#those games are really good!

[fembot-y2k]

Coming back to this because I have more feelings. I despise gamer culture and the shit that spawned Gamergate as much as the next gal but it really does boil my blood that some games get written off entirely because of the culture they came out in. God of War feels like an honest to fuck greek myth and its only sin is having really dumb sex minigames and being incredibly violent and gory. The things that series deals with and the things it has to say have had value since long before God of War 2018. The writing was always there. Dudebro gamer games weren't JUST made for all the fuckwits that said men are inherently better at video games than women like Tim Schafer. Turns out the people making some of the most impressive art on the PS2 wanted to tell a story more than they wanted a badass dude with chain blades that fucks harder every time you tap triangle when it prompts you. Stop writing off art because of aesthetics, especially video games. Please. Re-examine older games like that, they have more to say than their aesthetics and press coverage lets on.

ill never forgive gamer culture for boiling down genuinely well made/told stories to "oo-ra I like to kill fuck yeah man guns and explosions" gamerbro shit, just for being action games. I do admit that I think action games are STILL over permeating in the gaming landscape, but that doesn't mean that action games, yes even shooters, cant have well made and/or fun stories. This post is about HALO and GEARS OF WAR. Both of these games have genuinely well considered and well crafted worlds for different reasons and good stories to tell, but are only ever remembered for their multiplayer "fuck yeah shooting" impact. Gears of war is remembered for being gory and having good multiplayer, Halo is remembered SOMETIMES for its story, but more often than not for its revolutionary multiplayer. MULTIPLAYER is not the enemy, its not a bad thing, but fuck do these games have some potent writing in their CAMPAIGNS, which were the main focus of the game being made in the first place.

Gears of war has a potently written critique of fascism, living under it, those who are used by it, and its cyclical self destructive mode of existence. Gears of war is *sometimes* about big dudes with big guns screaming and shooting big monsters, but every other time its about how fascism eats everything it creates alive including the people it so proudly proclaims it will protect as the chosen ones. Halo is a space opera featuring a religious alien superpower that experiences a schism so great it almost destroys the galaxy. It has philosophical zombies that cause the FIRST galaxy destroying event. It has a united earth military that acts in spite of its secret fascist government that kidnapped 6 year olds to make supersoldiers and killed upwards of 60% of them in the process, you play as one who survived. Its a rich world full of stories and well written characters, interesting world building, dont even get me started on ODST and its side logs you can find from the fall of New Mombasa.

These games are more than just, shooters. Every game strives to be more than its genre. Sometimes they are, and they get to end being that. Sometimes they end up like Halo and Call of Duty, trapped forever in the cycle of annual franchises and upholding a legacy that was created by people who aren't allowed to work on the game anymore.

[bacchuschucklefuck]

truly this one's just for me. I can do what I want foreverrr

[girlwiththegreenhat]

team fortress 2 finally getting rid of the bots after 5 years

work on the team fortress 2 comic continuing after 7+ years

half life 3 development looking more likely than ever with legitimate code, file, and voicework leaks referencing a new non-VR single-player game from valve featuring a HEV suit wearing protagonist and Xen creatures and concepts

shoutout to the valve fan that found the genie lamp. you a real one

[humming-fly]

I only just now realized what a shame it is we never got to see Al and Greedling really interacting

[makanidotdot]

ELUNE CONVO FIX IT part 1

i did it i finished!! finished enough anyway

How about instead of Tyrande getting possessed by Elune, we actually got to see them have a conversation about why tf she won't let her kill sylvanas!!! And get some real payoff for all the "hmm something's off about Elune"!! And more!!

Warning this one is long and boring. part 2 is way better lol

sry she should more serious here but w/e we're just going with 'angy' lol

i think i drew these same poses in the sylvanas one lol oop sry my brain library is not vast

ok one thing i added at the last second was elune is like pulling from tyrande's personal elune power to get her real form back to properly tell winter queen to fuck off. and that's why tyrande looks like she has spider webs on her it's just glowy elune magic

and then winter queen does go fuck off bc i didn't want to draw her anymore

End of part 1!! Also when tyrande is watching elune and WQ yell at each other I imagine it like a kid watching their mom get in a fight at the grocery store or smt lol

[pigeon-noises]

More iSaT sketches! Euphrasie is so pretty...

[junewild]

Watching Sam & Brennan talk about the beauty of frivolity, of adults playing silly games just as seriously as they fight to survive, and... yeah. There are some things that keep us alive, and there are some things that make life worth living, and I think games are one of those things that fall into both categories. Games make our lives better and they make us better at being alive. I think that's pretty cool.

