I have to upvote your upvote. Subnautica is one of the greatest games ever made. Gave me serious Mal de Debarquement Syndrome when I finally pulled myself away to go to bed.
One thing that kills me are the “its just cosmetics” fellas. While I agree that is is the least worst option for micro transactions but for most games the drip game is half the game. I want to look cool and I want those looks to represent I did something in game.
As a newbie, I was rushing to figure out all the mechanics fast enough to unlock the greenhouse in year 1. It was a bit of a stressful optimization game trying to max out every single day.
Since I unlocked it, cash is rolling in so fast I don’t even know what to do with it anymore. I just hit Spring in t year 2 and it’s really chill, now. I’m thinking of selling most of my animals since It’s repetitive needing to pet them and make cheese/mayo every day. I might just cheat and get a couple auto-petters to make it even more relaxed…
My partner used to be a teacher. There was a period of like a year when she would get home from work looking insanely stressed. Then she’d boot up Stardew Valley on her laptop from the couch and I could see her mood change immediately. She’d play for hours too.
At one point it was like Stardew Valley was her real life while the actual outside world was some horrible nightmare she had to wake up from.
I’ve been having a blast. I’ve played other survival games but they rarely feel interesting to me, I haven’t delved this deep into since Conan Exiles (which now that I think about it also has a mechanic of capturing people to work/defend your base)
There are a few issues I’ve had. The worst are when playing on a dedicated server, I often lose connection and I load back in under the world. The worst is when offline my pals are unable to care for themselves and they’re all weakened and depressed when I log back on, the only solution right now is to put them back in the box before logging off.
I couldn’t get into the souls games themselves but fell hard for Bloodborne and Sekiro. Elden Ring has been hard to get into. The open world really detracts from the game which is disappointing because everything else is really polished.
I also hate souls games and Bloodborne didn’t feel much different.
I think the key issue is that Hidetaka Miyazaki is a masochist and I’m very much not. I don’t enjoy fighting the same boss dozens of times being taken down in 3 hits. Even when I win, I feel more tired than satisfied. I’d rather play a more traditional hack’n slash or some other action RPG where if some boss is too much of a pain I grind a little then stomp them.
I enjoyed Dark Souls 1 and 2 a lot, having played through the first one multiple times. I never tried the others with the exception of Elden Ring, and the difficulty just put me off. Something about the first game made it much more tolerable for me. I think it was the overall speed at which enemies move and their combos being more predictable.
They are extremely tedious, needlessly arduous games.
I think that is in part why I loved them all. It brought me into a different mental state where I wasn’t going to be able to rush. I enjoyed that aspect.
My mind can often wander on to various subjects as well, so there was this perverse meditative aspect because of the tension of knowing that I had to constantly focus on the game or it would just kill me in one of its various, unfair ways.
I don’t know how they all manage to do it but EA, Ubisoft, and Rockstar are all my most hated companies of all time. They can make some good stuff, but I just absolutely hate how they all force people to jump through so much hoops just to play the games you pay them for.
They force you to make accounts with them and use their stupid launchers which never work properly and are just advertisements. There have been so many times I just wanted to play a game and then forgot my password to the account and got locked out or the launcher needed an update and I had to wait like 20 minutes.
Any sort of fighting game if you’re planning to play online. It doesn’t matter how cheap Rivals of Aether or Street Fighter 6 is, if you’re not playing near release you’ll only be fighting against people with 500+ hours of experience.
I mostly agree, but I feel like Street Fighter 6(Going to throw Tekken 7/8 out as an option as well) has a good enough ranking system that you will be able to get people around your skill level years down the line. I didnt jump on Street Fighter 5 till Arcade Edition released, and never had an issue with learning and getting matches in Ranked, and I feel like that will be the same for SF6.
You will have to catch up with knowledge of characters, but I feel lower ranks are much easier in that regard.
However, the Street Fighter 6 Battle Hub is merciless and full of Master ranked players, and that is where turning up late is going to be painful and soul crushing(and I will be one of those people contributing to that).
This also highlights a huge advantage that popular fighting games have: the constant arrival of new players. You don't want to be the only person who picked up the game that week.
Thankfully, there are multiple really popular fighting games out right now (at least, really popular compared to how the genre was doing a few years ago), which is great.
Categorically disagree. I am a grown arse adult. Splatoon 3 tilts me like no other game, due to some very deliberate FOMO game design decisions and a very poor matchmaking algorithm. Whilst there’s no real money store in the game, it has a lot of other problems that make it just as bad as Roblox imo
Can you elaborate a bit? I played Splatoon 2 until Nintendo started charging for the online but, as far as I know, Splatoon 3 only has a free battlepass.
Honestly it’s a combination of the battlepass system and the stage design causing constant, very fast-paced combat. The stages are too small, so players are funnelled into the middle of the stage. This also causes spawncamping if the matchmaking is even slightly unbalanced (which it is most of the time), as one wipe will allow a team to push all the way into spawn.
Previous Splatoon games were very good about this - most stages were abstract shapes, with a lot of terrain, meaning combat was rare, and the game encouraged painting over fighting as painting would net the most points on a per-match basis. Splatoon 3’s new maps are all thin, straight lines, which forces players into that central killzone.
The battlepass, along with some very poor decision making around the results screen, which shows the winning team celebrating, means that losses feel bad. The matchmaking similarly punishes winstreaks by forcing losestreaks, usually matching you against people above your skill level, but on a team with players below your skill level. Whilst this is very addictive, it makes losing feel genuinely awful, and a losing streak causes tilting due to the FOMO of the battlepass.
Hope this writeup makes sense. I view Splatoon 3 as a genuinely bad game because of these factors, and greatly prefer Splatoon 2.
Seconding splatoon. Very kid and adult friendly, and basically no micro transactions (unless you count amiibo). No other game has kept my attention like it has for the last year
Factorio is a great idea if you’re ok with school going to sh*t. I called factorio the „time machine“ since it could zap 12 hrs in one second. Cant remember any other game that I played till dawn in the last 20 yrs.
OP said their son in his friends use Xbox Series X/S, so that effectively removes Krunker and Minecraft Java Edition. That said, I believe Minecraft Bedrock Edition is available for XSX.
Stardew Valley is great, but the son’s social group has 5 people. Stardew Valley only supports up to 4.
Cities Skylines does not have multiplayer.
Can’t speak for Dorfromantik, because I haven’t played it, but the rest seem like great choices.
After that (assuming you have a CD/DVD Drive), you’ll need to do VirtualBox’s Machine > Settings > Storage > Enable Passthrough for the DVD drive; them just plug in the game disk.
Going to have to disagree on the second bit. Nearly every game that was released on XP or earlier has run better for me with WINE or DosBox in Linux than Windows. Proton and Lutris/Heroic have only made it better. I have the Might and Magic collection and Mass Effect Remastered on my deck and both run flawlessly with little setup.
Indeed. Linux, with WINE is known to outperform Windows, sometimes by a wide margin, for older games for some time. Win98 hasn’t seen any development in about two decades. Meanwhile, people who enjoy old software have been continually improving WINE, allowing modern hardware and OS advances to be leveraged and unpatched low-level issues to be fixed. Linux is very much a better Win98 than Win98.
I haven’t played many of the indie games on the list, but I’m glad to see Sea of Stars get some love. It’s probably the best game I’ve played in the last year
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