I’ve been playing Marvel Rivals since it came out and I’m hooked, lol. It’s such a good blend. I put a lot of time in Paladins but it’s been a long time, so it’s nice having a little group of friends to play with again. Solo queuing also has been pretty good overall, but once in a while there’s a team that is clearly better and it’s just a stomping ground for 5 minutes.
It’s also funny how heavily it’s being compared to overwatch when it’s just hero shooters as a whole, and OW is hardly the closest match lol
I’ve replayed Metro 2033 after ~8 years, this time the Redux version. It felt much less atmospheric than what I remembered and a bit too easy (I think I never ran out of ammo and in the end I had around 300 extra military bullets.
I found a used copy of Bravely Default and I’ve been playing that, along with FFXIV where I was planning on starting endwalker but got distracted leveling crafters.
D-pads are the one aspect of a controller that I wouldn’t worry about much. I’ve only ever had one controller that had a D-pad that I wasn’t happy with, a Logitech in the mid-1990s that had a screw-in mini joystick on the D-pad. That rolled to the diagonal too easily.
thinks
Maybe the old NES controllers, which had a relatively-hard, non-rounded D-pad and could be tough on the fingers for long sessions.
I guess one could prefer the PlayStation-style or XBox-style D-pad position, though I’ve never had issue with either.
Do you have something in particular that you’re concerned about regarding D-pads? I’d expect pretty much anything out there to be fine, myself.
A decent example of a bad d-pad would be the Switch Pro Controller. Unless they’ve fixed it in a later revision, the controller has an issue with outputting diagonals when they aren’t intended.
Xenogears. 80-hour game, and that’s without grinding for everything. And, it probably would have been close to twice as long if they’d been funded enough to complete it. As it was released, the second disc began with a 2-hour cutscene with a save point in the middle, which essentially summed up most of the second half of the story. Amazing game. Like playing through an entire mecha manga.
Lufia: Rise of the Sinistrals. JRPG for the SNES published by Quintet. VERY large game for the era, there are a LOT of towns with dungeons to go through. Gets a little grindy mid-way through, it also manages to fit such a large quest with such a large game map on the cartridge by having relatively little variety in visuals. There’s one town tileset, there’s one dungeon tileset that gets palette swapped, there’s one cave tileset that gets palette swapped, there’s a relatively small number of music tracks you’ll be hearing a lot.
The North American release of its sequel had a very late game dungeon that was corrupted, and technically possible to move through but you’d have to have played the PAL version to know what you’re doing. One of the few broken games I’m aware of to get a Nintendo seal of quality. Lufia II is actually a prequel, you play out the full adventure of the legendary heroes you play in the cold open of Lufia. There’s a cool detail between the two games, in the first, when the legendary heroes were legendary, the dialog is spoken very formal and pompous. In the second game, when we’ve been with them this whole time and they’re just people, the same dialog plays out the same way but it’s much more casual. “Come forth and show thyself!” becomes “Come out and show yourself.” Probably my favorite detail of the whole series.
I’ve spent way more than 100 hours on plenty of games over the years, games that nowadays are below $10, like:
Doom
Duke Nukem 3D
Tetris
BlockOut (now, BlockOut II)
MS Flight Simulator 5.0
F-117A 2.0
Monkey Island 1
Monkey Island 2
Ultima Online (now, UO Outlands)
GTR: FIA GT Racing
There are many free-to-play mobile games with optional ads, that I’ve also enjoyed for over 100 hours each before they became frustrating, but hard to make a list now.
Dorfromantik. I had bought the award-winning board game as a gift for a relative and figured I’d try the videogame version. Please send help, I can’t stop playing. This game is so addictive, it should be classified as a dangerous narcotic. I have deliberately not installed it to my Steam Deck (which it’s verified for), because I need at least a few hours per day that I’m not playing it. In completely unrelated news, who knew birds are waking up this early?
I’ve also been playing a bit of GTA Vice City and San Andreas, not the botched remasters, but the original PC ports with mod packs (Reviced and SA Enhanced Edition Plus) that restore features from the PS2 version and overhaul them a little. I’m having a blast, unsurprisingly. These are games you can replay forever. San Andreas in particular absolutely glows (both figuratively and literally) with the restored lighting and holds up incredibly well. Since it’s been a while since I last played it, I noticed just how incredible the architecture in this game is. Weird thing to focus on, I know, but every building has the right proportions and, by PS2 standards at least, a remarkable amount of variety and detail, in large part due to the photo textures. Even most newer open world games don’t even come close, like the entire Saints Row series or the recent Mafia 1 remake (which I actually enjoyed quite a bit otherwise). It’s a huge step up from Vice City in this regard, which is however still a ton of fun. The attention to detail in SA remains impressive in every way, like how radio talk hosts will comment on story events.
I tried a bit of the classic hacking game Uplink again, with the brilliant UplinkOS mod that modernizes its UI and makes the game usable on modern display. I haven’t done many missions yet, but it’s still as enjoyable as when it was new 23 years ago. It’s remarkable how little this old Indie darling needs to set the right atmosphere: Some appropriately beepy Hollywood sound effects, a charming electronic soundtrack and just the right amount of well-written text.
Parking Garage Rally Circuit: Little retro arcade racer with a delightfully limited scope. If you like the old Sega arcade racers, this one is a well-crafted throwback and even if you don’t, it’s the perfect game to play in short bursts. The difficulty is old-school hard too - and comes with tons of filters and resolution options to make it look like it’s playing on your parents’ crappy old tube TV.
I encourage you to explore the wonderful world of indie games, and free yourself from the shackles and shitty anti-cheat implementations of the AAA/AAAA gaming industry
I can cite way more than 5 excellent games from this decade from the top of my head, We’re almost in 2025, so I’ll limit to games released in or after 2015:
Factorio
RimWorld
Stellaris
Fallout 4
Overcooked 2 (and all you can eat)
Life is Strange
Cyberpunk 2077
Before your eyes
Dead Cells
Shadow Tactics
Cities Skylines
The outer worlds
Two point hospital
I can keep going, but this is just from the top of my head, there are always good games getting released, and very rarely they’re AAA.
bin.pol.social
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