Metal Gear Solid V (on PC with mods that greatly expand/enhance free roam, and add more side ops)
Tomba 1 and 2 (Tombi in the EU)
Chrono Trigger
Megaman Legends (love the sequel, but haven’t ever completed it, life keeps getting in the way)
Castlevania Syphony of the Night
Sonic Adventure (it’s trash, but fun trash, especially with mods)
Sonic Mania, Sonic 3 and Knuckles
Minecraft
Some that I haven’t come back to in a while, but I’m overdue:
Ape Escape
Crash Bandicoot (1-3)
Spyro (1-3)
Digimon World 3
Any of the GBA or DS Castlevanias
Actraiser
Rayman 2
Megaman Battle Network series(3 and 4 are my favorite entries)
Dissidia Duodecim
Zone of the Enders 2
God Hand
Wipeout Pulse/Pure
Pretty much any Kirby game
Most of these games I find just plain fun. Thanks for asking, I was starting to get burned out and not finding stuff as fun, but writing this out has me hankering to revisit some old favorites again.
Capcom is on a roll, almost every single one of their releases has been unanimously praised.
I’m happy for the fans of the IP, I have a few friends who loved DG1 and were waiting for the sequel. I’m also a bit curious about the claims that they improved on the storyline, as it was by far my biggest gripe with the first entry, so much that I never bothered to finish it.
I actually loved parts of the story from 1. Granted, a lot of it was pointless, shallow, needed expansion, better written characters, so on and so forth. But every scene with the dragon was enthralling. A lot of what happened after you beat it was interesting. And idk how to do spoilers here so I’ll be vague, but what happens at the final boss on a second playthrough blew my mind. I had no clue, and it had been hundreds of hours since, so my jaw literally dropped.
Honestly they’ve been on a steady decline in my eyes at least. With each and every new entry they’re becoming more and more like the rest of the Triple-A studios.
Sure many of their games are still decent fun if you can ignore:
Dark patterns
Microtransactions in full priced games
Battle passes
Denuvo
Personally I just can’t as mere existence of these thigns ruins my trust towards these developers/publishers.
Can’t you all complain about games that are out having issues? Like Helldivers 2 and how the lightning gun was shipped in a sorry state and how Arrowhead lied about the flying bugs?
(I kid, this game sounds like a mess and my opinion of Capcom was already pretty bad)
I have a feeling you’ll really enjoy it! DOS1 is also awesome but rough around the edges in comparison. The story is super whimsical though. I really loved the story in dos 1 lol
Ah thanks for the recommendation! Due to kids and life in general I am about 7-8 years behind when it comes to gaming. It’s nice being able to get back to playing every now and then. Also, no need to get latest and pay full price which is also nice.
If only for the soundtrack, it’s worth playing once, at least. It’s so haunting and beautiful. The first time I played DOS1, I knew I would love it the moment I heard the music at startup. RIP Kirill, his music was so beautiful. Also nice they put his music on the piano in a certain evil dude’s house in DOS2!
Maybe I should replay it again. Just like OP I’m having a bit of a BG3 withdrawal issue. RIP Kirill.
Dunno if it’s on sale, but Solasta Crown of the Magister is a great dnd game made by a small studio. It’s much shorter, but imo the general mechanics are really good and the use of height in combat is better than in bg3.
Also not to mention workshop support! There’re a few campaigns that come with the game already, but people can make their own and add them through the steam workshop
As they are a small studio, they did not have the money to buy all dnd licensed content upfront (Wizard if the Coast makes it quite expensive). When the game was a success, they added dlcs for additional races/classes they could now afford.
Lost Valley and Palace of Ice add new campaigns (they are ok but I enjoyed the base campaign more).
If having all the races and classes from official dnd content matters to you, I would recommend the Unfinished Business mod (you can find it on nexusmods). Personnally I played the first campaign with the limited options from the base game and I still had a real blast :)
I’ve read this opinion a few times actually which is great news for me. Bg3 was the game that pulled me back from a long hiatus from gaming and after finishing it I was kinda lost about what to play next. Lookin forward to playing it.
Might be an unpopular take but the Red Dead Redemption 2 campaign. I’ve tried twice to start a second campaign but it’s so slow. The first time around the narrative carries it, so it doesn’t feel so slow. But knowing what happens next takes that away. The worst part is how ridged it is with mission failure/success conditions. It removes room for creative solutions.
This is not to say it wasn’t wonderful to play once. But it plays like they wanted to make a movie not a game.
My biggest complaint with R* games is that they refuse to let players leverage the open world to even a minor extent in their missions. I understand that restrictions are important to telling the story and can even nurture creativity but for as detailed the world and fairly deep their systems are their missions are quite dictatorial.
I couldn’t even finish it once and it took so long to get to where I stopped that I had important bits spoiled by random comments mentioning who dies and whatnot… It was really good for what I experienced but oh my God is it longggggggg.
I still have fun watching other people discover it.
When people are over at my house and we are just hanging around doing nothing I like to put on a game and toss a controller to someone with no explanation and just let them play while everyone watches. Goose Game, Donut County, ABZU and Journey are always a hit even for people that aren’t normally into video games.
It’s a puzzle game of working out how to complete your to-do list, so that the next area unlocks. Beyond its meme status, I do think it’s a very smartly designed puzzler, with lots of experimentation and observation.
I recommend one of my favourite CRPGs of all time: Neverwinter Nights - for the modern hassle-free experience, get the Enhanced Edition. The first single-player campaign is pretty meh by Bioware standards, but the expansion packs (included in the NWNEE) are pretty great. Heard a lot of good about the premium modules (a few of the original premium modules come with NWNEE, the rest are available as DLC).
The official campaigns are set in Forgotten Realms, the same D&D setting as BG3, but you really don't need to worry about diving headlong into horrors. More fantasy vibes and less visceral stuff. (the second expansion pack is a bit more in the direction of subterranean spooks, but not, like, excessively so.)
However, the real big strength of NWN was not the campaigns. It was deliberately designed for player-created adventure modules created with the included Aurora Toolset. There's loads of them and some of them had really great production values and writing. They're currently hosted at Neverwinter Vault and NWNEE also has a custom content browser (though the latter doesn't have much stuff). Custom modules also have a whole bunch of genres and settings, as expected.
Oh and it's a game from 2002 so it runs on any ol' potato. (Well the EE needs a vaguely modernish machine, but not anything unreasonable.)
Its 100% free, so you can play it like a demo until you are either fully in or bored.
It gets a season refresh every 3ish months with an entirely new mechanic, so most experienced players restart it 4 times a year, play a new build, and then stop playing when bored and return at the new season so its always got reasons to peek back in and see if you want to rejoin.
The leveling system is a little daunting at first, but the base game is completely playable newbie blind even if you pick “suboptimally” from the skill tree. If youre too worried about FoMo, there are tons of guides online for builds, both top level and newbie friendly.
The attack/skill system is very interesting and completely moddable, tons of replayablility.
The putt putt line of games. They run on scummvm and my kids love them. Later kings quest, and stardew valley. The lego marvel super heroes on Xbox 360 (I think there’s a pc version) has an entire Manhattan island that they can roam around freely and interact with.
Crosscode is one of my favourite games of all time. It’s an immensely charming action RPG heavily inspired by the 2D Zelda games. It has some absolutely insane combat and surprisingly challenging puzzles. The story is also very good and really touching at times. The devs spent 7 years making this game and I feel like it never got anywhere near the attention it deserved.
It’s just $20 on steam AND it has a free demo, so there’s no reason not to check it out!
I bounced off Crosscode hard. Which sucks because I wanted to love it. The pacing and difficulty were all over the place. And making the puzzle dungeons a race between you and other characters just made me hate them. I want to stop and think! After dying to a particularly nasty boss I was trying to beat as fast as possible so I could maybe eke out a win in the dungeon, I ended up cranking the difficulty all the way down, and was the last out of the dungeon anyway. I put the game down and haven’t looked back. That was about 25 hours in, and nothing of consequence had occurred with the plot by then, anyway. I might go back sometime and see if it gets better, but it left me pretty sour.
I love the entire 16 bit era, and JRPGs, and action RPGs, and Crono Trigger, and difficult games, but Crosscode just took all those elements and somehow made them unpalatable to me.
I think if I have one criticism of the plot is that it takes a while to get going. If I may, I’d recommend you to play thorough it at your own pace, possible also at the lowest difficulty just to experience the story. It’s well worth it just for that.
I can’t even remember any plot. I know I got past some hourglass shaped pyramid and then a few more steps. But it all felt utterly disconnected. I might have actually finished it, but I can’t even recall.
If you play with M+KB, you can aim as good as the game clearly expects you to. But you will rapidly develop RSI from the spam-clicking, nevermind how the melee attack has the weirdest input I’ve seen in a long time.
If you use a controller, most controls work fine, but in return you cannot aim that well. Which is still preferrable, but the game clearly originally built for precise aiming.
Combined with how janky all the enemy attacks and hit boxes are, it just feels frustrating. Plus the difficulty is wild, 90%+ are boringly easy, and then the odd totally normal enemy wipes you in seconds.
It really sucks that you bounced so hard. Some tips in case you ever do want to go back to it:
Enemies are puzzles too. Nearly every single enemy in the game has a specific trick to them that, once you get it down you can beat them much more easily. This includes bosses. Usually this is indicated by breaking the enemy.
Don’t worry about the races. I think I only ever won a single race in the entire game, and it has literally zero consequence other than a couple lines of dialog. It’s purely a feel good thing, and to connect you more with Emily through a friendly competition.
The story can feel a bit confusing and disconnected because there’s 2 stories happening at once: the crossworlds story and the actual story. The actual story only really starts to get serious towards the end, so until then just focus on enjoying the fake-mmo world!
If it’s not for you, it’s not for you and there’s nothing I can do about that, but I really want others to enjoy this game as much as I did because I do believe it’s something special.
Ohhh i just got one that will be really controversial.
I’m not a big fan of Morrowind.
Yeah the world has a very alien style, and the lore is cool. But the actual world feels empty and boring to me. Like IMO the map is way too big for it’s own good.
When wandering around, there’s always a cave or tomb around to explore. But yeah, there aren’t a lot of people out in the wilderness. Just the occasional naked nord or plantation.
bin.pol.social
Ważne