criticize your favorite game(s) (non-optional) (mandatory)

civ is a liberal great man theory alternate history sim in the worst possible way

Fallout 4 is a terrible disappointment of a game. The writing is downright awful, especially following New Vegas. The factions are nonsensical, most of the companions are not interesting and the world building is so lazy (the institute just so happened to simultaneously invent FEV on the other side of the country from the Master). The combat is clunky at best. The base building is far to limited and inconsequential. Why can't I stop playing this game.

Fallout: New Vegas should have been more optimized at launch

The Elytra in Minecraft ruined multiplayer survival servers. It is too easy to just fly around with rockets, so much so that there is no longer any incentive to do the fun thing about survival Minecraft: creating infrastructure! Why build roads, lay minecart tracks, use boats, or tame horses if you can just fly where ever you want with your magical firework rocket fuel source? It's an end game item sure, but that means jackshit in multiplayer survival where inevitably someone has a gazillion of them to hand out.

I'd prefer if they just made it glide only. Then it's something you need to build infrastructure to use: high towers to leap from!

Also Phantoms fucking suck, they are so dumb. Why does a group of hostile mobs randomly spawn literally on top of me every 3 in game days just to force me to click on a bed? Wtf. Yeah I know you can turn them off, but once again, you can't do that in multiplayer!

you can only play outer wilds once

New Vegas could be even more trans. Also, i've never liked the look of the games done with that Bethesda engine.

Dark souls 1's second half low-key sucks ass.

Warcraft 3’s legacy is World of Warcraft instead of Warcraft 4

I can only actually play Outer Wilds once, replaying it isn't even close to the same magical first experience.

Balatro is very fun but the replayablitiy of it hits a limit after 25 hours. The general strategy becomes less interesting once you have a deeper understanding of the game, and it leads into higher stake battles being dependant less on skill and more on just luck of the jokers you get. Winning or getting high scores loses its enjoyment quickly, especially if you try to farm gold stakes

9/10

Pokemon should of been taken out back old yeller style, revived like that ben garrison marx comic, and then given to somebody crazy like kojima or swery. Pokemon games are fun in theory, they just need somebody who doesn't know fucking anything about pokemon to make these game

I want Norman Reedus playing patty cake with a quagsire and pissing on himself when he gets stung by tentacools and getting to battle all of kojimas celebrity friends.

Y'all got infinite money, do something with it!!!!

CW before I start: I will reference a phrase now recognised as an ablist slur against the neurodivergent people like myself. A slur (I guess?) against people with autism. I am on the spectrum.

Okay. Fine.

Counter-Strike. Where do you want me to begin?

In the good old days when I started playing you had to download like 20 zip files to get the latest version of CS. You know what they did? They forced us to install a piece of software called Steam. CS was the thin end of the wedge that drove Steam into every true gamer's operating system.

Now there's good and bad aspects of Steam as a platform. Good and bad aspects of Valve as a company. But that move, funneling all us OG dial-up using CS players who were there since the beginning onto that janky ass platform that ate up system resources we didn't have to spare? Well a lot of us didn't like it. I didn't like it. But we went along with it because we wanted to keep playing our fucken shooter.

Now I have what, 21 years on Steam per my "veteran badge"? It's been longer than that, I guarantee it. I wasn't even using Steam 21 years ago, so I had to have been forced onto it earlier than that. I have a library of games I spent money on that I will never play. Slop.

But that's off-topic. Lets talk about CS.

CS is a game of rage and frustration, triumph and victory, it's play hard, play well or get brutally tormented and humiliated. Long before the horrorshow that CS has become today, it was already a torment nexus. You get killed early in a round? You're out. 15 minutes of watching everyone else have a good time while you wait for the next round to start. Get AWP'd thru the doors on Dust 2 a couple of rounds in a row? Shit I have seen people destroy expensive hardware in the fits of rage that CS can produce in its most passionate gamers.

CS is a game that will have you training with the intensity of an athlete while your body rots in a chair.

CS is a game where you better do your fucken research, you BETTER know your meta, you better not break the unspoken rules of the economy as it phases from round to round during a match or you will receive a torrent of abuse from your team mates even if you go on to clutch out the round and turn things around against the odds and have them all buying full loadouts in the following round because you dared to P90 rush B on a hunch and totally destroy the opposition. Even when you play well, if you play unconventionally you will be harassed.

You're a woman, playing CS? Forget about voice chat. Unless you want to grift. But that comes further down the line. CS has always been toxic, paranoid and intense. I remember playing CS 1.4-ish with a microsoft ball mouse that I knew so well that I could whip 360+ degree spins just from the momentum of the mouse ball and slam my mouse down on the mat to put my crosshairs on the head of someone unfortunate enough to come up those stairs on the CT side of Aztec too early in the round and catch a .50AE to the dome. "Obviously" I'm aimbotting. No fool, I have just been playing far too long and my brain is wired to work this system.

Fast forward, we'll skip CS:Source because I didn't even fucken bother. I was touching grass and washing dishes for shit pay during that period of the game's history. I returned for CS:GO. That was damn near a decade ago and I was "aged out" of peak performance. I played better than I had in my teens, I was actually good.

But then came the crates and the keys. Teenagers who were introduced to me as the children of family friends would add me on Steam, we'd queue, we'd rock shit. All femme trans team just beating gamerboy ass every night after work while doing mad drugs. But those kids, man, no life experience or education to teach them about the risks of the loot crate system, the total fucking black hole of gambling that they were playing with. I watched children cheat, grift and steal thousands, literally thousands of dollars worth of cosmetic skins from incel gamers who just liked having a girl to talk to while they played. "Hey hehe can I borrow your bayonet for a few rounds it looks so cool" and then yeet it's onto the gambling market, then gone, nothing to show for it but broken hearts and gambling addictions. Violations of the social contract, violations of the heart. A soulless situation.

I'm not gonna pretend I was above it, I bought keys. Why wouldn't I? I was an adult, I had disposable income back then and a drug addiction that made gambling feel even better than it normally does. I somehow managed to unbox stuff so rare and desirable that it once paid off my entire real world debt before I ran it back up again.

CS was the backbone of competitive shooters. The REAL deal, the hardcore shit. At least that's how we saw it. Everything else was a joke to us. We only had to tune into the international competitions to confirm it for ourselves. Suddenly gaming was legit. Suddenly we resented our families for chastising us for gaming when really, we should have been gaming MORE, that could have been US winning hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.

Gaming. Leisure activity to unwind. Morphed into an economic monstrosity, corrupted youth minds, a whitewash for brutal regimes who hosted the tournaments. And you'd still get called a slur if you spoke in mixed company on mic.

CS:GO2? I haven't indulged yet. But I already know it sucks. I have made up my mind without playing it. I know they changed map geometry. I know they "fixed" the quirks that made each playing field unique and special and to which we dedicated tens or hundreds of hours to learning and discovering obscure boosts and 'nade techniques. But you gotta churn right? Gotta add something fresh or you'll stop growing in the market... right?

Well I dunno.

Peak for me was 1.5 with the WoW mod run on independent ISP servers over dial up internet where I could pick a class and grappling hook around the map. I wasn't at my most performant (a metric that makes no sense when it comes to how you enjoy your leisure and off-work entertainment hours) during that era, but it was chaotic and fun, our shitty internet connections meant it was always the same people queuing for the servers. You'd get to know each other. Mask appropriately and you might even be accepted and make friends.

You bring in ELO matchmaking, country-wide or even region-wide players meeting, randomly, never to see each other again? Mix in the promise that one day you could make it into the big leagues? Add in a mechanism to gacha-gamble at the micro-level and then mega-bet on the competitions?

