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"
One of Fortnite's most insidious cultural influences is that other kids are just about expected to bully "defaults" for not wasting enough money on that hypermonetized piece of trash.
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.
It was an insidious crawling march of normalizing horrible monetization practices and it's gotten to the point that younger people just accept it because they haven't ever known a different way.
I've always hated Overwatch, mostly because it was so cynically designed from the start to press every button in possible about the le sexy waifu archetypes that would get sucked in and keep paying for it.
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Mechwarrior Online had some solidarity against the "gold Mechs" that were being peddled for hundreds of dollars each; they'd get teamkilled so consistently that it was extremely rare to see one at all after a while.