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This was a sting op to figure out if hexbear is full of gamers and we failed

civ is a liberal great man theory alternate history sim in the worst possible way

is objectively correct and fully justified in all of his rhetoric and actions, but the lib writers of FF7 nevertheless felt the need to explain his anger as being some kind of personal revenge quest and make his character arc about realizing that doing violence against Shinra was bad.

Fallout 4 is a terrible disappointment of a game. The writing is downright awful, especially following New Vegas. The factions are nonsensical, most of the companions are not interesting and the world building is so lazy (the institute just so happened to simultaneously invent FEV on the other side of the country from the Master). The combat is clunky at best. The base building is far to limited and inconsequential. Why can’t I stop playing this game.

you can only play outer wilds once

New Vegas could be even more trans. Also, i’ve never liked the look of the games done with that Bethesda engine.

Dark souls 1’s second half low-key sucks ass.

The Elytra in Minecraft ruined multiplayer survival servers. It is too easy to just fly around with rockets, so much so that there is no longer any incentive to do the fun thing about survival Minecraft: creating infrastructure! Why build roads, lay minecart tracks, use boats, or tame horses if you can just fly where ever you want with your magical firework rocket fuel source? It’s an end game item sure, but that means jackshit in multiplayer survival where inevitably someone has a gazillion of them to hand out.

I’d prefer if they just made it glide only. Then it’s something you need to build infrastructure to use: high towers to leap from!

Also Phantoms fucking suck, they are so dumb. Why does a group of hostile mobs randomly spawn literally on top of me every 3 in game days just to force me to click on a bed? Wtf. Yeah I know you can turn them off, but once again, you can’t do that in multiplayer!

Fallout: New Vegas should have been more optimized at launch

disco elysium insists upon itself

ITT: a lot of very good games that I’ll never play because now I think they’re all terribly, irredeemably flawed

Valheim is broad but not deep enough and its success is mostly due to when it appeared. If it weren’t in the early access cycle and the devs had made the game they wanted to make instead having the community poke and prod them it probably wouldn’t be very fun.

Satisfactory is absolutely hampered by the unreal engine’s limitations.

TLoZ: A Link to the Past, the enemy respawns get annoying when backtracking.

Chrono Trigger: Rewired my brain to make me like DBZ character design

TLoZ: OoT & MM: gave me nightmares which I was not expecting going into them from the previous games in the series

Super Metroid: led to me constantly waiting for MP4 but it’s totally coming this year for sure. The sheer missile-sponginess of the bosses is kinda tedious I guess?

Any Tribes game: it will never be the same and I am sad.

Dwarf Fortress, Kenshi: I cannot play these anymore because I forget to eat in real life and I will die.

Red Alert series: Yuri was kind of a misstep I feel and limited the series’ development.

Sim-Anything: Maxis selling to EA for a cash grab ruined one the coolest studios ever to exist.

Warcraft 3’s legacy is World of Warcraft instead of Warcraft 4

CW before I start: I will reference a phrase now recognised as an ablist slur against the neurodivergent people like myself. A slur (I guess?) against people with autism. I am on the spectrum.

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Okay. Fine.

Counter-Strike. Where do you want me to begin?

In the good old days when I started playing you had to download like 20 zip files to get the latest version of CS. You know what they did? They forced us to install a piece of software called Steam. CS was the thin end of the wedge that drove Steam into every true gamer’s operating system.

Now there’s good and bad aspects of Steam as a platform. Good and bad aspects of Valve as a company. But that move, funneling all us OG dial-up using CS players who were there since the beginning onto that janky ass platform that ate up system resources we didn’t have to spare? Well a lot of us didn’t like it. I didn’t like it. But we went along with it because we wanted to keep playing our fucken shooter.

Now I have what, 21 years on Steam per my “veteran badge”? It’s been longer than that, I guarantee it. I wasn’t even using Steam 21 years ago, so I had to have been forced onto it earlier than that. I have a library of games I spent money on that I will never play. Slop.

But that’s off-topic. Lets talk about CS.

CS is a game of rage and frustration, triumph and victory, it’s play hard, play well or get brutally tormented and humiliated. Long before the horrorshow that CS has become today, it was already a torment nexus. You get killed early in a round? You’re out. 15 minutes of watching everyone else have a good time while you wait for the next round to start. Get AWP’d thru the doors on Dust 2 a couple of rounds in a row? Shit I have seen people destroy expensive hardware in the fits of rage that CS can produce in its most passionate gamers.

CS is a game that will have you training with the intensity of an athlete while your body rots in a chair.

CS is a game where you better do your fucken research, you BETTER know your meta, you better not break the unspoken rules of the economy as it phases from round to round during a match or you will receive a torrent of abuse from your team mates even if you go on to clutch out the round and turn things around against the odds and have them all buying full loadouts in the following round because you dared to P90 rush B on a hunch and totally destroy the opposition. Even when you play well, if you play unconventionally you will be harassed.

You’re a woman, playing CS? Forget about voice chat. Unless you want to grift. But that comes further down the line. CS has always been toxic, paranoid and intense. I remember playing CS 1.4-ish with a microsoft ball mouse that I knew so well that I could whip 360+ degree spins just from the momentum of the mouse ball and slam my mouse down on the mat to put my crosshairs on the head of someone unfortunate enough to come up those stairs on the CT side of Aztec too early in the round and catch a .50AE to the dome. “Obviously” I’m aimbotting. No fool, I have just been playing far too long and my brain is wired to work this system.

