Cyberpunk genre gaming

"Retro But Still Current" edition

The last thread died, but it was pretty fun. Let's get back to it.

Altered Carbon is turning out to really cool (though I'm still waiting for the Quellist phrase "humans and their groups" to pop up). Would love an RPG of it.

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=i-9MbhK4tt8
washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/02/06/algorithms-just-made-a-couple-crazy-trading-days-that-much-crazier/?utm_term=.aec177f9a022
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

Anyone got any recommendations for relevant movies? I saw this kooky 90s flick called "Circuitry Man" and it wasn't good, but it was so cyberpunk it hurt.

The line "Why jack off, when you can jack in?" is definitely going into my next 'punk gaming session.

Automata (2014) is in the ballpark, and is a pretty good movie too, IMO.

Nemesis (1992) is kinda like Circuitry Man. It's not very good, but it is very cyberpunk. Worth a watch.

The Zero Theorem (2013) is a somewhat updated cyberpunk. It's crazy, and pretty good.

Obviously the Blade Runner films can help with inspiration. A Scanner, Darkly or the Matrix might be worth rewatching, too, even though they're fairly removed from the stock cyberpunk experience.

I've seen all of these but The Zero Theorem. That looks really worthwhile, cyberpunk or not. Thanks for the rec!

>Anyone got any recommendations for relevant movies?

Obligatory(?)

I second Johnny Mnemonic. Chrysalis (2007) is a neat one not regularly discussed here. Though it is somewhere more on the side of Minority Report and it is anything more chromed. Still lacking chrome but with all the right attitude: Split Second (1992) is the tits.

>Split Second (1992) is the tits.
Yes! Super fun movie, quite cyberpunk. Not a great film, but solidly enjoyable urban sci-fi action.
>Chrysalis (2007) is a neat one
Hmmmmm... Oh yeah! That WAS a good film. Sorta similar to it, kinda, is Renaissance (2006) -- chiaroscuro animated French cyberpunk flick. Quite good and visually captivating.

Split Second is a great film. It does me a boggle whenever anyone says otherwise. It's not art house. It's not Oscar bait. But it does a damn fine job of doing what it sets out to do.

There were actually a bunch of French cyberpunk/biopunk/dystopian films to come out of the late aughts. Which also reminds me of Babylon A.D. (2008) which got fucked up in edits. Or Eden Log (2007) which is more biopunk than cyberpunk really, but all kinds a fucked up.

Here some more cyberpunk or cyberpunkish movies:
Automata (2014)
Babylon A.D. (2008)
Dredd (2012)
Freejack (1992)
Hardware (1990)
Nirvana (1997)
Repomen (2010)
Robocop (1987)
Robocop 2 (1990)
Running Man (1987)
Strange Days (1995)
Total Recall (1990 + remake from 2012)
The Lawnmower Man (1992)

If you're into Japanese cyberpunk:
964 Pinoccio (1991)
Avalon (2001)
Burst City (1982)
Death Powder (1986)
Guinea Pig: The Android of Notre Dame (1988)
Gunhed (1989)
Hikikomori: Tokyo Plastic (2004)
Rubber's Lover (1996)
Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)
Tetsuo: Body Hammer (1992)
Tetsuo: The Bullet Man (2009)
Tokyo Gore Police (2008)

>Hardware

That movie sucked.

Well, you're entitled to your opinion. Personally, I enjoyed it when I was a kid and haven't seen it since. Note, if you hated it, don't watch anything from the Japanese cyberpunk list - their budget was even lower.

Oh, it wasn't the budget, I just thought it was badly written and unbelievable. I wished I had rented Trancers again instead, for a better B movie experience.

I completely forgot to mention TekWar the TV serie.

>Total Recall (1990 + remake from 2012)
>+ remake from 2012

Do not listen to this man

I listed movies without taking into account the quality of the said movies - otherwise a cyberpunk movie list would be pretty short.

>Tetsuo: The Iron Man
Why is everybody in this movie so sweaty? It's like they just got out of the pool.

Tsukamoto has a huge fetish for body fluids.

Who is the weird hobo who appears near the end of the movie to beat the Fetishist with the threaded rod supposed to be? Is he the last vestiges of the Fetishist's humanity trying to stop him from going through with his new world order plan or something?

