Not exactly the same but sort of related: the first time I played the New Vegas DLC Honest Hearts, I accidentally shot a character that is meant to be a companion, turned him and essentially all quest characters hostile and basically forced the game to direct me from the opening of the DLC to the final mission because I couldn’t do anything to side with anyone. I thought it was the shortest most bullshit DLC with not nearly enough to do for at least a few years before I played it again and realized how much I missed.
Disco Elysium is probably the best implementation of the ‘Fail Forward’ ideology I’ve seen in a game - not ‘Game Over’ per se, because running out of Health or Morale will give you a game over, along with some nonstandard endings, but failing important story-related checks doesn’t lock you out of the story, you’re just encouraged to go explore other parts of the world - raising the skill associated with the check you failed opens it up again, and certain objects, thoughts, or interactions can also open them up again. In the same vein, failing noncritical checks can often lead to more interesting and/or advantageous outcomes than succeeding. As an example:
spoilerOne red check (noncritical, can’t be retried) you make early on is to try to remember your name via Conceptualization. Succeed, and you’ll just admit to yourself that you can’t remember. Fail, and you immediately land on ‘Raphael Ambrosious Cousteau.’ You can then spend the rest of the game referring to yourself as RAC, with humorous reactions from pretty much everyone who hears it, and if you do it enough, you unlock a thought that raises your Savoir Faire and Espirit de Corps skills.
Prince of Persia (2008) is a game where you can’t die. You get a companion, Elika, early on and whenever you are on the verge of dying, she jumps in and rescues you. They even use that mechanic for a little puzzle later in the game where you have to find the real Elika out of a bunch of illusions and the solution is to
spoilerjump of the nearest ledge towards your death, real Elika jumps in and saves you.
All the Wing Commander games featured branching story lines, where things would take different paths depending on if you lost or won a mission. Even if you got yourself killed you still got a funeral cutscene ending your story instead of just a Game Over screen.
Eurofighter Typhoon had an interesting concept where you took controller over multiple pilots at once across a lengthy war campaign. You could switch between them freely at any time, the remaining ones switch to AI when not controlled by you. If one got killed, injured or ended up as POW, you could just switch to another one and continue as usual. The missions you would have to fly were dynamically generated based on how the war progressed and your success and failures. Basically a flightsim with an RTS running underneath, along with story cutscenes for some important moments. The game had some rough spots and arguably EF2000 or Falcon 4 did the dynamic war campaign better, but at least on paper what Typhoon was trying to do was really interesting. Rather sad that 20 years later we still hardly ever see games that do the small scale and large scale simulation at the same time.
Here’s a whole bunch of modpack on Curseforge. There’s some more on FeedTheBeast, Modrinth and ATLauncher (I think). The scene is alive and well, although many of the old mods (like buildcraft and industrial craft) have long been replaced by newer mods.
Your best bet on jumping back in is a quest-based pack on a fairly recent version of the game. The last one I played was FTBSkies, which was pretty cool and included questlines for all major mods to guide you.
I’m really excited to sit down and play sea of stars. Probably will be a solid three or four months though. Sorry chain of echoes, I don’t think I’m going to be able to fit you in any time soon.
Command and Conquer 3. I’m not very familiar with the series but I’m enjoying it, at least now that I figured out why the campaign was so hard. Apparently they patched the game balance after release with multi-player in mind and didn’t consider the consequences for single-player. So after a small mod to restore the original resource gather rates, the game is a great time.
As a super casual player, I’m mostly enjoying the spectacle of the campaign. Coming from rts like age of Empires 2, which has a sometimes pretty strict population cap in it’s missions (and also medieval technology), being able to build up an unlimited army of giant tanks and mecha is pretty fun. Maybe that loses its novelty at some point. Speaking of novelties, the fmv cutscenes are an interesting choice. I realize they were a fad when the original game was released, but I respect that they decided to preserve that portion of the series’ identity.
The use of only one resource is strange. It feels like there are only a couple places on the map (the tiberium fields) that actually matter, and the rest is just empty space. I haven’t seen what the multi-player maps look like, maybe they add neutral buildings or something to give the players something to fight over. They’ve been a couple of those so far.
My opinion is also heavily influenced by the fact that the game is from the time before all the modern bullshit with microtransactions and stuff. Like, I paid for a game, and I received an actually complete game that doesn’t try to sell me a bunch more stuff. Wild. Having just moved on from Immortals: Fenyx Rising, which really suffered from being a Ubisoft game despite its charming setting and characters really drives that point home.
I actually am a really big fan of FMV in video games. If that’s a subject that interests you, you should look at the games made by Sam Barlow. His big one recently was Immortality though he kind of made his name with Her Story and The Lies we Tell.
It is still used. There are lots of various hubs, a bunch of niche hubs with content that is almost impossible to find anywhere else, especially if it’s something really old and obscure, not all of them are public. Speaking of clients, try AirDC++ for instance, thats what I use right now
Playing Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. It’s sad, though. I’ve noticed my urge to play the game slowly drop more and more once I realized how much of the map, weapons, and music is borrowed from BotW. Sometimes, it feels like I’m just playing BotW 2.0 instead of a proper sequel. Still, I keep making progress.
Replaying Paper Mario TTYD. I really love this RPG and the Paper Mario series as a whole. Really hope we get a proper RPG for the next game in the series, with partners, badges and all that stuff.
I’m also replaying Mirror’s Edge. One of my favorite games, thanks to the setting and soundtrack. It still looks beautiful, despite it coming out in 2008.
Thankfully I have very short memory, and I played BOTW on launch, so didn’t had any issue with that. Maybe you should take a break, and come back to it later?
Well, whatever new Paper Mario we get, it will be on Switch 2. Let’s see what they do that with it.
Mirror’s Edged is that parkour game, right? Where you are running around on rooftops?
I only played BotW back in 2021, so that’s why I remember so much haha. I guess a break wouldn’t hurt.
Yeah, Mirror’s Edge is that first person parkour game. If you haven’t played it yet, I definitely recommend giving it a shot. I love how the levels flow, and I find myself getting a lot better every time I run through the game.
it feels like I’m just playing BotW 2.0 instead of a proper sequel
Really? Sure, they carried over some assets and the shape of the overworld map is the same… but most of the stuff ON the map, the chasm map, the sky map, cave systems, new abilities, a crafting system that makes the durability mechanic suck less, new characters, new ways of earning korok seeds, the president hudson puzzles, the shrines are all different (and overall more difficult, thankfully) … there’s so much new, unique stuff in this game that it’s sometimes overwhelming to me, and I 100%ed BOTW twice. I think you’re over-fixating on the fact that the games have the same engine.
Yeah but some of that stuff doesn’t really do anything for me. The depths are alright, the sky map is too empty, with most of the islands looking nearly the exact same, the caves all have the same look. The abilities are cool, crafting is cool, new characters are nice. I hate everything about korok seeds, and the Hudson puzzles can easily be cheesed to the point that you can use the same solution for almost all of them.
Ah, well then it sounds like a lot of the new stuff just doesn’t go along with your tastes/play style. Nothing wrong with that. Meanwhile, I can’t help but explore every square inch, so the Korok seeds are a nice bonus for that; and I’m an engineer so I like coming up with crazy alternative solutions to the Hudson puzzles and shrines
I agree. I played the heck out of it and really got my money’s worth, but much of that time spent playing I couldn’t help but feel it would have been better if
A) I hadn’t played BotW
B) I had skipped most of the side questing (except for the sky which was the best parts of the game imo) and just powered through the main story beats.
I felt like I had done all the sky content in my first 1/4 of the game except for the [Spoiler Area] which was a real shame.
I’ve heard nothing but praises for Yakuza’s story thus far. And I’m only a short way into my first game in the franchise, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, and godamn does it live up to the hype. The characters, plot, world, they all are lovingly crafted and fit together so well. After this I’ll be going back to do all the Kiryu games.
I highly highly recommend the entire Yakuza series if you want something story focused, with some caveats.
You’ll hear a lot about all the mini games in Yakuza but the games’ main focus is really the story. The games can take a while until they have introduced everything and you’re completely free to explore the city. Cutscenes and dialogs can be pretty long but they are all really well animated. It can sometimes be like watching a show.
Where I initially ran into issues is that I didn’t expect it to be this story heavy and just wanted to play. I highly recommend playing the whole series on Steamdeck. Since cutscenes can be long, the steamdeck’s pause and resume is really helpful.
Also, play the 2 Judgment games when you’re done with the Yakuxa series. I haven’t made it through 2 yet, but 1 was great.
Exapunks is a programming puzzle game set in a retrofuturistic cyberpunk world with early '90s aesthetic. The tutorial is in a form of an in-world zine. For me it was very immersive.
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