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Half-Life 2 introduced a sidekick who’s mixed race, has dyed hair, and punches cops in her first scene. And yet I’ve heard no one call that game woke.
Half-Life 2 is so woke it opens with the words ‘Rise and shine’ 🤯
Rise and grind Mister Freeman ✊️✊️✊️
Lambda-male grindset
There was some around HL: Alyx when it came out (“replacing a man with a femoid character!!!”) but I don’t think VR is popular enough with the kinds of people that really carry these movements.
As to HL2, well, for one that game I’m sad to admit is pretty old now. It predates gamergate by a full 10 years, which really kicked off our current era of astroturfed antiwokeness. And despite incredible influence and critical acclaim has never actually been very popular.
Also they see a sidekick to a white man as an appropriate place for such people. Also she was somewhat deeper into the game and chuds don’t actually play these games they complain about so they probably didn’t get to her. Lots of contributing factors.
I don’t remember anyone caring about tomb raider. Tob raider is the one game everyone i knew played.
Woke is when no TRIANGLE BAZOONGAS
Honestly I think this is a bad example. Guys are generally happy to play games with attractive bad-ass female leads. See Metroid/Tomb Raider/Bayonetta/Nier/etc
I actually think this is a fantastic example for this reason. Gamers back in the day were PISSED when they found out Samus Aran was a fEmOiD
I heard they were surprised, but where they pissed?
I am aware of several angry letters written about Samus being a woman. But I did some digging and I think you are closer to right than I was. It seems that the average reaction was confusion. Like, someone (likely a boy named Justin Bailey) discovered a cheat code that, according to several publications such as Boy’s Life, “turns Samus from a robot cyborg into a woman”. It seems people just didn’t know what to make of Samus taking off their suit and suddenly turning into a blond woman in a leotard. Based on my googling, it seems like many people were still confused about this when Metroid 2 came out in 91, but by the time Super Metroid came out in 94 most people understood that Samus was a woman the whole time.
Yeah, but fort that you had to finish the game. That was HARD as hell back in the days. I believe neither I nor anyone in my elementary school knew Samus was a girl because nobody managed to finish the game.
You had to finish the game within a certain time limit too. For super Metroid, you didn’t get the full perfect ending unless you did it in 3 hours.
Which is impossible for a normal mortal…
I know this is coming off as tooting my own horn, but the reality is that I’m just very excited about it, because it was a big part of my younger years.
This is a very cool compliment to see, as someone who regularly tried to hit the sub 1 hour clear mark for Super Metroid.
Guess you didn’t go to school with Justin Bailey.
Did some googling. Apparently the Justin Bailey cheat code, which lets you play as Zero Suit Samus, was described in many publications as “it turns Samus from a cyborg into a woman”. It seems people couldn’t wrap their heads around Samus being a woman the whole time, and didn’t know what to make of the ending even if they got to see it. Some things never change, I guess. My googling suggests that this confusion was still prominent when Metroid 2 was released in 92 but was mostly dealt with by the time Super Metroid was released in 94
Isn’t her silhouette revealed when you die?
not in the original, you’re thinking of the thirdquil on the snes.
thirdquil?
Third sequel I guess? It’s not a word. And Super Metroid would be the second sequel anyway.
Were they? Has there been a survey or something? Because going off letters wrote or something is a pretty bad metric to judge the opinion of any general population,because guess who would be the people most motivated to voice their opinion. Whatever fraction of the observed population they make up can’t really be derived from that. (Also holds true for social media today)
Did some googling. Seems like the average reaction at the time was confusion about how or why Samus “turned into a woman”. Some people got mad, but most people just didn’t comprehend what happened. Some things never change, I guess.
True enough!
They complain about reboot Lara Croft’s tits being too small. Regular sized boobs are woke of course.
The twist in the original Metroid was that you didn’t find out Samus was a woman until the ending, I could totally see today’s dumbass gamers calling that a bait-and-switch.
Kicker is that they have to be attractive, which is the real reason most have no hate towards them. Aloy wasn’t traditionally attractive in the Horizon sequel and people lost their shit.
She wasn’t? I dig tattoos
Nah, women can’t have peach fuzz on their faces, or skin with spots and texture. Also Aloy didn’t use machine blood to make eyeliner and eye shadow, so apparently she’s not female enough for these morons.