"Helpless to do anything, the salaryman, now the Iron Man, is visited by the Metal Fetishist, who emerges from the dead girlfriend's corpse to show him a vision of a "New World" of nothing but metal and turns his cats into grotesque metal creatures. This is where the film suggests a post-apocalyptic future. The Iron Man flees and is followed by the Metal Fetishist into an abandoned building. After the Metal Fetishist explains to the Iron Man how both of them became what they are, a final battle ensues. The Iron Man ends by attempting to rust/combine himself with the Fetishist and this merges both of them (in a hallucinatory rebirth sequence where the two are connected by a metal umbilical cord) into a two-headed metal monster. The two agree to turn the whole world into metal and rust it, scattering it into the dust of the universe by claiming "Our love can put an end to this fucking world. Let's Go!" The duo charges through the streets of Japan in a horrific fusion of the two men and the accumulated metal, in a largely phallic form. The film ends with the words "GAME OVER" as opposed to "The End" after the closing credits."

Escape from New York

That skips the hobo during the chase sequence, the one that makes the Fetishist fall over.

Robocop remake turns absolutely every message from the original around.

The bit in Split Second where Durkin finally gets his big fucking guns really encapsulates the typical Cyberpunk campaign when it comes to firepower.

>"A3, high powered semiautomatic. ARWEN grenade launcher. Calico, high capacity 9mm helical mag. SA80 -"
>"Too fucking small!"

Robocop remake is a rape of the original material.

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

What's your opinion on police in cyberpunk, Veeky Forums? Possibly as the protagonists?

If you do that, it basically by definition turns into post-cyberpunk.
The "punk" part of cyberpunk is the worldview - the anti-establishmentarian, no-future mix between righteous indignation, morbid humor and apathy.
You can't have this in a corp, and you can't have it among the cops unless it's a setting that's passed Mega City One and is rapidly speeding into oblivion.
If you write even a normal cyberpunk story from the corps' and cops' side, you need to explain why they do it, why not everyone is a one-dimensional villain, why there are good guys working for the bad guys and what kind of society they want to see, and in the moment you make that a part of the setting, you're stepping foot in post-cyberpunk.
You've probably watched it already, but give Psycho-Pass a try.
For those who haven't watched it, it's a post-cyberpunk animu set in a Japan ruled by the Sibyl System, a supercomputer that can analyze the human psyche well enough to tell people's propensity for crime and imprison them/send them to treatment before they commit it. It also decides where people are the most needed in society, distributing them into jobs without them needing to strive for them.
It has underground punk-rockers, rebel movements and motorcycle-riding violent lunatics, and it's a proper "cyberpunk" setting - but because the cops are the protagonists, you hear why they work for who they do, which is the part that makes it post-cyberpunk (and also the fact that it's set in a world where the cyberpunk movement already occurred).
It would be harder to pull off in a more dystopian world, but if you don't focus on making the cops humane and reasonable (and thus turning it into post-cyberpunk), you're going to have Cyber City Oedo, Armitage III or some of Ghost in the Shell, where the police or military status of the protagonists is only used to give them a supply of enemies.

Have the characters be cops in the slums. That's very different from working in the clean and safe corporate districts.

The Locations:
- They can see the towers from the business districts and the corporate arcologies in the distance
- Private highways and maglev lines pass over the slums
- Huge, rundown and overcrowded housing projects
- Trench towns consisting of makeshift houses
- Old ruins inhabited by squatters and drug addicts
- Narrow streets full of vehicles, people and trash
- Large red light districts where corporate personnel comes to have some distraction (private security contractors paid by crimes syndicates) - these are the areas with flashy lights and holoadvertising
- Pitch black narrow alleyways, where every corner could hide an ambush
- Chaotic electric wiring
- Chaotic net of wireless computer networks
- Ripperdoc clinics

The Opposition:
- All powerful crime syndicates who control the economy of the slums
- Brutal gangs
- Bloodthirsty terrorists
- Sadistic psychokillers
- Cyberpsychotic war veterans
- Crazy cults
- Gang wars
- Corrupt cops

Miscellaneous:
- Never venture inside the sewer system - never
- You raid crackhouses armed with a 50yo milsurp M4A1 and wearing an antique plate-carrier, while the corporate police has access to smartguns, combat armors, air support and UAVs
- Corporate special forces make bloody raids and stir the shit up

...

