Sundays are for realizing that there is a car in the Japanese Super GT racing series this year that is sponsored by horse game Umamusume Pretty Derby. It’s here. She raced in the GT300 class against, among other cars, a Mercedes sponsored by Hatsune Miku. I’m not sure I like them as much as my all-time favorite GT300 car, the Moonship Shiden (I’m just digging the name), but hey, they exist. I often wonder if their small teams of drivers – in Super GT, drivers change after a while behind the wheel – gather in the back of the garages and think about some guy in the UK who writes for a gaming website. This is probably not the case.
Oh, wait. Someone approaches them as they gather behind these garages. He hands them a package, then walks away. They are understandably confused. He left. The drivers open the box. Inside are sheets of paper. Above the first is a question. What’s happening to Love and Deepspace? Nothing comes to mind, but that’s okay, because RespectFormer RPSer and VG247er Rebecca Jones is here to fill them.
Despite Infold’s opaque communication – which relied heavily on groveling apologies without ever being too specific about what they were actually apologizing for – it was immediately obvious what had happened. Negative reactions to the planned introduction of Valko from some established LI fans have been vicious, particularly in the game’s native China. Complaints about the sidelining of existing characters and disapproval of certain aspects of Valko’s design quickly escalated into reports of cow manure and funeral wreaths being mailed to Infold offices and, more worryingly, the involvement of CCP officials to investigate aspects of Valko’s history. Valko. Specifically, alleged references to war crimes committed during World War II against China by Japan were reportedly taken from since-deleted game files (this should raise red flags at the best of times, but disastrous with the current growing tensions between the two nations), as well as some sexually threatening aspects of Valko’s behavior in his introductory trailer.
The drivers are intrigued. They move on to the next sheet. Hmm. If The Odyssey movie is anything like the 2012 adventure game The Odyssey, Matt Damon will spend the entire first hour trying to solve a single-job puzzle, it reads. “Ah, this one is about that new movie,” muses Hatsune Miku Merc pilot Tatsuya Kataoka. It’s true, and it’s written by Porsche curve playerThis is Christopher Livingston.
Let me give you a guess. You are on a small raft. Your rudder is broken. You are Matt Damon. You ask a god for help and he magically summons a fish into your empty food bowl. What do you do with this fish? Name the first 50 things that come to mind.
Did one of them “throw the fish into the ocean?” No? Why, because it would be completely crazy to throw away the life-giving gift of food that a god has just broken the laws of the universe to give you? This is the solution. Throwing the Fish summons a talking bird who gives Matt Damon 12 statuettes with images engraved on them, and to determine which direction to sail in, Matt Damon must identify 12 constellations in the sky and match them to the statuettes.
“I wonder if Matt Damon likes racing cars,” says Umamusume Beemer driver Yusuke Tomibayashi. “A lot of actors do it.” They continue their paper. The next sheet is not a sheet of paper. It’s a folding ladder. The drivers are perplexed. The ladder has some words written on its steps. “To hell with ladders.” Fortunately, a Eurogamer A blue Kirk McKeand post-it is stuck to the bottom rung.
Liz England, former lead designer at Ubisoft and Insomniac, has good experience with them. “There are always cases where when you put players in a different movement state, there are bugs that cause them to get stuck in that movement state,” she explains. “So you might end up getting kicked off the ladder, but you also won’t be able to get a gun out. Ladders are horrible.”
England wrote a blog called The door problem after she went to eat with some non-gamers and the topic of gaming came up. England found himself trying to explain the creeping complexity of seemingly mundane objects. She points to a door during our conversation. “We take them for granted, they are everywhere,” she says. “Everyone knows how a door works, everyone knows what a door is, but in a game, there’s no telling whether a door is solid or not. Does it open towards you, or does it open away from you? Does it hit you in the face?”
Doors are bastards. The scales are arguably worse.
Deep inside the box, the drivers find a telephone. Suddenly it rings. “Good morning?” » asks Umamusume BMW driver Yuta Fujiwara, answering the call. “It’s just a normal day,” grunts a voice on the other end of the line. “Eh?” Fujiwara exclaims. The voice on the other end of the line launches into a tirade about a fictional man called Tom Orry and his life being a Low Poly Mess.
11:30am, and I’m pretty happy with the item now, but I can’t stop thinking about the delivery guy. I google “Is a delivery driver allowed to use a customer’s restroom?” » for some reason, I’m hoping to find a useful result. I can’t find anything other than a website that seems to be for grandmothers to talk to each other, where a grandmother mentions how she let a driver in to use her toilet. I feel bad.
The day continues but I am still haunted by this decision/lack of awareness. I hope I never see him again, the stress would just be too much.
The voice hangs up. Fujiwara doesn’t know what to think. He and the other drivers exchange nervous glances, then choose to abandon the crate near a trash can and try to resume driving as if nothing had happened.
Hatsune Miku Merc pilot Nobuteru Taniguchi, whose The YouTube channel is called NOBreturns to the garage of his team Goodsmile Racing and Team Ukyo. He opens the door to the Miku Merc, just to check that everything is as it should be for his next training session. There’s already someone in the driver’s seat. “I guess you didn’t expect to see me here,” Adrian Edmondson roared. Taniguchi steps back then crosses his arms. “You’re in the wrong car for this gag.” Adrian Edmondson grimaces. “Ah. That’s bullshit. Like you were back then.”
