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"
Valve TF2 allowing users to buy hats circa 2008 -------> 2024 and children have gambling addictions that their parents and teachers have little to no resources to cure.
If there's one thing you can rightfully slam China for is allowing G@mer gacha into their country I would have purged that entire industry and jailed its ringleaders as child predators.
I also blame Overwatch, that was around first and people made fun of players with default skins there too.
But it's D I V E R S E in its selection of waifus! Please don't ask why the cowboy character's name is now different.
Im ngl I have lots of problems with Overwatch but charachter design has never been one.
Halo CE original sassy tomboy Cortana is still the best Cortana. Halo 4 Cortana's characterization and story was good but they
'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
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
Master Chief kills aliens and doesn't afraid of anything, got it. (thanks)
Extraction shooter, loot boxes protruding. Very very disrespectful.
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
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.
What are you talking about, everyone loves and remembers everyone's favorite game Haze™️ for PlayStation 3™️ fondly! "Haze™️: It's the Halo™️ Killer!"
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
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
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
It's an extraction horror game where you have to scavenge scrap and meet a quota. No microtransactions.
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
I found YouTube links in your comment. Here are links to the same videos on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Link 1:
Link 2:
Link 3:
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.
lolwtf, I know a ton of useless Halo lore and behind the scenes shit and somehow never heard of that
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.
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.
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
I feel like more people should get made fun of for blizzards idea that shooting lazers at women make them sexy and evil.
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
body type (and I definitely remember Mei being called fat for not fitting that mold exactly, just g*mer things).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.
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
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
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
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.
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... )
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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
what did the cowboy character used to be called in Overwatch??
McCree, after Blizzard lead designer Jesse McCree. Then some bad stuff came out.
I never got into Overwatch because it just looked like Team Fortress 2 with even more micro transactions. And TF2 is my love/hate game.
In early league of legends I feel there was the opposite culture, where you would get clowned on for using a skin especially if you performed badly
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Kid showed me some of his Fornite skins I think he got them all F2P though
He's got Magneto! They better not be bullying him he has Magneto!
I chipped in with some friends to get my buddy's kid a gameboy knockoff thingy that has roms of thousands of old games from like nes to ps2 on it. We did it specifically so the kid could have screen time without f2p and mtx skinner box stuff.
Yeah. I wish i had been around more for that (he's 8 now and last i saw him he was 4) and also had means to gift him stuff. His mom at least doesnt get him micros.
You should reach out to him and introduce him to emulation and older games. The benefit is that you can obtain a lot of roms at one time and the system requirements are very low. If you get an HDMI adapter and a controller you can deprogram him out of freemium games.
I'm planning to donate my current laptop to my younger cousins as a "SteamOS-like" machine and a HDMI adapter when they're old enough and load it with a bunch of games running at 1080p under Vulkan. I could introduce them to pokemon romhacks and shit.
Someone needs to make a prepackaged Linux iso with like, every remotely popular rom and pc game through ps1 era pre set up. It would only be 100 GB or something.
There are already ISOs like that running Batocera out there if you look around.
You wouldn't have to do that, a torrent tracker would work just as well. There is a "gamer box" Linux iso and it's called bazzite.gg which you can install on your steam deck which can go up to Nintendo Switch games if its optimized enough.
Are there any where you can get ROMs through the package manager? That would be cool af
If you use a pure package manager like Nix or Guix you can set up a flake/channel that hosts roms via direct download, then you can use a redump site like https://myrient.erista.me/ as a source and then set up a build farm/substitute server that can be wired to transfer roms via tor.
Lotsa possibilities.
I've done that with old laptops. Loaded it up with minecraft and some other kid appropriate games so they'd have fun games that are "safe" from a super-exploitative skinner box perspective.
He's 8 and i dont get a lot of time with him because we dont live close, and i also dont have a lot of knowledge about that stuff myself. (I can emulate via pc, but he doesnt have one literally at all. Just an Apple tv and a switch).
He does have switch online so i could maybe at least introduce him to old Nintedo games via that? I just saw the last of him ill see this visit but maybe ill try that next time i visit or if he visits me. Could do a lot if he visits me by emulating via pc and with my large steam library.
