If I go with unique experiences as a criteria just to mix it up a bit I have a few
Playing xwing with a f16 flight stick is really fun and one of my first gaming experiences outside of nes and arcades. Just really fun fast paced fighter combat. A close second would be everspace or Chorus on a controller.
Playing one of the big multiplayer arcade cabinets like Simpsons or X-Men was the original couch co-op with whoever was at the arcade not playing pinball or pool.
Beating your first boss in a dark souls or elden ring game feels like a big accomplishment, sometimes even more than the later ones when your character gets more powerful.
Going from small groups with friends to raids in an MMORPG feels like starting a whole new game, EverQuest and wow were big ones for me.
Playing one of the big multiplayer arcade cabinets like Simpsons or X-Men was the original couch co-op with whoever was at the arcade not playing pinball or pool.
I bought the 4-Player co-op X-Men arcade cabinet from Arcade1up and it’s been a blast playing it all the way through with my son.
That sounds like an awesome experience, I have a friend with a mame cab in their basement that I would probably spend too much time on it if I had one. I went with the cheaper option for mame and arcade legacy using a raspberry pi running batocera, but for some games it’s just not the same without the arcade controls.
Puyo Puyo 20th Anniversary. They took the best competitive puzzle game ever made and added a ton of goodies to make it the best package deal. 20 variant game modes, 24 character stories, a comprehensive set of tutorials, a devilish set of chain challenges, and a final challenge where you play against max level CPU while it's allowed to cheat.
It's a tragedy this game was never released in the west, and I can rant for hours about Sega has criminally neglected the series with the half-assed slop they put out now because they know that crossovers will sell better than the main series ever will.
Most of the games I play are so niche that 'matchmaking' simply consists of whoever's available. Or sometimes it even requires pinging people on Discord.
Yup, either this or the matchmaking is in find-the-most-toxic-people-available mode. I almost stopped playing online to be honest, I’d rather play couch co-op or even a good solo game.
Personally, I think it’s about how impresonal modern matchmaking is.
You’re only ever playing against “enemies” and “enemies” should be “hated with the hot passion of a burning sun”. And if you lose, you’re never at fault, because your teammates sabotaged you!
People don’t have to maintain cordial relationships, because they will never meet their teammates or opponents again.
Compare that to stuff that works using servers, where each team is made up of the same pool of people from one round to the next. People actually make friends with each other, friend or foe, and have more fun as a result.
Yeah, you unlocked many memories of mine. I played CS back in 90s, train with bots and learn map layouts at home, then play team vs team in a club. A bit later with ADSL started to play online and it was still kinda cool. When life fast forwarded me to Quake Arena and R6S it was very fun but I never ever made any online friend. Maybe a couple of people in R6 with whom I played a few times but even then the toxicity outweighed the team play fun.
Pretty much all the racing games from my childhood. I remember them having super realistic grip and aerodynamics, but playing them again compared to even sorta SIM modern racing games today is just night and day.
I will blame my 1000+ hours in beamNG for some of that. Once you have seen super detailed soft body physics it’s hard to play anything that doesn’t have it. Wreckfest 1 had a decent hybrid soft/ridged system that worked for that game. Seems the second game that just dropped on early access improves on it some, but I’m gonna wait for the full release before I pull the trigger on that one.
Yeah its disconnected from BYOND. I think you can launch it standalone but it also comes through Steam (always free). It was pretty bare bones but now its catching up. Looks easier to maintain and mod on the back end.
The same player isn’t going to perform identically every session, and accounting for every possible weapon or character/class they might play, potential synergies with teammates, or potential advantages/disadvantages in matchups against any given opponents…
It all makes for a literally infinite number of variables, all of which must be accounted for.
The correct way to get interesting matches, imo, is to make it semi-random, and not try to have all the players on both teams be exactly the same skill level. Rather, put players on both teams from a range of estimated skill levels. This way both teams have weaker links for the other team to potentially exploit, and both teams have strong players which will try to stop that.
Instead, the system should just enforce common sense stuff, like not pitting someone who is literally playing for the very first time, against a team with someone who is 2000 hours in, and hence might straight up deny the new guy a chance to play at all.
I should know. I literally wrote THE team balancer for titanfall 2 community servers. For a time it even used the Tone online database of player stats, to know how to balance players that had never played on a given server before.
I was genuinely shocked how good the resulting games were. All I did was take the completely random players that decide to join a server, and simply figured out a slightly smarter way than other balancer scripts at the time, to divide them into two teams that are close enough to equal.
Update: moved to Monday (tonight) because transparency sucked and I was tired.
Seeing: very little or slow twinkling
Transparency / Light pollution: Polaris visible, only one of the cup stars of Ursa minor visible to the naked eye. This is actually slightly better than normal for my area.
Equipment: 12" dob, 1520 mm focal length, 2" 2x Barlow, 2" 34 mm wide field eyepiece.
What I hit: M44: sketched it from my 10x50 RACI. I love finding M44 because cancer is dim as fuck, and I’ve got a cool trick where I just make a right angle with my left hand, pointer finger touching Pollux, thumb touching Procyon, M44 will be right in the 90 degree angle.
M65, M66 again. M66 was actually readily apparent to me, for some reason, where M65 took a bit of work to resolve. Did not manage to resolve NGC 3628. I also accidentally resolved another galaxy about three degrees south of and about two degrees below Iota Leonis. Found it purely by accident, couldn’t find it again, looked very slender, stretched almost across the view in 100x (34 mm wide field + 2x Barlow).
What I attempted: Bode’s galaxy. Spent probably an hour trying to starhop to it with different tricks (I think the thing that got me closest was drawing a line through UmA’s front elbows and shoulders and following that down to the level of Alioth. That got me onto a very neat little square of stars with a trail pointing towards the horizon, which I followed again and again to nothing. Very frustrating. I tried again to hit the owl nebula and cigar Galaxy, also no dice. Not sure if I just suck this bad at star-hopping or if the light pollution is really kicking my butt.
I spent so long on it that I ran out my clock and had to choose one last thing to do. Bootes was now plainly visible in the mid-altitude east, so I decided to try and hit M3 by making a right triangle with epsilon bootes as one angle, Arcturus as the right angle, and M3 as the last angle. Didn’t work. Tried a few other spaghetti plate strategies to find M3 and got nowhere. I mostly tried slowly slewing over at 100x mag, which I know is low for globs, but I figured it would at least stand out as a kind of weird bullshitty star that I could investigate, but nothing stood out.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne