Sometimes I just need a shot of conflict in my life and nothing stirs it up like going on reddit and mildly critiquing the lore or text of any game ever made.
I got such :frothingfash: pushback from Nintendo stans in particular that I deleted my account there.
The "7/10 for Breath of the Wild means that the critic deserves death and suffering" crowd is very real. :gamer-gulag:
I like Zelda games but Breath of the Wild is not exactly what I want from a Zelda game (I want my dungeons back). I think Breath of the Wild could be argued to be a good game but I dont think It is a very good Zelda game. So 7/10 is a pretty decent score for it in my book. (Im aware that some people think BotW is the greatest game of all time)
Then again im happy many people seem to enjoy it...just not my cup of tea.
I've gotten pushback here about that, that it's "emotional" and "nonobjective" to give the game a 7/10 because of some weird appeal to majority argument. :wojak-nooo:
I've had friends argue things like that to me before. "Well a lot of people like it so shut up." A lot of people really don't understand that criticisms of media are not personal attacks against people who like that media. The media I like most is also the media I criticize the most, because it's the media that interests me enough to even care to discuss it. When I play something I don't like I'm just like "that kinda sucked" and move on.
It's very hard for me to understand the mindset so many people are in where if they like something it's part of their personality and that must mean it's perfect and beyond criticism.
A lot of people can't handle the idea that they enjoy something with actually problematic parts to it. It may be shades of Main Character Syndrome where it's seen as a personal attack, or a threat, if some entertainment product is criticized, as if it might be taken away or its consumer condemned for it.
Dune is my favorite novel series of all time and it's got some gross gender essentialist bullshit in it, some clumsy Orientalism regarding exotic Zensunni culture :us-foreign-policy: , and while it has a message of "messiahs are a bad thing, actually" as a throughline, clearly many of its readers and audience members failed to receive that message and stan for the Atreides. :doomer:
Yes.
I, the joyless scold, the supreme magistrate of the Bolshevik Kangaroo Court, allow you to like bad things. :stalin-approval:
But not Courier 6, they KNOW what they did.
It was all rigged from the start. :stalin-gun-1: :stalin-gun-2:
I honestly dont expect real objectivity from critics. So I dont really care that much about the scores they give. I do read game reviews but those are mostly from small sites that specialize in the games I like (mostly strategy games of different types). I find it most useful to find critics/reviewers that have a somewhat similar taste to yours and focus on games that you care about. I dont really have a problem if someone who is into racing games doesnt give me an indepth review of an economy simulator.
I honestly dont expect real objectivity from Critics.
Yeah, me neither.
Thing is, "objectivity" is a false pretense when it comes to judging entertainment, because individuals will, as individuals, disagree on what is "objectively" good or bad.
I find it most useful to find critics/reviewers that have a somewhat similar taste to yours and focus on games that you care about.
Agreed there.
i really like cozy blonde twink game but i agree with you
if i feel like playing a zelda game specifically, i don't pick botw, i play wind waker or twilight princess
I played Breath of the Wild outside the cultural zeitgeist and it is very, to put it in modern parlance, mid. There were some fun mechanics and systems in place, but I'm so goddamn burnt out on open world everything. I beat it with all the shrines, but it wasn't an incredible experience.
I felt the same. It just felt... barren. Tedious. And the weapon breaking mechanics added to that tedium for me. But according to the aggressive side of the game's fandom, I am objectively wrong for not enjoying it.
:only-good-gamer: Isn't it time we stopped putting women in video games always in heels and chain mail bikinis?
:gamer-gulag: :frothingfash:
You hate Trump because he's a Russian KGB Agent.
I hate Trump because he didn't make anime real.
We are not the same :gustavo-fring:
When they mean "make anime real" they mean some impossibly contradictory weeby version of The Handmaid's Tale.
If they wanted a Universal Century and to make Zeon real, at least it'd be an ethos. :edgeworth-shrug:
If they wanted a Universal Century and to make Zeon real, at least it’d be an ethos.
Our Gundam would be so much more stupid with big corpos like amazon and tesla duking it out in giant robots on mars or something.
One of the bits of worldbuilding I liked from the Horizon series is that before the apocalypse, major corporations would fight these massive pitched battles for control of territory and resources, and a gambling industry popped up for people to bet on which corporation they thought would win that week's battle
It'd be a ton of bazinga billionaires trying to build the Torment Nexus, for sure. :so-true: :no-mouth-must-scream:
Doesn't even have to be that spicy. I went on to the Warframe subreddit a while back and suggested that the Tenno were roving space bandit chiefs more than anything else.
The fandom did not care for the comparison.
Wait, how is that even a hot take? Last time I played Warframe I figured you were supposed to feel like an ambiguously evil space bandit. Isn't that the entire vibe they were going for? Sometimes you do good things but it's never because you feel like they're the right thing to do, it's because it benefits you directly, either financially or in terms of resources used to get stronger.
I think the more generous interpretation is that you're supposed to be like knights errant or Robin Hood figures, saving people from the evil clone fascists and occult capitalists.
But it don't really matter one way or another. To the folks who got mad, I wasn't just attacking Tenno, I was attacking them. People get attached to their game narratives because it's the one place they can still exert some agency, and I don't think a lot of people like grappling with questions of how they're using that agency.
I was quite fond of Warframe and I wouldn't argue with you there. Even the "take down the big bad guy" missions were called "contracts" because they were paid assassinations.
Pre-SRS one of the best subreddits of all time was /r/trollgame.
It was a subreddit where they completely gameified trolling. You go anywhere on reddit, troll people, and earn points for the number of people that take your bait while losing points for people that call you out as a troll. They kept a monthly scoreboard and people competed to troll the largest number of people that they could.
It was fucking hilarious and ultimately got banned as it was causing abject chaos across the entire site. A leftist version of it might have legs.
The problem with that was the idealistic assumption that trolls surely didn't believe in what they were saying.
"Ironic" nazis used "trolling" as a pretense to push nazi propaganda for a long time. :heated-gamer-moment:
Oh yeah absolutely. I actually think it was potentially some sort of op that failed because it got banned, I say that because the level of effort and investment from the team running it was absurdly high, higher than I think I've ever seen from volunteer teams. But it was also extremely funny. I vividly remember one of the most effective trolls on the entire site at the time was to pretend to be a cyclist and literally say anything negative at all about cars or the difficulty of riding in america and people would go absolutely apeshit about how cyclists were the devil and deserved to be murdered by their metal death machines.
