The Taiwanese news animators at NMA are no stranger to covering the gaming industry, and now they've applied their particular brand of snarky humor to last week's "SimCity" DRM crisis. Though the videos have never been known to pull any punches, this one may have crossed a line or two.
Entitled "'SimCity' Disaster: DRM Ruins Launch," the report doesn't just go after EA and Maxis for releasing an unplayable game, but also the game's fans, portraying them categorically as whiny and obese. The report includes some of the story's later developments, including Amazon's temporary sales ban, but is far from comprehensive.
The video is also... Well it gets pretty racist. At the 0:40 mark, Maxis general manager Lucy Bradshaw, a white-skinned woman with straight blond hair, gets burned by fire-breath, turning her into a dark-skinned woman with an afro. There are obviously more than a few ways to construe it as racist: By a white person into a black person by injuring them, the video implies that light-skinned people are better than dark-skinned people. Realistically, the effect was an act of lazy animation and not intentional discrimination, but it's incredibly insensitive and hard to miss.
The NMA videos have never produced nuanced or accurate reports, but they've generally been kind of funny. If they've lost sight of that, what good are they?
