Hey hey people, Sseth here.
Hēihēi rén, shì Sseth zài zhèlǐ. As China's geopolitical relevance and power grows, we must all humbly admit the impending inevitability that it's only a matter of time before we're all speaking Mandarin. So, you better get started. And what better way than by appreciating Chinese culture before our new masters from Beijing begin their iron-fisted rule? Today, we're going to learn how to appreciate Chinese culture by playing a historical Chinese city building game. Neighborhood too ugly? Just wall it off. Mongolians at your gates? Just wall them off. China loves walls. Ancestors unhappy? Break some pottery. That should make them happy. Develop gunpowder. Improve your technology. Then, pick the nuke general and upgrade your nuke cannons to use neutron shells. These will eliminate the Mongolians, but leave your feng shui [Sseth mispronounces feng shui] intact. Unemployment too high? Garnish their wages. New village doesn't want to trade? Send spies to sabotage their economy and shit in their rice bowls, then export white rice to them at a premium. Establish bureaucracy. Fail to collect any form of tax revenue because you have nothing to write on. Send loggers to cut bamboo. Get mauled to death by pandas. Send in the police to distract them. Get mauled by Tigers instead. Establish a nobility. Spend most of your GDP on providing rice noodles to the nobility. Lose half of your workforce because they forgot to drink water. Lose your dynasty. Lose your head. Rinse and repeat. Welcome to Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom. As one of Impressions Games' final city building projects, Emperor's probably the most streamlined and straightforward of the bunch. Everything works clearly and efficiently and you're no longer constrained by older mechanics in the series, such as living standards, ethics, and human rights. Here in ancient to middle-aged China, the only thing that matters is raw productivity. And ensuring that your population has more variety in their food than just millet and silkworms. China is a hardcore place and it has a very hardcore history, which you can experience across a series of increasingly difficult campaigns. Manage your peasants, cultivate Feng Shui [pronounced incorrectly again] and export cheap electronics to the rest of the world, and you'll see your city flourish. Mismanage everything and you'll see your city fall apart. As Confucius once said: [Chinese voice] "If an Nvidia factory is currently not on fire, it will be on fire." Observe his wisdom and build appropiate health and safeth measures. Or else. Emperor is a game of balance. But mainly, balancing your finances. If you fail to establish adequate civilization and turn a profit within the first two years of game time, consider your government position terminated. In many ways, ancient China had the right idea about administration. They do a good job. They get to keep their job. They do a bad job. They lose their head. Emperor is also a game of planning. You need to plan out your city's layout to satisfy everyone's needs. The nobles want to be far away from the commoners. The commoners want to be far away from all the workshops, factories, and rice fields. The rice farmers are content no matter what. Even if half of their children keep getting systematically eaten by Tigers. This is an unfortunate loss. But rice picking is no profession for slow children. You might ask: "What is the purpose of these obese lecherous bottom feeders we call Nobles?" I'll tell you. Military. China is not a peaceful place, and there's many people who don't understand the fine art of diplomacy. And the only real way of communicating to these people that there's a better alternative to violence is through ultraviolence. Crush them, subvert them, invade them, and then demand everything they have. When they give you everything they have, demand everything they don't. When they can't meet this reasonable request, extinguish them. Then erase them out of every map, book, or scrap of literature. And that is how you peacefully resolve conflict in Emperor. Once your enemies cease to exist, you can actually go and enjoy your city, which is beautiful by the way. I'm running this stretched on a typical 1080p monitor, and all the graphics and sprite work still hold up as well as they did in 2002. Unlike us, this game doesn't age. There's also some widescreen patches available out there, which change the screen size to your native resolution. Bizarrely, these are all in Polish. But since I assume that everyone here is already fluent in Polish, this shouldn't be a problem. While the game is very straightforward, please follow the tutorials. There's nothing more depressing than accidentally building a Watchtower instead of an Inspector's Tower, only to watch your angry and disillusioned citizens get beaten down by police officers as a fire rages through their neighborhood. The music and voice acting is also pretty good. You can actually right-click on any of your citizens currently walking through the streets, and they'll give you some feedback and comments on the current state of your city [Dong Baojia, Guard:] "This city is prettier The most beautiful concubine in China." [Tsu Tiao, Peddler:] "I sell, you buy, you buy!" [Qian Ho, Peddler:] "I am ruined by my kindness in selling soooo cheap." [Li Bai, Homeless:] "I've been evicted by that greedy pig of a landlord. I hope a dragon eats him!" The voice acting by the citizens is fantastic. The same cannot be said of the narrator. [Narrator:] "The verdant lands along the humid shores of the Yangtze River are ideally suited for growing great quantities of rice." "Your wisdom