Decided to check out VOID/BREAKER, a roguelite FPS, which just released into Early Access. The trailer makes it look like some crazy, super fast-paced, effects filled shooter, where you constantly destroy your environment, and maybe it gets to that point, but so far in my <10 runs, 6h, with the game, it’s been pretty basic.
Each run you choose a single weapon, so far I’ve unlocked a pistol (default), automatic rifle and shotgun, and then you’ll find different upgrades and abilities that you slot into your weapon to modify it.
The main thing of this game is the grappling hook. You can either grapple objects in the environment to throw at enemies, like explosives. Or you can grapple to specific points in each arena to fly around, but so far, for me, that hasn’t been as fun as it should be.
Then the destructible buildings, although they are really basic (mainly just boxes) and take a surprisingly long time to bring down, and even then it’s mainly in parts, not the whole thing. Unless you find some upgrades, your grenades (and the aforementioned explosives) will be the main way to destroy stuff, so you’ll have to constantly wait for the short cooldown to throw the next grenade or look for more objects in the arena.
I’ll give it some more time, because I can see the potential, but I haven’t really found anything like the “deep gun modding” or “deadly synergies” the Steam store page is talking about. 90% of the time it’s been stuff like your bullets fly faster, and your grenade deals more damage.
A bunch of characters in Apex Legends are canonically gay, trans, nonbinary, bi, pansexual, and Mirage. As a hero shooter, I guess there’s no real “main” character as such.
Aloy in Horizon is pretty much there if the Burning Shores DLC is any indication, although she seems to be a work in progress as a fully developed person.
I remember when dinoflask did YTPs of Overwatch’s lead designer, he poked fun at how, whenever the game needed a progressive image boost, they would retcon a character to be gay at random. He sentence-mixed something like “Our fans are always wondering who’s going to be gay on our next update.”
I have an example that’s not gay, but trans - one of the two protagonists of Tell Me Why is a trans guy. (The other protagonist is his cisgender twin sister.)
I remember reading about that because I went on a SA2 Chao Garden binge at one point and really got into trying to get a perfect flying one, I even went and played a bit of Into Dreams and read the wiki.
It’s because they’re “dream beings” and don’t really truly exist so they have no gender.
The MISSING: J J Macfield and the Island of Memories is a great one.
EndingPsyche. Though much of the dialog and written messages could lead you, like myself, to believe Macfield is a closeted lesbian undergoing community/family abuse for her quiet obsessions with a girl…it’s actually the less common form of LGBT. Macfield is a closet trans woman; much of the game’s horrific bodily mutilation themes take a stand-in for the dysphoria of being uncomfortable in her own masculine body. Of course, many of the same types who’d retch at a gay protagonist would throw up at the idea of being someone they didn’t identify with - which ironically is exactly what the game is teaching you.
In baldurs gate 3 people of the same gender certainly hit on you. Basically all romancible characters have player characters as their sexual orientation
I will ask a different question. In how many mainstream games can you actually confirm the main character is straight? Sure it may be more than the two examples of gay main characters, but still very few compared to where it just doesn’t come up.
Pretty much every GTA, Duke Nukem, the Witcher series, the God of War series, Yakuza, Unchartered, the Final Fantasy games, the Super Mario games (including Donkey Kong), even Pac-man… and that’s just the ones I’ve played. Then you’ve got virtually everything featuring Disney characters, Star Wars, as well as most other TV and movie tie-in games (of which there are many).
That’s the thing about defaultism, is you can play a straight character and not even remember you’ve done it because it’s just the default. I’ll bet you didn’t even notice that Pac-man was canonically straight, and yet if Ms. Pac-man was instead called “Pacman’s Husband Steve”, suddenly Pac-man’s one defining trait would be his sexuality.
If nothing else, you’ve provided an object lesson in just how true OP’s meme is.
Also sexism. Women can do it because they’re silly creatures who don’t know what they’re doing without a man controlling them so obviously being a leanian is acceptable. But a man choosing to do those things? He should know better
To me it also kinda rhymes with the way bisexual men vs bisexual women are often regarded in wider society. “Bisexual men are actually gay” while “bisexual women are actually straight”. So only the part of their attraction that relates to men is taken seriously 😐
Women with a sex drive must be bi. Therefore bi women are hot.
Of course women can mess around with women, it’s not “real sex”.
She just needs a “real man”.
It’s so gross, and makes no sense to me. Guys seem much more situationally indiscriminate, sailors, people in jail, and honestly who cares if their guy is bi? Either you are monogamous and it’s a non-issue, or you aren’t, and your opportunity is wider for fun stuff than with a straight guy. No downside I can see.
I want to be something else when I play games. I don’t understand this need to be the same thing I am every fucking day. Bring on other genders, sexes, races, species, colors, limbs, all of it. Let’s be different. It’s a fucking video game.
Looking at my game library, I seem to prefer blank slate player characters.