Fast forward, we’ll skip CS:Source because I didn’t even fucken bother. I was touching grass and washing dishes for shit pay during that period of the game’s history. I returned for CS:GO. That was damn near a decade ago and I was “aged out” of peak performance. I played better than I had in my teens, I was actually good.

But then came the crates and the keys. Teenagers who were introduced to me as the children of family friends would add me on Steam, we’d queue, we’d rock shit. All femme trans team just beating gamerboy ass every night after work while doing mad drugs. But those kids, man, no life experience or education to teach them about the risks of the loot crate system, the total fucking black hole of gambling that they were playing with. I watched children cheat, grift and steal thousands, literally thousands of dollars worth of cosmetic skins from incel gamers who just liked having a girl to talk to while they played. “Hey hehe can I borrow your bayonet for a few rounds it looks so cool” and then yeet it’s onto the gambling market, then gone, nothing to show for it but broken hearts and gambling addictions. Violations of the social contract, violations of the heart. A soulless situation.

I’m not gonna pretend I was above it, I bought keys. Why wouldn’t I? I was an adult, I had disposable income back then and a drug addiction that made gambling feel even better than it normally does. I somehow managed to unbox stuff so rare and desirable that it once paid off my entire real world debt before I ran it back up again.

CS was the backbone of competitive shooters. The REAL deal, the hardcore shit. At least that’s how we saw it. Everything else was a joke to us. We only had to tune into the international competitions to confirm it for ourselves. Suddenly gaming was legit. Suddenly we resented our families for chastising us for gaming when really, we should have been gaming MORE, that could have been US winning hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.

Gaming. Leisure activity to unwind. Morphed into an economic monstrosity, corrupted youth minds, a whitewash for brutal regimes who hosted the tournaments. And you’d still get called a slur if you spoke in mixed company on mic.

CS:GO2? I haven’t indulged yet. But I already know it sucks. I have made up my mind without playing it. I know they changed map geometry. I know they “fixed” the quirks that made each playing field unique and special and to which we dedicated tens or hundreds of hours to learning and discovering obscure boosts and 'nade techniques. But you gotta churn right? Gotta add something fresh or you’ll stop growing in the market… right?

Well I dunno.

Peak for me was 1.5 with the WoW mod run on independent ISP servers over dial up internet where I could pick a class and grappling hook around the map. I wasn’t at my most performant (a metric that makes no sense when it comes to how you enjoy your leisure and off-work entertainment hours) during that era, but it was chaotic and fun, our shitty internet connections meant it was always the same people queuing for the servers. You’d get to know each other. Mask appropriately and you might even be accepted and make friends.

You bring in ELO matchmaking, country-wide or even region-wide players meeting, randomly, never to see each other again? Mix in the promise that one day you could make it into the big leagues? Add in a mechanism to gacha-gamble at the micro-level and then mega-bet on the competitions?

I saw a game, a creation of love and labour that used stolen Deftones music as the loading music for some of its levels become the most monetised and commercialised franchise in existence.

Now I don’t play games.

There’s a lot of reasons for that, most of them are related to my broken mind, my traumas, the way I was raised. But deep down. Despite having beaten multiple drug addictions. It’s because I know. I KNOW. That all roads, for me, lead back to CS. It doesn’t matter what it is. I will go back. At this point I’m resigned. Will I still beat the pubes at 40 the way I surprised myself being able to do at 30? I dunno. I fear finding out. I fear the learning curve, the meta study, the pitfalls of gambling vice, the conniving, the harassment, I fear that if I cleverly ninja my way past all those laser traps I will land on a pressure plate at the end that confirms to me, finally: you’re too old to game.

CS. The start and end of gaming. The only true game. Haters will disagree. I will allow them their perspectives. Hell I still aspire to create my own video games, as I have since before I graduated highschool and now after my career burnout as a software engineer. But the real game? the only game? I fear it. I respect it. I keep it at arms length or further, for the psychic damage it carries inherent to its designs which have been iteratively honed over the decades to become more and more exploitative.

I love you, Counter-Strike. I always have, since I first played you at a LAN party on novelty maps scaled such that we had the perspective of rats in a kitchen or play room, to the last time I played you before my brain broke. But you ruined games for me, you ruined the minds of many younger gamers. You will continue to contribute to the moral decay of our neoliberal dominated world.

You are the first skinnerbox I truly found, not the last I have to escape, but you might be the salvation, the salve, the cope that I need to scratch the itch that I have replaced with other addictions, more brutal lifestyle choices etc.

But you are evil. I see you, Satan. Volvo plz, etc.

GG. No ree. I am beyond ree. I am partially defined by the final defeat, as I sit out all of the metaphorical rounds now, enviously watching other gamers enjoy their time.

I wish my parents had just bought me a fucking console.

I forgive you, GabeN. Despite all the harm you have caused. The years of enjoyment you robbed from my years gaming and the years I could have gamed that I lost due to the way your co-opted and perverted versions of CS shaped my mind. I forgive you, because it is the healthiest thing for me to do.

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I declare myself, the most stable, most normal CS veteran with this post.

I can only actually play Outer Wilds once, replaying it isn’t even close to the same magical first experience.

Balatro is very fun but the replayablitiy of it hits a limit after 25 hours. The general strategy becomes less interesting once you have a deeper understanding of the game, and it leads into higher stake battles being dependant less on skill and more on just luck of the jokers you get. Winning or getting high scores loses its enjoyment quickly, especially if you try to farm gold stakes

9/10