The Gone Pebble
Also: machine megastructures, Columbo, and the ultimate hater.
This week we're talking about wrestling logic, cat and dog aliens, and games with soul.
First time reading? Sign up here.
A bizarre simulation empire expands
The extremely independent developer Mat Dickie, who PC Gamer once credited with making the “best worst game ever,” recently made two announcements. First, he released the third installment in his Hard Time series of prison sims. Second, he added a full dismemberment system to that game and to his pro wrestling sim, Wrestling Empire. The screenshot of the latter feature was vintage MDickie: a one-armed polygonal wrestler testifying in court, filling a giant speech bubble with outraged text in Comic Book font, saying “Leon Locke broke my body like an action figure for his own entertainment!”
MDickie’s games have always been known for catastrophic bugs, procedurally generated drama, wrestling logic applied to all social situations, and unpredictable violence. They’re comedy generators that are much more fun to watch than play, and they’ve become one of those things that every variety streamer tries at least once. Creators have mined so much gold from Wrestling Empire (see Jerma’s playthrough) that they jumped into Hard Time III immediately, making its release more of an event for the streaming crowd than the general public.
More:
- Several clips showcase an upsetting new feature in Hard Time III: the possibility for characters to give birth to a fully clothed miniature man.
- Polygon took a serious look at Wrestling Empire, praising it for including everything licensed wrestling sims leave out: low pay, serious injuries, steroids, and even union drives
The Gone Pebble
One item in Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky has an unexpected emotional richness: the Gone Pebble, which causes its target to have “an existential crisis.” Recently resurfaced by @shinyycatherine on Twitter, the Gone Pebble is a “Lookalike Item” meant to troll players who mistake it for the similarly named Geo Pebble, a throwing item that causes damage. The Gone Pebble’s effect, seen in action here, is different:
This item has a nostalgic feel and causes the user to bring to mind a dearly held memory. When this item is used, tears begin to well up, and the user sobs and switches to Enduring status.
Other Lookalike Items include poisonous berries and the Reviser Seed, which looks like the Reviver Seed (which revives Pokémon), but instead causes the Pokémon to revive and then laugh themselves to death. The idea of counterfeit items also returned recently in the Dragon's Dogma series, where items like "ferristones" could be given to other players as a prank. But it's a rare and inspired choice to create such an abrupt tonal shift as a one-off gag; 15 years later, it still comes up all the time in discussions of the game.
IT-Z fandom survives Concord’s demise
Everyone knows that Sony’s hero shooter Concord flopped hard in August; the discussion quickly became a one-note dogpile. But now that Concord’s been dead for a few weeks, it seems possible to talk about its afterlife. Though the game was lambasted for its character design, its main legacy may be one of its heroes: IT-Z, a skinny green alien with purple hair, who now has a semi-ironic following making fan art, modding her into Kenshi, and creating “DO IT FOR HER” posters.
Why is anyone stanning a hero from 2024’s most hated-on game? First, never bet against the popularity of a catgirl character; second, people just think she looks cool, particularly with the “Rocker” legendary skin that few players ever unlocked. Enthusiasm for IT-Z was found both among the game’s beleaguered defenders (who cited her slick movement tech) and its most vitriolic haters. On 4chan’s infamously toxic /v/ board, where posters spend virtually all their time poking each other with sticks, some users have been posting IT-Z reaction images both as a troll and in genuine admiration. One thread was dedicated to roasting a “chud artist” on YouTube who tried to improve her character model, but was universally deemed to have ruined it. IT-Z’s original design had “soul,” one anon wrote.
VTuber logs off
Popular English-language VTuber Amelia Watson announced the impending “conclusion of general activities” on her channel, which seems to be a kind of soft exit from her four-year streaming career with the Hololive agency. The surprise announcement was met with uproar on Twitter and “nooo”s from the thousands of fans who tuned in live.
The end-of-service notice has a lot of odd lingo from the Vtuber/K-pop stan zone. It’s not a “graduation,” which means retiring the character; instead, she’s leaving the door open to return for occasional projects. She noted that she would not be “joining Staff” by taking a backstage role, but fans continued to speculate about other possible interpretations of this statement. As usual with this sort of thing, there’s a stark disconnect between the messages of fans who feel deeply connected to the streamer (“I will continue to draw Amelia Watson for as long as I am able”) and the official notice from management (“Since her debut…she has actively provided her fans with unique content”).
More:
- One fan posted a favorite clip (non-Twitter mirror), and you have to ask: why does every VTuber seem to have their own “GTA V incident”?
- A clip juxtaposing Amelia Watson's Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom gameplay with that of rage streamer DSP exploded last year (mirror).
Recs
Lorn’s Lure
Many games make climbing feel good; it takes something special to make falling feel good. When you miss a jump in Lorn’s Lure, it lets you watch for a nice long time as you plummet into the abyss, passing through great networks of pipes and wire as the wind rushes past your ears. In the game, you’re an android descending through the inside of a corroded megastructure where you’ve been “lost for 253 years,” chasing a birdlike apparition. It owes something to the colossal machines of the comic Blame! and 2014 arthouse hit NaissanceE, but also to Minecraft parkour and Counter-Strike surf maps. The game gets you leaning involuntarily forward or sideways in your chair as you try to keep your grip on the game’s flinty, scratchy surfaces, or reach out to just a catch a ledge by your fingernails, which in this game are two bone-white climbing picks. In the early 2000s, nothing in games was more despised than jumping puzzles and subterranean levels; today, oddly, they're sort of a treat. [Chris]
Rebel Ridge
The good thing about Rebel Ridge — the long-awaited fifth movie from Green Room director Jeremy Saulnier — being on Netflix is that you can just run that shit right back. That live-wire feeling you get watching a particularly well-choreographed action scene, that sense that you should be watching with an extra pair of eyes, can be sated instantly. This relieves some anxiety. But it also misses the point. The “action,” so to speak, starts in the first frame of the film: every moment necessarily leading to the next, an elemental conflict unfolding with such cold, Coens-esque logic that when, 34 minutes into the movie, it all finally erupts into ruthless terse fight choreography? The feeling is almost one of relief. And the unlikely sentence that cues the audience at last into who and what they are watching — “I think he’s on the Wikipedia page” — gets etched immediately in the pantheon of all-time ass-kickers. [Clayton]
UFO 50
As a feast for the gamer senses, playing UFO 50 is like coming home for Thanksgiving. It's a collection of fifty games inspired by disks of '80s freeware DOS games, only every title in UFO 50 is a 32-color banger. Its creators — a team of six whose credits include Spelunky, Downwell, and Catacomb Kids — spent seven years working on its contents. Each one is a unique hybrid of retro mechanics and mouthfeels, including: Magic Garden, an alchemical mix of Snake and Pac-Man; Party House, a “party planning” game that plays like a strategy-flavored blackjack; and Pilot Quest, an idle game that gives way to a Zelda-inspired open world. There’s also a shmup where you pilot a car with a drifting mechanic (Seaside Drive) and a DRPG with real-time combat and gestural spell-casting (Valbrace). Underneath its surface, the collection harbors a hidden meta-narrative involving the fictional studio to whom the games are credited, accessible via “terminal” commands. More than anything, UFO 50 inspires the joy of sifting through colorful junk — those afternoons spent scrolling through janky Flash game sites at the computer lab after school. [Pao]
Chum Box
AI
- A new use case for AI: creating “aesthetic” moodboards without all the painstaking work of curation, taste-having [link]
- Using AI to replace an actor is now illegal in the state of California [link]
Games
- Flappy Bird’s long-suffering creator had nothing to do with its remake, which seems to be an NFT or something [link]
- Soulja Boy boasted about owning a comically large "Nintendo Switch" while wearing a Mario Tanuki hat [link]
- Dark Souls 3 corecore [link]
Screens
- A user’s guide to Columbo [link]
- Here’s a good channel of grody experimental cinema [link]
- Alien 3 dog alien may’ve just been a doomed idea [link]
- The new trailer for a sequel to Den of Thieves [link] revived a discussion of the statistical crimes committed in the original film’s opening crawl [link]
The Internet
- Either cool or terrifying, depending on your disposition: “Multiplayer cursors” lets you see everyone else's cursors moving around the website [link]
- Twitter was briefly accessible in Brazil on Wednesday despite a court-ordered shutdown, leading to a surge of meme posts [link]; the site's return was not an act of defiance, but rather a normal Twitter-style screwup [link]
- Blog post about monetizing blog posts seems to take emotional toll on blog post [link]
- The moderators of two competing bone identification subreddits are feuding [link]
- Possibly the sickest Home Depot flythrough we've seen (sound on) [link]
Art
- The artist Alex Schaefer, who found inspiration by painting banks on fire [link], has found new viral fame as a consummate hater. The original viral tweet has been deleted, so Schaefer himself reposted it [link]
- The land artist Michael Heizer spent 50 years creating the sprawling, surrealist piece City; it emerged into a world with very different ideas about land ownership [link]
- Great subhead [link]
Connect with EX
- Feedback? Hit reply or email team@exresearch.co
- Follow us on Twitter [link]
- Follow us on Threads [link]
- Follow us on Bluesky [link]
- Write for us [link]
- Support us with a donation by clicking Account
One Last Thing
Wow!!! Cheese prices dropped!! [link]
