I wonder how many of us will go through our whole lives being able to mentally trace the route between Freeport and Qeynos. Or the perfect knoll-grind route in Blackburrow.
I can give a spontaneous lecture on the lore of EQ np and it’s a distressingly pointless use of brainspace that could go to literally anything else as a better use. That said, I fucking love EQs unhinged post-imperial apocalypse setting with its catguys (who have cat animal buddies) on the moon fighting goth vampires with a fetish for leather while snakepeople chill in their pyramids surrounded by vacuum to keep away a sentient genocidal fart unleashed on them by the god of fear.
Final Fantasy 7, the first two Fallout and Disco Elyisum, Shenmue to an extent, but the Yakuza / Like A Dragon franchise probably tops all of them. I had stopped paying attention to video games after the dreamcast (I considered Shenmue the apex of what I liked in video games and couldn’t find something similar), discovered the Yakuza franchise through Judgment in early 2020 and I was hooked, it was everything I had ever dreamed of in a game. I bought a PS4 specifically to play them, bought 0 to 6 during covid lockdowns and pretty much blasted through the franchise in a year. Rekindled my interest in games and in Japanese stuff, made me take my ass back to martial arts and generally pay more attention to how I behave and look after bad breakups and depression. Disco Elysium came very close to the same impact, I might add.
All of them, really. 0 is the craziest, but all of them are just great. Even 3 which is widely considered the “worst” one is still a masterpiece, especially for its time.
It was 2013 and Zombie hype was peak. All my roommates gathered around the TV to watch me play a level each night. We would discuss what happened and our theories in between each play session. When those credits rolled we kept talking about it for weeks. Unforgettable.
There was something about that summer, and the way this game (especially through Twilight Town) delved into the theme of an “everlasting summer” …it was a magical year. And that year of my life still resonates with me till today.
Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2 were some of the first games I ever beat as a kid. I remember getting through all the credits and immediately starting over lol. I still do a play through if them both every few years. I played the third one once, it’s flashy but doesn’t hold a candle to the first two.
Portal 1 and 2 are both phenomenal. But my feeling at the end was less “Wow that changed my life” and more like “damn it’s over, I wish there was another game like that out there”
tbh it’s better this way.
Why?
Because nobody could ruin the story on the 3rd attempt. BUT asssuming they could make the 3rd installment a prefect fit to round it up: Gimme
If you check steam, there’s 2 or 3 portal games outside the legit 2 that are super fun. One valve even approved as canon IIRC. One of them you go back and forth in time with a third portal type. One of them is even multiplayer.
I made the mistake of trying to go back and play Portal 2 during the pandemic, and the themes of isolation, neglect, abuse and gaslighting just weren’t as funny in 2019.
The first one that comes to mind is Ocarina of Time. I was 10 when it came out. I didn’t know video games could do that. Been a huge Zelda fan ever since.
Also metal gear solid 2. I was 13 when that game came out, my brother and I rented a ps2 without a memory card. We were obsessed instantly. We left the ps2 on all weekend so we could beat it. I replayed it recently and it still holds up. Kojima is on another level.
Same, I only played OoT and MM when I was kid. The itch to play other Zelda games was bothering me for the longest time. So luckily over the years, I bought some random used Nintendo consoles off friends, last year I bought bunch of used Zelda games and finished them and emulated some games that I couldn’t get irl.
it’s basically such a rare item that that people with tens of thousands of hours of game time rarely see one drop organically. (they can be farmed in different ways though, that’s how I usually get mine) like lottery chances basically
It duplicates an item exactly. PoE was all about RNGesus. I can’t remember the numbers off the top of my head (and it got way more complicated over the game’s life), but each rare (yellow colored) item can have 6 magical effects, 3 prefixes and 3 suffixes. Each of those effects can have a tier from 1-11 (different for some effects), and each of those tiers has its own range of numbers. So a truly amazing item has a super, super low chance to spawn (because getting 6 of the effects [and the right effects at that] to be tier 1 is hard enough, and then getting the max number within that tier takes even more sacrifices to rngesus).
Just as an example, let’s say you wanted the ‘super super best’ armor you could get. First, you’d have to be playing at a really high monster level so that items have a chance to spawn the tier 1 effect (monster level=item level when dropped, and you need minimum item levels for high tier drops). Then you’d have to get lucky and have the right chest armor drop (because even at high monster levels, you can get the worst of the worst armors. So give or take a 1 in whatever chance for the armor, then a 1 in 20 chance for the right armor… Then you’d have to get the right effects, so that’s a whatever in whatever combination calculation (I can’t be arsed for that math, but let’s just assume it’s not too bad, so like a 1 in 300 chance), then each of those effects you’ll want to be tier 1, which means for each effect there’s between a 1 in 3 chance to a 1 in 11 chance (some effects only have a few tiers) to get that, then you’ll want each of those effects to be at the max number for that tier, so grab your ankles and prepare for even more chances with a wide range…
See why I don’t want to do the math? To get really, really good items is a really, really low chance. That means that if you have a really good item, it’s going to be wanted by everyone else. Cue the dilemma: if you sell it, you’ll make money, but you only have the one opportunity to sell it. If you could somehow duplicate it… well, sweet money, baby! So a mirror let’s you duplicate an amazing item without losing the original. There was a famous dagger with spell modifications (most items are either melee based or magic based, but a dagger can have effects that boost either, which means you have even less chance of getting what effects you want) that a fella would charge beaucoups of money for, after you already had obtained a mirror of your own, and he would get the money, because the dagger was just that rare and valuable. Probably something like 1 in a billion chance of something that good dropping, so it was much easier to save money and trade for the duplicated dagger.
