Cyberpunk is the only game in recent memory where I felt like I was not playing into my interpretation of who I wanted the character to be, but rather who I wanted to be as V. Games like Red Dead 2 let me drive the character’s outcome and I definitely has an emotional response to Arthur’s journey (one of my favorite games of all time), but it felt like the character’s story. Cyberpunk did a stellar job at making it feel like my story.
I think about CP77 to this day. I sometimes even miss Johnny. He’s with you the entire time and it’s a really fascinating bond to experience as a player.
Eastern Mind: The Lost Souls of Tong Nou and Planescape Torment. I think both helped me think about death and reincarnation - what would it even mean to have a “soul”? Would it mean some sort of unbroken consciousness, or are we bits and pieces of different segmented ideas and thoughts loosely connected together?
The answer is you’re a meat robot! We’re all just chemical gradients that learned to think.
A lot of people find this really existentially problematic but I think it’s fascinating. It’s even more fascinating that the meat doesn’t like thinking about it’s meathood, and developed bits of brain meat specifically to think about souls & gods instead of reality.
Tong Nou offers some interesting explorations of the idea of dharma, which I don’t think it got in the same way before playing it. Even if we are ultimately electricity flowing through meat, we all end up with an idea of “purpose”? And the ultimate despair re: materialist atheism is that the answer to “why do some people just suffer and suffer and suffer?” is that things just suck.
In Tong Nou, there is a dharma or purpose underlying each life. There are some lives you instantly die when selecting, or whose purpose is to die. There’s one where you sacrifice yourself and become a sacred torch. Suffering given meaning.
Planescape has an afterlife, and your character is going to hell at the end of it. Forever. All of your actions only lead you closer and closer to maybe a moral redemption? But what’s really the point there? You’re going to suffer endlessly after all of this anyway.
There’s also a really good series of Oblivion mods - Ruined Tails Tale, and The Tears of the Fiend - that have captured this in a personally inspiring way too. You find out that you are a demon who stole the soul of the body you inhabit, that you cursed them to an eternal afterlife of wandering and suffering. Your attempts to fix everything make things worse. But what do you from there? Try to live a life which makes up for it?
Whoa. A Jumpman reference in the wild. Thank you for reminding me. But I have no idea what that string of characters means. :(
The sound of the player taking a tumble off the stage, followed by a death march, has been forever seared into my brain. Watching my uncle play this, helped little_warp_core understand the limitless potential of (home) video games, above and beyond the likes of crappy Asteroids and Pac-Man ports.
The sound of the player taking a tumble off the stage, followed by a death march, has been forever seared into my brain. Watching my uncle play this, helped little_warp_core understand the limitless potential of (home) video games, above and beyond the likes of crappy Asteroids and Pac-Man ports.
Yeah, that too and then the aforementioned piece is the stuff of nightmares.
Truthfully the weakest and strongest part of ME2 is that nothing that impacts the overall plot happens basically at all.
At the start of the first game, the Council is shown irrefutable proof of the existence of Reapers.
Then the second game fully focuses on doing side missions and expanding lore, without anything directly related to the Reapers (Excluding Arrival DLC).
Then 3 has you actually confront the Reapers.
2 is likely my favorite of the games, if only because I love the set pieces, lore, gameplay, all the squad members, and the difficulty level of insanity.
But the ending of 1 with M4 Pt 2 by Faunts playing was just so incredibly like the meme in the post haha. I do also get the same vibe for the ending of Mass Effect 2.
Ending aside, I disliked 3 because of the forced over-the-shoulder perspective in missions. It made the combat, and more importantly the sections in between combat encounters, feel awkward and rushed.
ME3 not quite sticking the landing is an understatement. I mostly remember the awful unskippable dream sequences, Shepard suddenly becoming utterly incompetent whenever that mall-ninja cerberus assassin pops up in a cinematic, and to top it of the nonsensical red-green-blue ending. I tried to replaying it last year but couldn’t get any further than the second mission because I just got annoyed.
Night In The Woods. If you haven’t played it, I’d recommend it. The characters are so well written, and some of the things they touch on hit me on a very, very personal level. And the music complements it all perfectly. It manages to have silly moments and serious moments with the same characters that all manage to fit and mesh together so well, and their relationships and lives all feel real and evolving throughout the story.
Watched JackSepticEye a lonnng time ago play this game. It’s a really well done story! I should see if it’s on the Steam Sale since I have my own gaming rig now.
I studied cs because of it, hell I even wrote about minecraft in one of my admission essays. Something bionicles to minecraft to stem pipeline as I would call it
I also really like PGR. It’s a gacha game but I met a really nice community from it
If we’re talking about great story driven games, signalis and nier are always my top favorites.
So many elitists have dismissed Minecraft over the years as a ‘little kids game’ - missing out on a truly great game. The end poem made me tear up. Music is fantastic, I bought all of C418’s music off Bandcamp.
For me, minecraft kinda shaped my childhood in a sense. I played so much of beta 1.5, and watched so many minecraft YouTubers back then. My favorites introduced me to monstercat, an edm music label which pretty much formed my music taste, and also introduced me to pc gaming (i downloaded steam because my favorite minecraft youtuber also played skyrim)
So yea minecraft is still my no 1 game. Especially considering I still occasionally have a month long session with a modpack.
Thanks for sharing that, Minecraft has really shaped so much culture.
I got dragged back in late last year playing Skyblock’s latest version. It started as ‘I’ll just test it out’, then a few months building and exploring in it passed before I wanted to play anything else.
Super Mario World (SNES) - my first video game and the reason I eventually wanted to learn about computers
Final Fantasy VIII - my parents accidentally bought this for me instead of VII that I asked for. It was not a good impact, it was during formative years of my life and I looked up to the broody/loner main character and tried to emulate him, but in real life that just made me act an asshole and be lonely
World of Warcraft - this was probably an addiction and took too much of my college life. Haven’t played an MMO since I quit. Still reminisce about it.
SimCity 4 - forced me to think about systems, which I think indirectly shaped my career path
Kerbal Space Program - made orbital mechanics intuitive and made me interested in all things space
i remember wow was addiction to people in my HS, in the mid 2000s, im glad idnt play it. also it costs money so i never had interest. STARCRAFT/red alert CNC was pretty much got me more interested in space related topics(i did not pursue the field, because i wasnt really good with physics/high level math courses)
System Shock 2 - The only game to have truly scared me. This was one of the first games that I played when I switched to PC gaming since my HP Pavillion at the time couldn’t play a lot of the newer games. The rest was history
Deus Ex - This game still informs much of my world view
Thief 1 and 2 - While SS2 scared me in absolute terms, Thief gave me a sense of dread and isolation coupled with amazing stealth mechanics
Skyrim - My gateway to RPGs
GTA 4 - SA was my introduction to the series and, while I enjoyed very much, 4 was just blew me away.
Planescape: Torment - The most beautifully crafted RPG ever
Fallout 2 - I’ll be honest: I only played and beat the first two Fallouts just this year but, man, do I wish I played them sooner. FO2 in particular change my relationship with the series.
Games are an incredible story telling medium. So many things work in games better than they can in any other medium like diverging storylines and personalized content. Role playing games are an entirely different beast.
I understand, but there is something about physically having to play the controls that distracts me from the plot, and I find it overall boring. Side quests just overwhelm my brain and I either immediately do them or completely forget about them. I play a handful of “not very control heavy, no plot” games, such as Factorio and Minecraft and I enjoy the creativity. I played with my partner (aka they played and I gave some pointers) Disco Elysium, Outer Wilds and Zelda. It doesn’t resonate with me. :( I know I’m missing out
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Aktywne