Since you named Octopath Travellers 2, I’ll recommend Cosmic Star Heroine. It’s an old school turn-based indie JRPG that’s charming, fun and short. As a matter of fact all games by Zeboyd fit that description.
At some point in this millenium, it became ubiquitous in games to ask for a button press before switching to the main menu and it has become a pet peeve off mine.
Fake news. It was common in the previous millenium too
I knew I wasn’t going crazy! That press any key habit is so ingrained because it’s been around since I played my first game on a 286 PC, probably longer.
That’s the thing. I think it is a carry over from that. Back then a lot of games didn’t have a menu or anything, after you hit the button, you were just playing the game.
Like Mario 1 and 3 have just a simple 1 or 2 player select then you are in the game. Some single player games didn’t have anything, they just would go straight to the game after you hit start.
Now there isn’t really a need since nearly every game has a menu for loading saves, starting a new game and such. So they could go, but are just a vestigial part of gaming history at this point.
Creeper World 4 is fun and not terribly long. It is basically a tower defense game, but instead of guarding a set path toy build towers to defend against, then push back, physics simulator liquid that kills whatever it touches.
Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, you play a small group of ninjas (and a samurai) in a top down stealth game. Takes place in feudal Japan and you assassinate your way through the plot.
Superhot. FPS with a weird plot about VR and a rogue computer program. The gimmick is if you stop moving, time stops around you (almost), allowing you to slow down and plan.
Lastly and is a game called Soccer Kids Alpha. It is literally the alpha version of the game so it is SUPER short. It is a turn based soccer game, but without the grid based system that some other games use. The alpha is great and we’ll worth the very short time it takes to finish
Lately, I’ve seen it for controller detection on PC games. Larian games like Baldur’s Gate 3 at least use it to change how they render the “Main” menu. I mean, the “Main” menu also changes if I plug in a controller so maybe it’s just an aesthetic thing held over from older video games.
Sometimes windows itself will only let games know there’s a controller plugged in after a button is pressed, but connecting a controller with the game already open can usually be detected just fine.
It annoys me when you close down a game, and it only has the option to send you to the title menu instead of closing out. It's not the worst thing ever, but it's kind of annoying when you need to go, and you have to "quit" the game just to wait for it to go back to the title screen and make you hit "quit" again a second time.
Or, they have a hypervisor, so instead of needing to quit from inside, you just hit the magic button and go back to the console UI. Game is suspended and might resume after power off or switch, or not, depending on the system and user.
You could just ctrl-alt-del or window switch or whatever to get the same experience on a computer.
It differs, on some games it doesn’t work or still takes a long time. For those programs I like to use SuperF4, which kills the process when you press ctrl+alt+f4.
Clicks quit
Are you sure you want to exit? Clicks yes
Goes to title Clicks Quit
Are you absolutely positive you want to exit?
*Clicks yes DO YOU ACTUALLY THINK I CLICKED THREE TIMES TO GET HERE BY ACCIDENT??
Game hangs.
It’s been bugging me in BG3. Mostly because it takes a while to load and when it’s finally loaded, I have to press a button then WAIT AGAIN for a stupid animation before getting to the main menu so I can then load some more.
Gimme a command line to just automatically “Continue” please. The pretty animtions and menu were fun at first. Now I just want to get back to my brain parasites as quickly as possible. I’m sure that has nothing to do with my brain parasites.
I dug up my old 3DS in the past weeks, installed some custom firmware to play my backups of DS/3DS/GBA games. A bit of Zelda Minish Cap, some Metroid Fusion… But mostly I find myself playing various Pokemon ROM hacks lol.
I’ve been getting into “Pokemon Elite Redux”, which is a difficulty/challenge game centered around each Pokemon having up to 4 abilities at the same time in battle. And there’s tons of new abilities that make each pokemon uniquely useful. It’s certainly challenging, even on the lowest difficulty. It’s happened to me several times that I have to get together a whole new team to beat a single trainer. But, there’s zero grinding involved, and there’s SO many quality-of-life changes that it’s super easy to get a whole new team squared up in just a few minutes. That makes it really easy to jump in for a few minutes when I can, without feeling like I’m wasting my time
The best thing a game has ever done with this is ask on first startup if it should go to the main menu or just load your last save on every startup after this one.
I have a similar issue with Diablo 4 at the moment. I’ve been playing on controller on pc. It’s two button presses to skip the intro logos, and a third press will exit the game before even getting to the main menu. The number of times I’ve accidentally closed the game is much too high.
OMG yes!!! D4 has been driving me crazy with this! Especially if I’m playing on Steam Deck, where load times are longer and I have to sit through it all again.
It has a host of other issues besides basic ui problems, my largest pet peeve at the moment is town layouts being completely different. Picking a random nightmare dungeon to run and then porting to town is immediately followed by me opening the map to see which cardinal direction the blacksmith/shop is in.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne