I don’t know if its the age or perhaps I unconciously became sick of the practices OP describes, but the games I genuinelly enjoy playing the most nowadays are mainly AA or Indie. And ofc, I don’t mind paying full price for them.
A non-exhaustive list of those I loved:
Outer Wilds (became my favourite game of all times)
I recently went through a ps2 games phase. Some already mentioned but the lesser known standouts for me were;
God hand (probably the best game on ps2 and released really late in the life of the PS2 so many people missed it),
Odin sphere (best looking game on the system and really fun),
urban reign,
steam bot chronicles (robot action rpg really satisfying game play)
robot alchemical drive (ride on the shoulders of huge gundam style robots, really unique game)
champions of norrath, (action rpg based on EverQuest universe, really fun)
psi ops, (fps like game with stars wars style force powers, crazy fun)
Drakan: Ancient gates, (action rpg, fly on a dragon, one of the best magic systems ever where you have to trace the pattern to cast. The reason I started my ps2 phase was to replay this game, loved it as a kid and still holds up)
Zone of the Enders 1 and 2
Shadowhearts
SSX Tricky
Burnout
Katamari Damacey
Ribbit King
Roommania #201
SkyGunner
Oni
Dead or Alive 2
Silent Hill 2 and 3
Mobile Suit Gundam: Zeonic Front
Mobile Suit Gundam: The Lost War Chronicles
Xenosaga
.dot Hack
Smackdown: Here Comes The Pain
Def Jam Vendetta
GunGrave
Capcom vs SNK
Marvel vs Capcom 2
Eh, if it’s a new game I want and I can afford it I’ll buy it. I’m just buying less new games lately.
I am however just going hog wild on emulating all the old console games.
Got my PS2 all set up with a hard drive and FreeHDBoot so I can just load it up with all the PS2 games I never got a chance to play or own! Hacked my Vita and download all that stuff I never played.
Haven’t tried to hack any Nintendo stuff besides my Wii, which I need to do again apparently. But I’m not exactly desperate for things to play, I’ve got loads of things to choose from these days.
Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, Destroy All Humans! Shadow of the Colossus, The Matrix: Path of Neo, Psi Ops: The Mind Gate Conspiracy, Burnout Revenge, Gitaroo Man, God Hand.
I’m sure there’s more but that’s off the top of my head. Also some of these can definitely be found in newer versions or ports, but they started on PS2 so I listed them anyways.
They’re both fun, but I think Path of Neo is probably more what people were hoping to get out of a Matrix video game.
Enter The Matrix was cool, but it suffers a bit from some awkward earlier dual stick controls that Path of Neo had corrected. Plus you’re stuck within the timeframe of the second movie only really.
This is an obscure one, and not high on most people’s lists, but my personal favourite PS2 game is Steel Lancer International, a game where you build mechs and take them into arena battles in a post-apocalyptic future.
Just curious. Is piracy your strategy to kill the big companies, since you really want to consume their products but don’t want to pay, because of your stated reasons?
For the sake of discussion, is it not possible for you to not buy products from big companies but also not consume their products?
Using myself as an example, I hate EA so much I don’t install any of their products on my machine. Or I hate Adobe so I don’t use it at home (the workplace is uncontrollable). I don’t pirate their products as there are alternatives, and I cannot imagine how I may enjoy them since I cannot forget who made them.
Why bother with ethics or morality? I’ve been pirating what I can half of my life now, just because I’m a poor and stingy bastard. Let people with finished mortgages and nice cars pay those companies.
Yes, that’s true, poor people just want to have some fun, but society try to make it wrong, you need to follow all the guidelines of morality. But nobody talk about rich people destroying the world, spending on luxuries, exploring workers, and doing this kind of crap with the gaming industry.
Steam is fine, for the most part, but steam is also DRM. Personally I opt to buy games on GoG, because whatever releases there, you can download the installer and play offline, anywhere, anytime, and due to the platform requirements it strips a lot of the extra nonsense of requiring accounts and launchers and such.
The one downside is some publishers/developers don’t have the latest version on there or release on there later as definitive builds, but it’s better than having to deal with all that nonsense to begin with.
Also, I’m more confident that old games will work out of the box from gog than Steam. Unfortunately, as a Linux user, out of the box proton supports on Steam is just too convenient. I can’t think of many gog games that natively run on Linux.
