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Bohemia, yo

vavra

This happy chappy is Daniel Vávra, a Czech video game developer. Long story short, he had an idea for a videogame, tried to get funding, was told all anybody wants is puzzles to play on iPhones, took his idea to Kickstarter. He was trying to get half a million to start, he got nearly $2.5 million to date (he has another corporate backer, as well – it’s a big team and a long lead time).

The game looks gorgeous. It’s set in a meticulously recreated 15th century Bohemia. They’ve consulted historians and architects, rotoscoped sword fighters, bought topo maps of the area, really trying to nail the era down as fully and accurately as they can. No magic (their slogan is “dungeons, no dragons”). You have to eat and sleep and make homemade medicines.

It’s called Kingdom Come: Redemption. I know most of you aren’t gamers, and I don’t usually recommend early access, but these guys are the real deal. They’re professionals and they’ve hit all their deadlines. The game is currently in early alpha (they’re calling it “technical alpha”; they’re mostly looking for basic playability glitches. Flying horses and chickens that walk through walls). Due out for reals in a year.

The t-shirt? Vávra is under heavy fire because there aren’t any people of color in the game. In 15th C Bohemia. He doesn’t seem too bothered.

Don’t think this is a bit of SJW fluff. This is a thing now. The Witcher — a popular series of games based on Slavic myth — has been dinged recently because everybody in it is Slavic.

And some silly grad student at the University of Leeds has written a paper — or put together a presentation, it’s not clear — on how ‘medievally-themed video games are a space where whiteness can be anchored, in a “happy history” where a world is free of multiculturalism and white guilt’.

Unfortunately for her, she picked the worst possible game to illustrate this. Skyrim is a great game in a fantasy medieval Nordic setting, but it’s completely multicultural and, at times, annoyingly preachy and 21st C about it. Her research seems to have been entirely interrogating players without investigating the game at all.

May Talos smite her in the ass for it.


Oh, yeah: the commenter Formerly known as Skeptic has won the dick with Bobbi Kristina Brown. They finally unplugged the poor kid and let her go. See you back here on Friday for Dead Pool Round 76.

Comments


Comment from QuasiModo
Time: July 27, 2015, 10:14 pm

I’ll maybe buy it if I see it in Steam…don’t have any time or energy for games these days, unfortunately…or maybe fortunately, seeing as I’m working and a lot of people aren’t.


Comment from dissent555
Time: July 27, 2015, 11:31 pm

What, you mean Robin Hood: Men in Tights was not chromatically accurate either? Well, knock me down.


Comment from bad cat robot
Time: July 27, 2015, 11:50 pm

That is some really nice game engine action. The people move like people and not epileptic steam-powered deck chairs. I also approve of Mr. Va’vra’s sly grin. I would totally buy a swaybacked old nag from that horse-chaunter. (Er, but what is MRA? I’m not up on all the thoughtcrimes, oh no….)


Comment from Subotai Bahadur
Time: July 28, 2015, 2:04 am

Comment from bad cat robot
Time: July 27, 2015, 11:50 pm

MRA = Mens Rights Activist. Someone who partakes in the heresy that a) Men actually have rights in our society, and b) that fighting for equal treatment under the law is not sexist.

It is an underground cult religion that is likely to get you defenestrated or bastinadoed if discovered.


Comment from David Gillies
Time: July 28, 2015, 3:37 am

There’s nothing to stop the SJWs making their own games, other than the fact that they’re parasitical, talentless hacks and no-one would buy them.

They don’t want ‘diversity’, anyway, unless it’s the diversity of a tube of Smarties where all the different colours are exactly the same inside.


Comment from phineas fogg
Time: July 28, 2015, 5:13 am

So are the demanding that slavery should be included…


Comment from Wolfus Aurelius
Time: July 28, 2015, 3:18 pm

I’m not a gamer either, and I’d prefer Roman times to medieval, but the video does indeed look great. My avocation is fiction writer. I dabble in both crime stories and in fantasy (what I call “hard-boiled fantasy,” i.e., magic works but people still have to earn a living). The visuals of the village give me a lot of good detail to work with.


