The original DOOM game was the first game I played with a friend where our PCs were connected together. It was a riot, especially when wearing headphones and hearing growls from behind you. I know modern tech has improved exponentially and graphics are unbelievable. But at the end of the day, it’s the experience that counts. And experiencing a multiplayer game for the first time like that, hasn’t been beaten yet, for me.
Same here. My folks caved and bought a second phone line for computing, however it didn’t help. My friend & I would use the first phone line for voice communication :)
The phone pressed to my ear with my shoulder, yelling to my buddy while fighting off cacademons, such good times.
These are a few I've played over the years and really enjoyed. I think most are still available, but some are unfortunately only distributed via discord servers.
No particular order to these:
Pokemon Prism - A very in-depth mod of Pokemon Crystal with 2 entirely new regions and a large catalog of Pokemon from multiple generations to capture. To my knowledge, it is a successor to Pokemon Brown
Pokemon Brown - A very in-depth mod of Pokemon Red. This was made 2 decades ago, and was the first mod I ever played. Includes a new region and many Pokemon from different generations.
Polished Crystal - A faithful (or not) upgrade to Pokemon Crystal.
Pokemon Crystal Clear - A mod of Pokemon Crystal that brings in many new features and vastly upgrades the AI.
Pokemon Crystal Kaizo - A mod of Pokemon Crystal that adds in much better AI and a fair bit more difficulty. All Gen 2 Pokemon can be captured and just about every trainer presents a new level of difficulty.
Altered Emerald - A massive mod of Pokemon Emerald that adds "(almost) every move and ability from gen 1 to 7" along with a few extras while making all 386 Gen 3 Pokemon capturable.
Edit: Just realized this wasn't strictly Pokemon mods... Oops lol.
Me: You have wasted what little free time I have with a bad design choice that you could easily have avoided. Since I can’t skip your cut scenes, I will instead skip your games.
For anybody playing this for the first time, an important piece of advice:
Don’t be a completionist. Leave areas before you’ve done everything in them and don’t do any side quests you’re not interested in.
It’s my least favorite Dragon Age but it got a lot more hate than it deserved because other open world games trained people to play it the boringest way possible.
Interesting. So the side content is mostly uninteresting, I take it?
I still have only played DA:O, which I really liked. I still haven’t played the sequels, would you say they’re still worthwhile or is it for the best to leave the story at the end of Origins?
Not in the sense where they failed to make it interesting, more in the Breath of the Wild type philosophy where any side-content you do is indirectly progress toward the main goal so there’s a mix of things of varying levels of interestingness in all directions. You have an organization that raises in “power” or whatever they call those points whenever you do a side quest and you need to bank up certain amounts of those power points to do the next story mission or unlock the next region. That progression is paced in such a way that you simply don’t need to do most things.
Many quests are genuinely interesting but other ones are just filler. And some filler between good quests is inoffensive, maybe even a refreshing little diversion. One generic filler side quest is essentially “stand next to this portal and kill all the ghosts that come out of it”. Doing that once in a while is okay, doing it as many times as there are portals to find is torture.
I still haven’t played the sequels, would you say they’re still worthwhile or is it for the best to leave the story at the end of Origins?
The short version of that answer is that the sequels do not have what you love about the original but you might also like them for the different things that they are.
Awakening feels less like a sequel (technically an optionally standalone expansion but I’m counting it) and more like a fan mod. It’s nerdier, sillier, edgier, and has that high-effort mod habit of adding concepts that should logically be new mechanics but are executed by old ones because you’re doing it on minimal skill and zero budget. I think that’s a pretty cute vibe but it’s fundamentally just Origins again but worse.
2 has high highs and low lows and, while I personally love it, it’s negative general reception is very fairly earned. The thing that it was trying to do in the first place, story-wise, is something that would already have been divisive even if the rest of the game were flawlessly executed and it was emphatically not flawlessly executed. The simplest way I can describe it is that it is not a story about an adventure, it’s a story about a place. You do not leave that place, you just stay there over the course of several years and experience the historically significant events that are happening there. So the narrative focus for you as a protagonist is on how you feel about things rather than what you’re accomplishing.
Inquisition, conversely, is the least interesting one from a conceptual standpoint but, like, it’s competent from a technical standpoint and the harsh criticisms you tend to hear usually stem from misunderstandings about its design rather than the lack of creative ambition. There’s another new evil horde and you’re another special dude who’s the only one who can stop them and now you’ve got a personal army instead of being an underdog. There’s more political conflict than the first game but the politics are less complex. Ultimately, though, I think the most important factor of any open world game is simply the degree to which you want to spend time in that world regardless of what it is you’re actually doing and it’s an interesting enough world to spend some time in. Certainly, it’s worth trying for free.
Thank you for the extremely comprehensive run-down! I don’t think I’ve ever had it laid out so clearly before.
I think I’ll keep them on my tentative “to-do” list, but maybe not at the highest priority. I loved Origins but with how it ends I don’t have a super pressing need to continue the story immediately. There are so many good games out there, and more keep being released. It’s hard to find time for all of them. I’m really looking forward to Hellblade 2 next.
I think I will get around to them at some point, though. Exporting my save through all three games and seeing callbacks and consequences does sound interesting, and I’ve heard that is something that does happen.
My opinion is that Inquistion is the best of them. Story wise and characters are far better. Even though there are a number of returning characters, they are fleshed out and have more memorable scenes.
The downside to it is the gameplay can be arduous and taking on every side quest can feel like a fruitless endeavour.
Now if only there was a way to safely pirate stuff without the possibility of the binaries having keyloggers or cryptominers embedded in them. I seem to recall some studio hosting an official torrent on their website precisely for this reason.
She’s literally supposed to become a Witcher in her own right. Geralt isn’t training her to be his eternal assistant or some kind of sidepiece, after all.
It would be neat if this leads to two storylines that sometimes intersect.
I’ve played most of the metroid games, and i know theres a ton of nostalgia for super metroid, but to this day nothing has matched the feeling of exploration and awe from Metroid Prime. Every place in the game was so radically different, and the ability to scan and learn about the environment was so unique, and exactly what i didn’t know i needed. Learning the lore and finding out what happened to the planet only by analyzing everything made the world feel like it had died, and it’s death was a tragedy. All the enemies you encounter are just local animals that don’t know better, or had been corrupted by pollution. That is, until about halfway through the game when you meet actually hostile, malicious intelligence, and the combat steps up exponentially.
It’s fantastic. I still remember being amazed at the fogging and raindrops showing up on the visor the first time you step off your ship on Talon IV. I had never seen graphocs so good, and such attention to detail, and the game was already 4 years old.
The only game i’ve ever played that felt similar was subnautica, and while it had the wonder, it lacked the melancholy and insane combat.
@SadSadSatellite@knokelmaat the only games in the franchise I haven’t played are the prime ones. I think I owned the trilogy for Wii U and never got to it.
Look up “primehack”, it’s a modded version of Dolphin emulator which is specifically for playing the Metroid Prime trilogy. Modernised controls and lots of little QoL improvements, it’s my first experience of Metroid and I loved it!
I see this sentiment a lot and I’ve disagreed. Something didn’t really click for me with Metroid prime - I much preferred the side scrollers. I think it has to do with controllers - up until then I was a mouse and keyboard person, the controller was jarring and janky.
Maybe I should revisit the series. I never thought it was a bad game, maybe I’ll appreciate it more the 2nd time around.
I do love me some Metroid games whatever the form.
I’d argue Echoes was better in just about every way. It built on everything they made Prime great, while managing to improve on the things that needed improved. I love the whole Prime trilogy, but Echoes felt like it was the best in the series.
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