As a counterpoint to most of the cynicism here, this is how the company I now work for formed. Caveats include: the founder had a lot of money because he had previously worked for a big name Internet company when it was a startup, and we spend almost all of our time as contractors for other studios rather than developing in-house IP.
Play what you enjoy. The old games can look better because you skip through to the best ones over the last 50+ years. Many were buggy, had terrible controls or were just boring. You’re probably not wasting your time on those.
Half Life was always about pushing the boundaries of gaming. The first Half Life with their combination of story telling in a 3D shooter environment was absolutely at the sharp end of the field at that time. If you’ve seen the Black Mesa documentary you’ll know why HL2 was such a hit and how it was revolutionary at that time. After that they did some DLC, but Valve wasn’t happy with what they were doing. It wasn’t groundbreaking, it was just creating content for the sake of content. As they didn’t need any more money from creating games, they opted to not create HL3. It wasn’t till VR became more mainstream they again tried to do something at the sharp end of the field, by creating HL Alyx.
I don’t know what would prompt them to ever make a HL3 if such a thing even exists.
It was, devs just realized they don’t have to break the content up into episodes or actually complete the first part they release, and can call it early access instead.
The real problem is that you can’t create content fast enough to reach the cadence that you’d want with episodic content. Even a lot of TV shows have shifted away from predictable scheduling since Valve tried this experiment (and TV, largely, got better since then too).
TOTK overtook BOTW as my favorite because there is just so much to do. It’s one of the things I loved about BOTW, and they somehow managed to cram even more into TOTK.
Before BOTW, Ocarina of Time was my favorite Zelda game.
I think my first was Majora’s Mask (I joined the N64 age late) and I’m the same. I wasn’t even committed to buying “new Zelda” until I saw they were upping the difficulty and having players be more self-reliant, and I loved it. I still can’t categorize the exact mode of fun people associate to “dungeons” compared to wide-open exploration.
It’s the same type of microtransactions that they had in Resident Evil 4 Remake, so it’s probably not so much a test as a limit they found where backlash is small enough that it still makes sense. But there are 2 big differences with Dragon’s Dogma 2.
They fucked up the PC port.
They increased the base game price.
Anyone that tries to justify microtransactions in a paid game is a moron. They were literally introduced in free to play games to finance the game development. In paid game, it’s just pure greed.
I mean also it just seems like a case of normalization. You start out with slow meaningless MTX then you move it more and more. Hell its a bit odd since I'm glad there was some outrage over the MTX in this game but as you said its most likely due to the increase to $70 usd which is a slap in the face to deal with MTX in a fucking single player game but Capcom is one of the shittiest companies when it comes to dumb/pointless MTX.
Monster Hunter, Devil may cry, Dead Rising, and Resident Evil all have this kind of shit with very little peeps about it. So you basically hit the nail on the head on this on why there was such a big outrage this time around. Also I'm really surprised fucking Street Fighter doesn't, the literal poster child of pointless/odd additions which in a funny way has actually only gotten better in the digital age. I'm not a big fighting game fan but season passes have sort of solved having so many fucking editions of a single game. Like holy shit there were 5 fucking versions of Street Fighter 2 in a span of 3 years. 3 versions of SF3 in 3 years.
Edit: marked by bold, I was tired when writing this comment and seems I just forgot to finish my full thought before posting.
This is it, notice how Google Trends[1] shows a rise in “30 year old boomer” not long before “boomer shooter” becomes more commonplace. It’s just the whole applying “boomer” to things like being stuck in their ways or boomer-like behavior, rather than age, that took off a few years back.
Might be worth cleaning the computer if you haven’t in the last few months. If you’re unfamiliar with the process check out some YouTube videos on it, this is as mandatory as changing the oil in a car regularly.
There’s tools like cpuid that can indicate if throttling is occurring.
Sorry, can’t tell, it was in some sort of gaming room so I don’t have access to the computer in question but I assume it might be this since the game goes all over the place with the destructions
Possibly, but more likely the computer was just in need of some cleaning.
My friend plays Helldivers 2 on his laptop with integrated graphics on medium and hits 30fps. Any CPU from the last 8 years should be enough.
For the finals, yeah maybe you need something more powerful than that, but not by much. A 2070 is a fantastic GPU, it would be pretty weird to have a GPU from 2018 but a CPU from way earlier.
Disks are for games I want to be able to pull out of a box 10 years from now and go “oh man I remember this”. I have the box from a DSi that I filled with GBA games, and a shelf for Switch and PS4 games that, when they’re retired for something else, it’d be nice to come back to once in a while. My daughter has gotten into my GBA games lately, so that’s been nice.
PC games, they’re so much more available. Steam is steady, GOG is steady, I feel I can leave it to them to keep and I’ll have any particularly treasured games 10 years from now, anyway.
I recently redownloaded Driver Parallel Lines some 14 years after I bought it. PC is doing so much better than consoles on keeping things backwards compatible - imagine a PS5 casually letting you play PS2 or PS3 era games at no extra cost!
Please Don’t Touch Anything. What genre does it even belong in? It would have been a flash game if made 10 years earlier. You’re left at a console with a single large red button, and told to wait for a minute and don’t touch anything. Depending on how you interact with this console, there are many different things it can do/behaviors it can have, and your goal is to find all the different endings. It was entertaining, I don’t need to own it anymore.
