Armaina plays videeo gaem @armaplays - Tumblr Blog

cozy game means fucking nothing. i saw someone call firewatch a cozy game. the game about child death. i saw someone say dredge was a cozy game thats secretly horror. theres nothing secret about the horror the main plot is about necromancy and the world ends. what the fuck are you talking about. is it bc the art style is nice to look at. oh im gonna watch my favorite chick flick the descent. what are you fucking talking about

sfaira

I would argue Dredge falls into cozy game cathegory, based on comments and my own experience: - Cozy as in taking place on small area, limited locations - while expanding during the plot, Dredge takes place around like five islands and you cannot venture further. Long part of the game is travelling between first two, or even keeping around the first one (where you return anyways!) - Cozy as in artstyle - people do tend to call games with stlylised, pleasant artstyle cozy, and Dredge absolutely has that, have you seen the little boat??? - Cozy as a personal feeling - because "cozy" is different for anyone, Dredge can evoke the feeling of peacefulness even though it's mainly a horror game. Some parts of it did stress me out, but it was at the same time one of the most relaxing games I played. If you want, you can go through it all only safely and peacefully fishing during the day. It can also evoke the longing for living in a small town away from the worries of modern world. (whether that's realistic or not, irrelevant) So, I fully get if Dredge is not cozy for someone, but I personally think that in this case, the term fits.

armaplays

I think the issue is that people have different thresholds for what they consider Cozy, for them, and no one stopping to list their personal threshold when both asking for or providing recommendations.

For example, my threshold for 'Cozy game' is, 'No Combat', 'Little to no Death or Fail State that requires reloading a save' and 'Doesn't ramp up my adrenaline'. In addition to the afore mentioned elements of atmosphere.

If Dredge was just the fishing and story part I would agree it qualifies as a 'Cozy' game because the fishing and exploration is pretty chill and nice. Where Dredge looses me as a 'cozy' game, is because it has these moments of being stalked/chased by a sea monster, and even points where you have to set up traps to kill some. If found myself very irritated because I wanted to just explore and fish and now I'm having to drop everything I'm doing and run. That makes it no longer 'Cozy', for me.

This also means that, to me, Stardew Valley, isn't a cozy game. Minecraft with no monsters? Cozy. With monsters? Not Cozy.

So yeah I think when it comes to discussion of recommending Cozy games, to preface what a person's personal definition is of it, so that the framing makes sense for those with a different perspective of Cozy.

perfectcleavage

Mass Effect is one of my favorite franchises of all time, but it can be so difficult at times to reckon with the fact that as a female gamer, they were simply not made with me in mind. And, ultimately, it suffers for it.

Ironically, the gender gap in the ME trilogy especially apparent when I recommend the games to a male friend. I finally talk them into playing it, and they will, more often than not, have absolutely nothing at all to say about the female characters (or lack thereof). Wandering through the games, you're bombarded with a diverse universe full of unique-looking aliens- but male aliens. Asari are the only female aliens you meet beyond Tali and a couple other female Quarians, until ME3, where we get Eve and Nyreen in the Omega DLC. Which means for two (and a half, let's be honest) games in the franchise, every Turian, Salarian, Krogan, Batrarian, Drell, Hanar, Vorcha, Elcor, and Volus is a male. But what is even more striking than this atrocious worldbuilding oversight is that, handing the games to your average male fan, they barely notice. It escapes them entirely as something worth mentioning. They don't perceive the empty echoes of the female voices we aren't hearing, of the other halves of alien populations completely unrepresented. It's as if the default setting of the world, fictional and not, is male.

Asari- the primary female voices in the game- are poorly written. We know this. An entire race of biotic-wielding, technologically-advanced aliens with lifespans in the centuries and incredibly rich culture and technology, and the most we see of them in the entire trilogy is as strippers and occasional mercenaries. Liara, Samara, Aria and Benezia break this mold, but not without their own flavors of sexualization. After all, Benezia still dies in what is akin to Turian fetishwear under the control of Saren. Her favorite color was yellow, remember?

