🤓 The Talos Principle 2 is taking up my tiny slices of gaming time. Tons of puzzles to solve, a really engaging story to unfold and the music is just beautiful. If you played the first edition (from 2009) it’s totally like that and more. I’m, only halg-way through it but yeah, it’s great and I can’t wait to see what comes next.
If I had been the one to decide what features this sequel should have, I never would have considered including a playable New Jerusalem or having NPC companions or any of the new stuff. And if you had asked me what I thought about those features before the game came out, I would have said it sounds like they don’t understand what people liked about the first game.
But this game surprised me in numerous ways and I honestly loved every hour of my playthrough.
It’s the story of a mother in a post-apocalyptic environment having to care for her daughter and village while doing the war outside.
Everything, art, music, is a masterpiece. The music is just extremely good.
Outside of special zones, there are 20 you have to find, and it cycles between them. All 20 are voiced, with words or humming.
The story is good, and is extremely anti-war.
The gameplay feels amazing. It can be hard at first, but I quickly learned how to control the bike and and to do backflips and frontflips at the right time to reload guns and the pary.
The main character laika is one-shot, but the game isn’t very punishing. The respawn points aren’t too far away from each other, and they are optional. When you die, you loose a pouch with the currency, and can get it back.
There are some little issues with the game tho. The ending seems to be a bit rushed. The ending boss isn’t that difficult, and there were some cuts it seems.
But overall these little issues aren’t that bad, and the game is still amazing for an indie.
If shooters, beer visuals, and light swearing (think damn, shit, the voicelines are pretty rare and can be disabled with mods) are alright for your kid, check out deep rock galactic. its on steam as well as xbox, and is a 1-4 player coop mining and shooting game where you collect minerals and shoot the ant looking bugs trying to eat you. its incredibly fun and ive sunk over 2500 hours into it without feeling for even a second that any of it was predatory.
I play Fortnite with my kid and some friends. We’ve configured comms so he can only chat with approved friends from RL.
Fortnite has a reputation for getting kids to buy cosmetics, but it isn’t justified. We’ve been playing for a year or so and my guy hasn’t asked to buy anything.
It’s very approachable, so your kid may be able to convince his friends to play too.
Sometimes we just don’t like certain genres. I’ve tried dozens of times to get into rogue likes and I cannot get into them. I enjoyed hades decently enough, and I could get to the boss. But the gameplay loop always gets repetitive for me. It’s weird!
Vampire Survivors - They keep releasing new content, and I keep devouring it. This game is even more addicting than Cracktorio.
The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog - Best April Fools joke this year, and a solid light visual novel in its own right. This was a pleasant surprise.
Remnant II - My choice for Game of the Year this year. TotK let me down, and while BG3 is solidly in the #2 spot I don’t really vibe with it. Remnant II is an excellent sequel that builds on the strengths while fixing the weaknesses of its predecessor. It’s a hell of a game that still manages to stand out in a year stacked with great titles.
Note: I didn’t play AC6 or the new Street Fighter, so I’ve got no opinion on how they match up.
Worst:
Keywe - A puzzle game where you play as Kiwi birds managing a post office in Australia. Not my thing, but my sister likes it and wanted to play the multiplayer with me. We played online and holy hell this game’s netcode is broken. We kept desyncing mid-puzzle and then whoever was hosting would have to finish the puzzle while the other stood and watched because they couldn’t see the actual gamestate. It’s probably a fine game as a solo or local play experience, but it left a sour impression.
Did Remnant 2 feel more unique than Remnant 1? I tried the 1st and fell off in the 2nd world because it all felt too similar with a handful of enemies and procedural chunks. Reluctant to try the 2nd if it’s got the same lack of variety.
I didn’t have an issue with that in Remnant 1, but I think it was improved on that front. There’s more enemy variety, with several fodder mobs and elites with unique gimmicks, and some of the bosses are straight up weird. The maps are still procedurally generated, but there are more types of maps in the pool. They do still feel samey when you get two maps that use the same chunks, but there is less overlap from map to map.
They also made the area progression part of the world proc-gen, so you can encounter the areas in a different order on different play-throughs. That does help keep the replayability fresh, but it doesn’t fix the issue. It just sort of sweeps it under the rug so that it takes more playthroughs to notice.
That approach works for some studios and some game projects but it’s no silver bullet. A lot of times gamers don’t know what they want until it’s handed on them on a silver platter which can make taking the correct kind of feedback really difficult. Sometimes outside influence may also stray the developers from their original vision.
That being said, developing game in complete secrecy for years and expecting it to become a success has pretty much the same chance as winning in a lottery. Getting MVP out there asap to see if the game will receive any sort of traction and feedback is generally the best approach unless it already has an audience (sequel or well known developer). It can be prototype, demo or early access as long as it’s something.
1994 - 1996 and beyond. Originally played on Win98, currently on Win10. Trying out several different CDROMS, but I’ve been testing out an old “Learning in Toyland” CD, but I also have an old “Yukon Trail” CD I’m trying to boot up.
I’ve tried DOSBOX, but I keep getting messages like “requires Windows” or whatnot. Like HOE, I HAVE WINDOWS AND IT DON’T EVEN WORK
Dosbox is for dos games ;) If they ran on Win98 then try them on Win98 again. Get something like Virtualbox and make yourself a Win98 machine to play with.
Seconding the recommendation for Virtualbox. Wanted to play my old Lego Island CD a few years ago and I just booted it up in an old Windows VM. Worked like a charm.
Hilarious to imagine from the perspective of a non tech savy person though: your virtual machine program “something box” is for the other old windows, not the old windows you want. Get this “other box” windows thing to make the right old windows so you can play windows games on your windows pc.
Have you tried installing a copy of Windows in Dosbox, then install the game from there? I remember doing something like that to play the original SimTower.
Very likely the game is 16 bit mode, which is why nothing in Windows 10's compatibility mode is working, as it doesn't support 16 bit programs.
Ahhh....you're trying to play Windows 3.1 games...that's why you're having issues...yeah emulation for Windows 3.1's random differences from Windows 95 and DOS are surprisingly rare still.
There's no dedicated emulator for Windows 3.1 yet. I personally installed a copy onto Doxbox, but it's not a very easy solution.
But I can tell it's 3.1 cause one of those is The Learning Company and the later versions of the Super Solver games have the same issues.
I second the Lego games. Although the older ones (Complete Saga) & Lego Indiana Jones were annoying to play COOP because there’s no split screen.
But Lego Star Wars Clonewars has split screen so you don’t get in the way of each other. I haven’t actually played other newer Lego games but I assume they will have split screen as well.
In our world, the lack of split screen was a feature. It was less co-op as in play together, and more like play as a team. We enjoy fighting about meaningless stuff like whether to collect studs or whether to hurry along. I’d imagine if I tried playing with a sibling, there would be blood.
For me I just found it annoying that whenever we wanted to go in different directions one player would end up getting dragged back by the camera border. So many failed jumps…
But that’s fair, if someone thinks that being able to get in the way of each other and being forced to cooperate better due to it adds to their enjoyment of the game then playing the games without split screen could be preferable.
Dead space? It famously has a hud that’s built into the world rather than being random bars and stuff on the screen. Everything UI related is essentially from an object in the game
Squaresoft, Bioware, and Bethesda are three companies whose logos I once considered a seal of quality. None of the three really exist anymore, although there are new much larger companies using their names.
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