With “Dragon Age Veilguard’s” release a few days ago, the gaming community has been quite hostile. After nearly a decade, the game is finally out, but it hasn’t completely lived up to the hype. This is fine, as expectations were ridiculously high. What’s most important is that it has been well received. Despite the doom and gloom mindsets prerelease, “Dragon Age” made it.

You would think that this would be cause for celebration, but the gaming community is anything but positive about anything anymore. All the life in the community is being sucked out by “grifters” who continue to find new ways to complain about positive representations of people of color, and LGBTQ+ people.

Cartoons are a wonderful genre of art that can teach valuable lessons while keeping viewers entertained, but what happens when they lack depth or morals to learn from? Kids cartoons have always walked a fine line of being educational and fun, and sometimes they fail. This isn’t the end of the world as there’s nothing wrong with mindless fun, but there should be moderation.

This has led to discourse for years over whether or not kids should watch cartoons that are often mindless and prone to visual overload. Still, these are sometimes dismissed as nostalgia-blind arguments complaining about the new generations’ toys. While this is true sometimes, there is still legitimate concern over newer cartoons.

In this day and age, electronics are everywhere, and most of them are portable. We’re at a time when even our video game consoles can surf the internet with ease. It’s incredible, but it’s also overwhelming and sometimes dangerous, especially in the hands of kids.

One such danger is content farms. For the uninitiated, a content farm is a channel dedicated to mass-producing low-effort content to force engagement numbers. While content farms are terrible, they’re not the main focus of this article.

If you’ve been on YouTube for longer than ten seconds, you probably know what content farming is. For those unfamiliar, however, content farming is the practice of generating as much content as possible to force engagement and increase viewership. For example, a YouTuber uploading shorts every few hours for days on end.

Content farming is the latest fad for greedy “content creators” to garner more views to get money.

Despite the fantastical nature of anime, there’s a noticeable lack of both POC (people of color), and/or people who belong to the LGBTQ+ community. Even with its popularity overseas, anime largely remains exclusive to anyone who doesn’t fit a certain mold. 

While anime has instances of darker-skinned characters, they’re fewer in number compared to their lighter counterparts and are almost always Japanese. While dark-skinned Japanese representation is great, it’s only one type of representation.

Per the headline: taking the bus kind of sucks. Well, to be more accurate, using public transportation in Washington is awful. It’s inconsistent, it’s way less organized than in places like New York or Washington D.C. for example, and it can even be confusing. Missing a bus always sucks, but here it’s quite unforgiving.

“This first time I used public transit when visiting Seattle, I got lost and had to call my sister-in-law while she was at work so she could walk me through how to get to her apartment,” said an anonymous Highline student about their experience.

Although Japan has been open to the world for centuries, closing itself off from the world for nearly 215 years (a period known as Sakoku), has its long-lasting consequences, particularly in Japan’s entertainment industry. Said consequences have seeped into almost every aspect of Japanese culture in one way or another.

Unfortunately, like other countries in their “medieval” periods, Japan turned women into a commodity of sorts, something to be bought and sold. It isn’t easy to undo the centuries of cultural and mental damage such practices brought to the nation. Despite this, there are people out there demanding change.

It’s that time of year again! So begins another fall quarter, and with it, an array of new experiences. While excitement is in the air, it’s accompanied by all sorts of fears. There are so many new people joining Highline at this time of year and that means change. Change is great, but it can be scary. If you have doubts, what should you do?

Dragon Age is a strange game franchise. It’s wonderful, but it can be labeled ‘inconsistent’ as so many things have changed about it over the years.

The first in the series, “Dragon Age Origins” (DAO), was an edgy dark fantasy from 2009, complete with overt violence and horrifying social injustices that are handled kind of recklessly.

Coming soon to a heater near you: Trailers that either tell you the entire plot of the movie or absolutely nothing at all. No doubt this is a familiar sentiment that has only grown in the last few years. At some point, trailers took a nosedive in quality, and now all we have left are trailers that spoil everything about a movie or series, or ones that are beyond vague.

Think back to the last trailer that gave you an idea of what the movie was about without showcasing all the twists and turns and ruining what makes them so impactful before you even see the thing it’s advertising.

If you’ve played video games or at least have friends who do so, chances are you’ve heard about “Fallout”, the games series originally created by Interplay Productions/Entertainment, Black Isle Studios, and later by Bethesda. Set in a retro futuristic post-apocalyptic America after a devastating nuclear holocaust, “Fallout” is an RPG with a unique style known as dieselpunk.

Despite their games’ success, Interplay struggled financially for years, and eventually “Fallout” was sold to its current owners, Bethesda. Fast forward to today, and Bethesda has released multiple successful Fallout titles, which has led to the creation of Amazon’s Fallout series. ***Be warned, there are massive spoilers ahead.***

Have you ever wanted to play a game that lets you unleash torrents of magical destruction? Or do you simply wish to have conversations with dogs and skeletons alike? If that calls to you, consider playing “Baldur’s Gate 3”. “Baldur’s Gate 3” is a computer role-playing game (or CRPG for short), that allows you to adventure in the land known as the Forgotten Realms.

To those who may be unfamiliar with the genre, CRPGs are RPGs made originally for PCs and home computers. They’re designed a certain way with emphasis on intricate storylines and a simple yet effective gameplay style.

Music has always been a strong platform for people to express their emotions and their beliefs about a particular situation or simply about whatever’s on their mind. A lot of thought is put into how a song is made, and as a result, everyone has a different interpretation of its message.

For example, Creep by Radiohead, to some listeners, is about a young man who has low self-esteem and has fallen in love with someone whom he considers way out of his league. For others however, the song is about said young man struggling against his own self-loathing and depression as he feels outshined by a peer.

Video games have existed for decades and have quickly become a source of entertainment for people of all ages across the globe. Unfortunately with popularity, comes an increased rise in commercialization. In the case of video games, this commercialization comes in the form of many things, but microtransactions are the most prevalent.

Microtransactions are small in-game purchases that give the player either cosmetics and/or other content like level up packages or, on rare occasions, loot. They cost actual money, and oftentimes use an in-game currency as a go between. (Note that I said small in-game purchases.)

Many anime fans can find it awkward talking about the genre due to some of its more toxic fans. Places like the main anime subreddit, r/Anime, often shows droves of users ranting about censorship of sexual content at every turn, even if it’s merely reducing the visibility of a female character’s undergarments.

Often it’s difficult for a more relaxed or “casual” fan to speak about it with others because of the large amount of overtly inappropriate content that somehow permeates almost every anime out there.