I think being the “free” game that comes with the system hurt it’s reputation. We all got bored of it, but going back to it after playing some terrible platformers really shows you how great it really is.
Nostalgia and all-time enjoyment, probably Pokémon Gen 2 / Remakes (Silver / Gold / Crystal / SoulSilver / HeartGold). I consider them all one game of different “flavours”. If I had to choose one I’d probably go with SoulSilver. The remakes added some much needed modern conveniences, and having your Pokémon follow you around in the overworld was awesome.
Pure “this game is so good”, probably Elden Ring. Before the DLC I’d probably go with Dark Souls III because of Gael and Friede, but Shadow of the Erdtree blew me away.
Most hours played, Skyrim at over 5,000. HITMAN is in second place at a bit over 1,300.
I don’t think any amount of achievable retirement savings is enough to give me confidence that I could cover escalating health care costs enough that I could retire. Even if I had $10M in the bank, I would worry that the cost of health care will rise fast enough to impoverish me.
If you make it to Medicare age, it gets a lot less stressful. eg: my folks have had 4 knees replaced with very little out-of-pocket cost. There’s still supplemental insurance, but Medicare, not the profit-driven insurance company, determines what gets covered, and they mostly listen to doctors. There’s always edge cases, where some treatment might not be covered, but I feel like those are uncommon.
One way or the other, my ultimate health care plan is 9mm.
Maybe in our lifetime we will see an expansion of Medicare to be a single payer system for all Americans as a publicly available option (ie: the minimum standards other insurance would need to meet to be competitive).
That would be nice. Idk I’m just hopeful in like 25 years we may see some real change ushered in when it comes to that. Probably very naively hopeful but I have to at least occasionally believe in a better future.
I get more pessimistic every year and I started out extremely pessimistic. I think humanity going extinct in my lifetime is more likely than the US getting single payer in my lifetime.
I’m surprised that Trump doesn’t use Obama care to prescribe 9mm medication to people. It’s a lot cheaper to pay a one time cost of a 9mm that reoccurring costs of medication. Think about it, health care costs plumit and firearms sales skyrocket. It’s a republican wet dream.
Enderal, a whole new game built ontop of Skyrim. Offers an entirely different setting, map, class system, enemies, spells, and has an actual story that you will not soon forget.
Enderal and also its predecessor Nehrim are absolutely amazing! They’re so fantastic, I don’t even consider them mods, I see them as full games.
PS: Yes, I know Arkwend exists. But I’ve never played it because I personally dislike Morrowind and its gameplay systems. Especially the god aweful random hit chance system Oblivion got me into RPGs so that will forever be my gold standard for RPG games.
To me, this is different choices in player autonomy/agency. No player is truly autonomous in a game world, but giving the player choices and having the choices have outcomes that actually impact the gameworld makes it feel like it’s your own agency making the choice.
For example, why would I eat the fish in Nier Automata? Doing so kills me. Why would they give me the option to have a game-ending early on in the game based on eating a fish? Because in giving you the choice to do so, they’ve given you a level of autonomy. They let you find out for yourself what the consequences are, and the consequences make sense in the context of the game world.
Rockstar is bad at respecting player agency, but you know what the worst was in my experience?
Hogwarts Legacy. (Note: I pirated this trash to not give Rowling any money)
Right off the bat, at the beginning of the game, you’re meant to follow your Professor through a dark seemingly endless empty space. If you leave the side of your Professor, nothing terrible happens, just big red scary words cover the screen saying you’ve failed because you lost track of the Professor.
In a game that actually respects player agency, you wouldn’t just be like “Hey, you’re doing THIS MISSION WRONG” (which is basically what the message said in nicer terms), you would give the player an actual event showing why it was dangerous.
What would be so hard about animating a shadowy horror coming out of the shadows and snatching you, instantly killing you? At least then you have learned why you shouldn’t venture alone. Because there are scary monsters in the dark and they could kill you! This respects the players agency by allowing them to explore but also giving them clear limits that fit the theme of the world in which they exist. There’s definitely scary horrors in Harry Potter, and a myriad of things that could kill a new student. We don’t see any of them, just big all caps “YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG!”
The game would pose further issues, like not being able to jump over obstacles that your character is clearly jumping higher than. Invisible walls is another thing which disrespects player agency and breaks world immersion.
It’s been a while since I played it, but the whole game was crammed to the gills with these kind of wag of the finger “we didn’t tell you to play that way so don’t” instead of using compelling story-based reasons to keep people from doing those things.
Yeah. Use it at the Bunker and it blows up the Bunker. I love all the endings that are like, “I don’t know why she did that.”
Also apparently it’s a real last ditch move that doesn’t actually kill you. I didn’t know that until just now when I looked it up. I thought it was just an interesting thing where the game let you blow yourself up. Also, it apparently leaves you with tattered clothes.
I’m reminded of the abyssal words in Elden Ring’s expansion. There are signs that tell you “Don’t let them see you!” and “You have to hide and run!”. You find an area with some tall grass and some creepy eye-monsters. And sure enough, if they see you they come running at you. They’ll knock you over, grab you, and explode your head.
Clearly you’re supposed to sneak by them.
But…
spoilerYou can also parry their attack, and then just kill them. Or just fucking book it and run past them, but that’s way harder.
The last page of this survey is heavy handed and full of leading questions. It feels like you’re less trying to gather research data and more trying to push an agenda; it would not pass scientific review. The fact that I agree with the agenda being pushed doesn’t change my feelings on that.
A better method would have been to ask the question in a neutral way (e.g. ‘Do you believe that storing game cartridges qualifies as preservation?’ or even better, ‘Storing game cartridges qualifies as preservation’ as a statement, with a Strongly Disagree - Strongly Agree scale), then at the end of the survey provide the information you’re providing in the links below each question.
You should try Unciv. It’s an open source Civilisation game. Yes, you can play online too. Not a very good looking game, but still awesome. Works on Android too.
Yeah, its game mechanics are very similar to Civ5, which is still considered one of the high points in the Civ series. And it does reproduce them quite well, so I do think that can give you a good impression, if Civ is for you.
Then again, I do own Civ5, but still end up playing Unciv instead, because I’d rather have my laptop not screaming at me while it runs in the background and I do a couple turns every so often…
The first BloodRayne game (after the intro level, which is plain bad and almost nazi-free) sees a lot of bitten, shot, dismembered, burned, possessed and exploded nazis.
Honestly the gameplay is a bit clunky even for its time, but if what you need is dead nazis then it very firmly ticks the box.
It’s a shame, because I liked it more than Monster Hunter, but it’s always online, so it’s inevitable that eventually it stops making money, and the next step is that it disappears forever.
I played it on release and it was a fun time with friends. A few years back Phoenix Labs was bought out by another company, and it was all downhill from there. It really is a shame, Dauntless was a neat game.
I tried it at one point before trying any Monster Hunter games, and I found it really boring. I was legitimately getting drowsy when fighting the second monster and found it much easier to just chug a potion, rather than try to dodge its attacks. Monster Hunter World, on the other hand, was exhilarating from the first large monster you hunt. So… did Dauntless get better as you progressed?
It just got into the core fight, upgrade, fight loop way faster, without any of the tedious mechanics that I didn’t like from Monster Hunter, that I find boring. I played right around its launch on Epic, so who’s to say if we even played the same game, with the way these games can change over time?
Well we’ve had a couple Jedi RPG-lites in the Fallen Order series.
But nothing quite like KotOR I’ll give you that. They just had incredible atmospheres on each planet. I loved the city planets the most, like Taris, Nar Shaddaa, and Manaan.
idunno, to me the heavy reliance on platforming and metroidvania-style traversal far outweighs any superficial RPG elements in those games. I just get annoyed rather than immersed in the game.
Emulators are where it’s at on Android, at least for me. There’s a handful of good native android games but you can play so so many fantastic old games using emulators.
True. But it’s an introduction to a genre that is very satisfying for the people that do enjoy it. But yeah, I haven’t played it for years and haven’t looked at the current price tag
This is awesome. He said indeed also that he had himself a lot of fun designing levels and places for video games, so he though making a video game out of the very process of designing a level would be cool.
A project from Will Wright that always fascinated me is SimAnt, a game from 1991 where you build an ant colony.
I remember finally getting my hands on the editor for the Build engine after a few years of making maps in Doom and Heretic and had thought 3D level design was only something super geniuses could do… Until Hammer showed it was just the garbage UI/UX of Build lol
I’m glad that when I made my high school for Counter-Strike, it was back in 1.6 and not more recently. Heard about a kid who did the same for CSGO just a few years ago and he got expelled and I think he was arrested because they saw it like “terrorist planning” or some bullshit…
Subjectively at least - and this might be rose-tinted glasses influencing my judgment - it feels like it was more common, that certain genres were almost expected to come with an accessible level/map editor. I think I spent more time with the one from Age of Empires than the actual game.
I mean the point of all rating systems in the US was fear of government regulation of content and having to fight that particular legal battle. It basically exists because moral busybodies were upset about Night Trap, Mortal Kombat and Doom.
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