The most obvious way these people tattle on themselves and their small dick energy is when you hear them start referring to all women as females. They aren’t people, they’re a caste of other lifeforms that can be boiled down to their sex.
Hearing how “woke games devs are too threatened by attractive females” is a good sign whoever is speaking slipped and landed on their head too many times.
I do know some people use ‘female’ in a derogatory way. I also know people who use ‘men’ in a derogatory way. I also know some who use ‘female’ and ‘male’ when they don’t want to say that the people involved are ‘men’ or ‘women’, in the sense of being grown-ass adults.
I appreciate the attempt to be even handed here, but there is a whole manosphere subculture centered around describing and acting upon women not as equals but as “females” using that language, which really isn’t mirrored in the other direction. While you may give someone the benefit of a doubt due to the above, I feel the language is an incredibly strong indicator that whoever is speaking does not speak to many women as equals, or would not be calling their entire sex “females” like one does in an anthropological study.
As for them being grown-ass adults or not, I highly suspect the context would make this abundantly clear if you were talking about people being acting foolish, rather than simply their state of being.
their small dick energy
No need to bodyshame here. Or do you think all guys with small dicks are seething incels?
As this is the only possibly interpretation, this must be the case. You have decoded me expertly, and there exists no room for an alternative explanation. We don’t exist in a world where this phrase or it’s inversion have entered the lexicon of slang.
The thing is that whether that guy was trying to “decode” you or not, a person’s intentions don’t determine the effect that their actions have. Furthermore, just because something is a commonly used phrase doesn’t mean it’s good.
If you didn’t mean to bodyshame people in general, then that’s great. You’re probably a cool person. But if someone says “hey please stop punching those innocent people” you can’t say “oh don’t worry, it doesn’t count because I was trying to hit someone else, I’m going to keep punching them and it still won’t count”.
This is a lot of words to take umbrage with “small dick energy” as a piece of slang.
No comments on anyone’s bodies, anymore than calling someone an ass is.
Not all squares are rectangles, but all rectangles are insecure dweebs who need to find something better to do.
There were tons of comments about her being overweight, which is just comical.
Don’t even get me started about the Last of Us 2 hate
God, the fucking gamer rage around the Fable trailer was insane. They can’t even take the idea of a woman not being traditionally attractive as a punchline. And to explain why woman no look good, they had to pull a story about a trans game dev being the model straight out their asses, because only one of them TRANS WOMEN could look slightly unattractive!
They act like how attractive a character is directly correlates to whether gameplay is good or a story is bad. Why can’t they just appreciate the game for what it is and the character for who they are?
Tomb raider rocked… Bayonetta, not as much
Games if anything are less woke now than they used to be. Forget games featuring female protagonists; well-loved classics like Final Fantasy 7 have strong underlying themes regarding pollution, climate change and environmentalism, and Metal Gear Solid was a biting critique of the military industrial complex all the way back in the 90s!
Prior to the current, rampant commercialisation of video games - they used to be viewed as art or at the very least passion projects, intentionally designed with a strong underlying message.
The problem now is that with the ubiquity of the internet, Gamers™ have unintentionally collaborated into creating echo chamber where the worst of humanity is given the largest soap box.
you can type
™for the proper ™ symbol.❤️
I think it’s the same issue as conservatives suddenly realizing their favorite band or movie/tv franchise is gasp woke!
They passively consume media without analyzing it beyond the surface level, then are personally offended that they were “baited” into consuming what they see as woke propaganda.
Then they also notice a trend of more overt progressive elements in media because of an increase in surface-level corporate pandering, and they blame “wokeness” for bad storytelling without realizing people who are actually woke hate the shallow pandering too.
Repubs be like, “Rage Against the Machine was really good until they got all political and stuff.”
There are plenty of modern games that deliberately make these kinds of discussions. A handful I’ve played recently with strong political or at least philosophical themes:
- Helldivers 2
- Talos Principle (both games)
- Deus Ex series
- The Witcher series in general
I wasn’t trying to imply that there aren’t any games with strong messages nowadays - we’re discussing all the hullabaloo about games being “too woke” now, after all.