Through Heroic, while there are some exceptions, you get nearly the same out of the box compatibility. And if you don’t get that compatibility and don’t have the patience to troubleshoot, the refund system for GOG is very generous. I just tried The Alters today, which I knew had issues with Proton outside of Steam Deck, and I got it working just before running out of patience and refunding the game.
I don’t have to troubleshoot anything most of the time, and I’ve bought dozens of games through GOG of late, for what it’s worth. And in the case of The Alters, the Steam version has many of the same problems. Just letting you know it’s an option, anyway. You can even route some of your GOG purchase to go toward development of Heroic by buying through the Heroic client, so that it makes sure it only gets better and so that GOG knows how much of their revenue they’re giving up to people who want this sort of functionality.
I’ve been gaming on Linux for over a year now, and most of my games library was on GoG, though I also have a number of games on Steam.
Using Lutris for GoG games, in my experience the rate of “just runs out of the box” games (via Wine) is pretty much the same as for Steam (via Proton), both being somewhere around 9 in 10.
The Steam App basically wrapps the whole Proton, VKDX and so on with automated configuration, including game-specific configuration scripts, and that’s the same as launchers like Lutris and Heroic doing just with Wine instead of Proton, but if you’re trying to use those tools directly without such a launcher its like trying to run Steam games without Steam and just doing all the Proton/VKDX configuration (both general and game-specific) and launching yourself - the old way of running games in Linux from a decade ago which was a complete total PITA.
I am going to have to whip out this criticism for anybody that has made these kind of rants.
STOP. FOCUSING. ON. AAA. GAMES!
I'm not kidding, that's your problem and that's anyone else's problem who get sick of gaming as a whole. You keep kicking that can down the street for AAA game development to pander to you, but end up disappointed over and over and over. But you still kept your hand out, you still bought their games at Day 1, you still bought their DLC, you still waited for all and any patchwork. You were still there!
Meanwhile I and several dozen others by now, have been in the pirating game for years before you and anyone else had the guts to finally join in after having your face slapped hundreds of times by this point.
And people have been also telling you for years as to what the better alternatives that was out there were, but nooope! Still stuck to AAA development.
I think you can generalize it even further to don’t reward bad behavior. That should include purchasing goods and services from organizations that try to exploit people or commoditize art.
There’s a scene like this in one of the Telltale Sam and Max games that really deserves a better reenactment. Went something like this:
Sam: “So, Bosco, how much do you want for this…’Deadly virus’ that’s really just a tissue you sneezed into?”
Bosco: “A hundred trillion dollars.”
Max: “WHAT? That’s insane!!”
Sam: “How crazy can you get to think we’re going to pay something like that?”
Bosco: “All I know is, I keep finding the dumbest junk around my store, and think up the most ridiculous price I can imagine for them! And you two keep paying it! So who’s crazy now, fool?”
I started pirating games again when the official version of The Sims 3 from Steam wouldn’t run on Linux no matter what I did, but a pirated version (which I got just to check if I could get it to work) ran just fine.
Once I figured out how to run that version of the game in Linux (as well as how to sandbox it with Firejail), that knowledge meant I could just as easilly run other pirated versions of games.
Now, generally I’m the ultimated patient gamer (notice how all of that was for The Sims 3, which is from 2009, with its latest DLC being from 2013), but in my Redbeard persona I can just as easilly get recent AAA games as I can any other (probably more easilly, even, as those are the game torrents with the most users).
So I’ve downloaded a number of those, and installed a couple.
And you know what: even the supposedly best ones are BORING. Even highly regarded large open world ones, with their beautifully crafted supposedly alive worlds feel shallow and formulaic in terms of game play and don’t really hold my attention for all that long. I literally have 4 or 5 downloaded recent AAA games waiting to be tried, which I simply can’t be arsed to install because everytime I do try one it just turns out to be dissapointing. I find myself going back to Indie games I’ve played again and again like Project Zomboid or The Lone Dark, or even really old AAA games like The Sims 3 or The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (all bought and paid for, BTW).
Even when the only costs are my time and storage space, modern AAA games aren’t worth it over Indie games of older AAA games with far less dazzling graphics.
As I refuse to pirate Indie games, by now I’ve pretty much given up on piracy simply because if you exclude Indie games, all the other games are kinda shit.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne