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Harvester
Harvester was a point and click adventure game about High Score released in the late 1990's that was meant to troll the concerned American public following the ESRB Scapegoat but was surprisingly a commercial failure. It was created to spark drama following the recent speculation in American culture that violence in video games causes violence irl, but though heavily ignored by the main public, it gleaned a cult following by gamers who recognized its true potential as being the greatest game made within the last 50 years.
Harvester's Main Message
Incredibly awesome violence and gore aside, there's actually a message hidden within Harvester. The message is not so subtly divided equally between both endings, so either one you choose will leave you with the game's main Aesop.
GOOD ENDING: Roadrunner Cartoons
- "Don't you know that people who watch violence become violent themselves?"
- "That's bullshit Mom."
BAD ENDING: Getting Married (Lulz)
There's the alternate ending: where the game's message STILL can't be escaped: The Harvester scientists stand over your freshly dead corpse in an examination room discussing just how useless it is to use video games to create serial killers. Instead, they hint that genetics may play a bigger role in crime. (Which have proven scientific basis behind their contribution, which is not based on fridge brilliance created by politicians and overly concerned parents looking for something to blame)
If you're a SJW without the humor to see the message then you would've probably played your way through to find an ending fork that would leave a bad taste in your mouth either way. Otherwise, if you're like the rest of us and can actually perform higher than a freshly uprooted carrot on the SAT then you'd see that the game's message basically blurts out to the American public that if you actually believe that video games extraordinarily induce serial killing and violent psychopathy somehow, then you're a fucking idiot.
High Score: The Game
Even Retsupurae think this game is fucked up
The game itself lives on as a Top 100 for the most nerdy of gamers. Though it was largely ignored at its release and failed as the potential drama bomb that the developers meant for it to be (The developers complained that the programming took quite some time), decades later we can only speculate at just how much trolling it could have done had the compile-time not taken a few months longer than the anticipated release date.
Being that it's the career profession of YouTube LP'ers to review the best and worst of every gaming category, one can find a fuckload of videos of this game. Most are voiced over by internet personalities like Retsupurae and Phreakindee and all freak at the obscene amount of gore and violence that the game features.
Harvester uses hilariously obscene amounts of Full-Motion-Video gore to test the very idea that video games cause individuals to become serial killers. Attacking innocent NPCs in-game with something as weak as a pitchfork will lead to the defeated NPC to instantly explode to a gory shred of intestines, blood, piss, shit, semen and other vitreous entrails.
Despite this cartoonish bending of anatomy, Harvester continues to keep its tongue deep in its cheek without directly revealing the joke by hinting that the ridiculous amount of displayed violence in games isn't anything like the violence in the real world because to a greater extent, the ways that people typically die in violent games aren't ever really comparable to the way that people die IRL. I mean, jesus fuck people, how many times has your mom's pancreas instantly burst from her chest after a single baseball bat swing to the head?
If this wasn't obvious enough for you because you're a concerned parent, then later on in the game at the pre-ending ultimatum, it's directly stated in the dialogue that video game monsters don't fucking exist... yet somehow after battling through a tower of them, you're somehow expected to instantly become a serial killer from fighting them.. amirite?