They had bizarre TV adverts as well. You could never accuse early 2000s Sony of not getting weird with it.
I don’t know if any of it really helped. It rode in on the already wildly successful PS1. It had a DVD player in it back when a DVD player was quite expensive. It had SSX and Tekken Tag at UK launch. It could play all your PS1 games and “upscale” them. The only competition it had at launch was the Dreamcast. It was going to sell anyway.
It also looked so cool and, a rumor had it, could run Linux (it could, but only the fat models and with a hard drive sold separately as part of a kit, and only a specific kind of Linux with Sony’s patches, and slowly as hell, but)
I think that was the PS3. They took it out later though, and had to give a paltry amount of money back to people who were using it.
It’d be nice to see homebrew coding return to consoles. Something like Godot ported to it and installed, kind of like Dreams but less limited.
I first got into programming via Basic on the ZX Spectrum, and I do worry how future generations will get into it now they’ve all gone back to phones instead of PCs.
No, the kit was for PS2, PS3 could run distributions intended for it without modifications, I think (maybe with some firmware changes), but those were by enthusiasts, while the PS2 Linux was provided by Sony.
I first got into programming via Basic on the ZX Spectrum, and I do worry how future generations will get into it now they’ve all gone back to phones instead of PCs.
Maybe the future generations will realize the difference between “can” and “should”, and there’ll arrive a niche for simpler PCs. I hope.
First one was a cool premise but really annoying in some ways. The game sort of assumes you get certain fragments of blue prints by certain points but doesn’t actually make them easy to find nor really give you any hints to find them.
For people who’ve played it was for the sea moth and and later the moon well.
Yep, it loops between exploration and basebuilding / crafting.
The exploration part is what usually gets people hooked because the alien underwater setting is amazing. The other stuff is more to give you a reason to stick around for longer, and pace your exploration since need to unlock things at certain points.
This is a survival game, gathering resources from the environment to craft tools, vehicles, food and water are core mechanics, as is finding and scanning fragments of technology to unlock blueprints. You actually don’t need to craft very much, I have done a run of this game where I built no seabases, only one of the three submarines, crafted no food or water surviving only on what you can scavenge, and only made seven tools.
A common complaint I see people make with this game is that the inventory doesn’t stack, so where do I put my 900 titanium? Frankly they’re playing it like Minecraft, and it’s not Minecraft. You don’t need to hoard treasure chests worth of everything, most common materials are relatively easy to find and with the possible exception of Lithium, if you have more than five of basically any raw material on hand that you don’t have an immediate idea of how to use, you’re probably doing it wrong.
Base building is entirely optional; the idea is you’re a castaway, survivor of a shipwreck who is waiting to be rescued, you’re not moving in. To quote the game itself, “Treat this space as your home, but never forget that it is not.”
It was weirdly a little light on crafting in some ways. But extremely heavy in others. I tried playing it like Minecraft and stockpiling stuff but that’s not really the way. I found it slightly more enjoyable to gather things only when I needed them.
Also the game has no map and I’m REALLY bad with directions. Like REALLY bad.
That’s the point of the game - it doesn’t tell you where to go and what to do because you’re meant to explore the environment yourself. And the debris you scan, the screenshots you take, and the thrills that you get - are the real reward here, and not some goal that game artificially imposes on you. So I think you were just playing it wrong.
Look, I genuinely get your point, and I was tracking with you until you said this. Fuck off. Fuck for with this stupid bullshit. I was not playing wrong. I was playing it the same way everyone else does. I was exploring. I was collecting. I was finding new things. It was getting very clear that the distances the game expected me to travel were meant to be done much faster than what I was capable of. I was getting multiple upgrades for things that I couldn’t use because I didn’t have the thing that lets me install them. It’s been ages since I’ve played and I’m not psychic so I’ll never know what the actual devs’ intent was, but something was off. I’d definitely missed something. What’s more annoying is that I was finding multiple blueprints I already had or something? I don’t remember the context. Like you needed 3 fragments or something. And I’d find more like “ah surely this is the third for the thing I need” only to get the 5th of something I already had. It was give years ago when I played, at least, so I’m probably explaining wrong.
But don’t fucking say I was playing wrong. That’s such a condescending, brain dead thing to say to someone who is critiquing a game.
“Hey, based on what’s going on and getting tons of upgrades and not unlocking the thing to install the upgrades, I think I’ve missed something and I have no idea where to find it. It would be nice if there was a way to unlock this without scouring every inch of the ocean I’ve been through multiple times and without looking it up online.” No, you’re just playing wrong! It’s a game about exploration and discovery!
