I recently got a ps2 and all of the SOCOM games. I’m still working through the first game, but I think 2 was my favorite back in the day. It’s the only game I was aware of at the time that enabled voice commands to the AI, and the first one came out in 2002 I think. i wish they would reboot the series.
I’ve noticed tactical shooters have kind of sat on the back burner. There’s not a lot of selection at the moment. It’s a shame because they offer unique gameplay
This is a good list! I’ll be checking some of these out for sure. I also have some overlooked games of my own I’d like to list. No links since I’m on mobile, but I may edit them in later.
Qbqbqb (30): Simple arcade game with nice animation and catchy music.
Goetia (496): Spooky point-and-click with some very good puzzles in my opinion.
Under Leaves (530): Relaxing hidden object game with a nice art style. Great game to play when you’re stressed and want to turn your brain off.
Year Walk (1197): Horror adventure game with an off-putting atmosphere and interesting art style.
The Last Door (1541): Horror point-and-click adventure game with a lovecraftian feel.
+1 to Year Walk, I remember playing that on an iPod Touch when it first came out. I love Simogo, with games like Device 6 and Sayonara Wild Hearts, they make really unique games.
Thanks for bringing out Goetia. I bought it back when i had to have any sounds as a distraction, Goetia being very silent at times drove me off almost instantly.
Just seeing that you mentioned good puzzles was enough to give a real go. 3 hours later i’m loving it.
Aquaria is one probably not too many people played to make it a cult classic, but it has a dedicated following of people that love it. Was pretty popular as a 2d indie adventure. I never thought I would like it, but was glad I gave it a try. 😊
Ogre Battle on the SNES is the original auto-battler. I would really recommend Ogre Battle 64 though, not only is it one of the very few RPGs on the system but it’s got really unique gameplay. It’s got its flaws but I’m such a sucker for the character designs and job/class system that it’s still my favorite game to this day.
Really think you should give FFXIV a deeper thought beyond just looking at the store and finding the level skips.
Even if you were to buy a skip, there’s still a considerable amount of game in front of you to play. They are only meant to get people to modern content without having to (to some people) slog through hundreds of hours of older stuff. It’s not a p2e micro-transaction by any means — far from it.
I agree with this whole-heartedly, there’s simply no way any reasonable person would consider skipping story content as buying power in the context of how FFXIV works as an MMO.
It lets players jump right into the new content without worrying about dozens or hundreds of hours of prior story they may or may not want to play through to get to the latest content at the same level as everyone else starting out, that’s all.
The money makers here want you to play their game. The more time you invest, the more money they make in subs. If you want to skip all that game and thus, in some ways, get all that progress done without having to pay all that sub, you’ve gotta fork over some cash.
You don’t cost them anything for not playing part of their game, and you don’t owe them anything.
If your interpretation of why they do this is right, it meand they want you to believe that “modern content” is a reward for playing through the rest. Nobody should think like that. Playing the game is the reward for playing the game.
It’s like if Netflix made you pay an extra as you start watching a series on season 4, because you didn’t pay your subscription through the three previous seasons.
Hopefully you understand why I was a little suspicious!
But I tried it out, and holy moly it feels like a different era. My brain can’t compute the fact that I just got a free to play game (Just have the demo, which honestly sounds like a ton of game) and it’s not trying to sell me anything in game? The tutorial was all about game play in universe, and never once told me about premium currency? My ui doesn’t have 5 different things? Crafting doesn’t involve long cool downs that I can 5 gems to speed up?
Like it feels like a different era of game, thank you for being persistent! I’ve only played a couple hours, but so far it feels like it’s going to become a comfort game at the very least.
I agree that video game narratives are, on average, way worse than in other media, but… This post is like a script for a CinemaSins video on an entire medium. There’s a conversation to be had about the quality and originality of storytelling in video games and why gamers are so quick to praise mediocre narratives, but I dunno if glib one-paragraph summaries of “types” of video game stories (with no examples!) do much to advance that conversation.
There’s a conversation to be had about the quality and originality of storytelling in video games and why gamers are so quick to praise mediocre narratives,
No, there’s really not. This is just a condescending way to disreguard someone else opinion on a piece of media or writing you dislike. The simple answer is just that thehly legitimately thought it was good.
I’m so tired of people acting like they’re some keepers of “good” content because they have the nonsense notion that media/writing is obectively good/bad. Want to talk about a film you just really liked online? Nope, it’s “objectively” bad writing, therefore you have terrible taste for liking it (or get called worse). I was hoping discussions like this would be better here.
I feel like it would’ve made sense to include some real examples. Otherwise this just reads very… made up? :'D
Not sure how to explain, but the simplistic nature of the stories you use as examples make the whole text feel a bit like an angry strawman argument even though it probably makes some good points.
yeah it’s kind of a weird post with the way it’s all worded. framing it in a “why what you like is wrong” way probably hurts it more than anything. it doesn’t invite discussion and is more or less just a ranting if you’re not giving examples.
it’s not like anyone here is trying to force someone to like the same games they do and the first thought I had after reading was “okay…”
Personally I like all sorts of storytelling as long as it’s involving topics/genres I’m interested. Lovecraftian setting? inject it into my veins. stories about realistic depictions of depression and suicide - sign me up. There’s not a singular formula that all my favorite games need to adhere to - why would anyone want all their story structures to be so rigid and similar?
