I liked to post in the Friday fun threads what video games I've been playing recently. Sometimes I recommend the games, and sometimes I ask for recommendations.
I've always enjoyed talking about video games. But themotte has made me picky over the years. Its not just talk that I want. It is thinking, understanding, and discussion of video games that interest me. Video games are mostly a mental activity for me, and so diving into a mental discussion about them often enhances my enjoyment.
I didn't post in the Friday fun thread about what I've been playing, so I'll post now. And I'd like to know what others are playing.
The post I would have written:
This week I've been hooked on factorio (again). I've done many playthroughs of this game. A few vanilla playthroughs (some multiplayer and some not). A krastorio 1 mod playthrough. A few different attempts at the bob's, angels, and seablock mods (never could get into them, too much work, and not enough reward). A krastorio II and space exploration playthrough.
This week though I have been playing with just the space exploration mod. There has been some hints in blogposts that factorio might have an expansion, and that the expansion might be related to the space exploration mod. I thought I'd try and wait for that expansion. But my patience has failed me.
Playing space exploration without the krastorio II mod has been surprisingly way more different than I would have expected. The major difference in my mind is that krastorio II makes the starting world gameplay last too long, and gives too many advantages. I never thought this would be a real problem, but I've never managed to truly beat a space exploration game before. And I realized part of the problem is that krastorio II ties you to the homeworld too strongly. While space exploration on its own forces you off planet just for the sake of some quality of life improvements. For example, you have to go to space in order to get the logistics network chests. The tech is not unlockable based on ground items alone. I don't remember if krastorio II mod combination forced me to go to space, but I do remember that the belt inserters made so many logists aspects so much simpler that the need for drone based logistics didn't seem as pressing. There were also special ground based fabricator buildings for Krastorio II that were larger and much faster (matching the space based ones). But with just the space exploration mod I'm realizing there is an intentional difference. Either you can choose land based production to get productivity bonuses. (and usually the first steps in refinement for special resources). Or you can choose space based production for speed bonuses.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Played some Borderlands a while back, for old times' sake when I used those games as a tool to learn a foreign language with. Characters constantly jabber at you, but it's still an action game so it manages to retain my attention better than the more dialogue-heavy genres. And since it's from big-time publishers, it's fully voice acted in many languages, and with subtitles to boot. Worked well!
But to the point: I skimmed through various titles just to take a look, and I was somewhat surprised by how suddenly they took a woke turn. BL1 and BL2 seemed to have relatively little of it (or I missed it all in my brief excursions), the Pre-Sequel had some, but it was very limited and could be ignored or even missed with ease (though some research showed that it was included very intentionally), but BL3 is pretty much just one big propaganda piece for progressive sexual ideology. Male characters are almost all incompetent whining buffoons in constant need of saving, women are all competent and/or sane and can handle themselves. The women are always right, the men usually wrong. Family is practically always depicted in a deliberately negative light, romance mostly comes up in homosexual contexts, and of the four playable characters two are women, one is a "non-binary" robot and one is an old man. The old man is alright, probably a lifeline tossed to the median gamer. Other men in the various plots, especially old, white and straight ones, tend to just get killed so as to free up narrative space for the women.
In BL2 and the Pre-Sequel, the character of Jack, or Handsome Jack, was very entertaining. The Pre-Sequel existed mostly just to explore him further after he proved very popular in BL2, but was killed in the finale. Handsome Jack is a lowly programmer turned corporate apex predator, a tyrant with a hero complex, a supreme egomaniac and usually funny in his completely over-the-top violent antics. In BL3 he is long dead, but a DLC adds a side-campaign to milk him some more - by having a woman explain how bad Jack was, and that the player must now commit some damnatio memoriae to heal some of the harm he did to that woman. The DLC is very negative in tone, varying between depressive and condemnatory, and by-the-by shows some more sleazy or incompetent or spineless male characters withering under the gaze of various competent and powerful women. It's the opposite of fun.
It's very on-the-nose, and given that the writers announced their desire to add more progressive elements in the Pre-Sequel, it seems obviously deliberate that BL3 would have orders of magnitude more of them. And it's a worse game for it. The series may have steadily improved mechanically, but in terms of entertainment value it's gone downhill.
More options
Context Copy link