Comment by UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net on So watching my nephew play apple arcade games on his tv has been harrowing.

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”

Some of them are so incredibly painfully Blizzard-generic from the start that they feel like parodies of previous Blizzard slop. “Widowmaker” comes to mind especially.

Im ngl I have lots of problems with Overwatch but charachter design has never been one.

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).

and I definitely remember Mei being called fat for not fitting that mold exactly

I’ll believe it, and that’s fucked up. It’s part of that “HIRE GAMERS” that was that mad that Aloy looked like an actual redheaded human being that lives in a post-apocalyptic society that doesn’t have easy access to Hollywood tier makeup.

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.

I think so too. Faro was just with bazinga machines that actually did what they were promised to do, and having billionaires be directly responsible for destroying human civilization and life on the planet may have made them feel uncomfortable with the status quo that was otherwise selling them treats.

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

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.

That’s fine. That was a personal taste rant there, entirely subjective.

It doesn’t help that I found previous Blizzard waifu characters grating… especially what they did with Kerrigan over time.

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

Agreed. But Blizzard was a cultural monolith that was almost impossible to directly criticize, even for storytelling cliches, until a relatively recent tidal shift where all the sex pestery and general assholery in those offices came to light.

Yeah agreed that the waifuification of Kerrigan sucks.

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 in a horny way that counts as waifuication)

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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So watching my nephew play apple arcade games on his tv has been harrowing.

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