Anyways one of my favorite games, probably my overall favorite, is Control. It does a lot of ‘show, don’t tell’ while also having an incredible amount of world building there for you to engage with if you’re interested. The setting is like they tailor-made this for my interests. So pumped for the other games coming out in that universe
Space Station 14. The absolute best multiplayer experiences I’ve had since the heyday of Planetside 2 (not that the two games are even remotely similar, just thinking broadly about multiplayer enjoyment).
But it’s been a good year for other games too. Silent Hill 2 was excellent. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth was excellent. Monster Hunter Wilds had some damn good looking monsters (but was not excellent).
Space Station 14 sounds interesting. What kind of multiplayer is it? I.e. is it one where the typical experience is to play with randoms via matchmaking, or is it a game best enjoyed with friends?
I have discord server full of nerds who I played games with during COVID (and its aftermath), and this might be a good excuse to see if I can reawaken that server for games
Kinda sorta like if Rimworld was set on a space station, but players control a single pawn, and servers are in the 50, 80, 150+ player count depending on server and time of day. The vibe is pretty similar to Among Us, just vastly, vastly more deep and complex than Among Us.
You join a server, create a character, pick a job ranging from janitor, bartender, musician, botanist, cargo, medical, security, research, and so on, then you join and try to keep the space station running smoothly by focusing on your job and working with other departments.
Or, you can, if you want, get a chance at being an antagonist with various goals ranging from stealing stuff to killing specific people, becoming a zombie and spreading the infection, or even blowing up the whole station with a nuke.
It’s incredibly deep, and it being a highly social game with some degree of roleplay focus, it’s crazy and fun and nothing else out there is quite like it, aside from space station 13 which came before it.
To answer your other questions - no matchmaking at all, you join a specific server and whatever job you end up with is determined by which jobs you have unlocked (by playtime in specific roles), which jobs you’ve set for yourself that you’d like to work, and which other players have also chosen those same jobs. Playing with friends can be challenging if servers are full.
And you absolutely must NOT communicate outside of the game unless the server specifically allows it. That includes Discord, that’s considered “metacomms”, so go in knowing you’ll have to use text chat for everything - it’s how everyone teaches and learns anyways, so it’ll come naturally
That sounds like a space version of Eco, with the roles stuff. In Eco, it’s impossible for one person to acquire all skills, so people on a server have to specialise.
I started out as a miner, to honour my late best friend who was a dwarf at heart and would definitely have been a miner if he’d been playing with us. Then I branched out into masonry to make use of the absurd amounts of stone I’d been mining. If I wanted something made of wood, I had to go flutter my eyelashes at my friend who had started out as a logger and branched into carpentry. I enjoyed having a domain that was my own, and a clear way to be useful to the server. Other players had some level of mining and masonry skill by the midgame, but for anything serious, they had to wait until I was online.
It sounds like Space Station 14 is far more hectic than this, but in an interesting way. I wonder if it will scratch the same itch that Eco did wrt being useful in a clear role
Honestly sounds and looks quite different at first glance, but if you enjoyed working a particular job and getting better at it over time, that’s for sure an itch that SS13/14 scratches well!
take botany for instance. can be as simple as planting seeds in hydroponic trays and harvesting fruit and veggies for the kitchen and for the chemistry department.
But one can go so much deeper than that - tired of onion plants only yielding two onions when harvested? well, cocoa trees drop six pods when harvesting, so you can rub a cotton swab on the cocoa tree and then rub it on the onion plant to deposit a random genetic trait from the cocoa tree, and if you’re lucky or if you repeat enough times the right way, you can end up with an onion plant that drops six each harvest! or, maybe just end up with onions that contain theobromine.
There’s also mutation of plants, which can add various traits (like offgassing tritium, or making the plant scream in pain when harvested, or making the produce so slippery that people slip and fall if they walk over it), and of course those traits can also get swabbed over to other plants.
there’s even an illegal “gatfruit” that produces a high powered revolver when eaten, tho those aren’t easy to come by
I should play more Space Station 14. I use to play quite a bit of 13, and it was quite fun to deep fry everything. I hope more things are added to 14! Otherwise I’ll just have to continue my escapades of “I only know how to make banana bread, botany boss, thanks!”
14 is in a really good state right now, I think! Wizden, being the upstream/vanilla can seem a little sparse compared to, say, the Starlight fork which adds a lot, or the dozens of other forks out there.
I’ve spent probably most of my time as botanist, with cargo/salvage a close second and musician a close third.
Definitely play more, especially if it’s been some time since you last tried it, the development of it is quite active and ongoing. Hell, wizden’s test server has been trying out a complete rework of the medical system, so they’re definitely not afraid to throw some huge changes out there and see how well the community responds to it.
When I played I was a chef! Often I just ghosted though in order to learn more. Follow people around, see what they do. Helped my autistic brain so I felt better about fucking shit up.
Loved my chef knife. Stupid mice eating my banana bread!
Spectating is fun! I haven’t done much of it but recently I followed a musician avali for their whole shift, and it ended up being really interesting. They found a spear and were told to get a permit for it, which they did, but then someone stole the permit and they got arrested for carrying a weapon without a permit despite being issued one, despite the sec officer being told about the theft, and the thief standing right in front of the sec officer at the time.
then they later got arrested for the same thing by the same officer.
they eventually tried to sue the security department, and the trial was about to start, but was interrupted by the jury room getting bombed, and when they tried to hold the trial in the hallways of course chaos broke out and they had to evac, and didn’t bother trying the trial at centcomm.
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