Hot Take Thread

I hear "prude" moreso than "puritan" but maybe that's just my social scene online and in real life. 

80s/90s Japanese video game music is personally not as good as 80s/90s European video game music. Sure, they're still usually great, but I don't feel like listening to them for long because they'll often be short loops. Also European ones have some particular sounds & vibes that hit harder for me, such as arpeggios & the very rave party-influenced culture that makes it sound so... good.

That said, in terms of that era, American video game music is usually still the worst by a long shot. For every 1 game with a good soundtrack, there are like 20 others whose music is either laughably crap, boringly bad or total garbage. I mean, I'd go as far as saying American video games back then were usually the worst ones in terms of actual gameplay. IDK why(probably due to having much more experience than the usual American developer), but European video games back then are usually better than their American counterparts... well, outside of the Atari 2600, 7800 & Lynx, where such developers from Europe were usually not around.

The original R&S is a mixed bag for me for that reason. I can't really watch it that much.

Yeah the Games Animation era is a mixed bag at best, there's some stuff I liked but as a whole it felt like the creative spark the show previously had was gone. I'm one of the few who will admit to actually liking APC, I think it had it's moments and it could've turned into something interesting if Spike TV hadn't suddenly killed off it's animated series for whatever reason, I still wish Life Sucks had gotten finished as that sounded promising.

Pirated games & consoles are honestly worth preserving since for a lot of folks in some parts of the world, those were all they could afford(the official stuff was either too expensive or not there at all). There exists whole sites dedicated to this material & the likes, but it seems that the overall opinion on this stuff is a case of "Why should we care?". I mean, sure, I guess you could say it's LEGALLY wrong, but I mean, what about those who can't afford the real deal, especially not back in the late 1980s-1990s? SOMEONE'S gonna have to make some cheaper bootlegs of that stuff in order for them to enjoy it. Tectoy was able to be successful as the official Brazilian distributor of Sega products, but stories like that are few & far between.



EDIT: I forgot to mention cracktros, a particular kind of old school game piracy: Basically this was cracking various games, mainly for computers & this was mostly done in Europe. In this case, they turned it into an artform & there was actually a sense of community within that scene, in which their copies would include these intros that had some cool music & effects alongside various cheats one can turn on. They would even have messages sometimes, usually greeting other cracking groups, but they sometimes say other things. It's really cool what those messages say because it can REALLY give us a clue as to what it was like to be in such groups. In a way, they serve as parts of a time capsule, a part of history that not many outside of the community would know about.

Plus some of these groups would go on to make games themselves. DICE, then known as Digital Illusions, started off as a cracking group before making Pinball Dreams & its sequels, Fantasies & Illusions for example.

Also, they would make various tech demos & they are QUITE RAD.

I step away for a little bit and see a deleted account. Wild.

Hot take: 

Beauty and the beast was shit it was shit shit shit it was all shit-
happy Monster Band is a underrated masterpiece and its singers are FUCKING TALLY HALL MEMBERS HOLY FUCK-
Cici X Roary (the ship from roary the racing car) was shit its like the whole RTRC fandom literally treats it like god to my experience-
thomas x Emily was a bad ship-
Diesel 10 is misunderstood-
Diesel10 x Lady is a great ship if you adjusted some stuff about it-
Thomas will never be a great main character-