Here’s an RPG that I haven’t seen listed yet- Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. I spent a LOT of hours on this one back in the day (circa 2001, by Sierra-Online and Troika Games)
Yes, though it’s mostly been my partner that has been playing! She’s gotten into a gameplay loop of gearing up, heading to the furthest teleport point, exploring until she finds the next, and coming back to re-equip and work on the base stuff. mid-30s level I think, the base is pretty neat too
Yeah, I played the hell out of gta 3, San Andreas and vice city… But 5 felt very boring. I can’t really nail why but it got to a point where I tried to force myself to play before giving up.
Similar story with RDR, I played the original and the zombie dlc, loved both, the sequel just didn’t do much for me
Never liked GTA games. I find them very repetitive and boring. However, I fucking LOVE Saints Row 4 which I think of as comedy-GTA. Had so much fun pissing around doing insane shit on SR. It’s a shame the franchise died.
The universe is great but why would I feel bad about bandits not being able to be bandits anymore!? Still there is a lot of potential in that wild west universe.
GTA5. I loved the 4th one but not really liked the 5th one. I guess I can’t understand why you have to be a bad guy in these games and I’m getting too old for that.
Assassin’s Creed after the second one. The plot lost me and I don’t think there is a plot anymore.
MGSV. I loved the first 4 MGS and hated that one as it had no good story…
You can’t understand why you need to be a bad guy in a game called Grand Theft Auto, where the main focus of the series is stealing cars and building a criminal empire?
To be fair, in many of the GTA games, you’re not a bad guy. Sure, you break the law; but in almost every instance, the law is super corrupt anyway and you almost always end up working for said corrupt cops at some point because they have you by the balls.
Vice City is the only one I can’t really find any justification for the protagonists actions other than greed; and that one’s story is basically Scarface where you’re playing as Tony Montana.
To be fair, in many of the GTA games, you’re not a bad guy.
I've played Vice City, 4 and 5 and every one of them started out with the main character(s) being a bad guy who is just a little less evil than the people around them, but still willing to kill to get what they want.
4: Niko grew up as a child soldier and has basically been under the thumb of mob bosses his whole life. It’s also the ONLY game where you actually have choices in many cases to not kill someone as part of his revenge story (he wants to find and kill the man who sold out his unit in some war and got all his friends killed).
5: Franklin used to be a car thief, and has since gone straight as a repo man. His dumbass friends, along with Micheal and Trevor, get him caught up in all sorts of bullshit he doesn’t necessarily want to do, but doesn’t really have much choice. Micheal is also an ex-criminal trying to go straight, but having a much harder time at it than Franklin. His hot headedness is what got them into major trouble prior to Trevor’s arrival. Trevor is not only a bad guy and a psychopath, he could be considered the main villain of the game. Most of the plot revolves around Micheal trying to hide the truth from Trevor, because he knows Trevor is a fucking maniac and will possibly kill him and his entire family because he sold him out to the cops when they were bank robbers and Micheal wanted out of that life.
San Andreas: CJ is an ex-gang member who comes home to attend the funeral of his mother who was recently murdered. Things start out with him simply wanting to bring the killer to justice, and gets swept up in more gang violence, police corruption and even government conspiracies.
They’re as much bad guys as John Wick or John McClane or Arnold Schwartznegger in pretty much any of his 80’s and 90’s action films.
Being an ex criminal who is trying to reform after armed robberies, but still committing new crimes, is still being a bad guy. Choosing not to kill people doesn't make someone not a bad guy when they still continue to commit crimes as part of the game.
Painting the targets of their crimes as worse doesn't make them not bad people.
I totally agree with MGS5. I just could not get in to the game, I barely felt like I was playing an MGS game. It felt like Ghost Recon or some Ubisoft collectathon game, with just such a lackluster story.
Online games that let you talk to strangers aren't great when you're a guy either. Not because of targeted harassment, but because you often enough just end up with people screaming into the mic or repeating the N word over and over again for no reason. The last time I turned on voice chat with strangers was 7 years ago, with PUBG, and I quickly turned it back off. (It feels wrong that that game is somehow 7 years old.)
I’m sorry but it is definitely nowhere as close as the kind of harassment women receive. They have to deal with insults based on their gender, sexual harassment, digital stalking outside of games, etc
I didn't mean to imply that it's close, only that it's already awful enough that I'm not about to run some experiment for how much worse it can be. It's already an activity so bad that I haven't engaged with it in years.
MS Solitaire, Space Pinball, and Minesweeper come to mind. They were not my favorites, but I know a few people who have a few hundred hours on one or more of those.
For me it's C&C Generals Zero Hour. I have had a copy since it released in 2003, it still works, and I still play it in single player mode at least once a week. It's great because it does not require a huge time commitment and campaign missions take about an hour or less to complete. To me it's one of the best RTS style games out there. My second favorite? C&C Red Alert 2 and Yuri's Revenge.
I have also very much enjoyed the Assassin's Creed series up to AC Odyssey.
Seconding the other response. This page should have everything you need to get the game into an optimal, playable state. Like a breath of fresh air when I launched it again. Brilliant work by those involved in the fixes.
I feel like these conversations get dominated by games with the fewest explicit flaws rather than the ones that have the most to offer but it’s my firm belief that no piece of art can be truly great which is not also kind of annoying. Not because annoyingness is inherent to greatness but because greatness and annoyingness are both the products of an underlying willingness to take creative risks.