...

...

>- All powerful crime syndicates who control the economy of the slums
>- Brutal gangs
>- Bloodthirsty terrorists
>- Sadistic psychokillers
>- Cyberpsychotic war veterans
>- Crazy cults
>- Gang wars
>- Corrupt cops

Don't forget crooked landlords/slumlords!

Also: illegal fight clubs, with rich folks gambling on human lives

Why illegal? Life is so worthless in the slums.

>Why illegal? Life is so worthless in the slums.

(shrug) Depends on your particular setting, I guess.

I never got into the Kovacs series. Much preferred the author's standalone works.
Market Forces was what the world was head for until socialism got out of power, and Black Man is just dead on for the sociopathic super soldier vibe.

Because they're supposedly part of the same city, and so nominally have to obey the same laws as everybody else. Kind of like the Rio favelas, most of the shit that goes on in there is hugely illegal, but basically nobody gives a shit. Nobody but BOPE.

If you look at it from the perspective of what the movie is and not what it is not (including comparisons to the 1990 film and We’ll Rember It For You) it’s actually a pretty enjoyable cyberpunk intrigue action movie. It is worthy of being on a list of cyberpunk films.

>What is Blade Runner

This is still on of the dullest readings of cyberpunk and the push to call it “post-cyberpunk” is pretty pointless when you are still playing the same themes and settings and storylines. Any cyberpunk which doesn’t represent moral ambiguity is probably doing it wrong in the first place.

>I never got into the Kovacs series.

To each his own. Me, I LOVED the first book. The second was good... but there were a couple of scenes that were so sadistic, disturbing, grusome, and just plain upsetting that I decided to skip the third book. :-/

This guy gets it

Yes but Our Robocop Remake is awesome and has puppets.
youtube.com/watch?v=i-9MbhK4tt8

SO many dickshots, I loved Our Robocop Remake!!!!

I think people here grossly overstate the "punk" suffix and think it's not true cyberpunk unless all the MCs are shitkicking gangbangers. The only reason the term cyberpunk even exists is because some critic made it up to describe Neuromancer--which is largely devoid of the brute force rage against the machine pontificating so many people think the genre demands.

You can have a work where the protagonists are cops and the villains are punks, and it'll still be cyberpunk. It's just a catchy term, not an implied requirement. Plus it started this retarded trend of categorizing every little sub flavor of science fiction. Might as well call Star Wars "laserpunk" and Mass Effect "shepardpunk" by this point.

Honestly it's really only useful as an umbrella term for a certain visual aesthetic.

...

Well, a lot of that is a baseline misunderstanding of "Punk" in general. I don't think that characters all need to be prototypical punks, but certain aspects of punk should be implanted into the setting. In broad strokes you've got:
>Anti-authoritarianism (not always in action)
>Do-It-Yourself (cause no one is doing it for you)
>Direct Action (because the system will continue inaction)
>Self-Actualization (both in expression and not selling out)
These aren't an exhaustive list, as often anti-bigotry and anti-violence (The Pit is not violence) motivations, or at least only violence as a response, and community building are really important to the actual punk mentality. So I do appreciate its consideration in a setting. Some people just think it means Chromed-up Sex Pistols and that isn't it.

So you can take those philosophies and they don't even have to be the personal philosophies of characters so long as at least some of those ideas are part of the setting. The understanding that Megacorps are bad is itself anti-establishment. Vigilantism is both DIY and direct action. But sometimes that's building your community on the fringe.

The problem with most dashpunk genres are that they do use it as an aesthetic moniker. Dandies with Cogs and Steam isn't to me steampunk, but when you have a story that considers the impact on everyday people and the world and working class you can incorporate punk into it. Dieselpunk, biopunk, etc. all can happen, but it really is splitting hairs. I wouldn't call Star Wars laserpunk mostly because Space Opera is a much more accurate name.

So, for the most part I agree, but I do think dashpunk has a place, but most people just misunderstand it?

>Shepardpunk
Maximize your anti-establishment Jesus allegories.

>Maximize your anti-establishment Jesus allegories.

Fuck yeah.

How would you do a cyberpunk setting that extrapolates from today instead of the 80s?

Read the Nexus books. They're exactly that.

