Hammerjack

God Complex (2017) is a great comic. My only complaint is it was cancelled after 6 issues. But at least they've released the whole thing as a single volume to make it easy to read.

The series takes place in a cyberpunk city where the Greek Gods are real and they're the only ones who can access cyberspace. And they all look like futuristic cyborgs, for whatever reason.

The main character is a down-on-his-luck detective investigating a series of murders that seem to be linked to a new cult. This heretic cult claims to worship one single God and The Rulers (Greek Gods) want to put a stop to it. So the detective's murder investigation captures the attention of The Rulers and they get involved. I don't want to say the last issue ends on a cliffhanger, but it definitely ends on a big reveal.

You can read the entire first issue here.

A couple months ago, it was rumored that Robert Pattinson might play Case in Apple TV+'s Neuromancer. It looks like that rumor fell through because it's now official, Callum Turner will play Case. I'll be honest with you, I have no idea who this guy is. But an official announcement about Neuromancer means this project is definitely moving forward!

Anno: Mutationem is a weird game. First of all, it looks amazing. They totally captured the cyberpunk aesthetic. But in my opinion, the gameplay is just 'ok'. It isn't bad by any means, it's just generic.

The game has two different types of gameplay: 3d exploration, and 2d beat 'em up. And the two don't mix. When in the exploring areas, you can wander around wherever you want and talk to NPCs. But once you enter a combat level, you're locked in a 2d plane for a beat 'em up game. The entire game basically alternates between these two modes, until you reach the latter part of the game where it's all action.

Overall I enjoyed the game but I was obviously playing it for the cyberpunk aesthetic, which is where it shines. Otherwise, the exploration is limited to small regions and the combat is fairly repetitive. Neither are bad, just small in scope.

Here's a trailer. You can get it on Steam, Switch, Playstation, Xbox, wherever.

I've been thinking about Gamer for a while and I've been hesitant to post about it because it really is a bad movie. But I also think it firmly falls into the cyberpunk category. So here we are.

The movie is about a company that invents some new technology which allows you to remotely control other humans. They use this technology to make a new reality TV show where death-row inmates fight to the death for the chance at a pardon. So similar to Running Man, except here the inmates are remotely controlled by teenage video gamers. And while that makes absolutely no sense, that's the story they went with.

However, there's a subplot with a second TV show (or just video game?) run by the same company, and this game is called Society. Society is basically The Sims except you're controlling real people who get paid to be avatars. This is where the movie goes off the deep-end with social commentary and it isn't subtle.

Because this woman signs up to be a character:

And ends up being controlled by this guy:

And that goes about as well as you'd expect. So the plot points are already unsettling but the movie goes out of their way to make it as disgusting as they can.

Anyway, eventually it's revealed that the CEO of the company wants to use his technology to mind-control everyone and only Gerard Butler can stop him. It's a very strange movie and if it didn't try so hard to be gross I feel like it could've been a good movie.

Here's a trailer. You can watch it on Tubi.

I'll admit as a kid I never watched Phantom 2040 mostly due to his boring purple outfit. If he had a cooler costume I probably would've watched it because otherwise it's crime fighting in a cyberpunk city, which I'm a fan of.

So have any of you watched it? Is it any good? I worry that being a saturday morning cartoon from the 90s means it'll just be basic childish plots resolved within 20 minutes. I mean, Spider-Man Unlimited has Spider-Man getting trapped in a cyberpunk city of human/animal hybrids with a spider-suit made of nanomachines and yet the execution was mostly boring. So I expect Phantom 2040 probably isn't worth watching.

Here's the intro. I happened to notice the show because the entire series is currently streaming on Amazon Prime, YouTube, Roku, and Pluto. And there's also a SNES game which I've heard good things about.

What are your favorite old-school cyberpunk video games? I’m not convinced there’s anything worth playing from the ZX Spectrum/Commodore 64 era, but maybe the NES/SNES/N64/PS1 eras had some good cyberpunk games?

