All through December and January, the CAPC workforce has compiled an inventory of our favourite popular culture artifacts from the earlier yr. Not like most year-end lists, we don’t declare that these are the “finest.” Slightly, these are the issues that introduced us probably the most pleasure and satisfaction within the final 12 months.
For 2024, our favourite video games, memes, and cultural moments included style criticism, hyper-capitalist terraforming, JRPGs, and extra.
Derek Man
A social media account devoted to males’s style would possibly seem to be an odd factor to rejoice, however Derek Man—aka “the menswear man”—isn’t any mere style blogger or social media influencer. True, he spends a variety of time critiquing males’s fashions, such because the decline of males’s fits, and highlighting elegant fashions from the previous. Nevertheless, his posts are greater than entertaining; they’re deeply informative and academic, highlighting the methods through which style has developed, and the forces liable for that evolution. And never simply style, but in addition how our tradition’s notions and definitions of masculinity have modified over time.
As a part of that, he’s unafraid to name out emperors who don’t have any garments, providing pointed, hilarious—and sure, sometimes savage—takedowns of politicians and public figures, and never only for their poor style in ties and go well with jackets. His style commentary exposes hypocrisy as a lot because it does poor high fashion.
—Jason Morehead
Planet Crafter
Planet Crafter is the debut recreation from an indie studio with a remarkably easy premise: you’ve crashed on a barren planet with a gun that mines all the pieces and fabricates something. Your mission? Make the planet livable. It’s an attractive recreation that basically captures the marvel of creation whereas additionally indicating the risks of materialism.
You’re on the mercy of a company, a heartless terraforming corp that takes convicts like your character and basically launches them at planets with little greater than an oxygen tank and stated omni-gun. They’ve little care or concern for his or her “workers” and solely contact you as soon as the damaging work is completed they usually can harvest the planet’s bounty. Whereas it’s attainable so that you can arrange a sustainable, automated system that produces and ships items off-planet, varied data left across the planet point out this gained’t work long-term. The unique inhabitants left a large gravity sink trapping anybody on the planet particularly as a result of they noticed the rampant destruction that people have been making on the galaxy at giant.
Regardless of this grim message, Planet Crafter is an undeniably lovely recreation. Even the barren model of the planet is beautiful in its sterility, with large mud storms and clear, glimmering planets on the horizon. The participant can uncover intricate rock formations and abandoned ruins haunting of their majesty. And, as the sport progresses and the participant introduces an environment, water, vegetation, and animals into the world, it’s genuinely awe-inspiring to see the best way acquainted locales change and turn out to be wonderful photos of life.
It’s price noting, after all, that as a lot as Planet Crafter critiques materialism, the identical lovely transformation of the planet is a course of rendered attainable solely by way of the expertise of the materialistic society the sport scorns. On this approach, it’s attainable to view Planet Crafter as a superb expression of the type of Earth stewardship that God instructions in his phrase, one which appreciates the pure fantastic thing about creation whereas additionally in search of to amplify it much more.
—John Kloosterman
The Rise of Bluesky
When Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, and subsequently remade it in his picture as X, some of us would possibly’ve been excited given Musk’s claims to be a “free speech absolutist.” Twitter has grown more and more chaotic, overrun by bots and accusations of censorship. Musk promised to vary all of that, which he did by—checks notes—sharing conspiracy theories and making the place friendlier to Nazis and different extremists.
Not surprisingly, lots of people started in search of another as X started to flounder and grew more and more hostile, not simply to advertisers however to regular customers in search of data and group. Meta rolled out Threads as an offshoot of Instagram, and although it has the bigger person base, it’s arguably the upstart Bluesky that’s the true X/Twitter different.
After a protracted invite-only interval, Bluesky opened to public registrations in February 2024. To this point, it has round 30 million customers, which is a fraction of Threads and X/Twitter’s userbases. Nevertheless, Bluesky’s concentrate on person management arguably makes it the safer platform; it’s a lot simpler to regulate the content material that seems in your newsfeed and who you work together with. What’s extra, it’s constructed on high of a “decentralized” protocol, with the purpose of permitting individuals to create and run their very own Bluesky variations, which means that customers’ content material is just not below the management of a single firm or its billionaire proprietor.
