I have been playing a lot of the DOS version of Simcity 2000 recently. I grew up with it on my windows 98 pc, so revisiting it was nice. There were a few thing I picked up on that I never realized when I was young.
1: The game, especially the soundtrack, reminds me of Blade Runner. It has the synthy jazz instrumentals that are melancholic, but also has that classic simcity cheer.
2: The game kind of has a dystopian feel to it, at least visually. The ground is brown, with only sparse trees filling the world, buildings are fairly realistic, with not many colors, outside of the luxury homes and the Arcos are very intimidating structures, like something out of Judge Dredd or, again, Blade Runner.
3: Omg, water sucks in this game xD.
Why does this game feel so moody, at least to me? It’s also intensly funny, and I will never not laugh when 1700 llamas die in a plane crash.
These kind of protests are almost exclusively what the Yes Men do! They got their start when they were making a parody website of the WTO (Then GATT) and suddenly had a bunch of serious industry people mistaking their parody site for the real one and sending them emails inviting them to conferences. Thus Andy Bichlbaum and the Yes Men were born! They always go way beyond absurd to try to capture people’s attention, but most often with groups of “experts” everyone takes them all to seriously.