I sort of have a love-hate relationship with this game.

Truth be told this game was pretty much my life between 2010 and 2014 (as well as 2015 and 2016 to some extent) and I pretty much grew up with it. To this day I still feel like it had a major impact on my life with some of the people I met and am still friends with now, plus my interest in gaming and content creation to this day. I also do really think it provides a good gateway for kids to get more into game design and have a social platform of some sorts (even though the community is pretty questionable sometimes). People have made some pretty impression stuff with ROBLOX, with some games like Phantom Forces and Adventure Forward not feeling too far off from most A-tier indie games.

That said, I feel like ROBLOX itself has sort of fallen into line with a lot of modern mobile games on the corporate aspect with the amount of microtransactions and sponsorships this game has gotten. I kind of get it - obviously with all the servers and games being hosted there does need to be money, but it's definitely become noticeable even with some of the individual games on the platform having microtransactions and stuff like that. Plus I feel like there's been a lot of features that I did like that have been removed from the game over the years - probably the most notable one for me being PBS games alongside voxel terrain, which for me allowed for a lot of fun just building with friends in real-time.

I'll give it a 5 because of nostalgia tho

In some ways, it's weird to consider that Roblox, the 2006 game that I installed on my home computer in 2008 with my father's permission (viruses that wipe your OS will do that), can almost be considered ahead of its time nowadays. What with Meta being this billion-dollar company blowing billions out of the ass with a horse pill of a laxative that has their name on it. Fuck you; I was there in '08! And it was clunky, unintuitive, ran like shit, and I only liked playing it because I was bored. But goddamn, if that Devo hat, Halloween hat, and upside-down trash can with the pattern of those things they put french fries in in low-rent fast food joints didn't look fabulous on my character. Too bad I lost that account because it was tied to an email address I don't own!

Part of Roblox's appeal goes along this line: LittleBigPlanet is a fantastic game, right? But it took Media Molecule nearly a decade to make a version of it that cut the pretense of it being a platformer away and turn it into the game engine equivalent of the copy of MTV Music Maker that Jim Guthrie performed the entirety of Morning Noon Night on. Roblox isn't a game that would come to consoles for a decade, yet it was ahead of the curve in that regard. Limited by its engine, as you may be, it pulls no punches. Want to learn how to make a game? Learn how to code. Of course, back when Roblox's selling point was "haha, funny house go boom" and "game looks like Lego," there was this air of creativity, but it was mostly limited to the T-Shirts you could put on your character for free.

Nowadays, there's a lot of impressive stuff going on. Phantom Forces is, hands down, the best shooter I've ever played through my web browser. Its closest competition, Krunker, isn't half as in-depth with its weapon customization and has movement that pales in comparison. Arsenal, for as floaty and basic as its movement and gunplay are, has a powerful core gameplay loop that, if given more polish and budget, could be a strong AA multiplayer game on Steam.

And then there's Bad Company. It's funny that I brought up Krunker because it has more in common with Bad Company than Phantom Forces. Bad Company almost plays like an arena shooter, with the best players utilizing and exploiting its swift movement system to assist their pinpoint accuracy. It's shocking to see how young its userbase seems through chat because compared to the shooters I played growing up, Bad Company is fucking hard.

But here's why I didn't mention it in the last paragraph. For as good as its shooting feels, it stands out the most for an unfortunate reason: its progression system is two cans of ass. It's not different; it's just confusing. And perhaps that's the point. See, you could grind for hours on end to unlock one of the fun weapons you tried in Gun Game—or you could buy it. It's unfortunate because things weren't like this. Or, at a glance, they seemed more concerned with the innocence of fun.

Around ten years ago, Roblox's premise of being an all-or-nothing platform led by and made for creatives was becoming clearer by the day. Deadzonezackzack made two games to prove this point: Deadzone and Deadzonezackzack's Battlefield (which was about as subtle with its inspiration as you think it is). Deadzone would later become Unturned, which arguably lacks a lot of Deadzone's charm. A fan-made remake would prove essential playing for anyone who wanted a social horror game on the platform in 2013. In the meantime, there was a flood of new, innovative games that took advantage of Roblox's sparse aesthetic and open-ended nature. A remake of the original Cops Versus Robbers, Very Important Person, and Framed all stood out as shooters that used the framework for more interesting purposes. Games like Robloxia were social simulators where you could buy a party bus and tell everyone to flee by leaving the driver's seat and firing at them with a shotgun that did no damage. Things were looking up, a little bit down, but the ups were getting stronger.

Almost a full decade after Roblox's golden age waned, I'm left with the reality that Phantom Forces has lootboxes that the developers had to patch out for Belgian players. But more than that: the signs were always there. We never thought of them as microtransactions back then. They were funny shirts that you bought with your hard-earned Tix that would let you into rooms that others could only dream of entering. It felt more prestigious than typing in 1337 to a Numpad and having a secret door open. It made games better and kept them feeling fresh.

But then Roblox got rid of Tix, and the illusion fell apart. I want to say that Roblox is a good game because I grew up with it and still occasionally play it for the handful of games I return for. I want to say that all was bright and good and will be green again. But who am I kidding? It was fucking prescient. Those VIP shirts? They're everywhere now. Sometimes, they're called Battle Passes. They used to be loot boxes, but it didn't take long for the enthusiast to realize that randomized loot generation is just shorthand for "gambling for fucks." And none of this is getting into Roblox's very shady history of barely paying their developers, barely keeping sexual predators under watch, and silencing dissent.