[blondeaxolotl]

I gave in and made a quick little nightmares au to feed this rot I'm having over the series once again

Quick character list

Mono - Floyd Six - Jamil Girl in the Raincoat - Idia Runaway kid - Kalim Kalim's a big brother even in this universe <3

Bonus image, ✨HER✨

[st-hedge]

MGSV sketch dump. The brainrot is thriving

[dykedvonte]

I don't think any of the post crash Curly conversations have anything Curly would actually say after this point in time. They are not Curly nor his current sentiments

Not even the "I want to go home." Curly can't say what he wants or not. It's all Jimmy's perception of what Curly's desires were and are and Jimmy's himself. It's Jimmy entering the same but warped stagnating headspace Curly was stuck in at the beginning of the game.

An oppressive bright space with all the dead ends and burnouts you could foresee paired with a dark empty void of things that spark but are never quite as bright?

[spearxwind]

i think every game that makes flying the focus (and theres veeery few of those) should have a map with a lot of verticality to it. Yes we all wanna fly a dragon over a vast landscape but when youre high up everything is indistinguishable, the sky is empty, and that gets boring real quick. A flying game should have verticality in a way that lets you explore heights that are really high and places on the map that are overlaid with each other would feel more alive and give you so much more space to work with. In a way, itd be like the inverse of the subnautica map. The original map was amazing because it made the ocean feel so huge. "What do you mean theres five biomes underneath the earth?? what do you mean theres just vast caves under here?" and everything felt super interconnected too. There should be more things in the sky than just you too. Enemies, prey, companions.... etc.

my fave flying game is called 'aer memories of old' and it doesnt really have that verticality but its a good flying game imo because its got a map thats so rewarding to explore, there is a PURPOSE to flying around just beyond what the game wants you to do. The lore of the world is out there for you to find and piece together, and the map is filled with life and details. And recently theres been an uptick in developers trying to make flying dragon games but none feel like flying has any purpose at all other than be really showy and yeah it looks awesome but without a purpose for flying its gonna get boring for the player!!

"This is the dragon game you've always wanted" and its another purposeless multiplayer mmorpg with an insanely huge completely empty map and they focus so much on the five fucking billion dragon cosmetics (and god forbid theyre all free btw) instead of making a game that is fun to play and just put the responsibility of having fun on the shoulders of the player. "omg u can make any dragon in this game the models look so cool!!" ok but what about the game. can you tell me if you game is fun? is there anything to do? oh, just material gathering shit and crafting? and an mmo where you have to play with others for there to be any semblance of life in the world? ok

idk im just sick of seeing games advertised as a dragon survival game where the only survival aspect is like. 'find food' 'find water' 'find a mate to have an egg' repeat. repeat. repeat. surely theres other things?? what about migration? territorial disputes? becoming the apex predator? being a local tyrant or a benevolent protector? there is so much that could be done with dragons but all every dev wants to dip their ass in is multiplayer nonsesne with the most basic hunger and thirst and a basic as fuck combat mechanic and call it survival so that people can choose to kill each other. its so lazy

[wolfsong-the-bloody-beast]

Warden: You've never killed an innocent?

Zevran: Now there's an interesting word, "innocent." How many men do you know who can claim to be truly innocent?

Zevran: But if you're talking generalities, such as children and relatives and bystanders and such… never on purpose, but it happens.

Zevran: It's unfortunate, but death comes to us all. If not me, then some wasting disease. Or a fall down the stairs. Or at the hands of a darkspawn. It's all relative in the end.

Zevran: "Death happens," as we like to say. And when I get paid for it, death happens more often.

-

Zevran: In Antiva, being a Crow gets you respect. It gets you wealth. It gets you women… and men, or whatever it is you might fancy.

Zevran: But that does mean doing what is expected of you, always. And it means being expendable. It's a cage, if a gilded cage. Pretty. But confining.

-

Davrin: Lucanis, how do you decide when one of your targets deserves to die?

Lucanis: Usually when the client pays up front.

Davrin: I'm serious. Do you just kill anyone?

Lucanis: No. There has to be merit.

Davrin: "Merit?" Who decides that?

Lucanis: The Talon of the house.

Davrin: And then you just carry out the order?

Lucanis: It's my job.

Davrin: Must be tough to sleep at night.

-

Lucanis: You kill for a living, too, Davrin. How do you sleep at night?

Davrin: Like a baby. The things I hunt are pure evil. Monsters. There are no shades of grey with darkspawn. But you...

Lucanis: Provide a service.

Davrin: What if your target doesn't deserve to die?

Lucanis: Who does? Good, bad, everyone dies eventually. We just speed things up.

