CAPC’s Favourite Video games, Memes, and Cultural Moments of 2024
All through December and January, the CAPC crew has compiled a listing of our favourite popular culture artifacts from the earlier yr. Not like most year-end lists, we don’t declare that these are the “greatest.” 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. Nonetheless, his posts are greater than entertaining; they’re deeply informative and academic, highlighting the methods during which style has developed, and the forces chargeable 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 haven’t any garments, providing pointed, hilarious—and sure, often 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 sport 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 a phenomenal sport that actually captures the marvel of creation whereas additionally indicating the hazards of materialism.
You’re on the mercy of an organization, a heartless terraforming corp that takes convicts like your character and primarily launches them at planets with little greater than an oxygen tank and mentioned omni-gun. They’ve little care or concern for his or her “workers” and solely contact you as soon as the harmful work is completed they usually can harvest the planet’s bounty. Whereas it’s potential so that you can arrange a sustainable, automated system that produces and ships items off-planet, varied information left across the planet point out this received’t work long-term. The unique inhabitants left an enormous 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 massive.
Regardless of this grim message, Planet Crafter is an undeniably stunning sport. Even the barren model of the planet is beautiful in its sterility, with huge 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 way in which acquainted locales change and turn out to be wonderful pictures of life.
It’s value noting, in fact, that as a lot as Planet Crafter critiques materialism, the identical stunning transformation of the planet is a course of rendered potential solely by the expertise of the materialistic society the sport scorns. On this method, it’s potential to view Planet Crafter as a wonderful expression of the type of Earth stewardship that God instructions in his phrase, one which appreciates the pure great 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 people 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 alter 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 searching for another as X started to flounder and grew more and more hostile, not simply to advertisers however to regular customers searching for 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 various.
After a protracted invite-only interval, Bluesky opened to public registrations in February 2024. So far, it has round 30 million customers, which is a fraction of Threads and X/Twitter’s userbases. Nonetheless, 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 objective of permitting individuals to create and run their very own Bluesky variations, that means that customers’ content material shouldn’t be beneath the management of a single firm or its billionaire proprietor.
—Jason Morehead
Passable
After years of with the ability to mess around with Passable in early entry, Espresso Stain lastly launched the whole sport in Autumn 2024, prompting me to start once more from the start. And what a pleasure!
Considered one of my favourite issues in video games is constructing persistent constructions. 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 goal apart from (A) being aesthetically attention-grabbing and (B) possibly being a spot you might 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 sport 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 various and huge (a bit bigger than Skyrim, GTA: San Andreas, and Oblivion) with 21 completely different biomes and a variety of verticality to your exploration. Typically, whilst you’re ready to your factories to complete producing no matter it’s you want, you would possibly simply wish to go wandering for some time searching for new sources, different crashed vessels, or simply plain stunning vistas. None of this sport 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 ultimately pave over all of it with business. A pristine world, untouched by human colonization is out of the blue made into an enormous manufacturing facility by my very own lone hand, all to the top 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 shifting world to world like interstellar locusts. So, uhm, I suppose there’s that. However man, have a look at these twin suns, what a phenomenal sight!
—Seth T. Hahne
Unicorn Overlord
Considered one of 2024’s shock hits, Unicorn Overlord is a JRPG whose foremost character shouldn’t be, disappointingly, a unicorn, however could be very a lot an overlord. The blue-haired protagonist Alain should type a military of scrappy and gifted 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 sport, in actuality, the important thing gameplay in Unicorn Overlord is in getting nearer to your mates and studying to work collectively to beat obstacles.
Unicorn Overlord, in contrast to different tactical turn-based video games, has your characters robotically progress by their assaults with none in-battle enter from you. This streamlines a lot of the fight, but it surely does primarily 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 greatest collectively and maximizing their effectiveness when teamed up by growing their relationships with one another by hosted “crew dinners.” Whilst you as commander make selections about what squads are greatest capable of deal with what threats, you largely have to belief in your underlings’ talents to acquit themselves effectively. It feels much less a sport about you being a tactical genius, and extra a sport about relying upon gifted people who find themselves passionate for a similar objective that you’ve got.
This reality is particularly 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 actual 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 potential. 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 “sturdy man”-style dictator in opposition to a pacesetter who eschews glory and grandeur to serve his followers. It’s an atypical story the place the hero shouldn’t be, truly, supremely sturdy or supremely clever—at the least, no extra so than his opponent. As an alternative, Alain’s foremost 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 struggle collectively in opposition to evil. It’s a wonderful picture of how the church itself must perform.
—John Kloosterman
