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"

    • UlyssesT [he/him]
      ·
      1 month ago

      She was always kind of a cliche, but a fun cliche, in the earlier Starcraft game/expansion. Blizzard really, really, likes its "corrupted waifu" cliches and has pushed that button many times since, especially in World of Warcraft.

      Kerrigan was basically destroyed by waifuication in Starcraft II.

      I could rant for hours about a similar waifuication of Cortana in the Halo series (yes, even when trying to kill Master Chef peppino-run in a horny way that counts as waifuication)

      • LocalOaf [they/them]
        ·
        1 month 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

        • UlyssesT [he/him]
          ·
          1 month ago

          Halo CE original sassy tomboy Cortana is still the best Cortana.

          That's what pissed me off. The character used to be fine. I still liked Durandal a lot more from the Marathon series, but oh well.

          • LocalOaf [they/them]
            ·
            1 month 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

            • UlyssesT [he/him]
              ·
              1 month ago

              So much of Marathon is in text logs and completely optional/skippable, except that at one point you're caught in an endless loop without an ending if you don't pick up those text logs and figure out how to escape the cycle.

              Here, this'll explain some of it. Eventually.

              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9rMu1XYB98

              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQaNQ_uePFk

              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vurgeAkIxY

              • LocalOaf [they/them]
                ·
                1 month ago

                Master Chief kills aliens and doesn't afraid of anything, got it. (thanks)

                very-smart blob-no-thoughts

                • UlyssesT [he/him]
                  ·
                  1 month ago

                  John Halo would drive a ZYBERTRUKKK, just like John Blade Runner my-hero

                • LocalOaf [they/them]
                  ·
                  1 month ago

                  Extraction shooter, loot boxes protruding. Very very disrespectful.

                  • autismdragon [he/him, they/them]
                    hexagon
                    ·
                    1 month 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

                    • UlyssesT [he/him]
                      ·
                      1 month ago

                      I HATE THE EXTRACTION SHOOTER FAD joker-shopping

                      I HATE THE EXTRACTION SHOOTER FAD joker-shopping

                      • autismdragon [he/him, they/them]
                        hexagon
                        ·
                        1 month 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.

                        • UlyssesT [he/him]
                          ·
                          1 month ago

                          So many good ideas got sidelined or just thrown away over time by chasing the fad dragon.

                          Like, Planetside's devs and publisher wasted a staggering amount of their own development budget trying to chase the PUBG/Fortnite fad and made a completely garbage game that took the combined arms sci-fi gameplay of Planetside and stripped most of it out. disgost

                          • LocalOaf [they/them]
                            ·
                            1 month 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

                            • UlyssesT [he/him]
                              ·
                              1 month ago

                              I'd enjoy more Supreme Commander style RTS and maybe developments beyond it to something even more awesome if the MOBA plague didn't crush the genre. sicko-wistful

                              • LocalOaf [they/them]
                                ·
                                1 month 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

                                • UlyssesT [he/him]
                                  ·
                                  1 month ago

                                  I admit I wasn't good at the "clicks per minute" super sweaty soypoint-1 ESPORTS soypoint-2 emphasizing RTSes, though I was quite fond of Sins of a Solar Empire for its pacing.

                                  • LocalOaf [they/them]
                                    ·
                                    1 month 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

                        • LocalOaf [they/them]
                          ·
                          1 month 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!"

                        • UlyssesT [he/him]
                          ·
                          1 month ago

                          I don't know what that is. If it's an extraction shooter, I'm probably not interested, but feel free to elaborate.

                          • Hestia [comrade/them, she/her]
                            ·
                            1 month ago

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

                            • UlyssesT [he/him]
                              ·
                              1 month ago

                              If I was into scavenging scrap to meet a quota while being shot at, maybe I'd be interested.

                              I mean, I did enjoy Hardspace: Shipbreakers, but unsure what I might potentially get out of someone screaming slurs at me in a random pvp match going on at the same time.

                              • Hestia [comrade/them, she/her]
                                ·
                                1 month 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]
          ·
          1 month 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]
            ·
            1 month 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]
        ·
        1 month 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.

        • UlyssesT [he/him]
          ·
          1 month ago

          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.

          Subjectively, I hated both post-Brood War portrayals. I-was-saying

          • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]
            ·
            edit-2
            1 month ago

            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.

            • UlyssesT [he/him]
              ·
              edit-2
              1 month ago

              which is more marvel-fication than waifu-fication if you ask me.

              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. wall-talk

              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.

              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.

              • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]
                ·
                edit-2
                1 month ago

                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

                • UlyssesT [he/him]
                  ·
                  1 month ago

                  what is your definition of waifu-fication then?

                  When a character (either from the start, or over time) is designed to pander to the (usually cishet male) consumer's gaze and push their buttons in both a titillation and wish fulfillment fantasy way. Not always directly sexually, but still in a cynically pandering way that often gets more blatant over time.

                  Not exactly academic rigor on my part there, I know.