Chrono Trigger is at the way top. The greatest game of all time hasn’t been bested in 30 years. Telling the best narrative I’ve heard in my life, and packing it into 20 short hours, with timeless art and amazing music, and into FOUR GODDAMN MEGABYTES, this is one many try to beat, and none have succeeded. Not even Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
CrossCode comes right behind it. This game is much longer, but that’s okay. It’s essentially a single-player MMO with all the trappings of life within. A wonderfully smooth action combat system, more amazing music, and some of the most memorable facial expressions I’ve seen. It’s also written in freakin’ HTML5.
Zachtronics Solitaire Collection. Going purely by hours played and wins scored, this is on my favorites whether I like it or not. Every solitaire game from every Zachtronics title, right there. Special shout-out to Fortune’s Foundation.
Honorable mentions: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for the worldbuilding and music, Final Fantasy XIII for exactly the same reasons, The Talos Principle 2 for simply giving its NPCs the agency to say “nah, I don’t wanna go back, I’m staying home,” and Chaos Rings 2 for creating one of the most high-stakes yet viscerally unpleasant stories I’ve witnessed, wherein to proceed through the game, the protagonist ritually sacrifices his ever-shrinking party of people.
I wish I liked Crosscode more. I really enjoyed the writing and loved the puzzles, but the combat just didn’t feel that good to me. Ended up dropping it in the second dungeon and never picked it up again.
+1 for a Chrono Trigger ranking. For as popular as it still is in retrospect, I think people still don’t quite give it the full recognition it’s due for smashing pretty much every dreary console RPG convention that the genre had been persistently saddled with up until that point, while still remaining a console RPG. Believe it or not the developers had plans to make it even more ambitious at the beginning but they weren’t able to pull it off in the time allotted.
There are a lot of subsequent RPG titles (like even Final Fantasy goddamned Seven, not to mention Pokémon) that should have learned a bevvy of lessons from Chrono Trigger, but still didn’t. It was well ahead of its time.
CrossCode feels so much like chrono trigger to me (which is also my fav) I can’t even explain how, it’s a game on its own right with completely different gameplay but the chrono trigger essence is right there
There is one “No” she says in the story that is just … I swear they did such a good job of getting so much emotion through expressions and simple words alone, really impressive
XIII isn’t in my top 5 FF games. But the interpersonal dynamic is the absolute best in the series. The scene where Sahz discovers why his son was branded is one of the most impactful moments in gaming. Two of the most cheerful characters in the franchise, suddenly broken.
I don’t love how restricted the game is at the beginning. But each of their personal stories are magnificent, usualy leading to their Eidolon awakening.
Chrono Trigger is at the way top. The greatest game of all time hasn’t been bested in 30 years. Telling the best narrative I’ve heard in my life, and packing it into 20 short hours, with timeless art and amazing music, and into FOUR GODDAMN MEGABYTES, this is one many try to beat, and none have succeeded. Not even Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
I would lose the count of how many times I have read praises (well deserved) for Chrono Trigger, and it only makes me feel bad with myself because I left it unfinished (I am close to the 1st ending… I think) because I was lost all the damn time and needed a guide to move forward, something that I really don’t enjoy, and I didn’t have too many gaps while playing it to be fair.
I enjoy RPGs and jRPGs, even when they are not my favorite genres, but I don’t like to feel lost all the time.
Now, it should be obvious that I didn’t play this game back in its day, my last game session was about a year ago in my DSi XL (arguably the best way to experience it) so I have 0 nostalgia googles about it, although I am a Toriyama fan and I loved the art style, graphics and music, it is only the pace and the narrative that didn’t caught me completely…
I know I shouldn’t force myself to finish it as gaming is a hobby after all, but damn, I really want to complete it, at least one playthrough lol (I don’t like to leave stuff unfinished).
If anyone has tips to not feel lost all the damn time (aside of not stop playing for a brief time) I am all ears.
Unfortunately it’s a thing when going back to older games after being living in the map marker era for so long. This is a big part of why games back then came with annotated maps so you’d at least have a reference for all the locations.
I’d say at the minimum, don’t be afraid to pull up maps and take notes.
I didn’t know about this game, but honestly it is so good that others experience the same as I, of course I don’t think that I am the only one in the world that Chrono Trigger is not for him (not even sure about this myself), but definitely is so scarce to read comments of people struggling with the title compared with praises for it gets!
I love Chrono Trigger, but as far as SNES goes, Final Fantasy 6 and Secret of Mana 2 (or Trials of Mana or whatever we’re calling it now) both beat it for me.
Out of all retro JRPGs from that era, I'd say Chrono Trigger is the one that has aged the best, but it definitely is still a product of that era and that can be a bit of an acquired taste. If you haven't played any other modern JRPGs, I'd suggest checking out how the genre has evolved today, you might have an easier time getting into newer titles.
I actually started playing chrono trigger because of threads like this, but stopped playing close to the end because I wanted to do all the side quest but didn’t have the time to try things out and also played with a lot of breaks so I forgot a lot of things and therefore I started to look things up online but then it became tedious and also felt like cheating and now I can’t even motivate myself to finish it even though I am probably missing out on the best part of it.
Brickadia, surprisingly fun lego-like building game with physics, buildable & driveable vehicles and contraptions, weapons and game modes. I think it has very interesting potential.
Nethack / Alundra (PS1) / Sim City 2000 / Transport Tycoon Deluxe / Prey / Doom 2016 / Elite / Dwarf Fortress / Rimworld / International Karate / Paradroid
System Shock / Ultima 3-8 / Alpha Centauri / GTA5 / Titanfall 2 / Control / Eye of the Beholder / Sensible Soccer / Star Control 2 / Total Annihilation / Impossible Mission
Undertale / Bioshock Infinite / S.O.M.A. / Nemesis the Warlock (entirely because of the title song) / Pirates! / Stardew Valley / Revenge of the Mutant Camels
Really glad to see someone say Earthbound. I love that game and have really enjoyed sharing it with my kids. I started them young on it while teaching them to read. I’ll sit with them and narrate the game and it really helps them a lot with learning to read. Just got to Happy Happy Village with one of them the other day.
Minecraft - Was my absolute childhood and I met so many good friends and learnt a lot throughout my time playing the game.
Skate 2 - The controls are perfect, the vibe is amazing, it’s just one of my overall favourites.
GTA V - The first R rated game I played. Both this game and Fallout 3 were massive inspirations for me focusing on 3D environments as a Game Dev student.
Honourable mention to Little Big Planet and Rollercoaster Tycoon Deluxe; both of which absolutely shaped my childhood
If you use steamdeck I’d check out bazzite. You can use the deck image for your steamdeck and desktop image for PC and then you won’t have to worry about big differences.
I switched to Linux about 2 years ago now and its been fine. The only games that don’t work are ea games like battlefield or Activision like cod
I don’t really like to mess with it so I just use the default settings on almost everything unless there is an issue then I check protondb to see if there are any solutions, usually all you need to do is go to the game properties in steam and select for use a different version of proton and it runs fine
From my understanding its just more features and up to date, my reasoning mainly was if you go bazzite on desktop might as well use it on steamdeck so you have a similar experience across your devices
SteamOS works great for the steam deck, there really aren’t any extra features that I can think of that are useful from bazzite. Updates happen often enough… There’s just not really any reason to go through the effort of changing to bazzite and reinstalling everything, but I guess it shouldn’t hurt either.
It’s not always preferable to be constantly updating to the most bleeding edge available… On the contrary, for something like a handheld gaming device I think stability is a bigger priority. Most of the updates that might, for example, make a game start working better, will be from Proton anyway, and your choice of OS makes no difference to how fast you get those, they’re either from Steam or the ProtonUp app, which will get you the latest custom versions from GloriousEggroll.
In no particular order, and without adjusting for recency bias:
Single player
Hollow Knight
Undertale
Outer Wilds
Multiplayer
The Finals
Awesomenauts*
YOMI Hustle
Right now the game is in a weird state where the original company who owned it went backrupt, and the game is in the process of being revived by a different company. In the meantime, the already low player count got lower. On top of that, there’s two versions of the game: an old version that used Steam matchmaking (as the matchmaking server went down when the game original closed); and what had been the current patch, being accessible on a beta branch, which currently has issues making it hard to actaully play a match.
Morrowind is top tier. Every time I play a bit differently or go somewhere new, it feels new again. I’ve never had that from another game. Compare to Skyrim (which I also liked), I kinda felt like I experienced everything my first go-round.
Check out Outward. It has a Morrowind/Everquest kind of feel. It’s an offline RPG, but you can play co-op. You have to basically discover all the mechanics/secrets through trial and error or talking to NPCs, which makes it feel very old school.
Right? I never tried it online for years either, though my friends and I did a lot of local co-op. Even though online is in the name, I actually think the offline is what really makes the game.
Anyway, there was just something beautiful to me about that drop chart. You could hunt specific things with specific characters, and the rates made most of it feel rare but findable.
I don’t know how they struck that sweetspot so perfectly. Had all the hook of an mmo while still being grounded and approachable.
My friend and I played split screen for years in high school on a tiny 12" CRT. I’ll never forget finally beating the Ruins on extreme difficulty. He had to revive me 10 times during the boss fight because one attack would always 1-shot me. It was a 15-minute white-knuckle struggle, and it was incredible.
It’s an all-timer as far as video game stories and production value, but the railroading that they did to players did irk a great deal of us, as chronicled in that Nakey Jakey video. They set up so many dynamic systems for the player to interact with and then basically dictated that you couldn’t get creative with them during the story missions. Deviating even slightly from the intended path would be a mission failed.
The video evidence in that essay will do more justice than any of my anecdotes, but even things that seemed like possible ways to handle a story mission were not what the developers intended and resulted in a mission failed, like trying to take the high ground in a valley, or trying to sneak in through a window instead of entering from the ground floor.
I haven’t seen that video, but I suspect I would agree. RDR2 is something of a paradox.
They did an amazing job on environments and characters, and then turned around and hobbled the game with bizarre PC controls, a save game system and unskippable cut scenes woven from pure contempt for the player’s time, and dog shit mission mechanics that punish the player for any attempt to exercise agency and really have no place in an open world game.
I think your enjoyment will depend on what you’re expecting from your games.
Naughty Dog’s games are some of my favourites, RDR2 is the closest I’ve gotten to that playing a movie experience in an open world game. I would guess that’s hard to balance with more emergent gameplay in open-world story missions, so if that is more what you enjoy as a player, you’d probably feel very restricted.
Absolutely loved RDR2 though. My first or second favourite game of all time.
Great video. While I respect the crazy amount of work that went into RDR2, I found the story dumb and the gameplay on rail very boring. I’m always surprised when people are raving about it.
A one more heist story where it was clear it was never going to be just one more heist, and the band dissolved itself over a lack of real leadership. As opposed to the trope, where it’s one more heist that goes wrong. I take it back; I do have a critique of the story. Act 4, on the island, was a detour from anything that had anything to do with the main plot. Other than that though, I thought it was fantastic.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne