Honestly 5 had a lot going for it. It removed radio tower puzzles. It way cleaned up on absurd collectaton mechanics of 4, which had gone way too overboard. The survialist bunkers were a neat mechanic to replace a lot of collectaton stuff. I actually enjoyed the side games like the fishing. The gunplay and the customization was iterated on and improved. The editor where you could make your own missions and post them online was really cool (I made a lot of super complicated stealth missions).
The vibe of the game was pretty good, and the villains were engaging enough. It’s really just the main plot that falls to pieces and only at the very end does it become impossible to ignore how dumb it is.
I think that in mechanical design, 5 is a straight improvement on 3 and 4.
Master of Orion I loved I and II. The third apparently bombed and reboots have failed.
Sim City I mean the real Sim city as Maxis would have made it. Not a cash grab, not a mobile game, not a “city painter” where any simulation takes a back seat to decorating with DLC assets.
Super Mario RPG no those other, spiritual successors do not count. They are fine games on their own but not the same.
Lost in Blue not the fanciest games, but I enjoyed them. There are plenty of modern games in the genre, but I haven’t found one that quite fits…
Yes. Please.
What’s insane to me is that they are still regularly updating the game. How they can do that with 1.5 monthly players is a mystery to me. But props to them for sticking with a game for so long.
Valve doesn’t want to make a buy to play game unless it’s something that pushes the medium forward somehow, which is the only reason Alyx was made. A PvP moba can be a source of continued revenue like all the other games they still support (and one they don’t).
Earth Defense Force. You can probably get 4.1 on a sale really cheap and that could be a decent introduction to the series as a whole, it also has the best overall story tone in my opinion, made of 110% grade B cheese
If you two enjoy it and don’t feel burnt out, you can later get EDF 5, which has several QoL updates compared to 4.1, but tends to have a higher price.
This 100% it’s so fun to laugh at how ridiculous the story and gameplay is with a friend. Plus each class truly feels unique in how you play them, so you have 4 play styles to choose from.
Dune II - basically the grandfather of every RTS game out there (and incidentally very, very different from Dune I): opposing forces, resource collection, tech tree, fog of war, et cetera. Or perhaps it was (not World of) Warcraft, it’s been too long and memory gets fuzzy.
Wolf3d is an evolution of Hovertank 3D, which had flat shading for walls, floors, and ceilings. Wolf3d then has textured walls but still flat shading on the floors and ceilings. Some other games came out after Wolf3d that had textures floors and ceilings while id worked on Doom.
Doom not only had textured everything, but also stairs. Trick was, you couldn’t develop a level that had a hallway going over another hallway. Not enough computer horsepower yet to pull that off. This is sometimes called “2.5D”.
Quake brings everything together. Everything’s texture mapped, your levels have true height with things built over other things, and the character models are even fully 3d rendered.
While some might not consider it a game mechanic I certainly do, as gaming the proceduraly created levels is a core part of certain games, see mapping tactics in Diablo 2 for example as you use knowledge of procedural generation to reduce the time to find and kill bosses!
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