Chiming in as a parent. My kids are MOST social when playing video games. They hop online with their friends and they chat and laugh and bullshit with each other.
The case against video games was created by people who think staring at the TV until they fall asleep is a good night.
I’d just throw out that my recollection is that it was really more of a mid-to-late 2000’s thing for the oversaturation of WW2 games, if you’re willing to move your window forward a bit. That and there weren’t nearly as many games being released at that time period, so it didn’t take much to saturate the market; there were roughly 1/50th the number of releases in 2008 as today (www.statista.com/…/number-games-released-steam/ using steam releases as a rough approximation of total).
In terms of specific games, I don’t have any that aren’t already mentioned elsewhere. The Battlefield, Band of Brothers, and Call of Duty recurring releases are really the big ones. …wikipedia.org/…/List_of_World_War_II_video_games has a good list if you want to browse more.
Did Sony announce a PS5 Pro? I think its just a rumor at this time. And even if so, we don’t know what the system can do, what restrictions or problems it could have and what it will cost. We don’t know if the console will be available without a problem. We don’t know when the thing comes out either, if ever. It’s incredible hard to know if its worth waiting, if we don’t know anything.
And second, if you really need a console right now, then buy one. My thumb of rule is, if you can wait, then wait. So this is ultimately your decision.
Iconoclasts - really nicely made metroidvania with pixel graphics
Tametsi - a collection of handmade Minesweeper puzzles with additional twists and mechanics. Extremely cheap on Steam
Gunfire Reborn - roguelite FPS with Borderland-ish graphics, decently made 4 man co-op (unlike Risk of Rain 2, you can actually revive teammates that got knocked down immediately) and a lot of difficulty scaling. Notably, still gets new content, both free and paid DLCs (those add new classes and some new weapons)
Edited to add another: Opus Magnum - an automation/optimization puzzle game with alchemy theme. Supports user-created puzzles through Steam Workshop
Tametsi just barely eked out being my most played game of 2023 over, duh duh duh!! Elden Ring. Yes, it took me longer to finish a $1 Minesweeper clone than to finish a massive Fromsoft Soulslike. Haha!
Cloudpunk - A cyberpunk driving/walking simulator with a good story, great voice acting, LEGO-inspired graphics, and a Blade Runner inspired soundtrack. It’s dripping with atmosphere and I wish I could play it again for the first time.
Plate up : a rogue like kitchen survival game can also be multiplayer , survive as many days as you can getting more customers but also more kitchen gadgets
Back back hero: rogue like dungeon delve with pack management and new story mode where you rebuild a town .
Both are surprisingly addictive and consume my dreams
A Robot Named Fight - “Metroidvania roguelike focused on exploration and item collection. Explore a different, procedurally-generated labyrinth each time you play and discover randomized power-ups to traverse obstacles, find secrets and explode meat beasts.” Links: Steam - Website (It is also available on Switch, link on website)
I have almost 500 hours of playtime and still go back to it every now and then. Really awesome game with superb music, graphics and feel.
What’s extra cool is that the lone developer open-sourced the game code, available here: OpenARNF on GitHubSadly I’ve yet to see any mods, spinoffs or anything else come from it.
Not just that but the combat is boring as shit and brings “repetition” to levels I’ve never seen before. The only attraction to this game is that they actually got James Woods.
I kinda liked the Disney crossover thing but nomura just couldn’t stick to the concept and had to dive deep in his own ass and sideline disney in favor of his own convoluted roster of charcaters
Any of the Paper Mario or Super Mario RPG games. Maybe I’m not the target audience, but I’ve often felt that without the Mario name they would be considered mediocre.
Alongside this, basically every 3D Sonic game. I feel that Sonic has become a thing for furries, and that the 3D games just don’t really seem to get what a Sonic game should be. Frontiers was somewhat decent in the open world aspect, but its constant reliance on the homing dash just highlights how buggy those games are.
The learning curve does look really brutal but it made me realize I was falling into a gaming rut. I thought I was a decent gamer but it’s just that I’ve been playing the same “base” games with fancier graphics for so long. I’ve been mostly into sandbox games lately because I can vary my goals but with this game I think I’ll really be able to expand into any type of tactic or strategy to scratch that never ending itch.
The game is great and the learning curve can be tricky, but it has a whole load of scenarios which gradually ramp up the difficulty and introduce new concepts to help you learn how to play. I’d highly recommend checking out the game!