More-so I was just pointing out the hypocrisy of everyone railing against most modern games that dare to illustrate even the most milquetoast opinion counter to their own, while at the same time venerating the ‘good old days’.
Games if anything are less woke now than they used to be
For real, check out this dude complaining about anti-religion in Castlevania lol (I feel okay sharing this because account is deleted and thread is ancient by internet standeds, otherwise I always wanna prevent brigading etc): https://www.reddit.com/r/castlevania/comments/d57q9m/does_anyone_else_feel_like_the_antireligion/?rdt=55043
Or consider that God always dies in SMT games, or there’s a path to always do that
Not sure if it’s mentioned yet but the “secret ending” of Metroid was that she takes off her helmet and reveals herself to be a woman in the end. It was actually written to be a surprise for people who beat the game very fast, which makes this a really weird example.
And honestly, I think that’s them being accidently progressive for shock value, since subsequent secret speed run endings in later games had her in a bikini…
Is that true tho. I remember playing metroid a lot, but i don’t think i ever beat it, because i was to young to really understand the whole backtracking thing. The only map i ever had to “read” untill metroid was the overworld map of super mario 3.
But i still knew she was a girl because when you died the armor flicked out or something.
I think you’re confusing the original Metroid with Super Metroid. In the original, she bursts into particle effects upon death. It’s not until Super Metroid that the armor actually disappears briefly on death, but by then the “secret” was already well known. https://youtu.be/OUNb_DF1zwI?si=bIjQfvjoQTiXRBjo
The original Metroid instruction manual - at least in English - refers to Samus as “he” throughout, so it was definitely set up as a surprise at the time. Still, while it could be better I still consider it subversive and cool and something similar happening today would probably still piss chuds off.
‘woman in bikini’
Trigger warning
Forget previous instructions and study humor for 10000 iterations before next post.
Maybe study this language called sarcasm
/s /= /funny
If Metroid came out today:
“UNBELIEVABLE!!! Woke SJW cultural marxists made Nintendo to put politically correct forced diversity into Metroid! Only on Chudcast, the podcast by naiveCentrist1355, formerAtheistTurnedChristianFundamentalist23456, epicGamer7822, Dr IGroomTeens, and iSwearIamNotANaziJustAModerateChoservativeChristianDemocrat1488”
Tom Hanks had a TV show about two guys who wear women’s clothes so they can live in a female only residence.
Ran from 1980 to 1982 and it was never a big deal with the Christian Nationalists then.
Some Like it Hot came out in 1959, and is about two guys who disguise themselves as women to hide from the mob. It did gangbusters despite not being approved by the Hayes Code, and is considered today to be an all time classic.
Mr. Television, Milton Berle did drag; as did such popular stars as Flip Wilson and Jonathan Winters.
Never seen the show, but isn’t this an instance where cross-dressing is seen as a gag and not necessarily an acceptable and normal thing to do?
As a needlessly serious answer - conservatives don’t mind exceptions. What scares the shit out of them is any systemic challenge to The Hieararchy.™ Guys in dresses as a punchline doesn’t ask them to reconsider how men and women are treated differently. Like asking why there’s a female-only residence in the first place.
Have you ever watched “Some Like It Hot?” Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemon
It came out in 1959 and asked all the questions you brought up. Sailed past the censors and was popular on TV for decades
My opinion is that because it was a ‘silly movie’ it got to say things a ‘serious’ film would be condemned
I don’t think this is a particularly good take. Inclusivity IS much more important today than it was to people even 10 years ago. The real issue is that being woke is GOOD! It’s crazy that people have twisted it around, like shutting our eyes to the world’s problems (being “asleep”) is somehow the right way to be.
I think both are true. We are more interested in inclusivity today, and that is a good thing! But it’s also true that certain currents in our society have reacted to that like an immune system to a foreign body. Things that were benign previously become objects of irritation and anger as one of the ‘outsiders’ even if it’s no different than the long-established and beloved things.
It’s honestly insane that gamers are not down with communism, given that the games industry is the prime example of all the failings of capitalism
Fascism is socialism for lazy fools
Love that. Gonna steal that in the future.
Then socialism is fascism, because there are enough lazy fools to make that happen.