Identity politics/social fronting, corporate funding over corporate governance, high modularity in technology, wireless everything.

It's actually the main impetus to my own cyberpunk setting I've been working on.

Why would you ever

I'm an edgy and contrarian faggot

>the Nexus books

More specificity please?

The Nexus Trilogy by Ramez Naam. Basically cyberpunk for the 21st century. The title refers to a drug the characters take to basically turn their brains into interlinked operating systems, complete with actual UIs they perceive in their own minds. A lot of transhumanism themes are played around with this.

It's what I call "Black Suburban" sci fi. No neon mohawks, megacorps, or gang bangers. Instead you have drones, Alphabet Soup agencies, and the War On Drugs/Terror.

Sneakers, while grounded in reality, is the best Shadowrun movie I've ever seen

...

>Sneakers, while grounded in reality, is the best Shadowrun movie I've ever seen

By which you mean, of course, the best Cyberpunk 2020 movie you've ever seen.

Climate change and rising seas. Aside from that, tough, it's not necessarily a concrete wasteland with no trees, but it might be subtly fucked up.
Technology IS cleaner at least at first impact, but it doesn't mean it's nicer overall.
Cyber is less important per se, the physical machine implements might be non-existant (but maybe some wetware is), we'll just use drones.
EVERYTHING is connected, of course.
Knowledge is both terribly worthless (as in, human memory loses meaning 'cause there is the net) and terribly necessary (continuing education and all).
The Net has an impact on the real world so great that is difficult even to think of it as separate from the world, and not even just in mere social terms (hell, IRL monday's stock crash was because AIs dun goofed, apparently. Think about THAT for a moment, and tell me it wouldn't be better to think we got corps fucking us over instead, at least we would know who we'd deal with) - use the Veil as an inspiration.
But what is really scary is that there is no Master of Puppets dominating anyone: we created a small garden and got up with a jungle in which brutes do their shit without humans at the helm. Society is manipulated by AIs and algoritms without a real rime or reason.
Everyone has (on the net, but probably in meastspace as well) more identies, the familial ones, the ones at work, the underbelly on the web one, etc.
Truth is both MORE accessible and LESS useful.
Ethnicities and religions are even more of a mishmash, and this means that you might not really understand your neighbour - at the same time politcs (not even just democracy) seem to work way less, people bitch about boundaries (both passive in the "let me be" sense and active in the "let me say it" sense) and there is no projectuality anymore.
Elon Musk launched the Golden Heart to Alpha Centauri a decade ago and you missed the opportunity.

... and I'm worried now. I guess it works.

>IRL monday's stock crash was because AIs dun goofed, apparently

source for that information please

>projectuality

I cannot find a definition for that word.

washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/02/06/algorithms-just-made-a-couple-crazy-trading-days-that-much-crazier/?utm_term=.aec177f9a022

And yes, I expected cute cyborg girls BEFORE shit like that too, but Shirow lied to us all.

Thank you gato!

>Lightning-fast trading models, automated sell orders and an arsenal of sophisticated algorithms may not have driven every bit of misery in what became the biggest stock-market point drop in U.S. history... But investors and market experts say they are likely to have made a crazy trading day that much crazier.

Not quite as insidious as you initially described, but still a fascinating read.

Anyway I honestly think it's fascinating that we always feared the omniscient AI but in truth we might be fucked in the ass by their stupidity, if anything. I guess all the children look like their parents, in the end.

Brazil (1985), it's a dystopian corporate shitscape with analog tech instead of pure cyber/near future tech but it is fantastic

i'll also second the user that said Zero Theorem

Strange Days is one of my favorite lite-cyberpunk settings in a film. Also has based Fiennes

My issue with classic cyberpunk is that it assumes to much forethought and competency on the part of corporations and government, when so much of the evil in the world is actually driven by stupidity, laziness, and ineptitude

To be fair tough it depends. It usually has SOME intelligente antagonists, but the corps aren't particulary going "just according to the plan" or anything.

I always get a weird feeling when I look at some of the cyberpunk art in these films and pictures. Part of it is a longing. It's a future I was promised but never got. Part of it is nervousness and dread that despite how bad everything looks in these it could be so much worse. I feel claustrophobic when I look at it like everything is so cramped. At the same time I sort of long for that feeling that I get when I watch protagonists wander through wet, dirty city streets backlit by interactive neon signs..