—Jason Morehead
Passable
After years of having the ability to mess around with Passable in early entry, Espresso Stain lastly launched the entire recreation in Autumn 2024, prompting me to start once more from the start. And what a pleasure!
One in all my favourite issues in video games is constructing persistent buildings. The thought of fixing the panorama in a world I can traverse is quietly thrilling to me. Putting a constructing or home or small settlement in a spot that lasts for the rest of the sport is simply form of cool. It’s all ephemeral (clearly!), however inside the area of the sport, I’ve created one thing with permanence.
Minecraft cornered the early market on the concept (even when we noticed this in rudimentary, nascent type in earlier sim-type video games like Sim Metropolis and Populus), however whereas Minecraft is superb at creating issues which are functionally monuments and buildings that serve no function apart from (A) being aesthetically fascinating and (B) perhaps being a spot you could be inside with out having a spider eat your face, Passable sacrifices a few of that character for strutures that do one thing—specifically eradicating all of the boring elements of Minecraft.
Past being a recreation the place the participant works to automate away all of the mining/artful grind of Minecraft, Passable boasts a wealthy world for exploration. The world design is gorgeous and diverse and huge (a bit bigger than Skyrim, GTA: San Andreas, and Oblivion) with 21 totally different biomes and a variety of verticality to your exploration. Generally, when you’re ready on your factories to complete producing no matter it’s you want, you would possibly simply need to go wandering for some time in search of new assets, different crashed vessels, or simply plain lovely vistas. None of this recreation was procedurally generated. It was all lovingly crafted by people who deliberately designed the place bushes and rocks and geothermal vents would possibly go.
And all that magnificence makes it all of the extra fascinating after I finally pave over all of it with business. A pristine world, untouched by human colonization is all of a sudden made into an enormous manufacturing facility by my very own lone hand, all to the tip of manufacturing the wanted quantum supplies required for Earth’s Save The Day program—as a result of we apparently blew it with our personal planet and are transferring world to world like interstellar locusts. So, uhm, I assume there’s that. However man, take a look at these twin suns, what an attractive sight!
—Seth T. Hahne
Unicorn Overlord
One in all 2024’s shock hits, Unicorn Overlord is a JRPG whose primary character is just not, disappointingly, a unicorn, however could be very a lot an overlord. The blue-haired protagonist Alain should type a military of scrappy and proficient misfits to overthrow the traitor who killed his mom years in the past and went on to take over the world. Although ostensibly a tactics-based recreation, in actuality, the important thing gameplay in Unicorn Overlord is in getting nearer to your pals and studying to work collectively to beat obstacles.
Unicorn Overlord, not like different tactical turn-based video games, has your characters mechanically progress by way of their assaults with none in-battle enter from you. This streamlines a lot of the fight, nevertheless it does basically make the sport a matter of pitting one set of AI attackers in opposition to one other.
Due to this, your chief edge in battle comes from discovering what characters work finest collectively and maximizing their effectiveness when teamed up by growing their relationships with one another by way of hosted “workforce dinners.” When you as commander make selections about what squads are finest in a position to deal with what threats, you largely have to belief in your underlings’ talents to acquit themselves nicely. It feels much less a recreation about you being a tactical genius, and extra a recreation about relying upon proficient people who find themselves passionate for a similar purpose that you’ve.
This truth is very underlined by the truth that the chief villain is a mad dictator who vests all energy solely in himself and brainwashes individuals into following his precise instructions. There’s no teamwork on the opposing facet, merely a single hive thoughts (fashioned, as is later revealed, by a mob of undead souls from a long-dead kingdom). Such people as there are insult and berate one another, and even backstab when attainable. Others, when free of the demonic chief’s management, gladly be a part of your banner—assuming you forgive them, which the sport encourages.
Unicorn Overlord, then, pits a “robust man”-style dictator in opposition to a frontrunner who eschews glory and grandeur to serve his followers. It’s an atypical story the place the hero is just not, truly, supremely robust or supremely clever—a minimum of, no extra so than his opponent. As a substitute, Alain’s primary high quality is his grace and skill to work with others. He shares the hope of a brand new kingdom and conjures up a group of damaged, flawed, biased, once-sinful warriors to battle collectively in opposition to evil. It’s a superb picture of how the church itself must perform.
—John Kloosterman