In Factorio, you play as a humanoid in a jumpsuit. In Satisfactory, you play as a humanoid in a jumpsuit. Infinifactory you play as a humanoid in a space suit. Antichamber you play as some being that can hold a gun-like tool. Buckshot Roulette you play as…something that can fire a shotgun. In all Half-Life and Portal games you play as a series of named but barely characterized people. Return of the Obra Dinn you play as an investigator, each time you start the game it randomly chooses a male or female voice for the player character. In Subnautica, you play as a stuffed wetsuit.
I’m not even gay, but the first time I played Life is Strange (the first one) and when the option to…
Massive Life is Strange 1 SpoilersSpoilers ahead…
Be Warned…
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the option for Max to kiss Chloe showed up, I immediatly went for the kiss (well… the first time was a dare and that was barely even a kiss) Their relationship is just so sweet. I chose to sacrifice Arcadia Bay cuz fuck the dumb corrupt town. Max&Chloe is the canon ending to me. (The butterfly killed Arcadia Bay, #notmax’sfault)
Feel like dudes who refuse to ever play as women or in simulated gay relationships are just depriving themselves of some quality content. I haven’t gotten to this BG3 playthrough yet, but you can’t tell me Ascended Astarion and Ambition Gale won’t be the most toxic codependent enabling shit ever, and it is gonna be enthralling to watch that heat up and burn down.
Stay away from Gale. The mechanics of romancing him are more toxic than the character themself. There is no indication of when he locks you out of other options. It’s like playing “Set a Boundary Simulator”. Least fulfilling romance imo. What a fucking weirdo.
Definitely go full in, “I can fix him” with Astarion.
Talking from many patches ago fwiw, maybe some of the mechanics were fixed.
I did learn a lot of modding with my commitment to play gay characters at least. Thanks compulsory heterosexuality for teaching me to Google things like “Carth gay”!
One of the first mods I tried to mess with was The Underground for Morrowind (which Skyrim’s Dawnguard is 100% a rip off of btw) because it forces you into a het relationship as part of the storyline. Unfortunately, it was such a crashy mess that just changing all the gender checks didn’t help.
People assume heterosexual is the default and get pissy at anything else, they’re completely spoiled. I can’t really think of any video games which force you to be a gay dude, unless you’re playing like Dream Daddy? The Last of Us Part 2 has you play as a lesbian, and I guess the usual crowd did have a meltdown over Abby not looking like a Princess.
Still working on https://store.steampowered.com/app/440900/Conan_Exiles/, which got an update yesterday. My thoughts remain the same: good game, excellent base-building, but there’s not really much that I haven’t already seen a hundred times in other survival games. I’ll probably drop it soon.
I finished a co-op campaign of https://store.steampowered.com/app/427410/Abiotic_Factor/. We started our playthrough early in its Early Access period and had been returning to it every few months as new chapters were added. The game is every bit as great as everyone says, though the ending is incredibly abrupt. I’m wondering if they had to cut a bunch of content to make the release date. I hope they expand on things in a later update or future DLC, because it’s the only major flaw in an otherwise nearly perfect game.
Also played a bit of https://store.steampowered.com/app/1150760/Gloomwood/, a lo-fi immersive sim which comes very close to scratching that classic Thief itch. The stealth is great, the levels are well laid out and heavily intertwined so you always have multiple routes to achieve an objective, and the AI is the perfect balance between smart and dumb for shenanigans. There’s also an incredibly satisfying backstab with the canesword, though certain enemies wear armor that makes them immune so you sadly can’t clear out entire levels while ghosting.
I do have some minor complaints. As a packrat I’m not a fan of the Resident Evil-style grid inventory with limited space, especially since the game has a research mechanic where you need to chop up mutated corpses and bring one of every single body part to a specific point on the map to unlock crafting recipes and permanent character bonuses.
A single body’s various parts are enough to take up the entire inventory, necessitating either some very fiddly inventory juggling (items switch from grid-based paper dolls to physics-enabled models as you drag them to and from the world, causing all sorts of messes) or multiple trips across the entire open world map and back. The Goatman alone took nearly half an hour of combat-less hauling to research, and its boss arena isn’t even that far from the lab.
Enemies are also persistent. Once you kill someone they stay dead for the rest of the playthrough, which on one hand speeds up the backtracking, but on the other also makes it a boring chore if you’ve been thorough. There are a few points in the story where new enemies will spawn in old areas, at least.
All that said it’s an excellent game, and I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a good immersive sim. It’s still in Early Access, but what’s there is already incredibly satisfying despite my various gripes.
New arcade just opened up near me, they've got maimai, Chunithm, and Wacca all patched to connect to unofficial servers with most songs unlocked. Cabs are all in excellent condition, I'm never going back to Round 1 again. Location's perfect too, at the mall 10 minutes away from where my local Riichi Mahjong club meets, so this may be my new Wednesday routine to hang out there before club.
bin.pol.social
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