Lots of great suggestions here, but if you’ve never played the original Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros 3, and Super Mario World, you should. There is a reason they’re considered classics and everybody should experience Mario’s roots. My 8 year old plays them every so often and he keeps progressing.
SMB 2 is a good game as well, but it’s quite different from the others. It is the origin of a few series staples, though.
The amount of work he is putting into this is really impressive. Being from the US it kind of sucks to see his play out in every country but ours. Is 'merica just a lost cause or is there something else we can do here?
Most games these days have short marketing cycles. If you’ve played The Outer Worlds or Pillars of Eternity, you’ve got a very good idea of what this game is.
One is a first-person real-time RPG, so if you want to know what it plays like and what the size of that game is, it’s The Outer Worlds. If you want to know what kind of fiction and tone it’s set in, or what the mechanics of certain spells are, your point of reference is Pillars of Eternity.
FYI to everyone: there are several fake “ESA Official” YouTube channels running deepfaked Elon crypto scam streams that claim to be “Ariane 6 Launch Stream”.
They’re nothing new, but sharing in case anyone hasn’t seen it before. Those aren’t real streams!
Classic Doom 1 and 2. There’s gotta be over 100 levels if you count TNT and Plutonia, which I think were sold as Final Doom? Anyway, if you just get the base games for 1 and 2, there are thousands upon thousands of community made maps, including some total conversions, so you can play new Doom content until it physically pains you to continue.
Of course, I feel obligated to mention that even though it would be super easy to pirate the WAD files and play with a free modern source port like GZDoom, like absolutely trivial to find copies of DOOM.WAD and DOOM2.WAD floating around the net, probably showing up easily on Archive.org, but… Um… Where was I going with this? Oh, right, don’t pirate. Cheap on GOG last I knew.
If you like the older Pokemon games and can get the ROMs on your phone, PokeMMO is really cool. It’s an emulator that turns the first 5 generations of games into an MMO where you can take the same character across each region.
There’s a handful of changes to the base game, but most are small: Berry farming is changed, there’s an Exp Share for EVs now, Sweet Scent is used to summon a 1v5 against wild Pokemon… There’s character customization… There’s some QoL stuff like shiny encounters having a sound effect and adding a confirmation box so you don’t accidentally flee, and the stats page for your Pokemon is way more detailed.
For me the way has been using gyro aiming. It provides a mouse-like precision for aiming, which is really good for FPS games. It is supported on Steam nowadays. Of course on Steam Deck it may be not the best option in terms of playing experience, as turning the console also turns the screen.
They key for gyro aiming on a console where the screen is attached, is to get the movement to be as one to one as possible, to make it work as if the screen is a portal into the game world that turns in a matching direction as you move the device.
I had this revelation back with the PS Vita, where Killzone Mercenaries worked this way by default. It was magical for an FPS game to play that well on the tiny vita with its miniature analogue sticks.
The joystick camera input and gyro also worked in concert, I’m fairly certain the game hybridized the input signals such that if you moved the device to correct your aim, that would override any current input signal from the stick, making it possible to correct overshoot and undershoot in a way that almost felt like the console was reading your mind.
I’ve not been able to get that with steam input, but you can get close.
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