Oh, and an item that was a duplicate couldn’t be duplicated again (it was ‘mirrored’), only the original item could be duplicated.
The mirror? Of course. It’s a drop, and a rare drop, which made it valuable in and of itself, but PoE was brilliant in making its currency have intrinsic value in both use and rarity. HC folks were grinding for the best gear as well, but obviously there were factors that made the best gear even more rare. Having a duplicated amazing item was still a great thing for hardcore folks.
This is a really, really bad explanation, written colloquially and informally. The wiki was amazing and crafted by folks both technically brilliant and with great understanding of how to present information.
Yeah, I played from the end of the open beta until nearly poe2 came out. I was always an on-and-off player, and actually hated the emphasis on path-of-trading that it became. SSF was basically what I would do until high tiers when it was impossible to progress without trading.
I also much preferred the early game, before it became a spamfest gotta-go-fast run. New spells and mechanics were cool, but power creep was insane. I still fondly remember struggling to beat the boss of act iii, and god, that feeling when they added the fourth act, and then totally revamped everything for the ten act story… ggg was freaking amazing.
I respect that. I also typically play SSF, I have 9k hours in the first game, even went to exilecon. definitely try act 4 in poe 2 if you haven’t tried it yet, it’s a return to early game golden gameplay. probably the best campaign act in any ARPG.
I agree with everything you said for the most part. now I just play at my own pace, I hate racing or being rushed just to get a slightly better trade market price. I try to avoid using PoB until i’ve already “maxed” the character by my own means.
I always encouraged friends to avoid reading anything or looking up guides until the first character stalled out. The most fun has always been the hair brained discussions about wtf is going on as you experience a game for the first time.
I will admit though, after reading through a few build guides, you do start to see how the numbers fit together, and then it’s a whole new world of fun as you start putting together ideas about life equivalence and stacking bonuses. I remember being able to download the character planner and then things just got wild.
I have been avoiding poe2. Poe wasn’t as bad as the old school mmos, but I definitely fall too far into games and come out months later. Nowadays I definitely prefer games that are easy to pick up and put down, and have a definitive ending, which hurts, because story and not playing for hours on end means you forget nuances, and a lot of my classic ‘grindy rpg but really good story’ ones need way too much time in a single sitting. I’m becoming the silly nonce who plays games I’ve already played because I can remember their stories despite long gaps between playing.
Anyway. Avoiding poe2 because I know I’ll have to invest time I don’t have to have fun, and I really disliked the inability to play parts of the game that they phase out. I’ll never know what the background of the elder and the shaper were, or how that red haired chick with a name starting with z was involved, because I took a break for their introduction. That was what really ended my love for poe.
Dude. I played it when I was just getting into the emotional aspects of being a teenager, and mission 3 just hits you in the face. The desperation to rescue the six containers was real.
World of Warcraft. I was really addicted to it for a few years but it really helped me get over a lot of the social anxiety issues that I had. I went from being really shy and barely interacting with other people in that game to being elected to take over a 60+ person guild by the time I was done with it. That confidence carried over into real life when I went back to school and began my career.
Both Psychonauts games had this exact same dopamine release. I spent all of my time playing both as they both came out right around the time of a close family member dying and the games were my outlet for those emotions at the time. Very special games to me.
How it changed my life: I have a much deeper appreciation to go into nature and feel more confident
Also having that deeper understanding to put together an earth quake survival kit.like you never know if you have to bail and you just gotta be ready to evacuate and survive.
Other games: Titan fall 2. I bawled at the end. I’m just now playing it through again. And I’m not one to replay a game but I would with that one given the bond. Never thought I’d cry at a game but that one …that one was special for me.
That’s fantastic. It’s a survival game ? I remember loving to roam the ashlands in Morrowind and that might have contributed to my tendency to walk everywhere. But nature itself, I’m not sure. I remember fondly the lush hills of Cyrodiil, the enchanted woods of Albion (Fable), but I don’t think any of these really turned me on nature as much as having an edible, strapping on my trekking shoes and getting lost in the forest around my home
Yup it’s a survival game but it has a peaceful option in it so you can just set it to roam and build to your heart’s content.
Elden ring as well has some similar breathtaking moments. not that any of that can be replicated in our earth nature but it is a game that I think of when I think of a beautiful game to play for just sitting there and beholding artist effort and content.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne