GYGO: Soloing Runescape, Gravitating 2 Accidents

WHY HELLO. We took kind of a break! Y’know, our EiC is incredibly patriotic and all those fireworks over the weekend of the 4th just sent her into a feral state. It took a while to lure her back in from running around the woods yelling “‘MERICA,” and punching trees, but we did it. Now that I’ve relayed that completely factual and in-character piece of information, let’s get to the news.

Jagex Cancels Old School Runescape Partnership Plans

Jagex had plans for some partnerships along the lines of some Twitch stuff they did last year, and they put the question of it to their userbase. It appears that the userbase nearly unanimously panned the idea over concerns about microtransactions, something that Jagex claims wasn’t even on the table. That claim is backed up by the fact that the original blog post containing the polls did explicitly mention not using microtransactions. Looks like their userbase wasn’t having any of it, though.

G2A Just Can’t Stop Tying Its Own Shoelaces Together, Then Tripping

G2A, the game key reselling site, has had a rough go of it. I mean, is it their fault they engage in shady business practices and have been surrounded by scandal and accusations of fraud stemming from that for years? Who among us can say? After the most recent round of accusations against them, a G2A employee apparently tried to email several games journalists in an attempt to get a positive article written about their site for a change. The twist? The positive article was intended to appear as though G2A had no involvement in its creation. The company claims this was an employee who had gone rogue, and that he would face strict consequences. Mkay, sure.

These e-mails were sent by our employee without authorization, for which we apologize to @SomeIndieGames and the 9 (!) other media outlets he sent this proposal to. He will face strict consequences, as this is absolutely unacceptable.

— G2A.COM (@G2A_com) July 8, 2019

A Cuphead TV Show?

Cuphead, the platformer known for a) being super difficult and b) being based on old Max Fleischer animation, is apparently getting an animated show. It’s… a troubling development, given the history of Fleischer art and its ties to the super racist minstrel shows of the time. It’s the kind of thing that, stylistically, can’t really be divorced from the context of its creation, and it’s not really a thing you get around by making all of the characters various forms of animated objects, especially given that the caricatures were comprised of physical features that could be grafted onto virtually anything and be recognizable as a particular coded stereotype. A TV show in this style, an attempt to further sanitize something that was deeply harmful to Jewish and Black communities in particular, is a very bad, awkward idea, one that shows at best an ignorance of cultural context and at worst a degree of malice.