It’s old enough that I can’t attest to how hidden it was/is, but Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery is likely the greatest 3 hours I’ve spent in a single videogame. It’s chock-full of confidence and style and atmosphere. The story is nothing unique but the presentation is everything. Pixellated graphics contrasted with vivid sound design and a glorious soundtrack. I love everything about it.
Honestly, try Battlefield 1942 on single player. It's not half bad - the AI is about as smart as you would expect, but it's still fun to fight them. Also, the multiplayer is still going if you wanna try that!
Also, not WW2, but I HIGHLY recommend giving Vietcong a try (both the base game and Fist Alpha). It's one of the most engrossing games I've ever played. If you can get past the derpy (by today's standards) character models, this game has a seriously compelling campaign and there are still occasional multiplayer matches. If there was ever a game to make the Vietcong and NVA scary as fuck, it's that one.
Oh, I almost forgot - Hidden and Dangerous and Hidden and Dangerous 2 are also great. They're very similar to Arma (but released before Arma afaik, and have smaller maps). Pretty solid, but I do feel that the controls have not aged well at all (for example, they use the "end" key to aim down sights by default). They are overall pretty enjoyable, but to be honest, nostalgia aside, you aren't missing a ton if you don't play them. There are a lot of rough edges, such as grenades not killing enemies that are close because a chair leg was in the way.
If you're gonna play any of the games I recommend, I would say play Vietcong and give it a real shot. The game starts slow but by the 3rd mission it gets intense
Hidden and Dangerous was made free to promote the second game. It’s interesting, but it was already extremely outdated and clunky by the time the sequel came out in 2003. I can’t imagine time having been kind to it in the 21 years since. AI in particular is horrid in both games in the series, to the point of sabotaging much of the enjoyment one might have otherwise gotten out of these.
Yeah, you've really hit it right on the money. I grew up with H&D 2 and it really did have awful AI. The graphics also aren't doing it any favors in 2024 - it was mildly ugly even by 2003 standards, in my opinion. Still, it had some very imaginative levels and overall the vibes are right for a tactical WW2 shooter. Also, the multiplayer is (somehow) still going!
The graphics I actually really liked, because of how similar they looked to Mafia, which ran on the same engine and shared a number of assets with it, including textures and animations.
I had no idea the multiplayer was still going. Are you still playing the game? Got any favorite mods or other tips for someone who might have an interest in trying this game again? For all of its faults, I’m tempted to give it another go.
I still play once in a blue moon, but only the tiniest amount haha. I'd say you should check out the subreddit for Discord links - there's a "Royal Para Regiment" Discord with quite a few people that seems to be very active
Oh man, you may regret that work order. Incoming cliff face of (hopefully) -Well-Crafted- engravings:
So I’m redoing an old project where I turned a volcano into an obsidian caster and casted a 20z level solid obsidian fortress with the lava tube at the center. Reddit ate the original post and I can’t find the original files anywhere.
My original was chef’s kiss perfect embark, 3 biomes haunted forest, mirthful grass, and wild forest, a brook running right by the volcano. This time wasn’t so lucky, it’s just a Mirthful forest but the need for a Haunted biome was covered by the fact that I am in range of a Tower (more later). This embark also has Humans, Elves, and Goblins as neighbors, my original was a super evil world where only goblins and kobolds existed, so I guess that’s an upgrade.
My first task was to strip the volcano of trees and bushes, and setup my temporary fort where everyone will live til the casting is complete, and underneath that began digging out my water reservoir. The process is ridiculously water intensive and brook tiles refill so slowly that I’m going to need to literally just let it run while I sleep so the reservoir refills.
My next steps (tomorrow night) is to complete the reservoir and start filling it while I build a giant 4 lane water pump stack and build a huge faucet emptying in the middle of the lava tube. This will turn the middle blocks to obsidian and drop them down to the destructive surface at the bottom of the magma tube, draining it. I have to be careful on this, too much water will plug the tube and that is a MAJOR pain to clean out. Once I’ve drained the lava tube down below the level of the 1st cavern, I will build 2 double magma pumpstack and 2 double water pumpstack columns running up the middle of the fort.
The idea is to provide both RED HOT MAGMA and water to every floor without taking up the main floorspace.
Once that is complete, with the lava tube still drained, I will dig out the mountain leaving pillars at every level and hollow out belowground the radius of my fort down to 1 Z above cavern layer 1 and that will be the first floor of my obsidian casting.
As I’ve (hopefully) improved my casting process, my previous limited size (the limiting factor was that drawbridges are max 10x10 and need at least 1 anchor) of about 18x18 walls around a 38x38 lava tube should no longer be an issue and I BELIEVE that with my new style of caster that I can make arbitrarily large obsidian slabs.
My original caster had 2 levels of drawbridges surrounding the lava tube, the bottom filled with lava spilling out from the Z level of the volcano top (volcanoes in DF are weird), and the top drawbridge structure held water pumped up from a reservoir below.
Each level looked like the top of a crenelated tower, I don’t have the pics anymore so it’s hard to explain. It was cool but very very small.
My new caster is the above mockup, delivering 4x lava and water stacks straight into the casting area and allowed to spread out, unlike my original model which was filled then dropped all at once. This is how I am hoping to make larger slabs as the water pours out over a sea of 5-6 high lava at the casting floor. It may not work, this is experimental and I may have to go in after each cast and manually fill in a few gaps but the benefit of making very large slabs is worth the extra annoyance.
