the smell of chinatown

[amw]

There is a nostalgic smell from my past, a smell i always associated with Chinatown. I could never quite pin down what it was. It is a slightly acrid smell, not from food or incense, but something else. For the longest time i thought it must be some kind of exotic packing material that only existed in the warehouses of Hong Kong through which all

Comments

[egg_shell]

"You're like a sunflower" - how wonderful. You are!

[picosgemeos]

Really enjoyed your take on Cyberpunk 2077. I've always been curious about playing it but had only heard bad reviews, problems with its launch, etc. My 15-year-old nephew didn't think much of it.

Do you think it would have worked better as a Myst-style game? I could get into something like that, where it's more about exploring the city and enjoying its ambiance.

[amw]

I didn't find the game especially buggy, although it's been patched a bunch since launch. It is quite pretty, the controls are reasonably smooth and the infiltration mechanics work fairly well. It was solid enough as a mindless stealth shooter that I played it all the way through, despite my ongoing disappointment with the shallow characters and tedious/predictable stories.

There are lots of cyberpunk games that don't involve shooting the place up. A bunch of them are point-and-click adventure games like Beyond a Steel Sky (sequel to the infamous Beneath a Steel Sky), Gemini Rue (amazing game), Lacuna, The Red Strings Club, Gamedec, Technobabylon, The Sundew, Void & Meddler, Born Punk etc etc. Some of them are much better than other ones, and the best ones are the ones that don't fall into the trap of making the protagonist an angry, bitter, jaded shithead.

Cyberpunk 2077 failed as a compelling story for me because every character is unapologetically violent and vengeful. In fact the whole world is, and that doesn't ring true for me.

[picosgemeos]

That makes sense. Thanks for mentioning the other games - I'll check them out!

[picosgemeos]

Ahhh, Beneath a Steel Sky is available for free on Steam!

[notte0]

On the cleaning product, maybe (brand) Swipe 藍威寶? Or Campbell Evergreen H2O 金寶綠水 or even Dettol Antiseptic disinfectant 滴露消毒液
I forget which but one of those has a… not sure if pleasant is the right word, but, to me it’s the smell of CLEAN lol I can’t explain

[amw]

It's definitely not Dettol - that smells like a hospital to me, so it was weird when I was traveling in Latin America that they seem to spray that in the air at a lot of shops.

I will have to look up the other two. I can't quite put my finger on the exact smell, but once I started thinking along the lines of a cleaning product I realized it is a little bit (but not exactly) like the smell of a chlorinated public pool. Unfortunately whoever was using it for a few weeks there isn't using it any more, so maybe I'll be left without the smell again for a while, wondering if it even existed...

[nahele_101]

You're a sunflower!!! that is an awesome compliment! I want to hear about the hippie festival! I want to go back to Taiwan and eat veggie food and hike in the mountains.

I think you're spot on about cyberpunk being based on Asian cities...I never put the connection together. Do you think Blade Runner was based on the same thing? You summed up video games very well...kill the baddies, make the points. It does feel a bit...um, pointless in a way? I don't play video games anymore. It was a good distraction as a latch key kid though. Kept me from getting high and burning down houses?

The smell of fabuloso which is a cleaning spray is a smell that I love. It's everywhere in Mexico. It makes me happy.

[amw]

There has been a lot of writing about how cyberpunk is a genre of modern Orientalism. Even outside of Bladerunner's Asian-inspired cityscapes that kicked off the cyberpunk aesthetic in western visual media, the earliest books already featured megacorps and main characters with Japanese names. In retrospect the whole concept feels tied to 1980s fears that America and the west were in an economic death spiral and 20 minutes into the future the Japanese would own everything.

What makes the genre interesting is that it also became its own thing in Japan, with media made for Japanese audiences by Japanese creators inspired by Moebius and (presumably) Metal Hurlant, 2000 AD etc, so it's not like it's entirely a western fantasy of Asia, it's also sometimes an Asian reflection of itself. I suppose the context is different here, because the cities don't look as exotic, they look more like home turned up to 11, so perhaps its more about the transgressive characters and their adventures?

40+ years since the genre was created, now it's become its

[king_of_apathy]

I was curious as to what your nostalgic smell was.. and never would have guessed any kind of bleach

[amw]

I've played one Assassin's Creed - Origins. One of my friends fell in love with the main character and harped on for years about how i had to play it. It was very disappointing for her when played and i didn't love him at all, because he runs around Egypt doling out brutal vigilante justice on every one and everything. Even if you play him as i did - never killing anyone, only ever attacking with bare hands and "knocking people out" (that's how i chose to see it) - he's still an "assassin" and you still have to kill a few bosses. He never seems to have any qualms about it, until the storyline demands. It's awkward.

The only games i've found where they really show the weight of killing are adventure games. Whether Telltale-style "narrative adventures", visual novels, walking sims or traditional point-and-clicks, in those games you tend to be investigating a death or experiencing the emotional fallout of a death, and i find those stories much more compelling than shoot the bad guy games. They're a bit of a niche genre, though, because i