is as bright as the white rice growing abundantly in the paddies." Who sounds like he's one step away from falling over dead in his pawn shop. Interestingly, this was also the only city builder by Impressions Games that had online multiplayer. But does it work? Surprisingly, yes it does. With a little bit of Game Ranger magic, you and your friends can finally roleplay together as Chinese magistrates. [One of Sseth's friends:] "Okay, so I learned that city walls, uh these little walls that you build, they keep the bad feng shui [he actually pronounces it correctly] out, and keep the good feng shui... flowing." [Another one of Sseth's friends:] "Confucius say big tits with no ass will fill your hands, but big ass with no tits will fill your heart." It works very well, and it's a lot of fun invading your friends. While this game gives you a good background to appreciating Chinese history, just remember that the historical accounts given here are very clean and sanitized to keep the PEGI 12 rating, and do not reflect the colorful language and flowery prose you can find in the more vivid accounts. For example, in the game they don't explicitly state how one of the earlier dynasties, the Shang Dynasty, came to an abrupt end, all because of a single woman. Daji. Daji was the favorite concubine of Zhou, the Tyrant of Shang. He was so infatuated with her, he fulfilled her every request. And with each request her requests grew more and more depraved. It was said that her greatest joy was to hear people cry out in pain. In one case, she saw a peasant walking barefoot on the ice and ordered his feet to be cut off so she could study their resistance to cold temperatures. In another she had a pregnant woman's belly cut open so she could satisfy her curiosity of what goes on inside. Fun fact, Daji also invented her own torture device called the paolao, Which is a nice little bronze cylinder on which you strap a person's body and heat the bottom with charcoal. The heat transfers up the cylinder and slowly, painfully, cooks you alive. Despite all of Zhu's affections, Daji was not any more loyal to him than anyone else. She later had an affair with Boi Kao, eldest son of Ji Chang. Zhu had him killed and had his body ground into mincemeat, but this was not enough. Zhu forced Ji Chang to drink a soup made of his own son's flesh before throwing him in jail. Eventually, the people had enough. An uprising broke out, led by Ji Chang's youngest son, seeking revenge for Zhu's atrocities. Even the better equipped and formerly invincible army of the Shang turned on their own tyrant. Seeing his death fast approaching, Zhu committed suicide instead, by setting himself on fire. Daji's head rolled on the chopping block shortly after as their murderous dynasty crumbled to the ground. And that's why Daji gets my vote as 2019's waifu of the year. Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom is a fantastic city builder, which takes place in a part of the world that, sadly, we don't see depicted very often in western video games. The closest thing to Emperor in the market today would probably be Jade Empire, but as I later learned, historians hold serious doubts as to whether or not the Chinese were capable of transforming into frog demons and dragon punching their enemies to death. Emperor still holds up great today, with some of the cleanest and most refined mechanics in the series. It's fun, it's relaxing and it's usually on sale for very cheap. It can also be downloaded for even cheaper. I give it 12 bolts of silk out of 8 stacks of carved jade, which if we convert back to Imperial units comes to a comfortable high score of 96 degrees Fahrenheit. Highly recommended. Go play it. Anyway, Chinese dominance is inevitable and sooner or later we will all be living under the Chinese firewall. After a hard day's work at the Nvidia Factory, there's no better way to relax than by torrenting some anime. And just like that, your social credit score has plummeted five points. The People's Party frowns upon your poor taste in anime. You are no longer eligible for a mortgage. You must now settle for a smaller fishing shack. Your wife leaves you for a man with higher social credit from the Intel factory. You are devastated. "How could I have prevented this?" you think. I'll tell you how: By getting a VPN. Not just any VPN. ExpressVPN. Because they're very good, and also because they're sponsoring this video. However, free will is not an illusion. And even though we are subject to the appetites of our brain chemistry, we are still accountable for our conscious actions. As such, I can only influence you. Use my link and apparently you can get three months of VPN for free. You can also get your money back if you refund it in 30 days. I meant to give an honest account of ExpressVPN, so here it is: It's pretty fast. I mainly use it to upset the Japanese by pretending to be Korean online. I also use it to play region-locked Korean MMOs so that I can finally escape the hordes of Brazilians in other multiplayer games. All in all a very pleasant experience. So now you can safely torrent your anime in peace, and your family will never have to know. As always, more content to come so stay tuned. A warm thanks to the many members of The Merchants Guild, generously funding and bankrolling these videos. This one, however is free. You're all truly wonderful. Have a good one. [Bi Weimin, Tax Official:] "You all know, it's better to give than to receive. "Especially to me. I-I mean, to your government."
People ask how a black Jewish Muslim man became a Chinese emperor, and the answer is really quite simple. Famous black people are beloved by the Chinese.