But beyond Asari strippers, skin-tight Cerberus uniforms, and comically sexualized robots- all valid topics, but talked to death at this point- I truly believe the most astounding, hollow, and disheartening result of this casual misogyny is the Krogan.

The storyline of the Krogan cannot be emancipated from the concept of birth. An entire species near-sterilized, a war crime excused away for the greater good. The Krogan story IS the Genophage, and the horrifying explanations used by those in power to excuse atrocity. And for two entire games, not once are we ever shown what the Genophage has done to Krogan women. Not societally, physiologically, or psychologically. They are conveniently segregated away in briefly-mentioned "female camps," while the men discuss the horrors of a war crime that affects birthing rates. It takes until the final installment of the series to show you one female Krogan (who didn't even get her own model, they just covered her so you wouldn't notice) and to mention the absolutely devastating toll that a cultural pandemic of stillbirths, abuse, and chronic infertility-caused sickness can have on a population. Eve is a fantastic character. Truly. But after two whole games of the Genophage being such a critical cultural touchstone for so much of the galaxy, and so many player choices depending on it, it's incredibly difficult for this omission of perspective to be remedied by a few nuanced lines in the med bay.

On the other hand, I think about the Rachni a lot. The so-called ancient enemy of the Krogan people, the foe that led to them being uplifted by the Salarians (and then, ultimately, discarded by them) in the first place. A massive amount of pre-game lore is devoted to a culture that, interestingly enough, speaks to the player through a queen. In fact, the Rachni queen is one of the first female alien NPCs you encounter in the entire trilogy. And as you encounter her, she speaks of songs of mourning. Not for her, but for her children.

You are offered the chance to spare her twice, once in ME1 and again in ME3. Both times, she has been used for her control of her hive, her children, and the potential army that can be bred out of her. Given the choice to free or kill her, many argue she's too dangerous to be kept alive, her species too volatile to be left to reproduce unchecked. An eerily familiar narrative, echoed by the Krogan, creating very poignant foil to me. A species struggling to give birth, and another, their supposed enemy, constantly being taken advantage of for it. It is a struggle of mothers, being commodified by men, and everyone is losing.

I wonder what narrative depths this series could have discovered in the tragedies of the Krogan and the rich cultures of other alien civilizations if they had considered, even for a second, that female voices could support a story where male voices simply cannot. What would we have learned about Salarian women, and their opinions on fertilization regulations favoring male offspring? About Turian women in the line of duty and their place in the hierarchy? Does the Batarian caste system have a bias on the basis of sex?

Obviously, there is nothing that can be done about the erasure and treatment of women in a game series over a decade old. But, I do believe it can be used as an example going forward to show how cultural and environmental storytelling is genuinely made worse by the oversight of female voices. All that to say, I love this universe and these games. Sometimes, it's just difficult to remember that we were only given half a galaxy to truly appreciate.

#mass effect #mass effect trilogy

There's something funny about playing a good aligned cleric in full helldusk armor.

#bg3 #baldur's gate 3

sha-brytols

no offense but i genuinely can't help but wonder if most of this community is aware that bioware is a triple a gaming corporation and is perfectly capable of creating a toxic and unstable work environment without ea's help

sha-brytols

ea didn't force bioware to make anthem in fact they literally tried to cancel the game because it was in dev hell for so long that it was literally burning money. it was bioware higher ups that uprooted the entire company in favor of focusing all their resources on a new ip live service shooter to chase trends without giving their developers literally any direction to work with and in turn causing it to become a dumpster fire.

it wasn't ea that forced bioware to drop project joplin. bioware relegated dragon age's main writers to andromeda and then immediately moved them on to anthem when 2 years passed without any progress on anthem's development and were working in horrific crunch conditions with a skeleton crew on a game they had no experience making.