-

Emmrich: Do you have any say in your... targets?

Lucanis: You want to know if my victims deserved it.

Emmrich: Forgive me, I shouldn't have asked.

Lucanis: Everyone wonders.

Lucanis: I've never killed an innocent, by my count.

Lucanis: I cannot say if yours would agree.

-

Emmrich: Lucanis, do the implications of your work never trouble you?

Lucanis: Everyone on this team has killed before. I'm hardly unique.

Emmrich: Yes, of course. But in your case, it's a profession, rather than an act of necessity.

Lucanis: I'm not sure the Venatori or the Antaam see the distinction as you do.

-

Emmrich: I find it extremely interesting, Lucanis, that you consider the point of view of your enemies in battle.

Lucanis: I have to. It's much more difficult to find and kill them, otherwise.

Emmrich: Exactly! A utilitarian attitude towards death, and yet you extend empathy to your victims.

Lucanis: Not that much empathy.

Emmrich: Enough to wonder how the Venatori and Antaam view your actions.

Lucanis: Death comes to everyone, in time. I get paid to deliver it. Like a letter not everyone wants to read.

-

I think about this a lot. I'm always... surprised when I see the talk that they're supposedly trying to make Lucanis into the perfect "cinnamon roll" in Veilguard, because his sweet personality doesn't "match" his profession and background. Like, no? That's a very surface level of looking at it, I think.

Zevran is like this, too. He is an incredibly chill guy, and when you romance him, he is also very sweet and vulnerable, despite being an assassin. They're not that different in that department. They were both trained to be assassins since they were children. They're both traumatized in various ways. But neither of them acts like a bloodthirsty, evil freak. But they both also take pride in the job they do (or did), and how well they can do it, and have no intention of stopping. And yet they both express surprising empathy. (Zevran argues against annulling the Circle! Quite extensively!) And they make pretty much the exact same arguments about being killers for hire, as shown above.

Death is a natural part of life. Sometimes it just comes sooner, because we're there to deliver it. There's (almost) no such thing as an innocent person, so my victims aren't innocent people. Therefore, I've never killed an innocent in my entire life, as far as I know. (At least not intentionally.)

And that's interesting and fun about them! It's beautifully deranged. Lucanis completes an assassination mission, slitting somebody's throat or what have you, and then goes on his cosy coffee break, satisfied with a job well done.

The fact that they both say that they've never, in their opinion, assassinated "an innocent", so it's all good, doesn't automatically make it true and doesn't mean it's not complicated, however. Not every line of dialogue can be taken at face value. As video game players, we're rather desensitized to this, but hearing this should normally be at least a little alarming. For a regular person, at least. And it is for the people in the game! Like Emmrich and Davrin. Davrin has several banters with Lucanis about it. Like, who decides when somebody deserves to die and which contract's going to get carried out? Well, the "CEO" of "the company," of course! What could ever go wrong that way? Emmrich tries to coax Lucanis into saying that he does feel something about the whole thing, because he really wants it to be true. While Lucanis is very matter of fact about it. He knows what the Crows are, and that's it. He doesn't glamorize or demonize it.

So, it definitely isn't that "Veilguard says that Lucanis has never done anything wrong ever in his life," just like Origins doesn't do it with Zevran. Both the men's attitude towards killing is warped in an interesting way, completely in line with their background and upbringing. It shows when Lucanis argues with Davrin about them both being killers, because it completely escapes him (or maybe he ignores it for the sake of the argument) how the killing he does (contracts where the targets tend to be people) and the killing Davrin (a monster hunter, a darkspawn slayer) does is of different kind entirely. His logic is flawed at that point. But to him, it boils down to the fact that "it's just a job," and "killing is killing," and "death is death" regardless of form, and that rightfully baffles Davrin to no end. If anything, it shows how the Antivan Crows are taught to hand wave the issue, because the arguments Lucanis and Zevran both present are too similar to be anything else.

Of course, Lucanis, unlike Zevran, as the grandson of the First Talon and her favourite, might have had some extra privileges and wiggle space in comparison, which might have allowed him to bend the rules sometimes, give him space to show more compassion and act more heroically, because people are complex and there are many layers to what each person might consider right and wrong (e.g. killing is okay in various circumstances, and slavers in particular can get fucked - hell, we do it in video games all the time), but still. The fact that his grandmother wanted to tap a new market, so she made Lucanis specialize for hunting mages, which ultimately led to him killing a lot of Venatori and blood mages, makes it cleaner, which is nice, but then again, we hardly know the full extent of all his work. Moreover, when you ask Zevran to tell you stories about his jobs, you don't get much dirt out of him, either. He talks about some of the goofiest ones he's had. One of his targets that he (unsuccessfully) participated in taking out, a royal that got his position through plotting and murder, he also describes as somebody so immoral he basically deserved it. Also very clean. (Compare both these guys with somebody like Blackwall who truly committed a despicable act of murder for money that we do know of. And this single crime sounds so much more upsetting than anything either Lucanis or Zevran describe. None of the things Zevran says is as awful, besides the murder of his lover, which is framed like it wasn't really his fault, because he was misled.)

