InfoWars host Alex Jones has released a game on Steam. Alex Jones is the man who raised money for and participated in the January 6 protests that led to the attack on the U.S. Capitol, and who owes $1.5 billion to the families of children murdered over defamation.

You won't be surprised to hear that Alex Jones: Alex Jones: NWO Wars is not a good game, but its warmed-over meme jokes have earned over 400 positive reviews in just a few days. Reading them, you can feel the energy of Reddit commentators all trying to be the funniest person in the room by saying the same thing, and AJ:NWOW seems to be riding a wave of meme-like popularity after its limited release last November, with great success on the platform. [The best I can say about Alex Jones' game is that it played in about 36 minutes, within Steam's two-hour reimbursement window, with a sort of "corporate indie" look that is typical of games released on Steam in the mid-2010s. Otherwise" this is a piece of shit in a way, and aside from the quality, it's an embarrassment for the platform.

AJ:NWOW is a low effort riff on Metal Slug. Despite only supporting analog stick controls and no D-pad controls, you can only aim directly up, down, left, or right. Add persistent input lag to the mix, along with mysterious and impenetrable hitboxes, and it's a truly sloppy piece of work, and it's nice to be able to consume lives as generously as if you were swallowing down InfoWars' dubious psychotropic drugs.

The real attraction is supposed to be the Alex Jones-themed "anti-awakening" comedy, but to me, it just seemed like a sloppy, goofy routine that riddled the biggest hits of Jones' decade-plus of Internet virality.AJ: AJ. NWOW relies heavily on Jones' "making frogs gay" rant that went viral in 2015, with gay frog enemies exploding in Rainbow Pride blood and Jones himself "making frogs gay" or some sort of latter-day, greatly diminished gecko gex He repeats such ever-warming quips every other minute.

But that's about as much as Jones can laugh at himself. Instead of confronting his true biggest enemies like alimony payments and Sandy Hook parents, he is replaced by lazy caricatures of Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, George Soros, and the Clintons.

And while there are amusing ways to make fun of Bill Clinton, the quip, "I don't have sexual relations with that saxophone," is not one of them. He repeats this line and two others ad nauseam during a boss fight on Little St. James Island (called "Epstein Island" in the game), as if the developers don't trust their viewers, forget the Reddit home page, because the game's "I'm not having a sexual relationship with that saxophone. This crap is Imgur circa 2011: "This crap is Imgur circa 2011.

While it feels fruitless to talk about giving and receiving offense in regards to a guy and his fanbase, which is kind of the point, I have to shout out one time my general tired disgust was heightened to something more serious: throwing shit at you in San Francisco! level of flipping off the homeless people who are throwing shit at you in San Francisco. Stay classy.

I don't know about you, but this is probably not what Steam should be about: the tension between the thousands of low-quality games released on Steam and Valve's uniquely laissez-faire moderation is one of the big conversations in PC gaming, I don't think a definitive conclusion can be reached.

What I do know is that Valve's approach is generally preferable to the incessant and fruitless moderation policy changes of other tech giants. Twitch is constantly making OK or NG decisions about new types of suggestive nudity to curry favor with the most annoying men on the planet, and YouTube has been esoterically removing and re-monitoring speedrun history videos that are considered internally inconsistent adult content The company is working on a number of new videos. Give me a flood of truly awful hentai visual novels any day, with truly incredible works like "Cruel Angels" springing up all over the place.

That said, Alex Jones:NWOW is worth less than a free Flash game, and those guys who have left epic troll-positive reviews on le are calling for a better game to deliver an absolute "scam." Furthermore, I can say that this game clearly violates Valve's guidelines for what should not be published on Steam:

In any case, I'm worse off for the 36 minutes I spent on AJ:NWOW. Jones and Infowars remain banned from most of the major social networks and digital storefronts, including Apple, YouTube, Spotify, and Facebook. If anyone is banning anything, allowing it, whether intentionally or not, is not in support of Jones' warped worldview, but perhaps the same "platform neutrality" that Spotify used to respond to criticism of its relationship with Joe Rogan It is a statement for the sake of the idea of "platform neutrality". Not even Spotify would touch Jones, though.