I saw a game, a creation of love and labour that used stolen Deftones music as the loading music for some of its levels become the most monetised and commercialised franchise in existence.

Now I don't play games.

There's a lot of reasons for that, most of them are related to my broken mind, my traumas, the way I was raised. But deep down. Despite having beaten multiple drug addictions. It's because I know. I KNOW. That all roads, for me, lead back to CS. It doesn't matter what it is. I will go back. At this point I'm resigned. Will I still beat the pubes at 40 the way I surprised myself being able to do at 30? I dunno. I fear finding out. I fear the learning curve, the meta study, the pitfalls of gambling vice, the conniving, the harassment, I fear that if I cleverly ninja my way past all those laser traps I will land on a pressure plate at the end that confirms to me, finally: you're too old to game.

CS. The start and end of gaming. The only true game. Haters will disagree. I will allow them their perspectives. Hell I still aspire to create my own video games, as I have since before I graduated highschool and now after my career burnout as a software engineer. But the real game? the only game? I fear it. I respect it. I keep it at arms length or further, for the psychic damage it carries inherent to its designs which have been iteratively honed over the decades to become more and more exploitative.

I love you, Counter-Strike. I always have, since I first played you at a LAN party on novelty maps scaled such that we had the perspective of rats in a kitchen or play room, to the last time I played you before my brain broke. But you ruined games for me, you ruined the minds of many younger gamers. You will continue to contribute to the moral decay of our neoliberal dominated world.

You are the first skinnerbox I truly found, not the last I have to escape, but you might be the salvation, the salve, the cope that I need to scratch the itch that I have replaced with other addictions, more brutal lifestyle choices etc.

But you are evil. I see you, Satan. Volvo plz, etc.

GG. No ree. I am beyond ree. I am partially defined by the final defeat, as I sit out all of the metaphorical rounds now, enviously watching other gamers enjoy their time.

I wish my parents had just bought me a fucking console.

I forgive you, GabeN. Despite all the harm you have caused. The years of enjoyment you robbed from my years gaming and the years I could have gamed that I lost due to the way your co-opted and perverted versions of CS shaped my mind. I forgive you, because it is the healthiest thing for me to do.

I declare myself, the most stable, most normal CS veteran with this post.

disco elysium insists upon itself

KSP has a lot of really bad physics bugs, collectively called the kraken. My most hated one is that surface bases, as they grow or even just continue to exist, will gradually and inevitably floating point error themselves into the ground and then explode.

ITT: a lot of very good games that I'll never play because now I think they're all terribly, irredeemably flawed

The bossfight at the end of Sonic 2 is a bullshit difficulty curve, you should be able to get at least one ring

rolling people up into a ball does bring them closer together, but it's rude to abduct people in the middle of their day (katamari)

Team Fortress 2 is a money printer and valve should have kept updating it regularly with new weapons. The bizarre turn to a ranked esports scene sucked and made it way harder to find community servers, the best part of the game.

Elden Ring's community sucks ass. The best way to beat the game is however you want and it's really not that hard unless you intentionally cripple yourself by not using half the tools the game gives you and screams at you to use.

Sekiro's dragonrot mechanic is really confusing and seems like a tax on progressing quests if you die too much, which is already the most punishing part of the game since you lose skill point progression when you die as well as money and there's no way to go pick it up like every other Souls game. However the combat is better than any Souls game has ever been and nothing is more satisfying than perfect deflects.

Deep Rock Galactic's escort and drillevator missions are really repetitive and boring. The game is at its strongest when you're exploring the caves and terraforming to give yourself better odds against swarms. Those two types trivialize and completely remove the value of all the classes movement tools so you're left standing on the point gunning down bugs until the timer runs out. At least they had the sense to randomize core stone phases with season 5.

Heat Signature really good but some mission types are impossible without self-charging tools and those are so vanishingly rare from crates that you end up doing dozens of Soft Target missions to roll the dice on the overpriced mystery crates for good gear. And the really really high glory score missions are frequently impossible. Time limit warzone hijack, and there's defenders and predators on board the ship? Nah.

