anyways the real point is that even if people think that only men hunted mammoths, then that means women provided the bulk of the necessary food (smaller animals, plants, fish, etc) anyways, because hunting big-ass critters like a mammoth could only ever be a kind of ‘specialty food’. If you spent all your time trying to bring down these things, chances are you’re going to end up hungry.
(I appreciate this game being set in the distant past, too, you don’t see that very often)
@some sort of username: Obviously I can’t condemn or absolve, but I don’t think you’re a bad person because Yahtzee makes you laugh, in spite of his issues.
Hell, he used to make me laugh in spite of his issues. He can be a funny guy, and obviously some of his shtick stuck in my head (cf. my camera comment above).
It’s just … while it’s not my foot he’s stomping on, it got to be too much to watch him stomp on other people’s feet and wait expectantly for me to laugh. I decided to give him as little attention as possible.
Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that at all. ^^; I think everybody likes few problematic things; I know I do. I was just warning Zyvlyn what to expect.
*Likes a few. Missing letter kinda changed the meaning there.
I was over Yahtzee ages ago when all his reviews started sounding exactly the same.
All the “your mum”, “phallic object” “I’m a lonely masturbator” “Haha, dead hookers” “gaaayyy” gags just got really grating after a while.
@ Username – It’s ok to enjoy problematic media on whatever level – it’s up to you if you choose to continue to support his content. The call-out culture around this kind of stuff isn’t a demand to boycott, it’s just consumer information.
I personally haven’t got anything out of a Yahtzee video since he reviewed Psychonauts, so I don’t watch him any more.
Thanks for the heads up. It’s not terribly surprising that he’d do that given that his humor largely relies on being as offensive as he feels he can get away with. It was only a matter of time before he lost sight of where the line was.
@ssou
Liking a comedian (or anyone, really) who says something offensive doesn’t make you a bad person at all. Well, unless it was the offensive thing that MADE you like them, I suppose. Bigoted people create great works of art and entertainment all the time. If you can look past the flaws of the artist and enjoy the art, more power to you.
“Skybison — to be fair, things like SHFC said and the net hunting the article described make hella more sense than spear hunting an animal that has its own spears! Also, idk if it would “work” with mammoths, but some of the megafauna we may’ve outcompete for resources rather than killed outright, no?”
Possibly, especially for large predators/omnivores, but I dunno about Mammoths or Rhinos I’m pretty sure they can live off resources we can’t. SHFC’s thing would count under hunting. Hunters might also have been able to take out calves or juveniles as well even if adults were too big.
@OoglyBoggles
Hah, so basically even more straw-grasping. And that’s the thing, it makes his review all the more shallow. Without having played the game, how am I supposed to know if the thing he criticized is actually fair, or if he’s just trying to meet his weekly ‘negative and dismissive opinion’ quota?
I’ve heard friends who are game journalists describe how his positive review of Psychonauts didn’t get many views and that’s why he decided to stick to the ‘this popular game actually sucks and here’s why’. Funny thing is, his Psychonauts review is just… not well done. He does a very bad job of explaining what makes the game so good and there’s this condescending tone where he looks down on people who haven’t played the game, blaming them for the game’s financial failure.
@some sort of username
Not at all, there is nothing wrong with liking problematic stuff, especially if you’re acknowledging the problematic elements. I’ve always been of a fan of the expression “PC gaming master race” mocking the elitist attitude that I’ve seen so damn much in the gaming community and the “simon says button mashing sequences” is a hilarious way of summing up all the problems with Quick-time Events.
Another issue I have is that he doesn’t follow what he preaches. I played his game, Art of Thief, and there are not one but TWO annoying unskippable sequences that you are forced to go through every time you restart the level. One involves mashing two buttons for a minute, the other involves walking around to find three numbers that add together to give you the combination to open a door that starts the ‘actual’ part of the level. Forcing the player to redo annoying sequences for no reason is something he’s criticized plenty of games for, yet he went out of his way to put two of these in his game? This, being a stealth game where one wrong move makes you restart the whole fucking level?! And both of these sequences are on some of the hardest levels!!!??? WHY!?
One theory for mammoth hunting is that people would go uphill of where they were sleeping and pour water so they (the mammoths) froze to the ground. Then they’re pretty easy game, in every sense of the word.
There’s also some evidence of cliff driving, although the bone deposits may have been deposited naturally.
As we pretty much drove every example of mega fauna into extinction or near extinction it would seem hunting was, if anything, too easy.
Skybison, Alan — the other thing is that, by definition, megafauna were near the top of the food chain, so introducing any predator would be a thing they weren’t prepared for. We could be absolute shit at hunting, and still manage to kill more of them than died before we showed up, and depending on a shit ton of factors our resident biologist and paleontologist folks could better describe, eventually eradicate the species.
I know fish waaaay better than mammals, but in fish we aren’t (usually) outright killing them all, but rather killing enough of them, particularly juveniles, that they can’t sustain a sufficient breeding population — the longer they live, the less they breed, and the fewer eggs per breeding, the bigger the risk of overfishing. Seeing how mammals tend to live far longer than most fish, and have far fewer offspring per mating, I would guess that us going after their young would be a serious risk to their populations, but yeah, I’m neither a biologist, nor do I breed mammals (hell, I only breed fish accidentally, they really can reproduce like mad!)
Eh… unfortunately, it’s Ubisoft, and Ubisoft means it will probably require UPlay, and UPlay means IDon’t. I like knowing that my games will still work in 10 years when a company goes under or closes its servers for whatever reason.
And Beyond Good & Evil was amazing. I’d have loved a sequel to explore the cliffhanger ending, but, well, see above. If one ever did come out now, I’d probably just end up watching a Let’s Play.
Online reviewers of all stripes tend to really easily fall into a cycle of negativity; rants are fun and cathartic to watch in a way that positive reviews just aren’t, and particularly on the internet it’s an easy way to attract and keep loyal fans, so there’s a definite pressure to never say anything positive about anything.
Honestly, I think the mammoths were on their way out regardless of human activity. When the latest interglacial (warm period) hit, their entire habitat vanished; no mammoth steppe, no mammoths. That said, hunting sure as hell wouldn’t have helped and probably sped up the process by a few thousand years at least.
(… Am I the only one who finds it fucking hilarious that, for all the MRAs’ screams of FEMINAZIS CAN’T BRAIN, we have everything from lawyers to marine biologists to psychologists to palaeontologists here?)
The Escapist’s editorial policy right now is moderately pro-GamerGate (so it might be accurate to say they’re “useful idiots” enabling the more radical side). They hired Liana K. and a few more politically conservative columnists after Jim Sterling left. But pretty much nobody ever read The Escapist’s articles and they made most of their money off people like Yahtzee, Jim Sterling, and Lisa Foiles doing YouTube shows. They seem to think they can boost article views by appealing to more right wing gamers.