Damn. I really thought this was from Darkwatch, a very weird 2005 shooter where you play as a vampire cowboy. I have fond memories, but, given the timeframe, couldn’t say whether it’s good or worth playing today
I’ve been playing My Time at Sandrock exclusively on my Steam Deck, so controller controls. It’s more focused on crafting instead of farming (you don’t unlock farming until you’re 2-3 in game weeks in), but it’s still very Stardew. I haven’t played the previous game in the series, My Time at Portia, but I understand it takes place in a more fertile area than Sandrock’s desert.
In my experience, most games that offer support for both are better with KB/M.
The KB/M vs Controller betterness ratio of a particular game tends to also scale up with the amount of controls required to play the game.
If you want a game that feels almost as good on the controller, find a simpler game with fewer controls.
As far as game recommendations: the wife and I have more hours into Stardew Valley than I’ll publicly admit, and other games we enjoy that work well with controllers are Luma Island, Dinkum, and Plate Up.
A side note: If you’re chasing the magic that is Stardew Valley, you aren’t going to find it elsewhere. Be open to a different kind of magic in these other games and you won’t be disappointed that it doesn’t hit like Stardew.
Palia. It’s free on Xbox and PlayStation. Has in game purchases but I’ve never bought one. My fiancee started playing it recently and ask me to play. You can grow a farm, it’s 3D, get a glider, run around and do missions. (MMO) Play with others and get bonuses in XP. I’m only about 3 hrs gameplay so far. It’s cross platform because she plays Xbox, so if that helps… idk
Edit: also fishing, chopping wood, story lines idk. It’s worth checking out if you have time/access.
Edit 2: my fiance wanted me to say they have a Halloween event going on right now, and they have gatherings/events to encourage people to meet each other and team up and help each other grow
Whacked! It was a third person party combat game for original xbox, my brother and I played it SO MUCH growing up. We still sometimes play and have fun, but anyone else that tries to play with us hates it
I disagree, to me the corr of the mainline games is the Pokedex and region, the actual battles being turn based has always just been a negative to me.
In my opinion saying the turn based battles are critical to being mainline is like saying the saccrin and frankly bad writing is critical, sure it’s always been there but that just makes it a persistent problem not a feature.
I’m kind of confused by that sentiment, because the Pokedex and region are the things that change from game-to-game?
And like, sometimes the writing is bad and saccharine, but not always. It’s subjective, but Gen V is widely considered to have pretty good writing. Gen 1 is pretty understated and well-grounded analog to post-WW2 Japan, with Team Rocket acting as a family-friendly version Yakuza.
I’m also not sure why turn-based games are a negative. Like… From board games like chess, to tabletop games like D&D, to strategy games like Civ, to card games and card videogames like Slay the Spire and Balatro… For me I view turn-based vs real-time as a tool for game designers to wield, not just a strictly positive vs negative thing.
Turn-based has serious positives. It’s less impactful to be interrupted, which is important for handheld games. I find it easier to play when I’m not sober. It’s also easier to play while active - I’ve played through multiple main line games on a treadmill, but even Scarlet and Violet has too much active real-time movement for me to be able to stay coordinated while doing that.
I agree gen V had good writing, it’s a shame they forgot how to do that immediately after (This is part of why I fear them returning to turn based, they have back slid before)
Sure turn based has merits, even if you have to dig to find them, but it’s boring to me.
Board games being turn based are a completely different story, when you play a board game you are playing with a person, you’re talking to them, watching their body language and communicating the whole time.
Turn based in a video game is staring at a screen waiting until you have something to do again. It feels like a relic of a different time, when it wasn’t technically feasible to have live action Pokemon battles like the one in the show.
As for turn based being a tool, if course it is, but the setting and surrounding media and lore keeps claiming Pokemon battles are exciting and fast passed. You know, the opposite of turn based.
The problem is that the battle system is slow. Other games in the genre know how to speed things up. Pokemon insists on providing information one message box at a time. If they fix that, they could make the game feel faster.
Just emulating the old games and running them at 4x speed is an incredible QoL improvement.
Instead of implementing more options to speed things up, GameFreak instead decided to remove the option to disable animations.
I have been saying for years they need to split the franchise. From an anime perspective, before they retired Ash I was calling for them to let him age into a teenager, and for them to create a new character for a show for younger kids. For the games, i want them to split into 3D action RPG’s that play like the Legends games and Scarlet/Violet while the main games stay 2D and turn-based. Right now it seems like they’ve been adding new shit to the main games out of a fear of getting stale rather than to actually serve the games.
They seem to be doing some of that, with Pokemon Champions removing the burden of competitive play from the main games in the future.
My wife said the same thing. She is not a fast gamer, she likes the slower pace of Pokémon. I also have been forgetting the game is not turn based as zoning out during combat, or in a wild zone.
I know that Pokemon is, ostensibly, a children’s game. But there is a niche in my life for games I can play when I’m not sober, and being turn-based greatly facilitates that for me.
They do in the show once (Team Rocket) in a throwaway scene that implies pokeballs are fairly uncomfortable and also that humans are too powerful to be contained within ordinary pokeballs.
Had that on the PS3 back in the day. Got a weird glitch one time where the zombies all spawned with no heads and were basically immortal. Now that was true horror.
Had to switch the console off and leave it for a few days. Crowds of dozens of headless zombies running at me and I couldn’t kill them, all I could do was keep fleeing on horseback, only to encounter another crowd of them. Genuinely the scariest experience I’ve ever had in a game.
This feels like how it will be if there is a real-life Zombie apocalypse. It’s different than playing games, we won’t be killing the hordes, we will just be scared as hell and trying to run as fast as we can.
Steam changed it so that popularity metrics are mostly ignored during the first couple days of Next Fest. This started with the October 2024 run, and it's a big part of why you no longer have the good demos popping up quickly at the start. To my knowledge, they never published details on it, but there was a short blurb in the developer Q&A. Things should get better starting sometime tomorrow (tends to be day 3 or day 4).
The idea is that it gives games that don't have pre-existing marketing a way better chance of success, instead of the really massive snowball effect that used to exist where devs lost out for the entire thing if they weren't popular within the first couple of hours, but it has made it a hell of a job to look for new games.
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