Shenzhen I/O and TIS-100. Both Zachtronics assembly-em-up games, which…I don’t think there’s absolutely zero replayability, because you might redo the level you just did or go back to an earlier one with a solution you just learned from a later level, but I don’t know finishing these games feels less like beating Bowser at the end of Super Mario and more like graduating from high school. I’m done with that phase of my life and I can now move on.
Antichamber. The video game equivalent of a Piet Mondrian painting. It’s an abstract and brain knitting non-euclidean first person puzzle game that uses its surreal mechanics as a metaphor for the journey of life itself, and halfway though you get a gun that shoots cubes and it turns back into a video game. A lot of the actual impact of the game comes from how it comments on the epiphany you just had, and that effect is spoiled somewhat by “Oh I remember this part.” I will note there is a speedrunning community for this game.
Firewatch. There are some games where you’ll watch a Let’s Play, decide you want to have a go, so you’ll buy and play the game. Not Firewatch; a Let’s Play gives you 96.4% of the experience. It’s a walking simulator that probably should have just been a short film. I’m not even convinced it is a “video game” because…how do you play it well or poorly? Like do we need a new term like “narrative software” or something?
I liked firewatch, even though I usually dislike walking simulators. It really was a good mesh of dialogue and voice actors, unlike others where the dialogue just drags.
Interactivity really helps relate to the character you’re playing even if you’re not making any actual choices. And like you said, the dialogues are done pretty well to be enjoyable and not annoying. I liked Firewatch a lot.
So did I, which is why I listed it among good games that have no replay value. I enjoyed the thing that it is, I appreciated the visual style, it’s well performed…it’s one of the better walking simulators. The ending is controversial, which I take to mean it’s a work of art.
Firewatch is more in the visual novel category. I did in fact give it a replay with completely different choices to see how it changed things, and was disappointed to find that all choices are merely for aesthetics and make zero difference in the plot. However it’s a well-made enough game (especially dialogue and voice acting) that it was still kinda fun to play again.
I was going to write anti chamber, because I never want to play it again, but %'s 30-90 of the way through the game I was itching to start over. It had me so hooked, but then the ending just took the wind out of the sails so hard. Heck maybe 10-98% of the game had me itching to replay it.
When I think back on my time with AntiChamber, I don’t really think about the ending. I really think of the beginning up through getting the green gun. It starts leaning farther into the direction of Talos Principle or Portal at that point.
To me the game was about the experience of coming to terms with this strange new world you’ve found yourself in, and the THIS IS AN ALLEGORY wall tiles. It’s impressive how long the developer managed to keep that schtick up.
Baba is You - simplistic graphically, but immensely satisfying mechanically. Amazing puzzle game.
Celeste - gorgeous graphics and buttery smooth controls, a platformer that is encouraging and supportive all the way through but ranges from “easy as pie” to “hard as nails” as you progress. One of the most satisfying games to complete every level for. One of the best soundtracks ever. Trans rights!
Fez - another simple-ish at face value platformer game, but this time with puzzles as the main thread instead of action. Super satisfying puzzles and an amazing soundtrack.
Omori - an RPG which eventually deals with some heavy subject matter but does so tastefully and maturely. It’s a splendid story either way you spin it, and lots of fun.
Undertale - same as above, but shorter and more “punchy”. One of the best soundtracks in gaming, and a cast of characters you’ll come to feel like your family. It’s quite subversive for the genre, so it’s a fun experience. It has an episodic sister game Deltarune which is still in the works.
Void Stranger - a block-pushing styled game, but incredibly subversive for the genre. Gorgeous visuals, great soundtrack, and some truly mindbending puzzles. It gets super hard, but it’s also super satisfying to beat.
Stardew Valley - cozy farming game, really just oozing passion and love from the developer(s). Lots to do, many unique people to meet and things to see. Pretty graphics and stunning soundtrack. Fall in love with an NPC, marry them if you want. Or don’t do any of that. Make your own fun in this one, there’s a bunch of aspects to get into.
Citizen Sleeper - not technically 2d but may as well be. A gripping, beautiful sci-fi story, told in a tabletop RPG style. You won’t be able to help falling in love with the rag-tag character cast, and shedding a few tears along the way. It’s very down to earth but makes me long for the stars at the same time.
Ori and the Blind Forest/Ori and the Will of the Wisps - a drop dead gorgeous, lovingly crafted metroidvania with one of the best soundtracks you could ever ask for. Platforming is gorgeously refined, and the sequel improves upon the first game in many ways.
Hollow Knight - I could copy paste the majority of the Ori blurb here, however this game has a deeper focus on the deep, winding, sprawling exploration, and combat aspects. Gripping soundtrack and stunning stylised visuals. You will, however, join the wait for Silksong with the rest of us, which drives many people mad!
I definitely recommend Baba Is You and FEZ as well. Similarly to FEZ there is a mobile game Monument Valley (and Monument Valley 2) which I adore. It’s spendier in $/time, but I find is highly worth it.
Bastion isn’t a 2D game, but I’d like to recommend it while I’m at it, it’s play is perhaps close enough, and it’s stunning.
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