Despite all my rage I’m still a rat refreshing this page.

I use arch btw

Credibly accused of being a fascist, turbolib, commie, anarchist, child, boomer, pointlessly pedantic, a Russian psychological warfare operative, and db0’s sockpuppet.

Pronouns are she/her.

Vegan for the iron deficiency.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Yeah. I am not a Buddhist but I’ve always found something rings true in the reflections on impermanence. When we bond with someone we accept the pain of loss, and when we feel it most people seem to describe relief once able to “let go” an accept it being over.

    It seems to me that encouraging clinging and reminiscening stunts you a bit and only really provides temporary relief of the loss while drawing out the time it takes to process it.

    Idk though, maybe I’ll have the misfortune to feel differently some day. It’s hard to judge someone hanging out with their spouse watching death creep closer each day. I have approximately zero idea what my opinions would be in the face of that.



  • you get that this wouldn’t work as a critique if it was obvious you could make different choices right? Then it wouldn’t make the player complicit. If you’re not complicit it’s just a game saying “military shooters could be different” which is a nothing statement.

    Like how games with a “get the information (evil)” and “get the information (good)” button aren’t offering real moral choices. Or how deus ex would lose all impact if the “here’s a gun, go kill these people” starting mission tempting you with a rocket launcher popped up a “you might change sides in the future” warning.

    By involving you, leading you just like any other military shooter for a bit then cutting you loose is what creates the critique. You compare notes after playing and someone points out something and you go “huh, why didn’t I try that?”. It’s not condemning you for not trying that, it’s asking you if you’re happy with a genre which trains you to never to try it.


  • Military shooter games glorify war and shallowly reward horrible behaviour. Spec ops does it differently.

    Majority of people: do horrible thing

    Some people: experimental and find heroic thing is rewarded.

    Discussion possible, why did the majority do that? could we talk about horrible and uncreative design patterns in the genre of military shooters? How media portrayals of war train us not to look for peaceful solutions? Whether this feeds into how we view American imperial wars?

    you: no spec ops bad video game because I didn’t do the good option.


  • I think you’re actually engaging with it a bit shallowly. You are the one who invented the rule and a different framing is exploring how, if games seem to put us in situations where we must do horrible things to advance even a couple of times, we take that as a rule instead of risking losing to find other ways.

    Which is a fairly glaring indictment of the whole military shooter genre which is all about “hard men and hard choices” that completely dehumanise the factions you’re in opposition to.


  • I hate how difficult it is to find games I like when it used to be so trivial.

    2010: “I want to play another game like rogue”

    “Ok try these 10 games which are all excellent, and then there’s these 50 which stretch the definition but rhyme with it if you like”

    2020: “I want to play a game like rogue”

    “Here’s a 3d looter shooter with multiplayer and 9 currencies for upgrades between short runs”





  • I don’t even know what your position is anymore. It’s bad for a very tongue in cheek game to make a joke about lack of labour rights for monsters in their advertising, but it’s fine for other monster collectors to just not acknowledged how disquieting the premise is because they explain it away by lore, but when Rowling explains something away by lore it’s not excuseable because lore doesn’t have any material impact on what people are implicitly writing about?

    I think you should probably just learn about the game before having an opinion about it. It is very unserious. It is parody homage, and also just dumb and cute. It’s like getting worked up about mario kart encouraging teen destruction derbies or something. We’re not looking at something like the skeezy line blurring between Hollywood and the usaian MIC as the usaian department of war requires films to adopt pro imperial stances in order to grant access to military hardware which in turn makes movies more visually appealing.

    It’s just a ridiculous little toy going “Monster collectors are very silly hey?” where you can pat the cute mammoth in the spa and also work 100 cats to depression making bombs.

    This doesn’t have any meaningful impact, if you want to improve the world go do a weekend at your nearest animal rescue, volunteer your time teaching your local language to migrants, or promote a Union at your job.


  • Yeah so it doesn’t really matter what the “lore” is. Like if I write a book series with a slave race but I put in a line where a representative of the slave species, let’s call them uhhh mouse-elves, says “oh master we love being slaves!” that doesn’t actually change anything meaningful.

    There is always this disconnect between the fact that in Pokémon, Digimon, SMT, whatever else I’m forgetting for all the “no this is actually good clean fun” (ok smt goes a bit darker but still very sanitised) the creatures exhibit almost 0 agency and at the end of the day mudkip is facing down a moon sized laser beam from a galactic god. Further in the media around at least Pokémon trainers are legitimately worried when their “pets” are overmatched or hurt.

    So as much as they say “oh it’s ok because mc gobbledygook” there is an enormous dissonance between what the audience sees/what the player does and what the media presents it as.

    Also I note you’re not vegan, so it’s utterly bizarre you’re concerned about the imaginary welfare of animated fantasy monsters but not actual earthlings we share the planet with and murder for pleasure.

    also edit: I never graduated highschool, I was a bit busy being abused, I do have a masters and the ruins of a PhD though. I would tentatively suggest you focus your outrage on actual real problems and not kinda lazy filtered through a different culture and language parody of a genre advertising jokes.





  • Idk, it’s pretty difficult to get my peers to check out black and white film, let alone silent, and yet most enjoy what they see.

    I came to gaming after the NES (although I was alive at the time) and have recently been emulating games and have been surprised by how good some are.

    There are still modern games that expect you to read a manual before playing, there are still modern games where it takes about 2 hours to learn the UI. There are older games with 3 page manuals and simple controls too.

    You’ve got to remember you’re not immune to marketing tactics either. Like part of the resistance to checking out older stuff has been placed in us all by gaming companies training us to interpret stuff like low framerate as bad, or controls that aren’t fluid as bad.

    Best game doesn’t necessarily mean most enjoyable now, or even an enjoyable experience at all. Some of the greatest art is difficult, unpleasant, and challenging. Some of the greatest video games are those that set trends, or do something unique despite rough edges, or are even straight up hostile to their player.


  • Basically everything old. There’s such massive recency bias in game discussions. It’s very much an explicit marketing strategy to promote the new thing as more everything but somehow it’s infected almost all discussions.

    Sure ok, playing an old game requires a bit more investment and effort than watching an old film or even reading an old book but mostly it’s just about lack of familiarity. Especially outside of fps style games where I’ll admit prior to halo 1 things were pretty all over the shop many older games are still approachable.

    Coupled with the general dismissal of strategy and simulation genres (which were comparatively bigger in the past) and many things get forgotten outside of cult classic status.