You’re not alone. As much as I love that game, the absolute lack of direction is one of my biggest gripes with it, right along with the atrocious inventory system.
You’d think someone who manages to build a fricking atomic submarine and a mech suit would be able to pinpoint relevant tech on the go somehow but no. Also you get a scanning room that can pinpoint little pebbles a kilometre away but is it helpful? Nope. Just another half-baked gameplay element that was never developed beyond the initial concept.
So yeah, your concerns are absolutely valid. Anyone who played this game would agree. But maybe that’s why I personally love the game. Clunky and beautiful, frustrating but once you find that thing you’ve been looking for, a bit rewarding too.
Yeah, I think people look at that criticism and think I mean I want super explicit bright glowing objects with a Skyrim style HUD that points me directly to where I need to go to get blue prints. Nah. Some ideas:
Some way to tell if there aren’t any more in an area so you don’t waste time looking when there isn’t anything.
Some sort of device that tells you how close some are, but not where they are. Like the classic “beep … beep … beep beep beep BEEPBEEPBEEPBPBPBBPBP” thing that gets more frequent as you approach. But make the max range relatively small.
I think they were called life pods? Like the other crashed emergency escape pods. For things you’re expected to get like the sea bike (I don’t remember the name), sea moth, and moon well maybe always put some blue print fragments on life pods you find later. This way you can’t miss them (unless you’re really really not paying attention). You can still make it so you get them earlier on, but this way in case you missed some somehow you can always “catch up” to where the devs expect you to be. Like if they expect you to get them ~10% in, then make it so the life pods you find ~25% in give you what you are missing for the sea moth.
A bit of a map system. This one is controversial, so I’m putting it last. A huge appeal of the game is not having a map. But even just a blank screen showing you all your way points, but not showing you where you are or what biomes are around would be useful. Then do something like show where blueprints are in an area. Maybe something like once you get two of three it shows you the general area where the remaining ones are, but doesn’t put a marker on the HUD.
Because with games like this where progression isn’t gated behind actually having some of these items, you can get in weird states where you get further in and didn’t get them. But maybe >95% of players did. The other <5% just missed something somehow. And then there’s no real clue on where to.go to back track to get it. And you can get in these annoying situations where it seems like you should have it but you aren’t sure, and you don’t want spoilers so you don’t look it up. Then when you look it up maybe you see a spoiler and it turns out you shouldn’t have it yet, that’s common. Other times you missed something super obvious in some very random area you only needed to go to once and never checked again because it seemed empty.
But it’s just so infuriating when people say things like “you’re not playing right” like, I’m getting frustrated because I’m playing right! If I wasn’t checking everywhere I could miss things. So I have to check everywhere to make sure I don’t. But then you can still miss things because there’s no real way to guarantee if you actually checked everything.
Tbh I’m against the full on map idea since it would ruin and demystify/trivialise the aspect of exploration, but maybe they could have made it so that the scanner room HUD chip UI was actually useful and displayed any kind of distance indicator. Often times I’d be scanning for limestone chunks for example. Now my HUD is full of circles that all have the exact same radius and no indication of distance, just a vague direction, and it’s so frustrating to work with that.
They could have added some sort of compass as well. They chose not to.
I wish they implemented something like No Man’s Sky’s non-intrusive HUD, which conveys both heading and distance at the same time in a super nice way.
Fragments of the Seamoth can be found around wrecks in the red grass plateaus, there’s a guaranteed one near Lifepod 17 aka “Ozzy from the cafeteria WHAT THE HELL GUYS?” The game hints that you can find Seamoth parts around there by the line “Our pod was almost crushed by the Seamoth bay on the way down.” You can also find several guaranteed Seamoth parts in the Aurora, I think enough to outright complete the blueprint.
Moonpool parts can be found just about anywhere you’ll find Cyclops hull fragments; I tend to find them either in the Mushroom Forest or around wrecks in the Sparse/Grand Reef.
The Scanner Room you can add to a seabase can detect scannable fragments, and you can display them on the HUD with a craftable upgrade.
Also found in great abundance around the red grass plateaus especially near wrecks.
You’ll get radio messages from Lifepod 17, 6 and 7.
Lifepod 17 will give you a HUD marker that takes you straight to it, depending on where your lifepod spawned you’ll likely pass a small wreck and a scatter, and there is a large wreck within sight of it. I would actually be surprised if you couldn’t complete the Seamoth, scanner room and bioreactor right there.
