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[hops]

I've been obsessed with cyberpunk lately. Beats me why. Anyways, this thread is for discussing all things cyberpunk. In my opinion, even though cyberpunk sort of have a set of specific aesthetics, I'd say that if it's set in the near future and is not a space opera and has massive class divide, then it's cyberpunk.

I finished Neuromancer a while back, I found it sort of funny how familiar all the concepts were to me due to cultural osmosis. I didn't particularly feel the need to read the classics apart from Neuromancer, so I have been trawling for new material. Videogame-wise VA-11 Hall-A sort of scratches that itch for me, and there's also Deus Ex: HR and MD that is cyberpunk in setting although it didn't feel very cyberpunk. I'm sort of getting hype for Cyberpunk 2077 though and is about to buy Tokyo 42.

I haven't watched the Ghost in the Shell anime or film yet. I got a little in at the start of the anime but I guess I forgot to watch more of it.

Oh, and I'm currently reading Infomocracy, which I suppose so far is more like futuristic in general rather than particularly cyberpunk, though the nod to the pink, neon Japanese aesthetic tipped the scale a little towards punk.

[zombat]

Cyperpunk has always been dirty and gritty like Bubblegum Crisis, Blade Runner, and the first two Deus Ex games.
The tech is there but dubiously beneficial to humanity, people replace their bits but quickly become obsolete.

Deus Ex HR was too clean and sleek, more Neo Renaissance than Cyberpunk.

[hops]

Cyperpunk has always been dirty and gritty like Bubblegum Crisis, Blade Runner, and the first two Deus Ex games.
The tech is there but dubiously beneficial to humanity, people replace their bits but quickly become obsolete.

Deus Ex HR was too clean and sleek, more Neo Renaissance than Cyberpunk.

I feel like HR has the cyerpunk part of the higher ups being aggressively assholish for no real reasons down pat, though.

Also I feel like the main series Deus Ex were already so far into dystopia that they don't count as cyberpunk anymore.

[Levi]

Ooh.  I actually just watched Ghost in the Shell the live action movie recently, it was surprisingly decent.  Wasn't 100% sold at the start on the actor for Batou, but I think the actor did pretty well as him.

Edit: 

My first introduction to cyberpunk was the ShadowRun SNES game, I've kinda loved it ever since.

[MrRoboto75]

Mildly off topic but I've always been facinated with older views of futures with high technology yet missing obvious tech that actually ended up happening a few decades later.  Like how in the Alien movies or Starcraft we have interstellar travel but the ships and stuff are incredibly bulky and are covered in massive CRT displays.

Or, to better rope into cyberpunk, a lot of what made Shadowrun more difficult was that WiFi didn't exist.  You had to sneak in a hacker physically and jack him in to an actual port somewhere in the building.  A lot of newer editions of the game are there just to introduce modern tech that should have always been there, like wireless comms and later augmented reality displays.

[hops]

Wait, Shadowrun's been around that long? I always felt like it was new.

Jeez, why are good cyberpunk stuffs always so old? Ready Player One doesn't count.

[Harry Baldman]

Checking in to shill Bruce Sterling, specifically his books Holy Fire (excellent rendition of life extension and near-posthuman future) and Distraction (brilliant version of a collapsing America's backwoods areas) that I've read. I really ought to look into his more famous stuff, he's apparently one of the founders of the genre.

They're not exactly pure cyberpunk, or rather not classic cyberpunk, but if we count Human Revolution as cyberpunk they're close enough as both have compelling settings undergoing dilapidation and change despite being pretty light on class struggle for the most part.

[MrRoboto75]

Wait, Shadowrun's been around that long? I always felt like it was new.

Jeez, why are good cyberpunk stuffs always so old? Ready Player One doesn't count.

My second edition Shadowrun book is copywrighted for 1992.  It really isn't that its old morso than a lot of the tech I mentioned happened over like 20 years or so.  A lot of big stuff, Like when I was five we had mostly 3.5 floppies that held maybe half a megabyte, to 600 mb CDs, to DVDs that held more, to now several hundred gig thumbdrives and such.  And then there's the internet.

[nenjin]

Everything good that is cyberpunk is so old because it was conceived of in a time when shit like wireless, a thriving internet and cybernetics were actual science fiction.

Today we all have cellphones and the idea of a guy carrying a whole computer around in his backpack and having a "deck" is rather quaint, at best. You can see it in the revised Shadowrun editions where they try to rethink the world now that wireless is no longer science fiction.

Anyways, favorite part of Cyberpunk growing up: I had a GM who made a cybernetic enhancement called "The French Kiss of Death." It was a steel, articulated, telescopic tube with a rotatory head on it. It was installed in your chest and could be deployed into someone's chest cavity while kissing, where it would promptly liquefy the victim's insides. He used it as a personal defense weapon/assassination tool for street walkers in Night City.

[hops]

Okay but how is that more efficient than just stabbing the poor sod in the vitals with a knife? If someone is kissing you then it can't be that hard to kill them.

[nenjin]

Okay but how is that more efficient than just stabbing the poor sod in the vitals with a knife? If someone is kissing you then it can't be that hard to kill them.

Dermal plating, wired reflexes, patdowns, weapon scanners, no organic parts except organs.....plenty of reasons it works.

[MrRoboto75]

Heh, I remember some of the shadowrun equipment catalog books would have amazon-like "reviews" fluff for some of the products.  One of the things you could buy was a cybernetic arm that could transform into a literal chainsaw weapon.  Half the reviews were "that's stupid and impractical" and the other half were "shut up that's awesome".

[nenjin]

Classic Cyberpunk does come from an era when I feel like we demanded less practical realism in our entertainment and accepted a lot more stuff on the basis that it was rad. Possibly because all of us were kids.

"Why use a keyboard when you can have a smart phone implanted in your head" is one example of that which comes to mind. Yeah, having an implanted cell phone is, in practical and aesthetic terms, modern. But a dude with a keyboard in his hands and wires running into their head is way more awesome.

[nenjin]

I've never regretted spending .99 cents on E.Y.E. Not even once.

[GiglameshDespair]

I've never regretted spending .99 cents on E.Y.E. Not even once.

I have. God knows what you're actually meant to do in that game.