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”

              • LocalOaf [they/them, ze/hir]@hexbear.netEnglish
                7·
                4 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

                  • LocalOaf [they/them, ze/hir]@hexbear.netEnglish
                    6·
                    4 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

                • BelieveRevolt [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  4·
                  4 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.

              • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
                6·
                4 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.

                  • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
                    6·
                    4 months 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.

        • BelieveRevolt [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
          5·
          4 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).

            • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
              8·
              4 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.

                • aaaaaaadjsf [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  6·
                  4 months ago
                  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

                • Des [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  4·
                  4 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)

          • autismdragon [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
            5·
            4 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.