So in that spirit, my answer is Steambot Chronicles.
Nobody’s ever heard of it; I’ve been singing its praises since 2006, and I’ve never met another person in real life who’s heard of it. It’s an amazing game set in a slightly-steampunk world where cars have only recently been invented, but giant steam-powered mechs were invented around the same time as well. The story’s interesting, but the real fun comes from how much freedom the game gives in how you want to play it:
You can customize your character’s clothes, you can be a good guy, you can be a jerk who charges his friends for every little favor, you can just straight-up be a villain, you can hustle pool, you can play in a band with a bunch of different instruments, each with their own mini game associated with playing them, you can extort or save an orphanage, you can buy and decorate an apartment, then play a dating sim with some of the characters, and that’s all before you factor in the giant mech, which you can customize with a bunch of different pieces and use to fight in a colosseum, explore ruins for treasure, excavate fossils to save a museum, fight giant bosses, transport goods and passengers, and even turn it into an airplane to fly around in.
And that’s all in a PS2 game! Sure, all of the features are limited by both the hardware and the inclusion of so many other features, but they’re all fun, and the graphics look great. I rarely play any game more than once, and I’ve played this game well over a dozen times. It’s helped by the different endings depending on how you play your character, but even the parts that are the same between playthroughs are still fun every time. It’s my favorite game of all time by a huge margin.
It’s kinda insane how much people dismiss “System Shock.” It’s a serious bedrock of a title, so much of what we take as a given of games was really pioneered by LookingGlass. I think a big chunk of that was due to the gameplay not really holding up to modern times, but hopefully now that Nightdive’s remaster is out, more people can experience it and realize just how much of the game holds up.
Probably a close second is the original “Half-Life”, in terms of really cementing the story-based first person shooter, but I don’t think anyone is going to call Half-Life snubbed.
I loved the first level of System Shock, now that it's been modernized. Then I got to the second level, and resources were no longer scarce, and it didn't appear to be shaking up the formula from level to level, so now it feels like Doom with an inventory system rather than the games that took inspiration from System Shock.
Half-Life is still pretty great, but as far as organically teaching the player, it's far behind even its own sequel. There are a lot of cheap deaths that you just have to save scum your way through. My go-to example is that when Half-Life 1 introduces a sniper enemy, you see a hole in the wall that could look like a sniper's nest if I told you that they existed in the game and if you squint at it a little bit, so you just get shot in the back. In Half-Life 2, you emerge from Ravenholm, and a combine sniper with a laser sight is clearly trained on some escaping zombies, so that you know that snipers in sniper's nests are now a thing you'll have to contend with, and you get to observe it safely once before dealing with them in the game. That kind of thing. 90s PC games seemed to be worse at this than their successors and console games at the time.
I liked the price point of the PS5 vs getting a solid gaming PC.
Returnal is one of my favorite games of the last few years.
Demon’s Souls is a delight for the eyes, as well. And I loved being able to replay such a classic PS3 game, even if Bluepoint modified the art direction from the original in certain ways.
FF16 was incredible, I don’t care if they trimmed down the jrpg elements
Sony seems content sending many of its exclusives over to PC after a few years, which I’m grateful for. So if you’ve got a PC I wouldn’t see a huge need for a PS5.
Good point, but Returnal is on PC and you can play with mouse kB, Demon Souls is a remaster of something I played on PS3 which blew my mind then. And FF16 has mixed reviews. I’m more into FF7 part 2, but the complete dlc edition will eventually reach PC as well.
I agree partially. For indie devs: get the game directly from the dev if possible, never get the codes, because the dev doesn’t really get money for those.
With AAA games, the picture is different. The business model for most has now pivoted to be about extracting money to the point where its absurd. And for them, I have absolutely no qualms with taking advantage of their bad business decisions.
It was a return to nostalgia for me. My wife bought this for me for Christmas. I was worried that I would lug into a very dated game, however:
The gameplay is so exquisite and the track design so carefully thought out that it’s really an exhilarating game. The tracks never get boring because they sprinkle in just enough variation and style to keep them engaging. The tricks you can pull in a podracer do not break suspension of disbelief the way normal car games do when pulling amazing stunts. The flow is smooth and fluid even now.
Between the minimap, rearview, braking, air breaking to sustain airtime and cushion landings, self-determined boosting (rather than relying on external powerups or boost zones), and repair management you’re never not adjusting to something. The game keeps you busy while you’re flying along the track.
To boot, the obstacles and shortcuts are carefully distributed and used, playing into the themes of the tracks. Most are small influences, but useful or interesting. One track will force you to reconsider your playstyle for it, however. Despite that it’s not so jarring that you want to stop playing.
You also get a bevy of racers to choose from and the ability to buy and juggle upgrades and pit droids keeps your gameplay evolving. You can even be rewarded for being a skilled player by adjusting the finish placement payouts.
Unfortunately due to careful planning and purchasing, as well as a better sense of how to play as an adult, the game has some shortcomings. Instead of being neck and neck, I was regularly 7-12 seconds ahead of the second place racer, regularly unable to see them in my rearview. A complete lack of a story mode and a low difficulty bar meant I was done in three days even with limited play time and inconsistent access. While this could have been saved with an Online mode added, I still had fun completing Tournament mode and would gladly give this to anyone who wants high-velocity adrenaline with more complex mechanics than your average racing game.
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