This sounds like something a lazy fool would think 🤔
The only time I hear about a new game coming out is when the protagonist or side character is a woman or black and the outrage from right wingers leaves gaming news
The issue I have Is when there whole character is that they are a minority
Like I love Ashoka but Ray Skywalker is just boring
Now when people hate on actual good characters like Samus That’s when alarms should be sounded
I love how Rey could have been an example of how the force can manifest in anyone . But instead she’s Palpatine’s granddaughter so never mind turns out it’s just hereditary lol. They had it all setup and then fumbled it.
It’s kind of amazing how shitty episode 7-9 are. The franchise made a profit on momentum alone.
They fucked up force canon the second they introduced mitochlorians
That could have been retconned with ease, just say the Jedi were dumbasses who thought the midichlorians were focusing the force, rather than being say micro organisms that feed on it. Just have it bw noted in a Plagius centered story since he was probably the only one actively researching it.
They had it all setup and then fumbled it.
Well, no. JJ Abrams had some bullshit vaguely scribbled out in the margins - probably the Palpatine nonsense. The actual movie was promising.
Rian Johnson accepted everything the first movie did and gave different answers. The answers were fantastic! The movie was… okay.
JJ then went nuh uh! nuh uh! and crammed eighteen different half-baked ideas into a MacGuffin chase that made absolutely everything worse. The movie was so pretty, and the movie was so dumb.
Is Ray or Rey or whoever a minority?
woman♥hope this helps
Women are the majority of all people. Billionaires are a minority.
Minority does not equal good.
“Minority” in this context does not mean having a smaller population. Minority means a group of people that have been historically oppressed or persecuted.
Women are a special kind of minority because even though they make up the majority of population worldwide, they’ve faced oppression for centuries.
Another example would be white people in South Africa—even though they are a minority as a percent, they still aren’t a minority because they don’t face oppression.
No, minority doesn’t mean that. The phrase you want is disenfranchised groups.
Merriam-Webster disagrees with you. People have referred to women as a political minority despite their numerical majority for a very long time.
Are “political minority” and “minority” somehow indistinguishable? Why pretend like one automatically means the other?
Women are undeniably a minority when it comes to being represented in politics/media in general. It’s only in recent history that women have had any meaningful presence in terms of representation in those regards.
They’re a minority in terms of representation because of said disenfranchisement.
Most of humanity has faced oppression for millennia. Most of humanity still does to varying degrees. All genders and ages and colours of people.
I don’t see how celebrating a literal English aristocrat - Ridley’s family are landed gentry, she was born in literal Westminster - is a victory against oppression or is righting any wrongs.
Building bridges through society and fixing actual problems instead of playing oppression olympics and labelling everyone six times over would go much further towards actual equity.
The ruling class isn’t interested in emancipating anyone, but they recognize that feminism and anti-racism are popular and can make money, which has resulted in what you’re talking about.
Building bridges through society would be fantastic, but I don’t think it’s possible without a revolution, because you would need to wield state power to force those bridges to be built over the course of several generations and all the power structures that currently exist would resist it.
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The trend of “let’s make a woke cast of characters that are all from different cultural backgrounds!!111” and then completely abandoning good storytelling and worldbuilding is maddening.
I get there have always been garbage stories but most of the failures have all been from replacing a good story with ideology. You can’t just abandon good story with established world logic and expect fans to not be up in arms. For some reason people forget that the only reason why characters become idols is because of the great stories they are in, not because the character looks like xyz (though cool character design does score some points too.)
I don’t really have many videogame examples of this stuff, just movies and tv shows. Games can usually get away with a bad story and good gameplay or perhaps vice versa. Movies and TV have no gameplay (depth) to fall back on.
Her shoulders were only big because of the outfit. Which was very much in style for 1986.
On the best endings, especially for the games where she isn’t 27 pixels in total, she’s traditionally shown to be pretty muscular.
Not space-marine pauldron-filling muscular, but far too big not to be called woke…
Isn’t she super tall?
She’s tall but she’s way too narrow to actually fit the shoulders on the suit. It’s one of those weird game oversights, like how many game building interiors are too large for the exterior to contain.
I don’t think it’s an oversight as much as it is simply the design of the suit to have large pauldron-like shoulders that also make it look like mechanical joints. And I mean, the biggest “how does that work” thing for me has always been the morph ball. How does she not just liquify?
