Gaming
Playing History 2 Slave Tetris Mode Removed
Playing History 2: Slave Trade, a Steam edutainment game, came under fire over the weekend for some pretty questionable segments. Chief among them was a minigame called “Slave Tetris” which involved stacking African slaves onto a settlers’ ship in uncomfortable Tetris-style shapes. After an outcry from users on both Steam and social media, the game’s creator removed the mode.
The “Slave Tetris” minigame, which can still be viewed in Let’s Plays of Playing History 2: Slave Trade that were created before the update that removed it, tasked players with stacking Tetris-shaped African slaves onto a ship bound for the Americas. At the same time, the game’s instructions posed the question, “How come the slave traders were so inhumane?” The game would end when players had filled up the entire ship, rather than by clearing lines like in traditional Tetris. At the end of the game, players would be rewarded with some more informative notes, such as “slave ships were often packed to use every square millimetre.”
Serious games, the developers behind Playing History, wrote on Twitter that they had removed the minigame because “it was perceived to be extremely insensitive by some people.” On Steam, they go into more detail. “Slave Tetris has been removed as it was perceived to be extremely insensitive by some people. This overshadowed the educational goal of the game. Apologies to people who was offended by us using game mechanics to underline the point of how inhumane slavery was. The goal was to enlighten and educate people – not to get sidetracked discussing a small 15 secs part of the game.”
Back in September last year, the creators wrote similar responses to comments about the insensitivity of the game. “Our experience is that in the game it really gets people to think about just how absurd and cruel it is – trust me nobody is laughing or finding it a joke to play that kind of Tetris. They do however get a ahaa (sic) experience that will indeed haunt them. They will also discuss afterwards, and most of them will probably remember more than did from most their history lessons.”
While the “Slave Tetris” minigame has been removed, other material that has been found objectionable has remained in-game – for example, there are maths problems that task users with calculating the cost of human lives. While it’s understandable that the creators wanted to make a game that highlighted the harsh realities of history, there certainly seem to be many aspects of Playing History 2: Slave Trade that could have been better executed.
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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