People say that if corporations are people, such people would be considered sociopaths. I'm not so sure. Looking at their behavior, one might also say they're fucking BABIES. They want and want, so they take and take, and don't pay attention to consequences.

Laziness, stupidity, and ineptitude? For sure. Brilliant supervillainy? Not so much. Absolute greed? DEFINITELY.

(BTW, pic is from Vanilla Sky, a great movie that bombed for no good reason I can discern. This line is not central to the plot at all, but I find myself going back to it over and over and over again.)

I'm glad you mentioned Freejack. That's an underrated cyberpunk movie in my opinion.

I'm still kinda mad they ditched the Neuromancer script and gave us Strange Days instead. Even if it is a pretty good movie.

I thought this looked cool from the trailer but I never got around to watching it.

Sociopaths essentially are babies. Giant babies with the power of grown adults behind their amoral tantrum shit.

Same here. It's like a feeling of nostalgia for a place we've never been.

>Freejack

2009 sure was futuristic!

Huh, I almost forgot about that movie. Weird, since I actually saw the premiere in my hometown, one of like three premieres I've ever been in on.

Well, there you have it then.

I strongly recommend it.

It's more interesting that way, isn't it though? Assuming the hero / protag(s) defeat the Big Evil, it's hardly satisfactory at all if they're "evil" just because they're incompetent

The thing of it is that the individuals that is acting counter to the hero isn't being incompetent regarding them. It just so happens that a lot of the evils they do or the reason the hero is after them in the first place is often due to a bunch of different things bumbling together.

Someone I know once said about Cyberpunk 2020 that he felt like it "needed an actual villain," like an evil organization to resist. Like Mage's Technocracy, for example. A corporate Illuminati or something.

He liked Cybergeneration better because the ISA was a group of bad guys who were responsible for the bad things in the world, and could be pointed at and blamed and attacked and, of course, used by the GM to oppose them.

I disagreed, and still do. Having no centralized enemy seems more "realistic," more grounded in current society, and less easy -- with no single enemy, there's no simple answer. The world is the way it is, and changing it probably isn't possible. You just have to deal with it.

If he wants a centralized baddie, GURPS Cyberworld setting has that pretty solid. The National Emergency Resource Coordinating Commission (NERCC, essentially America's Schutsstaffel) is more or less set up as the big baddies.

Oh, changing it should always be possible. That should be obvious. The hard part to overcome is that you probably won't live to see the fruits of your own labor for those changes.

But I definitely agree that having one central antagonist is actually bad for pretty much any setting and genre.

In Cyberpunk 2020 all corporations are pretty much the bad guys.

Arasaka is always in the characters' way since it is the largest security contractor on the planet. When Arasaka is not in the characters' way then its Militech. Militech is also the worlds leading weapon manufacturer, selling to every dictatorship of the planet. Biotechnica is always conducting unethical researches and human experiences. Petrochem pollutes and participates to world hunger by using the few farmland available to grow crops for biofuels. It also supports different dictatorships and rebellions around the globe. SovOil does exactly the same as Petrochem. Orbital Air holds orbital colonies by the balls since they are their only lifeline to earth. IEC pollutes, runs unsafe nuclear power plants and produces unreliable home-appliances that injure people and set fire to their homes. Merrill, Asukaga & Finch is a bank. It launders money of crime syndicates, dictatorships and drug lords. NN54 is the largest fake news and alternative facts producer in what is left of the USA. It's also the main TV network of the USA, Alaska, Texas, North California and South California free states. EBM is evil because it's from Germany and all Germans are nazis. Zetatech is surely a very evil company, it just could hide the reason why extremely well. Infocomp snoops around and spies on people and companies, whipping it's ass with people's right to privacy. Trauma Team International will let you die if you don't have enough cash. Internet controls the matrix and its matcops are always after netrunners.

Well yes, the megacorps are certainly positioned as Bad, but there's no centralized villainous force. There are many corporations, and they are causing many Bad things to happen, but there's isn't some Council of Corporations to fight against.

Plus there's also boostergangs, the yakuza and other organized crime groups, serial killers, government agencies, and more out there. In cyberpunk, the "main villain" is essentially How The World Is, rather than a particular organization.

...

...

...

...

...

...

...

...