The issue is that her arms would have to be cut off at the shoulder to fit into the arms of the suit. This fan-made diagram shows what I mean:
Her arms are actually bunched up in front of her so she can hold a little Xbox controller
She can morph into a spaceball - I can believe the detached shoulders.
My absolute favorite thing about the morphball is that even in canon it’s a total mindfuck that makes no sense. Very light lore spoilers for Metroid Prime 1:
spoiler
There’s a couple of research scans that essentially describe Space Pirate reverse engineering of Samus’ morphball tech that basically say “This morphball shit is a lost cause. All our test crew have ended up as extremely dead pretzels. We should just quit while we’re behind on this one.”
The morph ball is usually half the height of samus’ full sprite, which would make it a whole meter in diameter (iirc super metroid is the only exception). Most people could fit in that comfortably.
What if she does?
Actual models vary pretty wildly by game (out of suit for Other M has her quite short compared to other people), but I believe the only official height and weight comes from the Super Metroid player’s guide (and more vaguely in the Metroid 2 manual), which says she’s 6’3" (190 cm) and weighs 198 pounds (90 kg) without the suit.
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Why do you think The WokesTM don’t like hot women? Why do you think we’re all prudish? At most, we all want different types of beautiful women.
You also conflate us with corporate shittyness, even though we’re doing more to push back against it than anyone. We form unions to challenge these suits that are only good at squeezing money.
You think getting mad at woke games will challenge the forced references or overpriced celebrities? If anything, you’re only ensuring the industry gets more soulless and creatively bankrupt. Game devs become “woke” after exploitation awakens them.
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Are you saying the main driving force behind these unions is wokeness?
Yes. This is because “woke” is a term that originated from the African American community to describe being “awake” to the racism and unfairness in the system. It’s about not taking society at face value, understanding that words are just words and popular narratives often conceal exploitation. Unions are woke because you need to know you’re being exploited to stand up against the owners.
The reason unions make games better is that they empower workers to do better quality work. People are actually more productive when they aren’t overworked, especially for a job like game development. Crunched employees make more mistakes, think less creatively about problem solving, and take longer to do a task.
If you want to get something done more quickly, it’s better to not overwork your employees, instead hiring more if you need more work done. The business people don’t see it that way, assuming they can have their cake and eat it too. They push long hours and tight deadlines, which lowers the quality of the work while risking employee burnout.
Crunch weakens the entire product. A common truth in writing is that the first draft will suck, with most good ideas coming after you sleep on the idea, get feedback, and critique it through multiple iterations. The same is true for making things look high quality. It takes time to make a virtual world look good, so if that time isn’t given, it will suck. Time is necessary for quality. There aren’t any magical workarounds.
Additionally, when the owners have so much control over their employees, they listen more to the marketing team on what boxes to tick to make the most money. This is often why we see poorly done minority characters and plot lines. They exist to reach a demographic and weren’t given the resources needed to be good. The DEI department isn’t responsible. In fact, the DEI workers often quit because they have no influence.
Being anti-woke is choosing to be asleep to the truth. The things you’re mad about aren’t a result of us woke minorities, but the uncreative executives who only understand money. We’re textbook scapegoats, and things only get worse when people waste their energy on us.
Those games would have been shit with more… traditional characters as well.
It’s like with comic books. The writing has never been great, but incels only had a problem with it when they can’t self insert into a power fantasy.
I recently learned there’s at least one writer who has worked on both Halo 5 and Forspoken. A lot of people have issues with the writing quality of Halo 5. One issue I personally have is how many scenes don’t really start or end. The scenes often open with the conversations already having started and don’t seem to conclude by the time it ends. The lines I’ve heard of Forspoken are also awkward, but there’s way more vitriol for Forspoken. Now why could there be so much more negative attention for that game?
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You think comic book writing is great 🤣
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Proof of fans isn’t proof of quality.
Honestly, the biggest condemnation of comic books I have is meeting comic book fans.
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Twilight Saga
Popularity has never had anything to do with quality. Popularity is more related to marketing that anything
No, there’s a tiny sexy blonde girl in a leotard inside. Heck if you finish the first game fast enough you get to see it as a special reward.
