Alright, so here’s my case for Thief, the Looking Glass Studios game.
Thief, on its own, is a great game and basically shares the claim to originating a lot of ideas behind stealth in games along with MGS, which came out the same year.
What many don’t know is how incredibly innovative what they were doing with their engine tech was. In another timeline, id software were mildly successful action game makers while LGS became the industry defining mega success. The Dark Engine refines a lot of ideas present in Ultima Underworld and marries them to tech that was decades ahead of its time.
Thief had, probably, the first ECS in gaming. They also had their own rendering technique using “portals” that was a bit slower than id’s BSP trees but allowed for insane geometry. They also had an incredible system for events called stimulus-response that was doing things like Breath of the Wild’s “chemistry engine” again, decades before it would be rediscovered.
They weren’t just making games, these were really simulations of a limited world with complex interactions. If the rest of the industry had caught onto their good practices, who knows what the landscape would look like today!
My then-girlfriend-now-wife and I went to a temporary video game exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image. A lot of the mainstays you’d expect were there, particularly from the arcade era, including ground-breaking titles like Dragon’s Lair (which is fascinatingly beautiful and a bad video game at the same time). At one point, one of the signs mentioned moving on from vector graphics, which my wife had no idea what that meant, so I immediately looked around for an Asteroids machine. You don’t really get how one of those games looks unless you’re playing on the genuine article. That’s the kind of thing that probably ought to be in a museum most.
I recently went to Galloping Ghost in Illinois, which is now the world’s largest arcade. It’s got nearly every arcade game you can think of, and they do a good job fixing them up. They have an F-Zero AX machine. I’ve always wanted to play one of those. I went to Galloping Ghost two years in a row, and it was broken both times. Turns out they’re having trouble sourcing the displays. As you go around the place, most machines are working, but even only a year later, more of them had display problems. I imagine even just getting regular old CRTs is going to make this kind of thing way harder as time goes on, and a good CRT does affect how these old games look, because they were designed for them. This is the kind of burden I’d expect a museum to take on.
For me, it has got to be tetris. It is still thriving, even today. Anyone can understand the base concept and play it : it’s simple and enjoyable, anywhen. Plus, it runs on remotely anything.
Your money wasn’t stolen if a game was de-listed. If you already paid for the game, you can still download it. De-listed just means that people who don’t already have it in their library cannot purchase it anymore. That’s not theft.
It does actually kind of look like it, but doing it at Lemmy of all places sounds like a bizarre waste of money and time. Don’t think we’re big enough for those kinds of efforts?
I do at some point. I’ll probably pick it up on sale at some point. I’ve heard mixed things about it but what i’m gathering it’s just a different vibe than the first one.
Yeah, the vibe is different, but both are excellent in their own way. Part 2 is a more complex piece of story telling. It does some things that I had not expected from a game and that make it more (emotionally) challenging but also unique in terms of the experience. I personally found it really impressive.
That’s definitely the vibe i’m getting from people’s descriptions. I was planning to pick the game up next sale, though with the different vibes i’m wondering if maybe putting some space between the games would be good
My favorite Tetris is The New Tetris from N64. Built quite an addiction to it in college! It had a feature where if you made a 4x4 block out of pieces you’d create a larger block. If you used all the same piece you’d get a gold block, and if they were different pieces it’d be a silver block. Those blocks, when cleared, would then rack up more points and/or more garbage to send to your opponent, than clearing just the regular lines. Of course, you could be caught trying to build these special blocks by a speedier player and get trapped. It was topped off with the best Tetris soundtrack I have ever heard! Drum & bass the whole time. I still listen to the lowish quality gameripped music files of that game’s soundtrack! Love it!
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