On top of making cars that burst into flames and being an alleged sexual harasser, Elon Musk is playing Elden Ring with the worst and most dumbfounding build I’ve ever seen.

On Tuesday, Musk tweeted that “Elden Ring, experienced in its entirety, is the most beautiful art I have ever seen.” Of course it is incredibly annoying when the worst person you know makes a great point, but Musk followed up on Wednesday with photos of his Elden Ring build. 

For some bizarre reason, Musk has two swords, a staff, and two shields equipped, making him a bloated mess, slugging through the game from each Site of Grace to the next.

“Equipped load will be lower if fast roll is needed,” he tweeted along with the photos. Let me explain why this matters and show he has no idea what he’s doing.

In Elden Ring the items you equip onto your character determine how much weight you carry, which impacts your stamina regeneration and speed. If you wear lighter armor, you can dodge attacks more quickly. If you’re somewhere in the middle, you have what is generally considered as the normal Dark Souls roll. If you wear a ton of heavy armor and weapons, you are, naturally, heavy and roll at a much slower pace. Crucially, your character has fewer invincibility frames, or i-frames, with a heavy roll, meaning that there is a much shorter window of time in which you can effectively dodge enemy attacks. You can level up the Endurance stat which will let you wear heavier gear while still using one of the more beneficial rolls.

The thing is with equip load, it gets heavier even if your character is not holding an item in their hand at that exact moment. If you have a staff and two swords equipped, your character is still carrying the weight of those three items even if only one sword is in their hand at any one time. So, unless you are switching between weapons for your build, something that some people do to enjoy the unique benefits of, say, different swords, it makes no sense to equip a bunch of unnecessary items.

That’s what Musk is doing though. For some reason, he has both the Heavy Brass Shield (good by itself with a relatively high Guard Boost rating when leveled up) and the Carian Knight’s Shield equipped. He’s not even holding a shield in each hand. If he did that, he could at least be running around like some sort of super tank. He’s just adding extra weight with no discernible benefit and living with the downsides of that.

His quip that “Equipped load will be lower if fast roll is needed” makes no sense. If needed for what? To medium roll? That would be better, yes. Then why not do that all of the time? Why not just pick one of the shields and use that with your current sword? It’s not like you’re using the second shield at the same time anyway.

Viable builds that result in heavy rolls do exist. In those, players basically stack heavy armor to the point where they can absorb large amounts of damage, and increase their “poise” stat. The higher this is, the less likely it is that you will be stunned or interrupted when an enemy attacks you, letting you plow through and just bash people all day. That is absolutely not what Musk is doing though. His armor includes the Twinsage Glintstone Crown, a helmet for typically lighter moving mages, and his poise stat is a distinctly average 54, which is not enough for a high poise build.

Somehow, Musk is also level 111, according to the photos he tweeted. That’s a respectable level, and the point in a character’s progression where you might be entering at least the last leg of the main story content. But has Musk been running something like this embarrassing build up to this point? Heavy rolling again and again across The Lands Between. It is not clear where exactly in the game Musk is at—it is possible to grind your level in Elden Ring without making much progression at all—but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt of getting somewhat far with that level. (His chest armor is Radahn’s Lion Armor, meaning he has at least killed that boss).

Now, what makes Elden Ring great is that it is all about choice. Whereas the earlier From Software games were more about perseverance and overcoming an obstacle in front of you, Elden Ring is more squarely about exploration. With that freedom, comes the option for the player to decide how to engage with the world. Many people do that by deliberately making the game harder, by perhaps never leveling up their character or trying to kill bosses without ever being hit. 

If Musk is making the game more challenging for himself by choice, more power to him. Maybe he can go for the one staff, two swords, two shields speedrun record. But, given what he said about switching to a lighter roll if needed, I suspect Musk just doesn’t understand how the game actually works.

I emailed Musk to ask about his build decisions. I also asked if he had beaten Malenia, generally considered to be the hardest boss in the game. The idea of him heavy rolling while trying to dodge her hyper-aggressive attacks is very, very, funny to me. At the time of writing I haven’t received a reply.

Subscribe to our cybersecurity podcast, CYBER. Subscribe to our new Twitch channel.

Seeing an image of Sonic the Hedgehog as a Nazi wouldn’t even make me blink in the year 2022. I’ve been looking at the internet for too long to be shocked by fascist imagery or weird fan art of Sega’s beloved mascot. In a way, the marriage of the two is inevitable, a kind of Rule 34 without the sex, though you can find a sexy picture of Nazi Sonic as well if you looked.

Google Image Search “Nazi Sonic” and see the images yourself. There he is photoshopped on Hitler’s body, with his friend Tails, saluting the Nazi flag. One of these images is not like the rest, however. It’s from a moderately viral tweet from October 29, 2020, showing a lovingly hand drawn Sonic with a Swastika armband and a rifle, seemingly blowing up Mario, his rival mascot from Nintendo, to bits. Unlike the other internet detritus the Google search turns up, this one by contrast has a childish charm. 

More interesting, however, is that the image was originally published in the June 1992 issue of Sega Power, a magazine devoted to the video game company, its games, and the fandom around it. How in the world, any reasonable reader today might ask, did a popular gaming magazine publish Nazi Sonic fan art?

To understand this image we must first understand its historical context. By 1992, the Cold War had ended and the Console War was heating up. It is the fourth generation or 16-bit era of consoles. The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) has been on the market for two years, and the Sega Genesis for a couple more. The Nintendo Entertainment System had completely dominated the previous generation and is widely considered to have pulled the video game industry out of 1983’s great video game crash. 

In 1992, Nintendo’s position was less dominant. The Genesis launched at a lower price point and consistently outsold the SNES during the Christmas shopping season. The Genesis had a slick, black, edgier look, and the marketing to match. “Genesis does what Nintendon’t,” as the famous ad said.

Key to this edgieness was Sonic, who differentiated from Nintendo’s loveable goofball Mario by taking on a kind of rude teen attitude. If you let him idle for a bit in the game he’d break the fourth wall, look at the camera, and start tapping his foot, urging you to get on with it. Over the years, these mascots became the avatars of the console wars, which is why PlayStation launched with an ad of Crash Bandicoot in front of Nintendo headquarters calling Mario a “plumber boy.” 

This intense rivalry and brand affiliation-as-gamer identity largely defined mainstream gaming culture when Sega Power published that June 1992 issue. Back then, magazines like Nintendo Power published fan art in their reader letters sections, and it’s no surprise then that the June 1992 issue of Sega Power includes a lot of anti-Nintendo drawings.

There’s a short comic where Shinobi cuts off Mario’s stomach with a sword to help him “lose some weight:”

One of Sonic punching Mario’s face in:

Another revealing that Mario is bald beneath his iconic hat:

One particularly morbid fan art depicts Mario with a noose around his neck while Sonic shoots him with a pistol and Luigi is decapitated in the background by Alex Kidd:

The image of Nazi Sonic is slightly less shocking when nestled among the images above, but it’s still pretty bad. A note from the editor alongside the image reads:

“A rightwing Sonic blasts that small chap who wears an M on his hat to kingdom come. The artist? None other than Alex Beardshaw from Sheffeld.”

Andy Smith, the editor of Sega Power at the time, told me that the issue was in fact published during the height of the Nintendo vs. Sega wars in the UK, and that the magazine published fan art as a way of connecting with readers. For some of those readers—kids, he assumed—seeing their art in the magazine meant the world to them. 

“As to this particular image—the armband was not considered a big issue back in those days,” Smith said. “Perhaps we simply weren't as 'woke' as we are now, but I think we were perhaps better at seeing things in context—the whole 'idea' of this particular sketch is to show Sonic (Sega) blowing away Mario (Nintendo) and that was about as far as it went.”

In Smith’s opinion, the Nazi armband was just a way to convey that Sonic was a ruthless force to be reckoned with. 

“Maybe that's my naivety, but I don't think anyone—certainly not me as the editor at the time— thought it was so outrageous that it shouldn't be printed. We also tagged the image as 'rightwing' in the caption which I hoped would give people the idea that we didn't approve of rightwing extremism, but I doubt anyone ever noticed that.”

More than anything, Smith regrets “Dan’s Crap Corner,” a part of the letters section where Sega Power shared the worst fan art it got by mail. 

“Naturally I thought I was being hilarious and thankfully someone with more sense than me told me I was being insensitive,” Smith said. “The name was dropped and simply called 'The Sega Power Gallery' after a few issues, but it still haunts me and I'm deeply sorry for my callous actions and unintentional pain I may of caused to anyone who ever had a picture of theirs feature in Dan's Crap Corner.”

(I was unable to reach Dan for comment).

It’s hard to imagine that Smith or anyone else at Sega Power intended to do harm when they printed the Nazi Sonic image, but “naivety” is probably the right way to describe the decision. It was hard to imagine back in 1992, but the “gamer” identity, manufactured by marketing campaigns and defined by rejection of others, be they fans of competing consoles or women entirely, had dire consequences. The idea that one console is inherently better than another evolved into the idea that there’s a superior type of player, or the right way to play or like a video game. As we can see as early as 1992, this quickly evolved into a rivalry that jokes about violence. 

Two decades later, some of the people who were steeped in this culture and marketing went on to develop similar but more hateful views on exclusion in the form of gamergate. People were rejected and threatened with violence not just for what kind of games they liked and what consoles they played on, but their race or gender. 

On one hand, labeling an image of a Nazi Sonic as "rightwing" seems to minimize a fascist, racist worldview. But on the other hand, it's also very clear about what right-wing politics were and are. It's an interesting sign of the times that a magazine thoughtless enough to run an image of a Nazi Sonic also felt that calling him "rightwing Sonic" was enough of a disclaimer to avoid accusations of endorsing Nazi fanart. Reactionary politics would spend the next couple decades obscuring their movement's racism and fascism, and by the time they burst into the mainstream of gaming culture with Gamergate in 2014, they'd been successful enough that it took months or years before the movement was widely recognized as a home for extremist ideologies. If publishing the image was insensitive and "not woke" by today's standards, the caption was at least not hand-wringing about whether it was being unfair to right-wingers when it called them Nazis.

Did a 1992 Nazi Sonic fan art predict all of that? Probably not, but the gaming culture eventually caught up with the worst way you could see that image today.

Elden Ring Is Extraordinarily Beautiful, But Also Totally Boring

This article originally appeared on VICE France.

For the past few days, I’ve been rampaging across the dark and mysterious Lands Between, the long-lost kingdom in the background of the much-anticipated action role-play video game Elden Ring. 

Produced by FromSoftware, a Japanese game development company best-known for the Dark Souls series, the game has been highly anticipated by fans for five long years. Back in 2017, FromSoftware also announced it would consult with George R. R. Martin, the author of novels that became HBO’s hit show Game of Thrones, for the game’s worldbuilding, a collaboration which contributed immensely to the hype around the release.

The story begins in the middle, after the Lands Between, a world once blessed by the powers of the magic Elden Ring and the spectral Erdtree, was torn apart by a bloody war waged between the demigods who rule it. The Elden Ring – likely more of a magical object than an actual piece of jewellery – was destroyed and scattered among these demigods.

In Elden Ring, I am the Tarnished, one of the many exiles called to try to repair the ring. If I succeed, I’ll become the new Elden Lord and restore these desolate mystical lands to their original glory. At least that’s what I’ve gathered about the plot from a very generic bit of scene-setting delivered by a rotting corpse I met at the beginning of my adventure. “Take the Elden Ring,” he said. OK.

I have to preface what follows by saying Elden Ring is incredibly beautiful. From its ghostly and angular castles to its unsettling, foggy marshlands, the game is very successful in creating an open world where pain and solitude seem to reign supreme. 

I appreciated the developer’s choice to build a vast and intricate expanse, in contrast to the Dark Souls series, where most of the gameplay takes place in tight, anguish-inducing corridors. I couldn’t wait to explore all the nooks and crannies of this immense map, to talk to the inhabitants of this cursed world and visit all its 145 (!) caves. 

Unfortunately, my visceral excitement evaporated as quickly as it had risen, once I realised that Elden Ring has one crucial thing in common with Dark Souls – the gameplay that feels unoriginal and pretty damn boring (to me, at least). All you do is take part in really hard fights, loot enemies for XP, and hope to level-up enough to make the next encounter less difficult. 

As a result, my daily explorations of the Lands Between settled into a pretty regular (and under stimulating) pattern – dodge, attack, dodge, attack, dodge, attack. All this while dying 40 times a day because of random attacks, like a 12-metre remote-controlled spear coming out of nowhere. I’d discover an area, kill some monsters, die, then try to defeat them once again, inevitably die a few more times and repeat the process until I’d eventually make it through. The gameplay ended up being so repetitive it instilled a sense of feverish fatigue in me, so much so that I almost gave up and bought a different game before coming back to my senses.

Despite it all, I continued my journey across Elden Ring’s beautiful, empty terrain, populated by monsters and soldiers who all - luckily - seem to have the field of vision of a very old Labrador. In the midst of this journey, I encountered the game’s bosses. These bosses are the cornerstones of the gameplay and demand disproportionate efforts to defeat. It’s almost impossible to beat them the first time around, in fact the only way to defeat them is often seemingly by learning their attack scheme by heart and responding with a beautifully choreographed dodge, attack, dodge, attack, dodge, attack like a modern-day RPG version of a Paula Abdul routine. And then repeating that a million times before finally pulling it off.

Yes, some might say it’s precisely this difficulty and this repetition that make the game satisfying. But Elden Ring doesn’t really introduce anything else besides that. After ten or so hours, I’d forgotten why exactly I was playing. I had internalised the idea that my only goal in the game was raking up XPs. Of course, I was also exploring the kingdom, whose artistic direction would shame any Halo Infinite fan, but to what end? It all seemed meaningless to me.

Online fans and journalists alike have focused on the free exploration of the Elden Ring world, appreciating the fact that players are basically on their own and aren’t given a huge amount of direction. Some used it as a chance to diss Ubisoft’s games, which are renowned for explicitly telling players where to go and who to speak with. Defending Ubisoft is not the hill I want to die on, but I think Elden Ring leaves you alone mostly because it has nothing to tell you. There are no interactions, no scenarios, no goals – aside from, “Go to the marshlands and kill everybody”.

The ambience might immersive and the landscapes stunning, but these are simply a veneer that repackages the most basic and tired of missions: travel to a new area, kill the enemies, then kill the boss. It’s all a challenge against yourself, fun only for those who are into frenzied XP marathons. There’s no narration, the whole plot could be summed up in very brief iPhone note and the world remains terribly hollow. Many have compared the game to Zelda: Breath of the Wild because of its free exploration aspect. But while the two are similar in their minimalist approach to giving the players direction, the Nintendo game offered different scenarios, interactions with non-player characters and a variety of missions.

In short, Elden Ring’s amazing artistic direction doesn’t save it from being a game solely based on a virtually empty world – without a story, without life, without a soul. In hindsight, I like to imagine the cadaver I met at the top of the game to be George R. R. Martin’s dead body. Needless to say, he was probably equally disappointed by what this studio did with his unparalleled vision.