Disco Elysium kind of throws you in the deep end. What's a thought cabinet? Why am I mulling on this tie? What do any of these stats mean?

Valheim is broad but not deep enough and its success is mostly due to when it appeared. If it weren't in the early access cycle and the devs had made the game they wanted to make instead having the community poke and prod them it probably wouldn't be very fun.

Satisfactory is absolutely hampered by the unreal engine's limitations.

TLoZ: A Link to the Past, the enemy respawns get annoying when backtracking.

Chrono Trigger: Rewired my brain to make me like DBZ character design

TLoZ: OoT & MM: gave me nightmares which I was not expecting going into them from the previous games in the series

Super Metroid: led to me constantly waiting for MP4 but it's totally coming this year for sure. The sheer missile-sponginess of the bosses is kinda tedious I guess?

Any Tribes game: it will never be the same and I am sad.

Dwarf Fortress, Kenshi: I cannot play these anymore because I forget to eat in real life and I will die.

Red Alert series: Yuri was kind of a misstep I feel and limited the series' development.

Sim-Anything: Maxis selling to EA for a cash grab ruined one the coolest studios ever to exist.

Cs2 is a game. Idk how to properly critize it though, cause it does exactly what it says on the box. Very competative team objective based shooter. Most of the criticisms I'd have would be around valve and how they created an underage casino but thats not the games fault.

The community is kinda shit, fps games tend to attract chuds in droves

The level design of Super Mario 64 is a messy directionless jumble of 3D assets with pasted-on themes.

Digimon world 1's digivolution requirements are so obscure that there is not a single guide for the system that is completely correct lmao
this includes the printed one, which is the most incorrect

literally not one of them are good without mods, and those mods aren't good until i've fucked with them myself

Fire Emblem: Three Houses: Manages to feel like one of the most packed Fire Emblem games while also feeling incomplete. It has 4 routes, but the first half of the game feels very similar in all routes, and two of the routes are also very similar in the second half. Master Classes are horrible, as are gendered classes. The game should have done Divine Pulse via save points instead of a turnwheel, and should have left the weapon triangle in the game. The graphics/animations are not great, and considering what they did with Shadows of Valentia it's shocking how a switch game feels like a downgrade compared to a 3DS game. Last thing I'll mention is Byleth and queer representation. Should have been more queer people in the game, and while Three Houses is better than the rest of the avatar characters in terms of characters being avatarsexual, it's still present. I feel like the game would have been better if Female Byleth were the only Byleth (I do not like Male Byleth), could not have her name changed, and was made more of her own character who's one of the co-protagonists to the other 3 protagonists (depending on route choice), rather than being a (not so great) stand-in for the player. Also the story, while pretty good, leaves things to be desired (they did Edelgard DIRTY).

Tears of the Kingdom: "Demon King? Secret Stone?" ::: spoiler TOTK Spoilers: Zelda should have stayed dead once she sacrificed herself in the past to save the future. It was something that felt emotionally moving, something that showed Zelda's power, determination, and ultimate sacrifice to save Hyrule. Only to be undone when she, for some reason, un-dragons, despite the other dragons still existing. I feel like it would have been more impactful for her to roam the skies of Hyrule for eternity, or however long those dragons live. :::

This was not a well-researched post, and I'm not going to try to make one. I haven't played through either of these games too recently, I could be forgetting things or misremembering things.

Ocarina of Time was TOO perfect and ahead of it's time, so the water temple was very difficult on the low resolution CRT screens that was the technology at the time.

More criticism, indie game edition

OneShot: having a hard time thinking of criticism for this one, maybe the music could have been improved in some parts but I generally like the soundtrack. I think this game's gimmick is something I'm a sucker for, but not everyone finds it appealing or engaging as I've experienced with people I've tried to share the game with.

Hyper Light Drifter: Also hard to criticize, but I am ambivalent towards the lack of dialogue or solid explanation of what is happening in the world. A lot of lore explanations stipulate that what they're saying is sort of up to interpretation because lore just happens through pictures (ignoring some of the coded sections, which I'm not fond of either). I'm still lost as to what happens to "drifters" that leads to their demise. Some of the pacing is also off in the game, namely the crystal forest/west section (I think). I'm also not a fan of the artistic direction of the sequel, but that's another game.

Katana zero: Amazing concept, but the ending is unsatisfying and leaves too much unexplained. (not sure if we're getting a sequel or not). Also makes no sense how Headhunter is killable even though she's also NULL, but you're not. Maybe I misunderstood something. Also don't really like the vehicle chase/helicopter fight level, doesn't feel like it fits with the rest of the game.

Undertale: Chara's motivations don't make sense

Signalis: YOU COULD HAVE BEEN SO FUCKING GOOD, BUT YOU JUST HAD TO BE ANTICOMMUNIST SLOP, FUCK OFF

Rimworld encourages you to perform Eugenics on any undesirable colonists, especially with the biotech DLC. Also encourages cannibalism and harvesting your opponents organs to sell on the market for greed and profit.

Also too many quality of life mods should be in the base game.

The pacing in Half Life 2 is sometimes off. Specifically, going from Route Kanal to Water Hazard is bad pacing, there needs to be a change in scenery. Also, the helicopter fight on the airboat sucks and is an absolute slog. My most controversial opinion perhaps is that the episodes are where Half-Life fell off, not the lack of Episode 3. Yes, the gameplay is good but the story is convoluted and doesn't make as much sense. It makes the ending of Half Life 2 worse in my opinion.

i dunno what my favourite game itself is (current or all time), but I'll gladly shit on the battlefield franchise because there is no greater example of a continuous, slow motion, generational bag fumble culminating with 2042 killing the last vestiges of good favour DICE ever had.

while there are a few nonsensical chud criticisms of the franchise in the last decade (V getting bombed before release because customised woman skin existed), the consistent elimination of game mechanics specifically on the tactical/team management side to try and chase the COD/Fortnite moneybag through simplification and monetisation left everyone eventually realising that the only thing moderately 'battlefield' about 2042 was conquest being a mode and vehicles being usable. but the downward spiral started years before.

everyone knows about EA enshitification, given that they've cratered almost all of their non-sports IP at this point (and even the sports fans hate the games but keep buying that garbage), so i'm not going to write an essay on what we already know. but my boomer-ass contention is that the removal of the commander position in BF3 is like one of the core blunders for the whole franchise, the attempts to re-add it were half-baked in 4, and it subsequently killed the overarching layer of (optional) tactical teamwork that actually kept more players invested.

BC2 not having it can maybe be forgiven, as Bad Company was specifically console-focussed, still had decent squad-order mechanics and the destruction physics in Frostbite at that point were amazing. But then they nerfed the destruction, the commander role, the squad orders, the fucking class system, the availability of vehicles and even making the maps boring flat fields with fuck-all assets left anyone playing 2042 thinking "what are we actually doing here? what's the point?"

honestly, if BF1 wasn't the absolute marvel of sound design (and arguably graphic design & tech) or untapped setting that it was, the franchise would have died over a decade ago. the "love letter to fans" PR and overpromising for 2042 didn't help things. we've basically been watching EA and DICE uppercut themselves over and over for 15 years at this point, and no amount of begging for them to stop has worked.

it honestly makes me sad, which is so lame... but 1942, Vietnam, 2 and 2142 were just so engrossing for my formative online gaming years that i can't help it

DotA 2: Should have had random items as rewards from matches based on the hero you are playing, instead of entirely random. Also, they should have had in-game currency for their stores rather than just barter and RMT.

Disco Elysium: Thought cabinet should not cost a skill point to remove an already internalized thought.

EU4: More internal realm management/struggle.

WoW: Raising the level cap is always a mistake. Obsoleting content is always a mistake. Worst storyline imaginable.

Heroes of Might and Magic: Conflux in HoMM 3 was lame

Stormworks: I think overall I'm pretty happy with it. There are some things where they don't change stuff because too many people's creations would break if they changed (e.g. parallel jet turbine bug). Also, the actual overworld game is pretty undeveloped. I think people would really appreciate a semi-live economy, though simulating the physics of that would be wild.

My main frustrations with the game are usually because I want to make things by myself, instead of downloading other people's engine controllers and ballistic computers >.>

Also having a creation tip over outside of the de-spawn range and having to restart a game because there isn't enough money to re-make it.

Then there's just a pile of parts that are either too big (pivots, sliding connectors) (usually from the early era of the game), only in one size despite it being quite a broad range of products (pneumatic piston), or just missing.

It would be nice if you could simulate/control things with hydraulics without an intervening electrical component (e.g. carburetor, piston control units), but I also get that that might be rather complicated.

It would also be nice if there was a way to have parts on non-cardinal directions at the start without shenanigans.

Also, I always play by myself and wish my friends would come join me and say "Oh wow, you're not a complete idiot" or something. :(

Binding of Isaac can be unfair, and while yeah that's kinda the point and mastery can overcome most of that, some rooms are laid out in a way that it's impossible to avoid damage. For example, a closet filled with spikes and a large troll bomb spawning and immediately homing in. This never feels good even if damage is avoided through pure luck (such as flight or explosion immunity).

Also most bosses are fine but they do love to add at least one bullshit boss per version. Rebirth brought us the dreaded Bloat, then in AB they added Hush, a bullet hellish, tanky completion mark boss that can only be attempted if reached within 30 mins or less. That wasn't bullshit enough, so in AB+ they added Delirium, another mark boss that is hidden somewhere on the largest map in the game among 6 other bosses (which included other end bosses). Before Rep there was only 1 way to guarantee access and that was by killing Hush (2 bs bosses in a row!) Oh and the fight itself is a disorienting chaotic nightmare and honestly never fun.

I don't think anything added in Rep compares to Delirium, though I'm never happy to see Scourge or Colostomia. Mother is difficult, but honestly getting to that fight is more annoying than the fight itself. Then Rep+ added the most devastating boss of all: barely functional online co-op that can delete your save.

Xcom 2 shouldn't be so demanding of my video card and it gets worse as the campaign goes on. Not a big fan of the chosen either, especially with the long war mod - they're either unfairly overpowered and unfun or just a bullet sponge and unfun and neither the mod nor vanilla can hit the right balance to make them fun. Also not particularly fond of the story, but that's kind of secondary to what actually makes the game fun.

The first Dead Space was magical (the remake is also really good) and then everything afterwards falls off hard. Dead Space 2 is still worth playing I guess, but it's not the same - the way the markers effects manifest as hallucinations and psychological conditions makes more sense and works better in the first game, but in the second one, idk, the final boss fight just feels like an overdramticization of mental illness (literally going into your own head and having a gun fight with your hallucinations? Idk just feels gaudy compared to DS1's reveal). The only thing that makes DS2 strong is how it expands on the theme of religions mimicking cults and causing damage to society and people's psyche, something that was mostly junt hinted at in the original DS1.

All that to say everything that comes after DS1 makes it feel worse in retrospect and I really wish they'd finish the story in a more satisfying way. The only other criticism I'd offer is that DS doesn't need so many weapons and, in fact, it both makes the game harder and removes tension if you carry more than one. Multiple types of weapons work best in games where each weapon fills a role or purpose that the others can't (this is accomplished with stasis and telekenesis, the other weapons have nothing else to do besides do damage) and it might actually create MORE tension in the game if you're only offered the plasma cutter to fight with and nothing else.