The one that sticks out in my mind is the original BioShock. Spoilers if you haven’t played it.
BioshockThe first thing that happens is a voice over the intercom asks, “Would you kindly pick up that weapon.” And of course you do it, or the game does not progress. The voice is very polite and resonable, helping you navigate this dank maze of horrors. “Would you kindly open that door?” “Would you kindly kill that monster?” The calm manners contrast starkly against the modern horrors you’re experiencing in the game. Of course every request seems like a great idea at the time, and of course the game ends if you fail.
Then halfway into the game, you finally meet the man behind the voice and he explains that you are a mind-controlled slave, conditions to obey any command that begins with “would you kindly…” He’s trying to destroy the tyranny of the system and commands you to kill him, sacrificing himself to free you from the control phrase. The “tutorial” seemed like it was just helpful instructions, but you didn’t really have a choice, did you? The majority of players just followed those instructions without question, never considering whether they were good choices or moral actions. And could you say no? Without the wrench, you can’t survive the first attack. Without opening the door, you remain in the first room forever. Your world is pre-ordained and tightly controlled. How much free will do you have in the game and outside of it? At what point do you stop making decisions and start following orders? And when can you stop again?
I was going to mention Bioshock too, but what I love about it is the voiceovers never pause gameplay. The worst tutorials are the ones that make you sit through cutscenes that are longer than you want to sit through.
I agree, but mostly because I dislike roguelikes. They get too repetitive and turn into a slog, and the success of your runs is often entirely dependent on which items you find.
I’d much rather have a tight, concise game with handmade maps. IME, roguelikes just pull the old NES/SNES trick of “well we can’t fit more data on the game cart, so just make the game harder to force players to replay it over and over again. That will artificially inflate the game length.”
Bastion and Transistor don’t need sequels, but I do wish they’d stop with the roguelikes.
Thats really not what roguelikes are. They wouldnt be one of the most popular genres ever if the base was laziness. Its more like being able to focus fully on the mechaincs/gameplay instead of spending countless hours designing worlds that either end up feeling repetitive anyway or you need to spend another few chunks of countless hours to make it feel good.
Besides, Hades is by faaaaaar their most successful game, it would be objectively stupid not to keep going with that at least for a while.
I remember trying the demo to Homeworld when I was a kid, it came with one of those old school PC GAMER demo CDs. I think I was too young to understand how to play it effectively, but still loved it because I found the ambience of the experience so memorizing while hyper-cozy. Would you say it she’s well as something worth going back and playing now, and what of the sequel(s)?
Roller Coaster Tycoon 1. (2 was weaker without OpenRCT2, the real masterpiece, but idk if unfinished projects should count or not)
Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tournament 1999 GOTY, Worms Armageddon, SimCity 3000 Unlimited, Forza Horizon 2 / Motorsport 3, Need for Speed Underground 1, Clonk! Rage, Metal Gear Solid 1/2/3, Ace Combat 4, Okami, Tokyo Jungle, Zelda BOTW, Mario Odyssey, Sven Co-Op, Killing Floor 1, Final Fantasy 7, LISA: The Painful, Everhood 1, Deus Ex 1, Left 4 Dead 1/2, Portal 2, Battlefield Bad Company 2… Champions of Norrath and Return to Arms, Diablo 1, Baldur’s Gate 3 makes the list…NIER both games. Planet MiniGolf.
@PerfectDark I only recently cames across with project and it looks amazing - like a Jellyfin for games. I only wish there was plugin support for Retroarch/Lutris or something similar rather than needing to rely on EmulatorJS.
I love the work you've done sitting down with the team and it's definitely convinced me to put this one down as the next of my ever growing number of services going onto my homelab cluster.
As an aside, I also wanted to thank you for your writing in general. I used to do a lot of writing (heck, I did three quarters of a journalism degree a lifetime ago), and the effort and quality you put into this stuff has definitely started that itch in me again...
As an aside, I also wanted to thank you for your writing in general. I used to do a lot of writing (heck, I did three quarters of a journalism degree a lifetime ago), and the effort and quality you put into this stuff has definitely started that itch in me again…
Please do!!!
I’d love to read more from ‘our’ circle of people. I find there’s…not enough, which is (in part, anyway) why I like to try my best at sharing this kind of thing. Especially in an atmosphere where short videos are consumed like crazy, where A.I. can slap together (poorly) someone’s writing, and where the big sites are just click-bait or begging for subscriptions and support.
IDK, I’d love to read whatever you’d be writing!
And thank you so much for writing this, I’m gonna link the RomM team to a new convert :P
I only wish there was plugin support for Retroarch/Lutris or something similar rather than needing to rely on EmulatorJS.
We integrate for now with playnite (lutris for windows) and any handheld that can run muOS or Portmaster, but Lutris integration is on the list! Sadly, retroarch doesn’t have a plugin system, so for now that’s discarded
archive.org has old media of all sorts including game magazines, demos trailers and manuals.
a lot of video material has been uploaded to youtube, that was formerly hosted elsewhere. hell i’ve watched the old eoLithic frag movie from like 2002 a week ago.
vimm’s lair is also worth a visit if your are looking for old game manuals.
Yeah I’ve sometimes used all those sites at some point, but they’re so vast (or have only manuals, like vimm’s lair). I was interested in finding something a bit more curated and game-oriented.
Nintendo is a terrible, anti-consumer company. Unless you simply can’t control yourself when it comes to their first party franchises, the Steam Deck is far and away the better choice.
ALL the gaming console companies are, INCLUDING steam once gaben dies. Even currently you dont actually own your games on steam like you would a physical copy, you have to download a crack to play your steam games without steam.
You are right. Unless the world starts to enshrine digital ownership laws very, very soon, things will get bad. They already are bad, but they could be, and will be, far worse in the not-to-distant future.
True, but Steam deck lets you boot into the Linux desktop environment of the os and you can do whatever you want with it. I have installed games and emulators outside of steam on mine pretty easily.
You could probably even put a different Linux OS on it entirely if you wanted to.
That control over the platform was the biggest selling point for me. More control even than the windows based handhelds.
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