Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/05/13/tonight-we-riot-is-a-bruta.html
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And the Publisher is Means Interactive, the games division of Means TV who are the same people who came up with Nyan Cat.
Other socialist leaning games developers are Motion Twin (who made Dead Cells) and ZA/UM (Disco Elysium).
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So I assume it is being distributed to the workers as a means of helping morale and provide entertainment?
No? Well, ok then. 
That said, I like the art style a lot. If it was on PS4 I’d give it a shot… I need a new personal computer, I’d get it on Steam.
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odds are your old PC can run an 8bit game.
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It’s 8-bit style, not actually 8-bit. Sometimes those games can be harder on graphics cards than you imagine.
Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
OS: Windows 7
Processor: Intel Core i5
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: Intel HD Graphics 4000 or a better
DirectX: Version 11
Storage: 2 GB available space
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My old PC can’t run anything. Something on the mother board died 
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Yep. To begin with, it’s almost certainly using Unity, rather than a highly efficient custom engine. Unity was built for 3D, but later bodged in some 2D support (and I’ve seen plenty of “2D” games that were actually a bunch of flat images that were arranged in 3D space, flattened out in the rendering). So it’s pretty much the same system requirements as any other modern, 3D game.
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How old is old? I think we’re long past the days of capacitor plague but there might be some susceptible motherboards out there.
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Feels wrong not to pirate this game…
Really now. If felt like giving them money even if the game was shit, because I support the message.
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Then you have the wrong idea about what socialism is. Stealing from the workers is what capitalists do.
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Here’s some free games about socialism
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Had a TV succumb to that. At the time I thought it was a pain to take them out and replace with higher temperature models but in retrospect it was better than TVs killing themselves because software. Which is what they do now.
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You’re totally right - I just balked at seeing an anti-capitalism game published on closed, behemoth platforms like Steam and Switch. Feels like it would be better to send cash (or crypto cash) directly to the devs.
On the other hand, I do dig the idea of using The Machine to dismantle The Machine…
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My theory is the video card died, due to some video glitches that happened shortly before it went kaput. Being a laptop, its part of the motherboard.
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We are all forced to participate in capitalism, the devs and publishers had a choice of sell the game on the closed platforms or let it disappear into obscurity.
GOG is probably the best choice for you, they still have ethical problems but you will get a drm-free installer download that could last longer than the store. That’s about the best I can offer.
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It’s frequently true, but maybe not for this game. According to the developer:
It’s a tangled mess of both C# and JS.
In a dystopia where wealthy capitalists control elections, media, and the lives of working people, we’re faced with two choices – accept it or fight for something better.
true. but what happens in the game?
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Yeah. The excellent Void Bastards uses Unity for its flat, comic book style graphics and seems to put way more strain on my graphics card than the photo-realistic Forza Horizon 4.
As a related aside, I downloaded Streets of Rage 4 the other day. It’s not 8-bit but has arcadey graphics yet somehow was 4.7Gb. I’m really not sure how.
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Yep, that’s Unity alright. (I think they finally pushed out JS in favor of C#, but at least until recently, you could script in both. Which… isn’t normal.) And… yeah, a later comment confirms it is indeed Unity.
Yeah, Unity chugs a bit at best, as it’s designed to be easy to use and flexible via scripting (as opposed to say, Unreal, where you have to do everything in C++), not be efficient in terms of performance. (And it’s easy to make a game without knowing anything about how to maximize performance, which means it’s easy to make a game that performs even worse than normal.)
Absolutely massive numbers of images. This is a problem with 2D sprite-based games. The game uses something like 1000 frames of animation for each character, at fairly high resolutions (at least compared to earlier games in the series),and that adds up. 3D is fairly compact in comparison - one model, one texture set, and a relatively tiny amount of animation data - which is one of the reasons why 3D became popular with developers of certain types of games even at a time when it didn’t look that great. Games that rely on a lot of sprite-based animations are an absolute beast to work with.
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