Trials of Mana and Legend of Mana released on GOG!!!

https://www.gog.com/en/news/the_legendary_mana_series_arrives_on_gog_alongside_the_firstever_square_enix_jrpg_sale

GOG is lately on fire, with adding new SE games to their catalogue! I just wish a day would be 48 hours long, as I never played the Mana series, but absolutely no time atm

https://www.pcgamer.com/games/gog-apologizes-for-emailing-nazi-runes-to-its-followers/

Was wondering wtf was with that

GOG is the only DRM-free storefront with more professional titles, so I hope that they will remove whoever thought it was a good idea to send this (a bit too specific to be random) and hire a sensitivity reader or a team (I was annoyed when I got an unclearly marked ad for hetero porn). Admittedly, I stopped reading the email after "Slavic".

They used AI. Bit hard to sack them.

Tempting as it might be say that they used Grok one of the problems with AI is it has no actual context beyond what it 'reads'. The tsunami of "no, they're just pagan symbol enthusiasts!" every time a Ukrainian neo nazi's tattoos or uniform patches gets posted to social media means AI 'thinks' that it really is just slavic culture to be doubly enthusiastic about Harry Potter cosplay/ a confused Buddhist/ like specific stylised renditions of a sun/ skull etc.

OTOH, can't wait for the reaction to GOG's Jain games promotion week.

Edited 13 hours ago13 hr by Zoraptor

2 hours ago, Zoraptor said:

They used AI. Bit hard to sack them.

Tempting as it might be say that they used Grok one of the problems with AI is it has no actual context beyond what it 'reads'. The tsunami of "no, they're just pagan symbol enthusiasts!" every time a Ukrainian neo nazi's tattoos or uniform patches gets posted to social media means AI 'thinks' that it really is just slavic culture to be doubly enthusiastic about Harry Potter cosplay/ a confused Buddhist/ like specific stylised renditions of a sun/ skull etc.

OTOH, can't wait for the reaction to GOG's Jain games promotion week.

Interesting. Thank you for the possible explanation. Still, it is unlikely to be "agentic" AI with access to the mailing tool and there must have been a human who LGTM'd the output, though it would be less intentional in that case. I guess, the genAI subscriptions can be cancelled, but I doubt that anyone would get a subscription for a non-programming LLM only instead of some sort of an office suite (MS Copilot and Google Gemini and not Anthropic Cloude).

The apology is ridiculous.

Since when does Poland need German proof reading to learn about World War 2 and Nazi Germany?

Next thing they'll tell us Poland wasn't invaded. There was no Warsaw ghetto uprising. So it is quite understandable that staff at GOG wouldn't know about the SS.

Well as a guy with ugric and slavic ancestors, as soon as I received the mail, I knew, that there will be crazy backlash from it. Although as much as some people love to point fingers of blame, these runes are part of our ancient history and have been misused by neo-nazi propaganda. Removing these symbols from proto-slavic history because of these "modern" connections is stupid, and it can be seen as erasure of our ancient cultural heritage. Some people who have absolutely nothing with neo-nazis are still using these symbols around here, as much as some hinduists are still using swastikas. Shall we point fingers at them as well?

That being said, one of the runes posted was the rune used by SS units, and one of them is used by russian neo-nazi battalion Rusich, which is actively brutalizing and killing ukrainian civilians... This should never gone through the approval process. So GOG ****ed up on that...

10 hours ago, Hawke64 said:

Interesting. Thank you for the possible explanation. Still, it is unlikely to be "agentic" AI with access to the mailing tool and there must have been a human who LGTM'd the output, though it would be less intentional in that case. I guess, the genAI subscriptions can be cancelled, but I doubt that anyone would get a subscription for a non-programming LLM only instead of some sort of an office suite (MS Copilot and Google Gemini and not Anthropic Cloude).

If it were AI it wasn't sent without any human checking it for sure, since the german language version got edited due to someone noticing; though germans subbed to the english language version still got it. Could easily be that whoever was checking the english version just skimmed it without thinking what it looked like. Don't think there'd be much issue with the kolovrats/ sun wheel(s) in isolation since they aren't the overtly nazi black sun version. It's the double sowilo that is the problem and to be scrupulously fair to GOG, the sowilo is also 100% the rune for 'sun'. As well as having been appropriated by the SS.

(Of course it's the germanic rune for sun, not slavic... but if you want a sun rune that's what you get)