#they pee microtransactions

[anthro-cat]

WOW. popular roblox games are BORING.

[buckbutch]

I've lived my whole life with Angry Cis Men and I can't wait until I don't have to anymore..... screaming swearing saying slurs kicking and hitting shit over extremely minor inconveniences that you can hear through the whole house when their lives are much easier than mine it's so obnoxious and ridiculous

[acethedria]

Hello your local wiki editor has all of the lore to deliver from Drawing Games Based on Randomly Generated Titles and it is fucking WILD

Mickey's Bong From Mars

This game's taglines include "An adventure* is out of this world (*weed)", "Go for the high score", and "This game has highs and even more highs, no lows." It is very similar to Earthworm Jim and Journey, but it is also similar to a toy for babies that makes animal noises. Most of the game is a cutscene, with one button press about every 20 minutes. While Goofy has his normal voice, Mickey is voiced very seriously. It was released on the Switch, but was also released on mobile, where you can pay for Mickey Coins in order to buy skins for Billy Bong as well as to be able to finish the game at all.

Billy Bong from Mars crashed on Earth and is now trying to get back to Mars. It bonded to Mickey Mouse, the first person who smoked out of it, so he imprinted to Mickey and thus mimicked his face. Mickey is high and wondering where he got gloves, because if skin is a glove for the body, and gloves are gloves for the hands, what is gloves for gloves? He is also very worried about bugs running down his legs, but it is actually him peeing himself.

Educational Duck Armageddon

This game consists of a single screen in which a duck yells urgently, in panic, at you to complete math problems in order to save everybody's life. His wife is the first female president and is also a duck, and she will be killed if you fail at the math problems, because the kidnapper (who may or may not be a duck himself) has stipulated that the husband cannot finish them, and he must have somebody else complete the math. It is the purge. When the president dies, she says "You didn't remember PEMDAS". Once you beat the game, it shows the duck and his family eating peas while the victory music from Final Fantasy plays, entirely composed of quacks. At some point, the duck yells at you to figure out the dimensions of his house, or else the floor will disappear and they will all fall into the center of the Earth.

The game includes microtransactions for the kidnapper's Wife-Knife.

Other games in this series see other members of the duck's family being kidnapped, including his child, his other child, and his father. There are also other subjects, such as biology and geography, in which the duck yells at you to name a point on the map at which his father is kidnapped.

Beautiful Blood Bastards

Known as "Triple B", this game controls with slippery ragdoll physics. The game has pixel graphics. The game was made in Japan, so it includes nonsense English words on the clothing. In the original Japanese, the titular Blood Bastards were named 7 and Up, but, due to copyright concerns, they were renamed to Kevin Number and Jack Jump in America. The more you punch, the more blood appears on the floor, and the more slippery the physics become. You can also pick up baseball bats and other weapons from the sidewalk. The Blood Bastards put on clothing from the enemies they kill.

Cross-Drawing Lore

These games were introduced together in a triple-pack. Their plots tie together, no matter which game you play first, and they end together at the same point. The Blood Bastards arrive to save the president's daughter, where there is a duck yelling at them to do math in order to save his wife, meanwhile Mickey, very high, contemplates his existence as a cartoon character on the side.

[amplexadversary]

Here’s a take people are going to hate but I’m right: Hard timers in video games suck unless the game centers around PVP.

Rant incoming.

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In shit like TF2 or Overwatch the timer works because it’s not your main opponent. It’s a competition of which team can do thing most while preventing opponent from doing the thing. That’s great.

Fighting games? Yeah, it works because even in 1p mode the pc character is supposed to be a stand-in for another person, and you still face the challenge on (relatively) equal footing, since typically when the timer runs dry whomever has the most health left is given the win.

What’s not great is having a combat system in your real-time fighter with rpg elements where most of the actual rewards are locked behind an exceedingly strict timer. When you have your default “your party’s offense-enemy defense vs their offense-your defense,” there are a variety of ways to approach that. You can turtle. You can dodge. You can heal. You can overwhelm the enemy with Big PP Number before they can get their trousers back on.

