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Fast Facts!

  • Sci-fi/fantasy nerd
  • Pro LGBTQ+
  • Kind of an idiot
  • Bad at HTML

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Ratheronfire's Better Site Former Grafald Subreddit (dead) My Bluesky Account (mostly dead) Old Twitter Account (dead) Old Cohost Page (extra dead) Eggramen's CSS Templates (thx)

My Apparently Unpopular Opinions

(This is basically just a list of random opinions on various unrelated topics that I originally wrote for Cohost back when it wasn't dead. It's notably the only thing I ever posted there that ever got any comments. Be prepared for hot takes.)

So over the years I’ve learned that a lot of my opinions on various topics are a bit contrary to common consensus. Now I’m not gonna bring up anything super messed up or political or anything, I’m just talking about things in various fan communities. Since I’m fond of sparking meaningless debates, I figured I’d post some of those unpopular fan opinions here. This is just gonna be a whole mish-mash of random thoughts, so I’ve broken it down into various topics.

Star Wars

  • The Star Wars Sequel trilogy is better than the Prequel trilogy
  • The only truly great Star Wars movies are A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, the rest are “OK” at best
  • The CGI Tarkin and Leia in Rogue One looked fine

Indiana Jones

  • Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and especially The Dial of Destiny are good movies
  • Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is not a good movie
  • The De-aged Harrison Ford in Dial of Destiny looked fine

Star Trek

  • All the Star Trek movies and TV shows are worth watching to some degree, and new viewers should not be encouraged to skip episodes
  • Star Trek Discovery is a good show that has only gotten better with each season. Discovery Season 4 was some of the best Star Trek in recent history
  • Star Trek Picard seasons 1 and 2 weren’t amazing, but were still pretty good and definitely better than people say
  • Star Trek Picard season 2 is better than season 1
  • Star Trek Discovery and Star Trek Picard are both better shows than Star Trek Enterprise, and it's not even close
  • No Star Trek show or movie has ever been especially good at maintaining internal consistency, and saying “it doesn’t respect the canon” as an excuse to hate on modern Star Trek is just nonsense

Mario Kart

  • Mario Kart 64 hasn’t aged well
  • Mario Kart Double Dash has really awkward controls and physics, and isn’t actually very fun to play
  • Baby Park, Excitebike Arena and SNES Mario Circuit 3 are good courses
  • Mount Wario and Big Blue are super annoying to race on and aren’t very fun
  • The simplified layouts for GBA courses in MK8 Deluxe and MK Tour were pretty much all improvements over the originals
  • The courses from Tour were some of the highlights of the MK8 Deluxe Booster Course Pass
  • A few guest characters from other franchises are a nice addition, but the Mario Kart series should stay part of the Mario series. “Nintendo Kart” should be its own thing if they ever feel the need to make it

Super Smash Bros.

  • Melee is the worst Smash game
  • Brawl feels better to play than Melee, and tripping wasn’t that big of a deal
  • Samus and the other original 12 characters have pretty decent movesets that represent their home franchises pretty well
  • Doom Slayer would not have been a good fit for Smash as bloody violence is too integral to the Doom aesthetic

Pokemon

  • Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire are bad remakes and shouldn’t be ranked even remotely close to HeartGold and SoulSilver
  • Pokemon Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon were an improvement over Sun and Moon
  • Pokemon Black and White, while still good games in their own right, did not improve much over HeartGold and SoulSilver and were where the series started to go downhill
  • Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl were fine
  • The always-on, party wide EXP Share was a good addition, the problem is the recent games are not well balanced around it
  • Nuzlockes aren’t fun
  • Mega evolutions were not a good addition and were not executed well, Z-moves were the better one-off power up mechanic

Bethesda Games

  • I prefer to play Bethesda’s RPGs without mods
  • Fallout 4 is the best Fallout game
  • Fallout 3 is better than New Vegas
  • The Skyrim Anniversary Edition was a very worthwhile DLC and is probably the best DLC/update Skyrim has ever gotten just in terms of the amount of new content it adds

Half-Life

  • Half-Life 1 is better than Half-Life 2
  • While Opposing Force is the more creative of the two HL1 expansions, Blue Shift is the more fun to play
  • It’s better to play Half-Life before Black Mesa
  • Most of the level design changes made in Black Mesa’s 1.5 update are worse than they were originally
  • Black Mesa’s Xen levels aren’t that long

Nintendo Hardware

  • The 3DS was Nintendo’s best console in terms of design, software and games
  • The Wii U was a better console than the Switch
  • Nintendo was better when they had distinct handheld and home console lines. The Switch is just the worst of both worlds

RuneScape

  • RuneScape was at its best in late 2010/early 2011
  • Removing PvP in the wilderness was the correct choice, and the way PvP works in Old-School RuneScape is one of the game’s worst elements
  • The change from “hitpoints” to “constitution” was worthwhile and barely changed anything, and the days of riots that came from it made literally no sense
  • The Evolution of Combat was actually pretty cool and did a good job making combat more engaging
  • Dungeoneering is better off as a skill than a minigame and would be a good addition to OSRS

Minecraft

  • I prefer to play Minecraft without mods
  • Each new update is an improvement over the last, and the game is better now than it's ever been
  • Glow squids were a better addition than mooblooms or iceologers would've been