Lifepod 6 and 7 are both “coordinates corrupted” quests; it won’t give you a HUD marker but a picture and a hint as to their location (lifepod 4 is similar). 6 is similarly within sight of a large wreck and a scatter, going to Lifepod 7 will take you past a large scatter and a small wreck.
All three of these are fully explorable with a seaglide, high capacity air tank, and repair tool. I recommend a rebreather and an air bladder. You can find scanner room, bioreactor and seaglide parts in addition to scrap titanium outside the wrecks, and laser cutter, propulsion cannon, mobile vehicle bay, modification station, battery chargers, plus several useful databoxes including the vehicle upgrade console, and a strong chance of +30 bottles of water in supply crates.
It can be a bit of a bother for new players telling scannable fragments from the background scenery of the wrecks; act a bit like a bloodhound, drag your nose around looking for the scanner icon to pop up in the corner of the screen.
I’ll give an oblique hint for further in the game: there may come a point where you say to yourself, “Well now what?” And the game doesn’t seem to give you somewhere to go like it has been. go deeper.
I don’t need hints because I’m not playing the game and I’m not planning on continuing. I’d gotten further than you think. But for context I’d already begun to explore the deeper areas when I ran into this conundrum. I built a stupidly long oxygen tube to get down there. I think the game expects you to have the sea moth first. That was one of the first moments I thought something was wrong. Then I think once I got it I couldn’t take it down there without an upgrade because I also didn’t have the moon pool unlocked. You’re talking about life pods, I never had a problem finding life pods. Those were easy and fun. It was going deeper without the sea moth and upgrades that was troublesome.
Yeah, it sounds like you didn’t explore the wrecks or their surroundings, because all the blueprints you say you need can be found above 250m fairly easily. There are Seamoth parts and a free depth upgrade for the Seamoth available right at sea level in the Aurora. I’ve finished the game several times without building a seabase at all.
Companies only answer to profit and unfortunately we get to see the results. Can’t have those proles making 250 million dollars now. That would eat into the profits of our shareholders.
Think I have something like 16k hours across all my PC games, with EU5 having the most at ~1.7k, I’ll never understand how someone can have more than 10k in one game.
My most played games like Terraria are well under 1K. Even this was before I become a parent and started working full-time.
These days if I put more than 50 hours into a game its considered a lot. I just finished the Oblivion Remastered and literally this was the only game I played for many weeks, with a playtime of ~45 hours.
Some people are afraid of trying new things. And they also don’t mind doing the exact same thing over and over.
So they play repetitive games like Call Of Duty, Rocket League, LoL, Dota, Counter Strike, … where every match is the same gameplay. And they don’t get bored, even after 10k hours.
If they were to play Terraria, they would be the ones mining the entire map as a “challenge”
PvP is inherently not repetitive due to the fact you will be interacting with many many different people over your gameplay sessions. And people are random, inconsistent, and weird.
Also, some people like honing a particular skill. It’s not really about being afraid to try new things, but rather trying to be better at one thing.
that’s true to a degree, but not for 10k hours, 10k hours is literally the amount of time people use as a benchmark for slogging away at something until you master it and i can’t think of any FPS game that is quite that varied unless you just play a new map every day
Lol. The amount of times I’m actually typing something and then think “nahhhhh, not worth it” and delete the whole thing anyway I think my friends are all used to this 😅
I think the “typing” status is debounced to a few seconds only. You won’t appear to be typing if you stop actually typing. At least that’s how most messengers work that I use.
I guess no cuteness / anime excludes the rune factory series so I’d go with the following recommendations:
Stardew Valley is an all time favorite .
Kynseed feels like the fever dream of someone who once heard of these kind of games. But you can decide for yourself if you want to focus on questing, farming, becoming a business mogul or whatever. Time is not really relevant in this game since you character doesn’t have to sleep and you can just get kids or adopt them and continue you game with them if your character gets old.
Graveyard Keeper has a very different spin on the whole genre, it has a dark sense of humor and not knowing what to do, when the bodies pile up can be stressful but I enjoyed it a lot.
Travelers Rest is a game where you build your own tavern. I only played it for a few hours in early access but it felt relaxing and looked nice so far. It’s out for a while now but I haven’t returned yet (stupid sexy Hades II… )
There are also cross overs with other genres like Moonstone Island which combines building your own home and collecting pets and discovering new islands with their help.
Many thanks for the tips! Graveyard Keeper and Traveler’s Rest look interesting. The rest is pretty much exactly what I don’t want in terms of style haha.
Not who you asked, but I’m in the middle of a playthrough right now and yes that’s exactly it. The deck building doesn’t feel grindy like Pokémon though.
I haven’t played since they added a bunch of updates and features but a while back it lacked the deep bonds you can forge in Stardew Valley but they added more content to this part of the game so I guess it became better in this regard. Collecting pets is likely still the main focus.
You start in a base island where you can forage building material and start collecting pets. You then build flying objects (I think you start with a kite?) to leave and discover other islands with different pets and different difficulties (finding out the difficulty is through fuck around and find out afaik).
The building is besides some very basic objects entirely optional but having a barn fit your pets it’s very important. But then you can go out, discover islands and collect pets.
What felt a bit annoying was that there are specific items needed to open dungeons on some of these islands and these items may only appear during a specific season. I was a bit frustrated when I finally found the summer dungeon and it just became fall.
Writing this made me want to replay it since they added a bunch of interesting stuff. But even in it’s unfinished state I would have recommended it.
I second travelers rest. I’m not too far in it despite owning it for years. It’s very chill. I don’t think there’s any real time limits. The only real issue I’ve had with it was accidentally opening my inn and not realizing a crowd has developed with no one to serve them.
Graveyard keeper is pretty good too but I stopped playing after needing extra kinds of materials. It’s been a while but the farming of the resources was just a little too much for the type of experience I was after. I’ll get back to it eventually. I liked the idea of the game a lot.
I had the same experience with Graveyard Keeper but gave it another try a few years later. Either they balanced it more or it bothered me less, but the second time I was able to complete it without ending up hating it :D
Psychonauts I and II, with the caveat that there used to be a HUGE skill spike in the penultimate chapter of #1. I gather they’ve softened it, but don’t know how much.
I know Portal isn’t a shooter. But Portal made me think of them. I feel like a lot of FPSs would fit OP’s question. Half-Life 2 and most of the Halo games come to mind.
Yes really. I played it all the time as a kid and didn’t think it was any more difficult or abstract than the rest of the 2600’s catalogue. Granted, we kept the manual, which made a huge difference in understanding and enjoying its bizarre logic, but still. I had no idea it was so hated until at least a decade later.
it was actually way ahead of its time, for a game. One small bug (the workaround for which was in the manual) ruined its reputation. But I genuinely think it was a good game.
Also written in 6 weeks by one guy. Freaking impressive
when climbing out of the pit, it was very easy to immediately fall back down (due to the pixel-perfect collision detection).
And here is an excerpt from the manual: “Even experienced extraterrestrials sometimes have difficulty levitating out of wells. Start to levitate E.T. by first pressing the controller button and then pushing your Joystick forward. E.T.'s neck will stretch as he rises to the top of the well (see E.T. levitating in Figure 1). Just when he reaches the top of the well and the scene changes to the planet surface (see Figure 2), STOP! Do not try to keep moving up. Instead, move your Joystick right, left, or to the bottom. Do not try to move up, or E.T. might fall back into the well.”
he was forced to release it quickly to coincide with the film’s release. For comparison, it used to take a team of devs a couple of months to make a game. He had 6 weeks.
Also, if you read the manual, this essentially never happened to you. It was easy to avoid.
You also needed to read the manual. The game did stuff that other games at the time didn’t, for example, a contextual button. You couldn’t know what would happen unless you read the manual to learn what the icons meant. A lot of people never did and so decided that the game was bad.
Yeah, I played it as a teenager on emulation and was pretty mystified at why it was considered so much worse than the other things available on the system. Why would people love Adventure but hate this?
It was the best FPS, arguably the only FPS, on the Nintendo DS. Nintendo has long since shut down their online service for the DS. However, if you go into your WiFi settings you can change your DNS to point to a server that spoofs Nintendo’s credentials.
Thanks to this exploit you can play all the original DS games online with a legitimate game, on a legitimate console. There’s even a discord for MP:H with a matchmaking channel, clans, and regular tournaments. (The same probably goes for Mario Kart DS)
hold up link me the discord, I played the absolute fuck out of this game as a kid. literally built a whole community by shooting friend codes on a wall to add people I’d match against LMAO
Yes, but you took the time to do it. Then you took the time to share the link, which got me to read it, which taught me about all the fancy tech they use to clear the road. I was ready to just call it a neat pic and move on, but now I got a lot more out of it. So…ummm…Schmetterlingseffekt? 😄
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