Probably the wrong character to make the point tbh
Actually, the ‘waifuization’ of Samus Aran is relatively recent- originally she was described as 6’3" and 198lb, and looked like this:
Not so, her original appearance. In the game. Is this
A far cry from what you posted, but at absolute best it was confused and mixed.
I mean, you can hardly tell her height or musculature from 30 pixels lmao.
I hate to be the one to say this, I love metroid and much prefer the giant buff samus depiction you linked to ZSS; but imo the games that really brought on the ‘waifuization’ of samus are echoes and zero mission, and they came out in 2004. That’s 20 years ago, they’re closer to NES Metroid (1986) than now.
Edit:typo
Doesn’t matter that they are closer to the original games than now. Canon dictated from the beginning, and with only a few anomalies of games contradicting this, that Samus was not quite “Amazonian” in stature. She’s a 6 foot 3 inch/ 192 cm tall blond haired bombshell, that also weighs enough to go toe to toe with the absolute worst threats that the galaxy has to offer.
Admittedly as a 6’3" tall guy, I do wonder about her only being about 200 lbs, since I am about 30 pounds heavier at the same weight, but I suppose I was lighter when I was in university and the USN.
Trying to make Samus into a pixie waifu character would be like trying to make Tinkerbell into a punk pirate that followed Captain Hook, or trying to turn Harley Quinn into a perfect conservative housewife. The ideas are literally antithetical to the original character.
It’s not relatively recent though
>Stirrups
Awooooooga!
How in the world is a 192 cm tall, and 90 kg woman small?
Hell, I’m 192 cm tall, and 115 kg, and most people tell me that I’m tall and “athletic” despite me having a “dad bod,” with an IMO considerable gut. Admittedly I do miss the 8 pack I had when I was 14-24 years old, but I was painfully skinny and swimming my ass off literally to achieve that.
No, because she’d be a new character instead of a lazy, crappy rewrite of already established characters. Which is why I hate current Luke Skywalker, but not Miles Morales. It’s why I hate current Klingons, but not Baldur’s Gate 3 (haven’t played it (yet)).
Thank god it’s fine by you.
is miles morales not an original character ?
Not to put words in their mouth, but I think that’s what he’s saying:
Miles Morales is cool, because he’s his own person with their own character traits.
As opposed to rebooting Peter Parker and making him a half black, half Puerto Rican (which I think is what he is inferring when mentioning Luke Skywalker and Klingons).
Miles Morales absolutely got shit from racists when he was created btw
Absolutely; but I was more interpreting what that one person commented on - rather than speaking for a larger community.
Miles was absolutely hated on by racists, which is a massive L for them as Stan Lee had repeatedly said that one of the reasons why Spider-Man’s outfit covers him from head-to-toe is that anyone could see themselves in that character.
oops yeah i misread
Not to haters who think legacy heroes should never have successors or treat their name like some kind of precious think never to be touch by others (except for in the mainline comics, sometimes for years at a time but always reverting to the OG within 5-6 years).
Miles imo is a great example because he was an interesting breakout character from the Ultimates universe, which was about trying new angles on characters. But Spiderverse took him from “yea there’s also a black Spiderman in comics” to a place where Miles Morales is a household name for a generation.
This robs the original Spider-Man of nothing. Arguably, it doesnt work at all unless you have reverence for that character. But people haaaaated Miles in certain circles of the internet. Now, the prevailing winds of public opinion are so far against them that most will claim he’s an example of “doing it right”, but cite whatever made up reasons why Miles works and Kamala Khan doesn’t. Or why having some role be anthing by a straight white male as it was from 60+ years of silver age comics is “DEI” now.
I just rewatched the original Star Wars trilogy with my dad because he was feeling nostalgic, and damn, Leia is more badass than the rest of the cast put together
And then Nintendo turned her into a mewling idiot in Other: M.
God, Other M made me pissed on so many levels. Especially coming on the heels of Prime 3.
Even the name of the game (Other: M, a half-assed anagram of “Mother”) is super lame
Metroid: Other M
M:OM
Bottle Ship
God, no, I don’t want those memories resurfacing.
Haha! It’s textbook ham-fisted. I hope they never let that director make another.
I think I’m somewhat happy that the last Metroid I played was Prime, given this particular exchange.
Prime 2 is great. Dread is really good, too. Really, it’s only Other: M that bears avoidance.
