The spongebob game wasnt so bad. It had like a login bonus but it didnt seem to be too bad But once we got into the lego star wars game the f2p bullshit started. And oh god. This game clearly designed for kids had all the f2p bullshit. Login bonuses. Gridnyness. Multiple in game currencies. The daily/weekly ect missions. The unlockables

But god the racing game was even worse. 100000 things to unlock and basically nothing is by default basically. Sooooooooooo absurdly grindy. And most harrowing of all... i swear to god... 5 seperate in game currencies.

I want to reach out and scream to him "games werent always like this maaaaan"

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            • LocalOaf [they/them, ze/hir]
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              3 months ago

              Halo CE original sassy tomboy Cortana is still the best Cortana. Halo 4 Cortana's characterization and story was good but they awooga'd her too much and then completely shit the bed with the plot after that. Don't even get me started on The Weapon or the creepy Oedipal subtext of Chief/Cortana/Weapon and Halsey/Keyes's relationships too

              avgn-horror morshupls

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                • LocalOaf [they/them, ze/hir]
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                  3 months ago

                  I wasn't old enough to get into Marathon when it was new, but picked up on a lot of it through references from being a Halo nerd since that series started. I should give it a look sometime but I always got the impression it was "Doom, but with a ton of lore for nerds" and that might be unfair but also might make me like it more

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                        • autismdragon [he/him, they/them]
                          hexagon
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                          3 months ago

                          https://www.gamesradar.com/games/fps/marathon-development-is-reportedly-facing-trouble-at-bungie-theres-a-reason-that-it-was-planned-for-this-year-and-slipped-a-whole-year/

                          Theyre turning it into a live service that plays like Tarkov lol

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                            • autismdragon [he/him, they/them]
                              hexagon
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                              3 months ago

                              Trend chasing is one of the oldest game industry problems and its still one of the ones i get the most angry about. Because it has demonstrably failed time and time again so even the most dumbass executive should be able to tell that chasing another game's success works almost never and chasing the bottle lightning when it does work is so obviously not financially viable. Like how many times do the old men have to learn the lesson.

                              But i guess they all have enough hubris to think they can pull off an Apex Legends and trend chase sucessfully.

                              • LocalOaf [they/them, ze/hir]
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                                3 months ago

                                What are you talking about, everyone loves and remembers everyone's favorite game Haze™️ for PlayStation 3™️ fondly! "Haze™️: It's the Halo™️ Killer!"

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                                • LocalOaf [they/them, ze/hir]
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                                  3 months ago

                                  I want somebody to try making a game like MAG again, that shit was tight

                                  Fuck raytracing and 8K resolution or whatever, gimmie something with some big ass battles and huge maps and make the graphics "good enough" and give me a stable high framerate and good physics and aiming mechanics and I'd be super happy with it

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                                    • LocalOaf [they/them, ze/hir]
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                                      3 months ago

                                      I'm a stupid baby and don't have the attention span to remember queueing enough build stuff and microing units so I always sucked at RTS lol

                                      (Consequentially, favorite was Halo Wars because it's for stupid babies like me and you can just play Covenant and pump econ and just smash everything with The Arbiter and keep upgrading him if you weren't playing like, actually good opponents)

                                      Energy swords go stabby i-love-not-thinking

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                                        • LocalOaf [they/them, ze/hir]
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                                          3 months ago

                                          Ooh, I'm pretty sure Sins of a Solar Empire is the one that somebody made a Halo overhaul mod for. Sins of the Prophets I think? I remember seeing a thing about that an some of the fan made ships from the mod ended up making their way into canon just because they were well designed and cool enough

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                                • Hestia [comrade/them, she/her]
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                                  3 months ago

                                  It's an extraction horror game where you have to scavenge scrap and meet a quota. No microtransactions.

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                                    • Hestia [comrade/them, she/her]
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                                      3 months ago

                                      Yeah, it's more of just a game you play with a small group of friends.

                                      And only 1 or two things tend to shoot at you

              • BelieveRevolt [he/him]
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                3 months ago

                My favorite bit of Halo lore is that the character of Cortana was created by a guy who paid for college by winning a He-Man character contest as a kid, and people found this out through a blog post on x-entertainment.com.

                Something I wish there was more useful information stored in my brain.

                • LocalOaf [they/them, ze/hir]
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                  3 months ago

                  lolwtf, I know a ton of useless Halo lore and behind the scenes shit and somehow never heard of that

                  data-laughing

            • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]
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              3 months ago

              Kerrigan was basically destroyed by waifuication in Starcraft II.