You will find one but it´s all manageable. I recommend focusing on one faction and one or two unit types at the beginning and learn just those tech trees first, to avoid getting overwhelmed by the abundance of units and go from there. Vehicles and/or Bots are good unit types to start with. Just let your team know what unit types you will go for at the start of a match, choose a fitting starting position and it should work fine.
Dark Souls 3 and only Dark Souls 3. I love Dark Souls 1 and 2, Elden Ring, Bloodborne is my favorite game, and Sekiro. But Dark Souls 3 is just so boring and unfun. Even the ingame world feels uninterested in this game, (because it kinda is over the whole age of fire thing.) Everything is gross and brown it just makes exploring kind of icky. DS1 had a good balance of gross and majestic locations and enemies. DS2 suffered from too few monsters and too many generic armored knights, and locations felt too clean and empty.
It feel like this game does not like you to diversify your build. Armor is basically cosmetic, and offers very slight damage protection. Poise sucks, and is basically removed, so making a tank build kind of sucks. Its so damn fast and doesn’t give you a ton of options like Elden Ring does. DS3 is certainly the most actiony of the action rpgs, and idk, I’d like more rpg. I remember watching a video about how playing these games at level 1 is the intended and best way to play. I can kind of see that, I think that discredits a lot of the rpg elements in these games. I always saw permadeath runs as the more fun way to play, especially in DS2, that game was like designed to be run as an arcade game.
The game also feels like it rides on nostalgia pretty hard. Anor Londo? Thats here. Andre? He’s here. Firelink Shrine? Thats here, too. Artorias? There’s a whole cult trying to cosplay as him. I actually think DS2 handled this sort of thing better, it being so far it the future from DS1 that most characters and places from 1 are only legend or ancient history. I think it gave 2 a sense of discovery, even if DS2 certainly has much less coherent lore lol.
There are good things in this game. The dlc is fantastic. Certain areas look downright stunning, often helped by the muted color palette. A lot of the bosses are fun when you use the correct play style for them. Pontiff Sullivan or Champion Gundyr is my favorite boss on my most recent playthrough, but I haven’t gotten to Gale, the Twin Princes or Midir yet.
For games that are in genres that I'd actually play:
Final Fantasy 6 (3): I grew up with the NES, and when we got a SNES I got whatever games I could from the $20 bin at Toys R Us. I had some friends who were a bit better off that loaned me some games, and I eventually managed to get my hands on a copy of Chrono Trigger (as well as other RPGs like Breath of Fire), but when I borrowed FFIII from one of them I was just... underwhelmed. I didn't really care for the characters, it felt pretty slow initially, and I remember getting to a bit with a bunch of moogles in the party and I just put it down and never went back.
I've since tried to play it a few times here and there, but it never really manages to hook me... but people sing the praises of it high and low and I just don't really get it because I can't get over the hump.
The Witcher 1/2/3: I just really don't like the combat, honestly. I've tried playing all three, and managed to get enough time into them to appreciate the good bits (voice acting, story, quest lines) but the main meat and potatoes for me in a game are exploration and combat, and only one of those really works for me in those games. I had a better time in the first game, all things considered, because I guess I was willing to allow a bit of jankiness from an older game, but I bounced off Witcher 2 pretty quickly combat-wise, and didn't manage to get more than many 1/3 to 1/2 way through Witcher 3 before I just admitted that I wasn't having fun.
Persona 3: I got into the games with P4G on my Vita, so part of this is 'going backwards is hard' in terms of QoL improvements and what not. But I also played the PSP port of Persona 2 (whichever one was actually ported in English) and had a good time (not so much with the PS1 version of the one that didn't get the English PSP port... that one was rough) so I guess its just the game didn't resonate with me as much as the other ones did... Maybe it was the characters or maybe it was the cuts that were made for the P3P version of the game, but it just didn't hit the same.
Otherwise, a lot of military-style FPS games (stuff like Halo or Destiny or Timesplitters or even Goldeneye 64 are/were fun), the more recent sports titles (up to the Dreamcast/PS2 I was fine with them, but more realism doesn't do anything for me), and stuff like MOBA or visual novels or 'walking sims' or battle royale or whatever those asynchronous horror games just don't tick the boxes for me in terms of what I want from a video game.
Ugh I feel the same way about The Witcher. I tried 2 and 3 and just couldn’t get into it. The combat was not enjoyable and it felt really clunky to me. I actually tried 2 a couple of times because everyone raved and I thought maybe I was just missing something, but it wasn’t for me.
I’m with you on FF6. The leveling system for abilities was interesting (but slow), but there were too many characters. The previous one on SNES (called 2 in the west but I think it’s 4?) had a better balance with number of characters to story.
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