Switch Online would at least be a good entry point to emulation. If there's any possibility at all of like used lenovo thinkpads/their workstation desktops with like a 6th or 7th generation (or higher) chip in them you could (I and many others here would gladly assist too) load it up with a curated retro-romset and you could set up a steam family library to share all your titles with him
Im already in a steam family (and they dont allow multiple right?) So im tied up there but the rest seems possible.
You're probably aware but its's up to 6 people and you can set child accounts to prevent access to certain games. Just wanted to share that information in case it was guiding any future decision
I think back to Charles Entertainment Cheese's children's casino when we talk about this kinda thing. It was only better back in the day because they didn't have the infrastructure to make it worse.
Honestly at this point it's better to just buy them a PS4 and some old school kid games and remasters then have them accept this as a normal part of recreation. Like my weird paranoid theory is that all this f2p shit targeted at the young is to create a sense of acceptance towards extractive capital infesting every aspect of their daily lives, intentionally or not.
Yeah as I said elsewhere in the thread I wish I had the means to get him some better quality games that dont have this bullshit or at least only minimally do. So far the best solution that ive come up with thats realistic is showing him the old school stuff he can access on Switch online. But he'll probably still just do that with me and keep doing Fornite on his own lol.
They ruined Lego Star Wars?
Wall.
anyway yeah the fucking YouTube games as well - pure attention grabbing cancer. I remember back in the day there were YouTube malware ads where you had to swat or shoot a fly or something, and that was considered unacceptable. Those no longer exist. Instead we have built in Angry Birds.
The console/PC Lego Star Wars is still pretty normal, it's only on phones that you get the crazy predatory stuff (usually)
I will say in defense of this (but only a tiny bit) that for some people collecting things and unlocking things can be fun, and these types of games have a nearly infinite amount of things to collect and unlock. So in some ways getting all the bonus this and currency that and hoarding it like a dragon can be fun for some people.
I think it's bad for kids to be exposed to it like that though. Definitely treatifying their developing brains to such a level can't be healthy
Oh yeah. I love completionist stuff in games. But the degree these games take it too and for games for kids
The problem is you can pay to unlock them or to accelerate your progress, which cheapens any achievement of doing it via grind anyway. Everyone will just assume you bought everything
More of a problem in multiplayer games where there’s a “keeping up with the joneses” effect pressuring kids to keep up with 40 year old dudes who just buy everything. That leaves a kid with 3 options: drop their entire allowance to keep up, grind with no life, or accept falling behind.
All 3 of these options suck
Don't conflate collectathons with skinner boxes. These aren't designed so you can just gather things to your heart's content, they are designed to keep you playing (including by limiting what you can do on a given day) and to pressure you into paying money by making the free returns from playing unrewarding and frustrating. Usually the reason for all the currencies is to obfuscate exchange rates, so at least a few of them can only be obtained with real money, and none of the currencies are meant to merely be collected like a high score.
Back in my day we had 1 coin, and nobody knew how to "spend it".
spoiler
Eventually we found out 100 coins redeemed for a 1x1up, nowhere was this explained in the tutorial level.
I have no idea how Diablo Immortal and IV are so popular. Immortal was instantly pegged as being a pay to win knockoff of another game. Diablo IV is like $75 and had day 1 DLC. I'm still pissed over Blizzard gaslighting everyone over Diablo III PVP. My guess is it's the same group who still play Call of Duty or buy EA products.
Then there's all the awful sexual harassment stuff which is reason to boycott by itself.
Kids deserve better games
I'm 100% serious they also deserve their own safe places online and a bunch of other stuff they've lost thanks to the vice grip of big tech.
(controversial opinion) This is why I'm a fan of things like gamepass because it offers a different option for publishers to sell their game other than f2p, even though there's still games on gamepass that have f2p microtransaction bullshit in them.
The game industry is so bad with this shit and desperately needs a big change. Hearing devs say that using things like gamepass allows them to design without f2p microtransactions made me hopeful, but I think a majority of games on the service have some kind of mtx or expansion that they're selling still
There's monetization on Apple Arcade? I thought the whole point was that most of the games were "plus" versions of mobile games just without the microtransactions. I wouldn't be surprised if companies were double dipping though, and doubly unsurprised if Apple was fine with that.
Turns out these are just like "repurposed" f2p games or something? Like they were originally f2p but they just haphazardly took the micros out so youre just left with grindy disasters lol