              I don't think that's the issue with Kerrigan in SC2. SC2 was ruined by Amon and Kerrigan's character was collateral damage. Honestly, in Wings of Liberty she was more of an archetypal dommy mommy waifu than in Heart of the Swarm onwards where she just became a dull, incoherent mess of a character.

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                  She was really one-dimensional in WoL. Problem was that they tried to give her the same treatment as Sylvanas, where they go "Oh actually she was just evil because she was under the control of the super-mega-satan villain" and try to sell her back to us as a good person, which is more marvel-fication than waifu-fication if you ask me.

                  Amon killed the story so hard it's genuinely depressing. An evil so great that it leaves 0 room for any individual motivations or interesting personal conflict between the other characters, we must leave all our differences (and everything else that might make us interesting) aside to unite against this existence-ending threat. An evil so great that, once again, the only reason anyone might be on his side is fucking mind control. An evil so great that he was actually behind everything bad that happened up until this point, retroactively taking away agency and character depth from characters before his name was ever mentioned.

                  No room for conflict between Kerrigan and any of the Protoss or Terrans whose loved ones she killed, after all, we can't waste time squabbling amongst ourselves while Amon is preparing to kill us all! No room for intrigue between any characters, this is not the time for personal motivations, we all need to follow the exact same goal, doing anything else would be suicide.

                  I really hate Amon. Like I said, Kerrigan was collateral damage of Amon blocking any character in the story from having depth.

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                    • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]
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                      I consider Marvel-fication to be a form of waifu-fication so I put them under the same category but we could get to an impasse there if we both held firm.

                      what is your definition of waifu-fication then?

                      I admit I checked out of Blizzard slop by that time but it sounds a lot like the bullshit Wish.com-version-of-Lovecraft that World of Warcraft was plagued with for a while, where every character was just a recipient of "corruption" until the knockoff-Cthulu was sort of yeeted away in a single patch, from what I hear.

                      yeah pretty much that, villain as a pure plot device

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        • StalinStan [none/use name]
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          3 months ago

          I feel like more people should get made fun of for blizzards idea that shooting lazers at women make them sexy and evil.

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      • BelieveRevolt [he/him]
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        3 months ago

        I guess I have to give them credit for having non-white characters who mostly aren't teenagers or early 20s, but most of the women still have the same awooga body type (and I definitely remember Mei being called fat for not fitting that mold exactly, just g*mer things).

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          • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
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            3 months ago

            I have a theory that a lot of the capital G gamer hate for the Horizon Zero Dawn game series and Aloy is a subconscious thing given the themes of the game, at least in the first game. Without spoiling anything, masculinity and femininity are some of the main themes present in the first game, often in opposition to each other, and more often than not the "masculine" side is in the wrong. This kind of thing probably annoyed a lot of gamers even if they didn't pick up on it themselves.

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              • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
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                Horizon Zero Dawn spoilers.

                Yeah Faro is basically Elon Musk but death robots instead of Tesla cars. So him being the main villain will ruffle techno optimist and gamer feathers. Then there's the juxtaposition between what Ted Faro and Elisabet Sobeck represent. Faro represents the masculinity of the old ones, to go forward without restrictions, without care, not to show restraint, even with death robots. While Sobeck represents femininity in a sense, caring about earth, nature, eventually creating basically mother earth as an AI in GAIA to restart life on Earth after the apocalypse.

                Then there's the in game villan Helis, who leads an ultra masculine religious cult and is the personification of them himself, with his appearance and beliefs. A religious cult that was an offshoot of carja patriarchical society. Meanwhile Aloy comes from a matriarchical society in the nora, and is a genetic clone of Dr Sobeck, created by the mother earth AI GAIA to restore the world. So the juxtaposition is obvious.

                That's not to say the games themes are as simple as masculinity = bad and femininity = good, the matriarchical nora society has plenty of flaws and does a lot wrong, but the game has an interesting way to explore both masculinity and femininity. Which all goes back to the flaws of the old ones and how the robots raising the first generation of humans were programmed, with the mother persona being the nurturer and the farther persona the disciplinarian, and how that understanding has influenced the current socio politics of the game world and the tribes that exist in it.

                Also I haven't played the second game yet please no spoilers lol

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                  • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
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                    The writing went over most peoples heads I think. It even went over my head during the mid game, I thought it was really boring and didn't play it for years. Then I got back into it and suddenly it all made sense and became a lot more interesting after I got through the mid game.

                    spoiler

                    Action for action's sake and murderous contempt for the feminine, just like the Italian futurists that preceded contemporary fascism, then

                    Also that happens in the game again when Helis orders the genocide of the matriarchical Nora tribe before capturing Aloy, even after capturing Aloy he still wants to carry out the violence and conveniently can't stop it with the crashing of the focus network

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                      • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
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                        Yeah the pacing of Act 2 in a three act story is probably one of the most difficult things to do as a writer or creative. I certainly couldn't do it. Though sometimes the audience just has to continue on with the story and it will all make sense. But how to get them to do that is very challenging.