I'm put into this weird situation where I can't say I love this game because saying that is saying that I don't care enough not to want those things to happen. But I am inherently biased. I was raised on this game. Come on! I can't hate it. So I'm not going to rate it. I'm going to let my experiences languish in the sun, and whether you choose to read everything I write or not isn't relevant. Let it cook, let it burn, and then maybe I'll have more to say.

i'm not oblivious to the irony of my feelings about this trash. when i was in my teens, magazines like egm and gamefan loved to report on joseph lieberman's campaign against violence in video games. he and his fellow senators didn't really get it, and even as kids we knew better. better than them, better for ourselves. mortal kombat was and always has been looney tunes, but these crusty old politicians took it seriously - at least enough to raise funds from clueless conservative parents. this whole era tilled the soil from which gamergate would sprout a couple of decades later. censorship was the enemy, no matter what considerations might motivate the direction of art or changes to it.

(a couple of side notes: howard lincoln, president of nintendo america in 1993, said that year that night trap would never appear on a nintendo system. well, he was wrong about that. also, it's pretty interesting to see these guys wring their hands about konami's justifier lightgun "teaching children that any problem can be solved with a gun" when we consider the world we live in - at least in the us - today. lightguns are pretty much a thing of the past, and i feel like it's a safe bet that kids who played lethal enforcers didn't all go on to become cops. but if they did, well, then i don't imagine lieberman has anything negative to say about them. i'm quite sure he's not thinking about what a tragedy it is that some old video games "justified" them becoming the violent foot soldiers of the white supremacist state. and how would we ever know if even a single cop in 2022 ever played lethal enforcers, anyway? what the fuck am i even talking about?)

here i am, well into my adulthood and reading articles about a fascist recruitment campaign which happened in roblox, thinking i'd like to make it my mission to get my nephews away from this junk. initially i frowned upon learning that the elder of my nephews was playing lots of this because, well, it's fucking devoid of any sort of aesthetic quality. funko pop shit. and, in fairness, my nephews are still young and easily distracted and who the fuck am i anyway, i'm literally talking in irc in between paragraphs here about cruelty squad and the worldview of its developer, who is supposedly anti-capitalist, though he also collaborated with the brigador devs not long after they were exposed as something awful forum posters into white nationalism and holocaust denial or whatever, and i find the whole situation frankly fucking bewildering and idk if i want to play this game (cruelty squad) which otherwise seems to be, incidentally, the exact inverse of a game like roblox... but is it really? jfc i really am an idiot. sometimes nothing makes sense. it's not like i'm afraid of some level of depravity... i mean, have you seen the movies and music i'm into? but i mean, despite my depression and the world i'm not a doomer or a nihilist. the red pill is a metaphor in the matrix, a movie that whips ass, not the hateful bullshit some 4chan nerds equate with being "based." all of this is so much weirder and more unsettling to me than mortal goddamn kombat ever even came close to being.

look, i mean... i don't want to approach my nephews as a lieberman, as some arbiter of content safe for consumption with a stick up their ass. still, one thing i do know: roblox is shit and the kids could do better. play a fucking dragon quest. discover culture, idk. maybe even go outside, learn how to be alone.

ive been on a semi childhood binge lately, so i figured fuck it yknow

hopped into one of my old favorites, "natural disaster survival" with a player look i last updated at least 6 years ago. felt weird. this game mode was a lot more boring than i remembered. it also stole my money, as the game specific items i bought all those years ago were gone. i guess i grew up cuz this shit mid af lol

although i cant really speak for the entire game if i only played one of billion modes ig.

oh well

Roblox, a game profiting off of child labor more than Somalia and India combined and somehow getting even more away with it.

While it has its hidden gems, and I've certainly had some very great and funny moments on Roblox, good experiences are hard to find as every game is fighting for home page visibility.
The homepage, and by extension the whole platform is primarily made up of content farm slop with predatory gacha and live service models plaguing every corner, most games want both your undivided attention and unbelievable amounts of money, making many games impossible time commitments to play and massive money sinks.

They've lied about how easy it is to make games on Roblox, and how easy it is to start making money off of them. They've promoted speculative marketing and cryptocurrency to the tens of millions of children who frequent the platform. Even if the games were good the corporation behind it is vile and shouldn't be supported.

Where pedophiles are born.

You have no idea how many friends of friends that I know of that got exposed and they were all people from the ROBLOX community.

This community is not what you think they are the hollywood of video games. they are hiding so much from you. RUN far far far away from this game while you can.

This is the Epstein Island of Video Games.

This game needs to be researched and expose the many people that are pedophiles on this platform.

I miss the old Roblox, straight from the Go Roblox
Chop up the soul Roblox, set on his goals Roblox
I hate the new Roblox, the bad mood Roblox
The always rude Roblox, spaz in the news Roblox
I miss the sweet Roblox, chop up the beats Roblox
I gotta say, at that time I'd like to meet Roblox
See, I invented Roblox, it wasn't any Robloxes
And now I look and look around and there's so many Robloxes
I used to love Roblox, I used to love Roblox
I even had the Shaggy, I thought I was Roblox
What if Roblox made a song about Roblox
Called "I Miss The Old Roblox"? Man, that'd be so Roblox
That's all it was Roblox, we still love Roblox
And I love you like Roblox loves Roblox