But a hard timer that isn’t just meant to check for afk takes away all of those options and leaves you with nothing but Big PP damage, fuck your strategy. And when there’s only one viable way to go about it the game just isn’t fucking fun anymore. Someone obsessed with math figures out the *best strategy* (ugh) on day one and there. It’s over. Game’s solved. You copy the person who did the math on the internet or you don’t win.

Single-solution challenges like that are boring! If I wanted to see something that will only proceed with a certain input I’d watch a goddamn movie and take half the time! Or I’d play a different genre of video game, like a puzzle, or a virtual novel. Part of the appeal of an interactive medium like a video game is that the player has *input* and discovering one solution doesn’t take the element of challenge away because hey you can try to find a different solution than that one. Speedrunners, low level runs, powering through the game with the joke weapon are all things people find fun.

It just gets my goat that I could take most of the enemies in this game about 30 levels below what is suggested, using the resources the game gives me, and just taking more time. And when I do that, the game plays like Dark Souls, which is what I wanted anyway, except for all the parts where I run into a fucking timer, reducing the game to “oops, time for a NUMBER CHECK!!!!!!! If you don’t play the game a specific way then SORRY you don’t get to proceed!!!”.

Like, if it only happened occasionally I wouldn’t be so pissed but there’s so many of these bits in this damn game and the frequency gets on my nerves.

If you want to push a time limit on your player, go with accumulating damage or some other kind of “soft” time limit so your players will feel creative getting around it with shields, or healing, or managing the magic fairy dust that keeps you from getting smoke in your lungs.

Fucking hell I should just go back to better soulsbourne clones. Or Warframe. You don’t *technically* have to grind in Warframe if you’re fine doing single-player with most of your bots.

[nautiscarader]

Glitch Techs - review

Okay, so I’ve finished the Glitch Techs, and it was... profoundly okayish. Some spoilers below.

The show is an average buddy friendship team-up where two teenagers learn lessons while going on wacky adventures. Except there are also computer games everywhere that glitch ALL THE time, and into our world, no less, so the company that makes them, Hinobi, needs a whole heap of tech teams, called Glitch Techs to defeat and contain these glitches Ghostbusters-meet-Men In Black-style.

Before I continue, I should disclose some biases: I don’t consider myself a gamer. I occasionally do play games, but I most certainly am not obsessed with them, and I didn’t grow up with retro consoles like NES and Genesis actually Xboxes are considered retro now. Wow, I’m old.

I also might have a slight allergy to the fad of pixelation that has been going on for the last decade or so. I’m not against it, but... Come on, people, we have anti-aliasing. And vector graphics, which are superior anyway. 

So, as you might expect this show didn’t exactly “click” with me, and the final element that made me take so long to finish it was the lingo. Oh dear lord, the cringy, cringy lingo. 

See, Miko and Five don’t go to work, they “do quests” to “get EX PEE”, by defeating an “NPC” that “aggro’d” on them and then they can exchange said XP for “power ups” when they “level up”. Could they be any less subtle?

I mean, imagine a show about people working in a pet shop, and when they go out, they go “in herds”, refer it to a pizzeria as “a waterhole”, and their leader is “an alpha”, it would be a bit over the top, wouldn’t it?    

Once I take those annoying parts from the equation, though, we get a rather standard show for kids. We have an episode about lying, about working in a team, about not pretending to be someone else, taking care of your pets, you know the drill. Some episodes were painfully predictable, though. In Castle Crawl, for example, that broken sword, described as “the worst weapon” was a perfect example of Chekov’s gun, but with extra Bethesda floating quest-marker pointing to it in case you missed it. It was still funny, though.

I also have to admit, though, they nailed the depiction of the e-sports obsession .

It looked as ridiculous in the show as it does in real life. Also, I thought they would address more gaming-related problems, like lootboxes or microtransactions. They kinda touched the subject of pre-ordering craze, but not that much.

