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”

  • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    3 months ago

    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.

      • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        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 peppino-run in a horny way that counts as waifuication)

        • LocalOaf [they/them, ze/hir]@hexbear.net
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          3 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

        • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]@hexbear.net
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          3 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.

          • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            3 months ago

            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. I-was-saying

            • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]@hexbear.net
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              3 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.

              • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                3 months ago

                which is more marvel-fication than waifu-fication if you ask me.

                I consider Marvel-fication to be a form of waifu-fication so I put them under the same category but we could get to an impasse there if we both held firm. wall-talk

                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.

                I admit I checked out of Blizzard slop by that time but it sounds a lot like the bullshit Wish.com-version-of-Lovecraft that World of Warcraft was plagued with for a while, where every character was just a recipient of “corruption” until the knockoff-Cthulu was sort of yeeted away in a single patch, from what I hear.

                • UmbraVivi [he/him, she/her]@hexbear.net
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                  3 months ago

                  I consider Marvel-fication to be a form of waifu-fication so I put them under the same category but we could get to an impasse there if we both held firm.

                  what is your definition of waifu-fication then?

                  I admit I checked out of Blizzard slop by that time but it sounds a lot like the bullshit Wish.com-version-of-Lovecraft that World of Warcraft was plagued with for a while, where every character was just a recipient of “corruption” until the knockoff-Cthulu was sort of yeeted away in a single patch, from what I hear.

                  yeah pretty much that, villain as a pure plot device

                  • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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                    3 months ago

                    what is your definition of waifu-fication then?

                    When a character (either from the start, or over time) is designed to pander to the (usually cishet male) consumer’s gaze and push their buttons in both a titillation and wish fulfillment fantasy way. Not always directly sexually, but still in a cynically pandering way that often gets more blatant over time.

                    Not exactly academic rigor on my part there, I know.

      • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        3 months ago

        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.