                        I also updated my previous comment after noticing an interesting thing in Horizon to do with what you mentioned about Italian futurists prediction of fascism

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                          • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
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                            3 months ago

                            Second/middle acts tend to be a hard sell in most stories, I noticed, with a few exceptions where for some reason the second/middle act is considered the high point, like in the first three Star Wars movies for most people.

                            For a very funny and jokerfying example of this in gaming, most people consider 2009s "Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2" to be the peak of the original Modern Warfare trilogy. And I have to say that I agree with them lol. As cheesy as those games were, MW2 probably has the best story of the three.

                            I never played Halo because I didn't have an Xbox, but yeah I'm glad that the people who finished your book trilogy enjoyed the ending. That's a good sign.

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                              • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]
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                                3 months ago

                                I admit that sometimes I wish I started with the second book and somehow crammed in some "so you might be wondering how I wound up here piloting a mecha while fighting billionaires" record-scratch exposition after the fact.

                                There are some trilogies where the final part is basically a prequel to the first two parts, it's a narrative device that can work well in certain contexts. The Ace Combat trilogy on the PlayStation 2 does this, the final game in the trilogy is titled "Zero" and explains how the game world ended up the way it did. Just don't go around making an entire prequel trilogy to explain the previous trilogy (Star Wars... )

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                          • autismdragon [he/him, they/them]
                            hexagon
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                            3 months ago

                            I think I hated Halo's lack of satisfactory story resolution and the absence of an actual meaningful conclusion enough that I went out of my way to wrap up my own story series with great care.

                            Lol im just going to go on writing my massive scope final fantasy/gambo/shonen hybrid kinetic novel series that closes individual arcs but technically doesnt "end" because thats whats fun for me.

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                              • autismdragon [he/him, they/them]
                                hexagon
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                                3 months ago

                                LOST is a show that I stick up for even if I hate the Mystery Box shit in totality, since Abrahams only had his hand in the first season anyway. The thing is, most of the mystery stuff is wrapped up, its just not spelled out for the viewer explicitly. You can logic your way to most of the answers.

                                But also always saw LOST more as a character drama than a mystery show, and thought the ending wrapped up the characters arcs decently with a few exceptions (Sayid's ending is ass, Shannon being his one true love and not Nadia is completely bonkers, but anyway).

                                I wont argue post season 4 gambo being a mess obviously. I cant personally report on HOTD. '

                                As for origin stories. I will give the MCU credit on one front here, the fact that they decided to forgo that route with MCU Spidey entirely (or was that Sony's decision who knows). Because they were like "ok everyone knows the Uncle Ben stuff now, fuck that, lets not even show the guy". And yet some fans were actually mad at that lol. That being said it seems like the new Fantastic Four is an origin story so the lesson didnt stick.

                                But yeah Im just going to be pretty open with my readers that this story is going to take awhile and be more like One Piece or DC/Marvel comics shared universes and that they should just have fun with the ride. Character arcs will close, individual adventure and political arcs will close, mysteries will be solved, but theres always going to be something else going on. Or at least the scope is going to be so big that if it gets popular enough some other poor sap is going to have to put my notes together to continue/finish it lol. Like it could in theory end I just... havent gotten there yet in my preplanning yaknow? Sort of like how Oda has outright admitted he doesnt know what the One Piece actually is yet. (actually most of the core mystery arcs are in fact preplanned endings?

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                                  • autismdragon [he/him, they/them]
                                    hexagon
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                                    3 months ago

                                    Honestly like. I think LOST is just one of those times where the half of the fanbase that didnt like the conclusion is just... wrong lol. Its not really homework to figure out the mysteries. IN this case, its the ones who want the reason why the bird screamed "Hurley" spelled out for them step by step that come off as the wrong ones to me. But thats just my taste. Im open to the idea that someone who was in it for the mystery could feel unsatisfied. I just dont get it.

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              • Des [she/her, they/them]
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                3 months ago

                yeah i can see that the game is basically at it's core a war against the bourgeois of the past. the ultimate conflict with FALSAC being the end goal (i haven't finished Forbidden West yet just btw)

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        • autismdragon [he/him, they/them]
          hexagon
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          3 months ago

          Mei's my favorite actually.

          Im less put off by body type's fitting that certain mold than you are really. And the one that does the most to me, Mercy, is my least favorite design lol. And then you got charachter like the body builder one and uh... the tall and lanky one (forgot names) that arent even waifus in the traditional sense.