Hammerjack

Absolutely nothing is shown in this teaser but IT'S REAL, IT'S HAPPENING!

This looks like it might have more cyberpunk themes than the Schwarzenegger version while still retaining some of the light-hearted aspect of it. With Edgar Wright directing, I'm cautiously optimistic about this one.

I was going to make a flippant post about a 12 year old Julia Stiles in the PBS show GhostWriter playing a hacker. Seriously, check it out. The clip is only 41 seconds long and it's so incredibly cringe.

But then re-watching the clip myself, it reminded me of how optimistic we were in the 90s about the future of the internet. There was a time when the internet was a new frontier. It was a way to find people with common interests, or have conversations with people on the other side of the planet. It was a way to share ideas without any boundaries. This could only be a benefit to humanity.

I remember seeing someone talking about Trouble and Her Friends and how the book was written from this optimistic perspective. It was written in 1994 (the same year as that Julia Stiles episode). The book takes this 1994 optimistic vision of the internet and extrapolates it out into a future world. And now, in hindsight, it just feels anachronistic. That future never happened. It's a world of ubiquitous internet and virtual reality, but the internet of Trouble and Her Friends has no commerce whatsoever. It was never monetized. And that just seems quaint now.

It reminds me also of the early 2000s internet where things had picked up but only young people and tech enthusiasts used it. "Old people" just didn't get it . I remember politicians trying to regulate the internet when they themselves had never used it and only had others briefly explain it to them.

There was a band at the time, Machinae Supremacy, who had a bunch of songs about internet culture and the politicians trying to stop them. Like their song Force Feedback:

This is the world you're in
And this is where ours begins
A borderless nation of thoughts to replace
Your walled-in existence in space

Sure you already know
That your age was long ago
We augment reality online
And you hail from ancient times

Again, this protection of internet culture just feels quaint today. I don't know if internet users in the 90s and early 2000s could've predicted what would happen when everyone was online or when businesses realized there was a profit to be made online. Maybe they could never envision that future; or maybe they just didn't want to.

I guess I don't really have a point here. I just wanted to watch a silly clip from a tv show but ended up feeling nostalgic about the optimism we used to have for the internet, and for what could've been.

Dystopika, the game where you build a cyberpunk city (and... that's the entire game) has just released a free anniversary update with a bunch of additions. The game is on sale for $4 so you might as well check it out!

I love the artwork for this cover. It's too bad the rest of the graphic novel wasn't illustrated to this level. Also, they only made a "volume 1" which covers the first two chapters of the book. You can find the pdf online if you look though. Like, right here.

I'm no expert at tower defense games, but packet.Breach() has a demo and I thought it was pretty fun. There are tiles on the board that shoot energy bolts and it's up to you to place other tiles which can redirect, split, or amplify those bolts to shoot the viruses trying to break through the firewall.

I've been keeping my eye on the game for a while and it just released today. It looks like they didn't do a very good job at marketing their game though because I'm not sure anyone else cares. As I write this, there are no reviews and even their 1.0 release announcement only got 4 thumbs-up on it.

I'm sure there are better tower defense games out there, but this one is about hacking and I'm a sucker for that stuff.

I came across this meme and it's just so oddly reductive it doesn't even make sense. Can tech noir not have philosophical elements? Is cyberpunk really nothing more than high-brow tech noir? So weird.

So let's fix this meme. What two elements would you combine to create a definition for cyberpunk?

I've gushed before about how much I enjoy the Watch_Dogs games, even though there's very few similarities between Watch_Dogs 1 and 2. Hacking with a cellphone is just a fun game mechanic. Plus, they're making a Watch_Dogs movie which apparently finished filming in September. Of course, we'll see if the movie ever gets a release. Who knows anymore.

I've been keeping my eye on both of these games for awhile but I wasn't sure if either one of them really deserved a post here. But since they both released this week I figure one post for both games is sufficient. I should mention I haven't bought either one yet, I just thought others here might be interested.

CyberCorp is a top-down twin-stick looter-shooter. So kind of like The Ascent or Ruiner but with less story. Each mission is just clearing out enemies in a cyberpunk setting, collecting loot, and deciding what you want to keep/toss. Here's a trailer.

Kiborg is a rogue-like beat-em-up that basically uses the Batman Arkham combat system. So if you lock-on to an enemy and attack, it doesn't matter how far away you are from the enemy, the character will fly across the room to land the punch (just like Batman). So the entire game is basically just an endless stream of the combat from the Batman Arkham games. This game also has guns though. The plot is: you're stuck in a cyberpunk prison where the warden forces players to fight to the death in a Running Man style gameshow. Here's a trailer.

Personally, I'm more intrigued by CyberCorp, but I have a tendency to play twin-stick shooters. Kiborg definitely looks like a more polished game but I don't know if I could handle an endless stream of that style combat. I dunno, they're both bargain-priced indie games; I'm sure they're fine.