Overwatch’s Busan Map Takes Me Back To The First Time I Went To Korea

Overwatch’s Busan Map Takes Me Back To The First Time I Went To Korea

Blizzard added D.Va’s hometown of Busan, Korea to Overwatch. I happen to have been there in real life many times. Gita and I talk about it today on Kotaku XP, our weekly discussion of hot video game topics.

It’s always exciting to see a city you know in a piece of entertainment. When my friend sent me a screenshot of my own house in Oakland, California as it appears in Watch Dogs 2, I screamed.

When I first went to Seoul (and Busan) in 2003, my first destination was one of the country’s already-famous PC bangs, where I played Starcraft under indirect electric blue lighting while drinking aloe juice, surrounded by the happy noise of people of all ages grinding SOJs in Diablo 2. It was magical.

As a person who has loved video games since the early 1980s and still loves them now, and as a person who loves Korea, it warms my heart to see Busan as represented in Overwatch’s new map (and the accompanying D.Va short), full of authentic, correct Korean words and meaningful cultural references.

If you want to hear me say a lot more about my personal experiences in Busan, you can watch (or just listen to) this stream archive, in which Paul Tamayo and I play the new Overwatch map.

Also on today’s episode: Gita talks about her interview with the developer of a dating sim in which you kill members of ISIS. I go on a bit of a rant about a “macaroni and cheese buffet table” apropos of God of War’s new game plus mode. Gita and I talk about how we definitely can’t fix the internet.

Finally, I ask you all a question: Are there any games you learned to love by watching someone else play them very, very badly?

Click play and hang out with us for 24 minutes.


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