It's also worth noting that Zevran talks about how he was the best the Crows had before he left and how it brought him respect, wealth, women, men, or "whatever it is you might fancy." All in all, it comes with benefits. By his own admission, he was well off. But of course that came with a catch, as well. The "gilded cage" Zevran talks about. But that's not what made him leave. It was the plotting, backstabbing, and ever present distrust in the end, which led to the biggest mistake he'd ever made. Much like him, Lucanis also mentions that he had a comfortable life before getting captured, in the same quest where he also talks about how he didn't actually have full control of his life. ("Even before I was captured, my life was not really my own. So much had been determined for me.") The gilded cage comes up yet again. And it was plotting and backstabbing that made him lose a year of his life in the underwater prison.

My point is: Lucanis and Zevran are both assassins, because that's what they've always been, they were trained to be assassins since they were kids, they have a very pragmatic approach to death and killing, which they were most likely taught or perhaps were forced to develop, and they both take pride in how good they are at their job, and express no intention of ever stopping. And yet they both show that they have a good heart in various other ways, turn out to be friendly and incredibly loyal, and even very sweet as lovers. Because people can be complex, and so can be fictional characters. Yes, they're very different men, with different problems and personalities, yet also not that different.

You can't think that Lucanis is "too good" without also thinking that Zevran is "too good." You can't have this problem with Veilguard unless you also have it with Origins, is what I'm saying. And I think this may also apply to some of the other Crows we meet in Veilguard.

[longmaxsilvarg]

something about the main menu for life is strange genuinely makes me wanna collapse and sob

[pavuk-starsymbol]

(SPOILERS!!)

so. I've finished in stars and time (go play this game right now) and now siffrin lives in my head to the point when I doodle them all the time and I can't stop

you can see which doodle was done without the reference lol

and also the digital art!!! this was supposed to be a simple sketch but i really liked how it turned out

siffrin...

[blueskittlesart]

*sigh* thoughts on Nintendo's botw/totk timeline shenanigans and tomfoolery?

tbh. my maybe-unpopular opinion is that the timeline is only important when a game's place on the timeline seriously informs the way their narrative progresses. the problem is that before botw we almost NEVER got games where it didn't matter. it matters for skyward sword because it's the beginning, and it matters for tp/ww/alttp (and their respective sequels) because the choices the hero of time makes explicitly inform the narrative of those games in one way or another. it matters which timeline we're in for those games because these cycles we're seeing are close enough to oot's cycle that they're still feeling the effects of his choices. botw, however, takes place at minimum 10 thousand years after oot, so its place on the timeline actually functionally means nothing. botw is completely divorced from the hero of time & his story, so what he does is a nonissue in the context of botw link and zelda's story. thus, which timeline botw happens in is a nonissue. honestly I kind of liked the idea that it happened in all of them. i think there's a cool idea of inevitability that can be played with there. but the point is that the timeline exists to enhance and fill in the lore of games that need it, and botw/totk don't really need it because the devs finally realized they could make a game without the hero of time in it.

[shroommush]

So i drew some fanart of @pompadorbz sorry boys "still wakes the deep" au ! I had fun with the more action filled drawings, and definetly wanna do more >:P

While drawing, i got to brainstorming about what character roles the boys might take in the story. Like, charlies probably caz, and maybe phil is caz's friend whos a cook (i forgot his name) but then i thought about if characters like Rennick had a coresponding cc, and i immediately thought about schlatt. So, i have ideas about what expanding the au might look like, but this isnt MY au, so for now ill hold off on yapping my ideas and just share what ive drawn for now

But either way, i REALLY enjoy this au and love all the ansgt potential it has. Like i was thinking, who out of the boys would end up being the last one? (Aka, taking caz's place at the end of the story with the lighter) and thought that, out of the boys, it would just make the most sense to be tommy. And thats HORRIBLE, AUGH ITS SO SAD but i LOVE IT

Anyways, sorry for the rambling, i hope you guys enjoy the art :] i still have to draw that other scene with charlie on the elevator, tho, so i might come back with more later