it wasn't ea that forced bioware to turn project joplin into a live service in fact mike laidlaw said himself said dragon age origins & 2 were ea's favorite fucking cash cow because story-driven RPGs in that old engine were so cheap and unintensive that they end up earning more money than they spent

it wasn't ea that made the environment so hostile and unworkable for writers that they were dropping like flies in fact david gaider made it unambiguously clear that it was bioware that constantly cut corners and threw their writers under the bus because they were more interested in gameplay than storytelling.

bioware is not a small indie studio who is being forced to work under ea's mercy they are a multimillion dollar corporation and they are just as greedy and soulless as any fucking other triple a gaming studio stop giving them get out of jail free cards in favor of using ea as an easy scapegoat

blakebreaker

I was talking to people from BioWare Austin when EA took over. (Won't say who.) And while, yes, there were some things big daddy EA declared that were utterly shit, The Old Republic project was well and truly fucked and a massive drain on resources when EA came in and started bankrolling.

For context, SW:TOR was still in development at the time, but here's a list of some of their truly brilliant fuck ups that started before EA:

They took a very early version of HeroEngine and fucked it up so bad it gave the poor engine an undeservedly bad reputation for a while. That shit was so poorly optimized they decided to ship SW:TOR with Bubble Captions disabled to improve performance.

They hired a brand new team of in-house writers who either most of or all of had never worked on any video game before. This was actually somewhat of an open secret, but I think the podcast where Hall Hood talked about having never worked on a video game before is long gone. Technically, the project was headed up by Daniel Erickson who wrote for Dragon Age but it is questionable how involved he was in the story.

SW:TOR still stands as the largest voiced project of all time. For which they spent a lot of money. A. Lot. Of. Money. And reminder of point 2, this was all off the backs of small name writers. I hesitate to say the vocal cast was A-List, since ya know, A-List voice actors are not exactly the same as hiring Hollywood A-Listers. But they had so, so many voice acting studios that could've been some guys already on the project with a shitty mic in the basement.

They put Tatooine as a full fledged explorable planet in their game. Okay, maybe this shouldn't be on the list but honestly hate it when people look at the planet who's defining trait is being a barren wasteland and think that is a hotspot destination. And it also helps establish my actual main point.

SW:TOR was a hot mess of corporate decision making. And like, from a financial perspective I think it might've done alright? I don't have EA figures in front of me lmao. But from the start it was a massively bloated project that helped force the sale to EA. And BioWare managed to fuck up that way all on their own.

And look, it really fucking emphasizes the point made by the OP that BioWare favored gameplay over their writers that they thought for the biggest video game writing project in history they could hire just about anyone with a book or two under their belt. But at the same time, before EA came in, they were proudly boasting about how they would be so different from the rest of the MMO market bc of the "Fourth Pillar" for MMOs, Story. Oh hey guys we have story? Who's writing that story? Uh, don't worry about it lmao.

#BioWare

my-never-ending-nightmare

patchoulism

armaplays

This puts into visuals what I have tried to put into words when I've tried to explain to others about how different the culture and experience is with deathmatch games then and now.

Games like Apex and Overwatch try to emulate what the old school, self-hosted systems used to do with little toggles that remove certain restrictions, but they're no where near as open and flexible as older self-hosted servers where you can arrange it however you like. The experience, and the culture, just isn't the same and we've really lost something with the move to make every PVP game focused on ranked play.

(it's worth noting that I don't 'relate' to any of the experience on this specific list. I'm the anxiety player that only closed servers with friends in no-stakes goofy deathmatch and can't do anything Ranked or Competitive because I can't handle people snapping at me while I'm trying to figure stuff out at my own pace, so I don't even play ranked at all because it is inherently, not fun, to me.)

#multiplayer #pvp

I love me some Baldur's Gate and it's been a wonderful game thus far but guhh, IDK if it's just me, but it really feels like the game railroads you into romantic and or sexual interactions with characters. It's like the Mass Effect 1 problem, but worse in some ways. There are times where I felt tricked into romantic story lines because I thought it was like, you know, general character story development. And there are very little options for turning down things kindly, most of them are really curt or even outright insulting.

And if you don't reciprocate, it'll start like, taunting you for it. If you romance no one and talk to a character at one point they'll be like 'Wow you haven't shacked up with anyone yet? sure is WEIRD.' Like ???? Excuse you???????

I don't like that being nice and comforting to characters creates this immediate assumption of romantic interest. Why can't I just hug/offer hugs platonically without the assumption being made that I am romantically interested??

And before anyone is like 'There are Mods for that' - I do not want to put a bandaid over what is a fundamental issue with the ideology of the writing staff itself. Offering a hug to someone only to be overtly flirted with the next time you see them is a mark of a writing team that believes all tokens of affection are inherently romantic, and that is uncomfortable. No mod will fix that. The tone and intent is still there and baked into the game from the ground up.

Really missing Dragon Age Inquisition style 'HEY, THIS IS THE ROMANTIC OPTION' and writing around that fact. (And once again, even if there's a mod that flags what options lead to the romantic setting in BG3, there's a lot of stuff in the game that still makes romantic assumptions even if you don't pick those things.) I haven't played it but I heard even Starfield had platonic relationship options.

It's a great game but dang I wish the assumption that everyone wants to romance something wasn't so ubiquitous in the game itself.

#baldur's gate 3

chilopodacrudus

Monster Raising Genre Takes

Did you guys know that Dragon Quest V was cited as being an inspiration for Pokemon and not the other way around. Did you guys know that Digimon was created by Bandai to go hand and hand with their Tamagotchi line as a 'Tamagotchi for boys'. Pokemon didn't invent the genre.

There are so many monster raising games that came before and after Pokemon that are on par or even better but the one we choose to support is Palworld and I'm very very very amused by that. I don't care if you play or enjoy Palworld I just think it's very funny.

When genre fans like me were like 'hey you should try out this or this it's super good' and then people in the West pissed themselves saying 'omg Pokemon clone' but now PALWORLD is the one that people changed their minds about. Actual peak comedy.

If you want some good Monster raising genre recommendations: Dragon Quest Monsters is incredible; all of the games are fun in some way. Fossil Fighters; Monster Rancher, Digimon World Dawn/Dusk and the Cyber Sleuth series, Monster Crown, Monster Sanctuary, Cassette beasts, etc.

NOT TO FORGET! One of my absolute favorites if not my favorite; Demi Kids. It's a more 'kid friendly' SMT spin off and it deserves the world. SMT in general came out way before Pokemon so ya know lol.

Also Ultraman had Capsule Monsters waaaay before Pokemon was even a glimmer in anyone's eyes. DBZ also had capsule based stuff very similar to Ultraman. If this is what makes people realize that Pokemon didn't invent monster battling then I guess that's okay lol.

Okay I'm done lol.

armaplays

There is this weird sentiment that I can't understand at all, that there can only be One monster-collecting/battling franchise. Like when Yokai Watch got big and people were like 'this is the Pokémon killer' as though the two games wouldn't be able to coexist in the same genre. It's bizarre that the genre, unlike any other, has ever single newcomer compared to Pokémon and if it's going to be better or worse than Pokémon, rather than accepting the game on its own merit.

This video basically touches on the same grievances, that the genre has been rich with a variety of games that got heckled, pushed aside, or otherwise not given a chance due to being 'Pokémon clones'. Not even the 'Doom Clone' term persisted this long, so it's baffling to me why so much of the fanbase continues to center a whole genre on one franchise.

#pokemon #monster taming #Youtube

nellasbookplanet

'Enjoy it despite its flaws' is one thing, but Mass Effect somehow invented its own category: 'simultaneously one of the most flawed and the most well-crafted sci-fi stories I've ever experienced'. These games are incredible. They’re the worst. All the women are sexualized. All the women have deeply flawed and complex personalities without being either demonized or romanticized. The first available f/f ship seems to be written along the guidelines of 'what would a straight man find hot'. As the games go on, they effortlessly include multiple same sex romance options given just as much care and development as the the opposite sex ones. You can play as a xenophobic murderhobo asshole. You can play as someone genuinely caring but also harsh, who inspires growth and co-operation wherever you go but who makes hard choices when you have to. You can kill civilians and punch reporters and commit genocide. You can stop a generational war and mediate peace and save several species from extinction. The robots are stereotypically evil cannon fodder. The robots are deeply complex with a tragic history. Your team mates are assholes with xenophobic opinions or justifications for police brutality and genocide, or they just want excuses to Do Murder. You team mates are deeply flawed and can be urged to grow alongside you. The most important aliens are all humanoids. There are plant aliens and jellyfish aliens and insect aliens and elephant aliens and aliens who can’t share an atmosphere with us. You have to drive around countless identically boring planets with little to show for it. You get to discover hidden secrets and civilisations millions of years old and live through some of the most emotionally harrowing scenes in storytelling history. I am going absolutely insane about it.

#mass effect

My collection of Ultra Rares in Paleo Pines, in order of Acquisition. (though I honestly, I think that the Saturday color for the Psittacosaurus isn't a true ultra rare, because I've seen it almost every 3rd Saturday, so either it's miscategorized, or it's bugged)

#paleo pines

I've played the FF14 free trial all the way through, all of Heavensward and I still do not like it.

Now hopefully people will leave me alone and actually believe me the next time I tell them I don't like certain styles of MMO.

#ff14

Started playing No Man’s Sky and finally figured out how to customize my avatar.

#No Man's Sky

host-of-chthon

❗❗FELLOW GAMERS PLEASE HELP A PSYCHOLOGY STUDENT OUT❗❗ TAKE PART IN THEIR RESEARCH❗❗

A fellow psychology student is conducting research on gaming and aggression. If you are a gamer, please devote 15 minutes of your time to complete this questionnaire! The participation of each and every one of you will be very appreciated!

Destiny is just a transformers AU where Primus decided to enhance the knowledge and technology of other planets instead of hunkering down and being one himself. Ghosts are Sparks, they just have different shells instead of whole bodies.

#destiny 2 #destiny

Armaina's special edition DLC ending for Mass Effect 3

Yeah yeah we’ve all complained about ME3′s ending, it’s old news. But hey I’ve had an idea for an ending that would tie up loose ends and feel like your efforts mattered and here’s what it would be:

This ending would only be available If you are able to get the Quarians and Geth to reconcile and end their conflict. Upon doing so at the final moments, you are able to make a case to the Reapers that the cycle of flesh vs machine has come to an end, and they do not need to destroy you all. Following would be a series of arguments and choices where you have to make your case. If you have met other conditions such as getting allies with the Raknoids, it strengthens your case that your goal is ultimately to unify.

If you fail you just get a bad end but at least you got the chance to even try. If you succeed, the Reapers concede your argument and leave you be, claiming that they will give you all a chance but they feel you will all inevitably turn against each other, and they will be ready for it. (delaying the inevitable and all that) And then boom, they all just vanish and you're left with the responsibility of knowing you have to teach everyone to not repeat these mistakes again.

Tadaaahh there it is. thank you for your time.

#mass effect

In the trend of me adopting AI characters in games, please meet my newest Robot Daughter, Zero.

LOOK AT HER I LOVE HER

#element: space

FO3 & FONV Quests

I had to make a new game in Fallout 3 since I lost my save, which turned out to be a good thing as I'm having a much better time with the game this time around than I was the last time. And now that at the 50 hour mark on this new game, I've found myself struggling to find more to do in the game itself other than just filling out the locations on the map. I felt this was odd as in my Fallout New Vegas game, I had over 50 hours and still had not even completed the main quest nor had I touched any of the addons. I wasn't sure if maybe I was imagining the content differences between the two games so I decided to take a look at the full list of fallout quests in each game and.. well...

Fallout 3 Quests: