games

256 comments

This was a sting op to figure out if hexbear is full of gamers and we failed

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

is objectively correct and fully justified in all of his rhetoric and actions, but the lib writers of FF7 nevertheless felt the need to explain his anger as being some kind of personal revenge quest and make his character arc about realizing that doing violence against Shinra was bad.

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.

you can only play outer wilds once

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!

Fallout: New Vegas should have been more optimized at launch

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

disco elysium insists upon itself

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

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

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.

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!!!!

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.

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)

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.

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

Morrowind's combat sucks even if I got very good at making it work for me. I get what they were going for, but it's a very weird thing to allow you to aim at people in first person and still have your accuracy determined by dice roll.

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?

Disco Elysium and BG3 are both incredibly well written, to the point where my first playthrough was so good, and so perfectly fit my head canon, that playing it again with different choices and playstyles just feels tedious, and an exercise in futility.

Helldivers 2 really needs some sort of end game content. The gameplay loop is fun, but i'm not even max character level, yet I have everything unlocked, all warbonds, and maxed out resources.

El Paso, Elsewhere is flawless and there is nothing to criticize, go buy it now you losers.

Life is Strange has a lengthy stealth section in a dream sequence near the ending which doesn't really add anything to the game but tedium.

CrossCode's pacing is a little strange, especially towards the start of the game which feels long and slow, and has a billion side quests available for doing much less interesting tasks compared to the later game side quests.

Majora’s Mask is too short

Real answer, Termina Bay is such a buzzkill to play through. I enjoy the associated temple but I groan upon seeing that sickly teal ocean. Woodfall/Southern Swamp and Snowhead imo had a better art direction and map layout. In comparison, the Bay has those hostile green land turds, while the water is nigh-on empty except for more enemies. The Pirate’s Fortress is fine but going back-and-forth for the Zora eggs is another buzzkill. The area fees dilapidated and empty but not in the weird or creepy way as the rest of the game (the ranch with the Flatwoods aliens, Ikana Valley).

To use a tired cliche, the area needs more “mystery” and even “Lovecraftian” influences. It’s otherwise just a polluted beach inhabited by the local Zora and pirate populations. Bloodborne did it right with the art direction of the Fisherman’s Wharf.

As a side note, I wonder what the venn diagram looks like for Majora’s Mask enjoyers and Disco Elysium enthusiasts. The mask sidequests are the best part of the game imo which translates over to DE’s.

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.

The most popular WoW streamer is a champion of Nurgle who has roaches crawling on him while he screeches about DEI, the people that like him are typically even worse.

dwarf fortress is still kinda unplayble at times without dfhack scripts. spend too much time down in the caverns and the nature aggro system kicks in and pretty soon there's hundreds of invisible enemies dragging down your fps to a painfully slow crawl because the game just has to keep track of their sightlines, a calculation that also inevitably grows more complicated as the map fills up with trees.

also the farming system is a bit silly, you only need like half a hectare of land to feed a small city.

Touhou player, I just suck ass at getting anywhere past stage 3/4 in every game

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

Dwarf Fortress has a very silly difficulty curve consisting of an initial cliff followed by not that much, and all of its options just increase the size of the initial cliff.

Earthbound has some quest chains that can get stuck in really obtuse ways, particularly in Twoson and Fourside.

Crosscode's DLC has that fight where Apollo is way too damn hard all of a sudden.

UFO 50 has ~5 perfunctory games in genres that clearly nobody on the team really cared for, and it's worse for it. That's Fist Hell, Star Waspir, Caramel Caramel, Campanella 3, and Block Koala. There are worse trash fires in the collection, like Hot Foot, but those are at least bad because they tried something interesting and failed.

In Super Metroid, the entrance to Kraid's hideout is poorly telegraphed.

Mario Odyssey giving you moons for every silly little accomplishment is great, but giving the same reward for korok-tier stuff and actual challenges cheapens the reward feeling of actual challenges, and they should've done a tiered system.

ok, disclaimer, these criticisms are only refreshed as far as my last playthrough, which was late 2023, so they may be half-remembered

CrossCode's level graph very much assumes you're champing at the bit to do a good chunk of the quests in each area before you move on (or an annoying amount of grinding), which–especially in the early game–can be a bit of a slog due to the amount of backtracking and/or fetching you have to do. The justifications I've heard for this is that it's supposed to be a part of the general satire of MMOs–however, if you make something that drags on purpose and I have to play it, I may or may not feel the purpose but I definitely feel the drag.

The bit after Red Area^TM^ and before Japan^TM^ honestly drags a little. I see the vision but it feels like it ballooned in scope relative to its importance to the story. Don't get me wrong, after Red Area^TM^ you absolutely need to have downtime, but I remember a bit before you get to the temples feeling like we should either be getting back into the plot action or at least be in another area by now, and then there's two temples. Cool idea, a bit much, especially on replay.

I think the puzzles are a design strength of the game, especially the final puzzle, but it very much constitutes a barrier to entry, especially the very long puzzles (including the final puzzle) where sometimes I just want to get back into the combat (the most fun part for me). It's more in retrospect that I like some of those longer puzzles.

I don't like the stealth sections at all. They're insta-room resets (annoying), and Lea feels too floaty to work with it. Her fluidity is great for combat but it just doesn't do precision. I'm glad that there's like, two in total, but I think they should have nixed it. CrossCode is a very active game, and IMO it thrives most when it allows you Metal Gear Rising/Sekiro levels of pure activity in gameplay. It's like if you were mid-Titanfall and they hit you with turn-based menu combat (shoot at options)–funny bit, kills the momentum, frustrating to control.

Lastly, platforming is generally fine but there are some bits where the isometric layering is poorly communicated, and it's rather frustrating when that happens. Also, I'm generally not the biggest fan of auto-jump platforming (currently first-timing Ocarina of Time so this is rather fresh) but it's implemented well-enough to not be annoying in a way that I remember.

your turn