Comment from Wolfus Aurelius
Time: July 28, 2015, 3:52 pm

OT: A/C is sexist. No, really: http://dailycaller.com/2015/07/25/air-co…gation-reveals/

I got news for you:

1) Wear a sweater. I sometimes do, and I love my A/C.

2) Go sit outside in your HOT car and try to do your work. You’ll flee back inside in about 2 minutes, toots, I guarantee it.

3) This is the last stand. I draw the line here. If women in my office start up about this, I fight. If I lose and get fired, hello welfare office. (I once did have a conflict with one of those “fat, menopausal” women in an office I worked in, with windows that faced west, in a Louisiana summer. I won a temporary respite on that, and then got a job in Colorado.)

A/ C is one of the finest achievements of Western Man. “NO, dammit, DON’T TOUCH THAT THERMOSTAT –!”


Comment from Wolfus Aurelius
Time: July 28, 2015, 4:00 pm

Oops — the entire link about “A/C is sexist” didn’t come across. Try a tinyurl: http://tinyurl.com/newmkf3


Comment from David Gillies
Time: July 28, 2015, 8:30 pm

A large portion of the US is simply uninhabitable without air conditioning. Miami is south of Cairo.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: July 28, 2015, 9:26 pm

As a woman from the Deep South, I have always wondered how women survived in the days of multiple petticoats and no air conditioning.

No wonder Southerner have a reputation as lazy bastards.


Comment from BJM
Time: July 28, 2015, 10:31 pm

The PC police/SJW are bent on turning everything into mindless mush. The un-PC patriarchal art in the the Met, Tate and Louvre must make their tiny heads explode.

Diversity pretty much ruined one of my fav Brit series “Midsomer Murders”. The cultural nannies began to bitch about it being too “English” thus culturally exclusive (Dwerp. Genre.) The producers obviously caved as the current season is unwatchable and the token people of color is just embarrassing.

Once they removed the dottiness, English-ness, in-jokes, puns, classic actors and literate plots it became little more than just another police procedural. They even managed to mostly airbrush out Midsomer itself. Nettles was wise to retire.


Comment from BJM
Time: July 28, 2015, 10:42 pm

May Talos smite her in the ass for it.

Moe Lane got there first.

I’ll buy it 1.) because, hello, Medieval game! 2.)to reward the producers/creators. 3.) to spite the crazies.

The mother of all backlashes is coming, I can smell it in the wind.


Comment from TwoDogs
Time: July 28, 2015, 10:55 pm

The mother of all backlashes….

Yep. I’ve started my own little passive rebellion. I will not watch any television show or movie with sympathetic black characters. I’m OK with them in their natural role as villains.


Comment from weasel tablet
Time: July 28, 2015, 11:44 pm

I gotta figure out how to make comments upvotable on this blog.


Comment from mojo
Time: July 29, 2015, 1:57 am

Calif. central valley in July/August with no AC?

Oh, HELL no!


Comment from mojo
Time: July 29, 2015, 2:00 am

Oh, and: judging by the response, this “Men have actual, enforceable rights-rights” idea is pretty radical, eh?


Comment from BJM
Time: August 1, 2015, 1:20 am

Calif. central valley in July/August with no AC?

Back in the day when I was a kid homes & schools didn’t have no steenkin’ AC in the Valley. A swamp cooler and screened sleeping porches was as good as it got. In May & June we went to school in 100+ temps…in fact we used to wish for 113 so they’d have to dismiss school.

Fast forward to 2015 and I’m back in the valley and pretty much live in an AC bubble in July/Aug. PG&E (the power company) is happy-face promoting letting them control our HVAC; to spread the load. Right. They’re gonna have to pry the AC remote from my cold,dead hands.


Comment from Oceania
Time: August 3, 2015, 6:51 am

Who is the Fagggot in the Photo?

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