Most of the old cyberpunk games I can think of were on PC, and most of those were point & click adventure games. But what about more action-oriented games? Like X-Kalibur 2097, Slave Zero, or Tron 2.0? Or maybe there are some arcade (MAME) games worth playing?

Also, when I say "best" I really just mean "fun". So give me something better than Raid 2020 and I’ll call it a win.

I know there probably aren't too many metalheads here, and music posts in general never do all that well on this community, but I'm going to post this anyway!

Burton C Bell had been the lead singer of Fear Factory for 30 years when he quit the band in 2020. This is his first song as a solo artist since the split. It's more industrial than Fear Factory was but the video and lyrics are definitely cyberpunk in my opinion. I hope he releases an entire album in this style.

I don't typically browse kickstarter looking for cyberpunk content but the Almighty Internet Algorithm shoved this video in my face and I gotta admit, it is cyberpunk.

The animation seems really smooth, kinda like the old Flashback, or more recent Lunark. But for all I know, maybe they were going for something closer to Anomaly Agent.

Anyway, this is a Kickstarter that just started and it doesn't look like it'll be a runaway success (or maybe they're just asking for too much money). They've already created a Steam page for the game though, so maybe they'll still work on it even if the kickstarter fails. Who knows, I'll probably just put it on my Steam wishlist to keep an eye on whether it ever releases.

All of Philip K. Dick's writings pre-date cyberpunk as a genre but were very influential in the creation of cyberpunk. So he represents a proto-cyberpunk period in time. Also, most of his books are about drug use and questioning reality.

When his books are only used as the foundation of a movie, amazing things can happen (Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall). But when you create a faithful adaptation of his works it always ends up... kinda weird. A Scanner Darkly follows its source material very closely. So even though the movie was made in 2006, it really represents a proto-cyberpunk point in time. And it's all about taking drugs and questioning reality.

The movie has big-name actors (Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr, Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder) but the majority of the movie is just a bunch of junkies sitting around their house being weird. The rotoscoping animation style is really cool (and used to great effect here) but it isn't enough to get me to care about the story. I don't know, I guess I'd call this movie interesting but I'm not sure if it's good.

Here's a trailer. I don't think it's streaming anywhere though.

I have no idea who made this but I found it on reddit and decided to share. Here's the full-size image for those who want to zoom in.

We can argue which GitS work is the best but I enjoy all of it. Even bad GitS is better than most anime. And I'd argue the live action movie would've been better received if it didn't have the high expectations of being a GitS adaptation. It's still a fun sci-fi movie.

When making recommendations, I typically try to ensure something is "cyberpunk" rather than ensuring it's "good". After all, this community is for "cyberpunk" content, not "my random list of recommendations".

But I'm not going to try with this one. It isn't cyberpunk. I'll call it cyberpunk-adjacent though simply because of the mood of this movie. Plus, it's a really good movie. And the animation is incredible. You could call it style over substance, but there's a lot of style in this movie.

Redline is about an illegal car race which draws in racers from all over the galaxy. This year, the race has been chosen to run on a planet called Roboworld, who definitely do not want the race to happen on their planet. So it's sci-fi, it's weird, and it's a gorgeous film made by Madhouse.

Here's a trailer. I don't think it's streaming anywhere right now but if you ever get a chance, definitely watch it.

I know posting cyberpunk artwork is the quickest way to get those precious upvotes, but I don't like posting random art for no reason. I'd rather find an actual artist's work that happens to be cyberpunk than some AI-generated thing or someone who spent an hour learning Blender and posted the results. Of course, sometimes it's hard to tell when looking at a piece of art how much effort actually went into it.

With that said, I'm pretty sure this artwork was done by an actual professional. Yes, this picture was posted on deviantart but the guy has a lot of other work there and seems to be using his actual human name rather than some avatar.

I know I could've posted this picture without going on a little rant, but I typically spend a lot of time thinking about each post before making it so just posting a random picture I found on the internet feels so lazy to me. I'm not opposed to others posting artwork here, but I try to have a reason to post something (to start a discussion) and I've got nothing with this one. It's just another "person looking out over cyberpunk city" motif, of which there are thousands, but I like this one.