The animation is pretty good, typical for western cartoons, with occasional dive into anime-inspired madness, and its style benefited the fast-paced nature of the chases and battles.

Also, even though it’s full of used tropes, the friendship between Miko and Five, as well as Miko and her incredibly extended family was very well done. Her parents sure had lots of DLCs (see? annoying!). 

The quote-unquote douchebag villain was delightfully facepunchable, and I am looking forward to seeing him got punished more. 

Also, in episode 2, we got a glimpse into a potentially darker storyline featuring a LEGENDARY glitch urban legend, so that better be good.

But there is one thing that really irked me, and it’s that I don’t think the show really understood what potential video game glitches can be. 

A glitch, as a concept is amazing. And the idea of something like that happening in our world is fascinating. Computer programs are ruled by logic and math, so an error there can turn the world upside down - literally, sometimes - create effects so random and unpredictable, decided by machine’s relentless dedication to doing its job, your brain cannot comprehend them. 

And in the show it was all boiled down to random monsters showing up in the world. That’s Pokémon Glitch Go, they even parodied it with Flunkies.

Which is ironic, because one of the most famous glitches, MissingNo, comes from Pokémon, and if they did that, I’d be madly impressed. Imagine if someone’s pet turned into A BLOCK OF PIXELS OR A SKELETON OF KABUTOPS.  

Hell, when it comes to glitches, Matrix did that better years ago. That scene with a deja vu cat? That is a glitch. And an even better job of depicting glitches was shown in an animated short “Beyond”, a part of “Animatrix”, and anthology of shorts in Matrix universe, which I cannot recommend more. It is a fantastic movie.

In this short, a woman finds an abandoned creepy house, where Matrix has glitched, and it causes temporal and spatial anomalies: lack of gravity, localised rain, time distortions, etc. 

That’s what a glitch could do if it leaked into our reality! 

(oh and BTW, Thor 2 stole that whole short and put it into the opening scene when Jane finds the Dark World thingy in that abandoned tower, and I’m still mad about this).

I would be okay with video game monsters escaping, if the carnage they did matched with the abstract nature of glitches: give me buildings that suddenly are made of hot-dogs instead of bricks because the tile palettes were swapped. Give me a coffee machine spawning endless coffee because the end loop command was never executed properly. Give me a person who suddenly knows what the person next to them is thinking due to memory OVERFLOW. That would be interesting!

And instead we have a bird that vomits pixels.

...which, you know, would be still weird, but not very creative. On occasions they brushed that pure abstract madness of glitch art, but nowhere near close as I expected.

Also, I have to ask: this company, Hinobi... They have portals.

And can spawn items.

And can create virtual reality.

And can erase memories, through tv no less.

...what is stopping them from overthrowing all the governments, exactly? And if you tell me that is a higher level quest, I’m gonna strangle you with my mouse cord-wait, no, I have wireless one, dammit.  

Also, for an organisation who has a dedicated glitch-capturing team, their tech glitches itself A LOT. Hm. Maybe that’s what stopping them...  

Watching this show gave me a major “Cyberchase” vibe, but I was fine with that, since it was an old show that taught you math, so I was willing to see past the clichés there, or the fact that they referred to “cyber space” as real space, and what do you mean it’s still going. “Wander of The Yonder” was cancelled after two season but this thing is still on air since 2002 what the FLUNKY DETECTED! 

So, yeah, not a huge fan of this show, but from what I understand, there are more episodes done and some potentially in making, so maybe it will get more interesting. And the game parodies were clever enough for me to get lots of laugh, so, as I said, it was o͓̳̩k̔a̯̭̭̻̤̗͌̓̎̽ͧ͒y̻͔͓̞͙̻̩ͪ͌.̭̯̼̞̇

See, even I can do that.

[kirbyknife]

pee oh sees worry about "microaggressions"... tch... Try being a GAMER and having to worry about MICROTRANSACTIONS