Once I’ve casted enough levels to about 20z above ground, I disassemble the mould used to hold in the lava and start digging my lava moat. In my original version the moat just drained off the map above 3z deep, and was a risk for lava-safe intruders so now it’s all going to be recycled through the pumpstack system leaving just enough lava in the moat to deal with sieges.
When it is all said and done, this fort should be a lava defended obsidian monolith where every surface is carved with the story of my people. It will be my greatest work to date and I can’t wait to see what I learn building it.
The Need for Necromancers
It is critical to my fort to have a pit of undead butchered animal parts for my archers to practice on, and in my original fort the animation force was the part of my fort in the Haunted biome, and it worked so much better than trying to convince militadwarfs to train archery. Nowadays we have necromancers, so I plan on capturing a necro from a raid and walling him in to a little booth where I can lift a lever and let him see the corpse target pile, reanimate them, then get shuttered again till my crossbowdwarfs finish the random pile of torsos and intestines wobbling about.
Lol don’t call it ☼Masterful☼ till it works! I could be very mistaken about lava flows here though I hope to post my updates to lemmy so we can all see how it goes together.
My inspiration was, in a roundabout way,: how to find a FUN way to dispose of kings who keep making insane crafting requests like weapons made out of soap. I envisioned a room suspended over a lava tube with a hanging pillar holding it up and drawbridges providing access. If the king got silly I could pop the pillar and drop his whole royal suite into the tube.
And of course I had to keep his subjects near him so I built the fort into the volcano side but I was annoyed about how irregular the floor size and mineral patterns were. I had just learned about obsidian casting in industrial quantities (the reason for the initial volcano embark) so as I was playing the thought kept coming back: 'Well, obsidian is a really valuable mineral when carved, and obsidian mechanisms are an amazing trade good, so… what if I made a whole fort out of obsidian?
So I tried that with that existing fort, not a fancy fort with a lava tube, more like just a giant cube of solid obsidian cast off to the side from the volcano.
It worked magnificently! The rooms were all lavish with just bare stones engraved, and I had unlimited material for stonework and mechanisms.
Smiling in satisfaction I said “This is cool… but it could be cooler.”
And that’s when I came up with my ‘volcano base with a live active lava tube in the middle’.
The original took about three months of damn near every moment I wasn’t working or sleeping, hopefully my experience since then will cut that time down a bit.
I’m really excited to see how this goes, and can’t wait to share my updates.
Fun Fact: If you dig out each floor and drop them all at once, the game registers the internal hollowed out tube as being ‘outside’, meaning even after you cast the obsidian tower, all internal areas are considered in sunlight, so your dwarves never get sunlight sickness when defending raids and you can grow aboveground crops in the safety of your mountain home.
Visual novels. I haven’t tried many but as a fan of steins gate series, I didn’t find the visual novel fun. Maybe because they were so outdated or because I already know the story but when I played it, I was thinking it would be more fun to just watch as media or watch someone else play while I have my lunch.
It makes sense, but I highly suggest to try and see visual novels as reading material with mixed media (e.g. music). Many are very mid, but some do excel: Higurashi and Umineko are a great example of that.
any 3d Zelda games. I didn't play OOT until I was in my late 20s and it was awful (specifically controls and camera). I tried watching people Speedrun it or do the randomizer, but the sound link makes when rolling (which most did most of the time) drove me crazy. BotW seemed like something I would like on paper, but Nintendo just had to work their new controls into some shrines and I found it frustrating. Also didn't like the breaking weapons. Link Between Worlds (神様のトライフォース ２) sits in a weird place. I mostly liked it, but hated the gimmicky 3d bits on the 3DS.
goldeneye for the same reasons - felt like a step backward and I had no nostalgia for it, playing it for the first time in my 30s.
anything with the N64 controller for the same reasons. It felt so unnatural and weird.
most roguelikes (but not all). Losing to random chance is annoying. Some randomness is of course fine
dark souls and the like. Watch boss. Die. Try again. Die. To me, that's boring. I'd rather have in-world ways of learning about the boss.
pokemon. I was already in high school, working part time, and doing a lot of school stuff (band/theatre/sports) and just never got into it. I tried Pokemon go and didn't care for it (but did like Dragon Quest Walk that came out later)
Final Fantasy 7 -- hated the camera and other similar things. Story and all was fine
Most 3rd person shooters (with the exception of Just Cause). I would line up the perfect shot in Sniper Elite only to shoot the few pixels of the corner of something I couldn't see because my character's dumb body was in the way
starfox. I was already playing better games like that on Amiga and other platforms, so it felt like a step back to me
I know it’s kind of an unpopular thread, but geez, those are widely considered some of the greatest games. It seems like you’re a bit older than I was when I played most of those, and I wonder if my youth made me enjoy those games more than they deserved.
Yep. I think my age (I'm in my mid-40s) and being an adult when I played them or they came out has a lot to do with it. I think having less free time and a number of issues I deal with makes it harder to enjoy certain types of games (this is not to say young people don't face their own stresses and issues!)
I’m so glad someone else feels the same way I do about OoT. I could go on for hours about how Nintendo ruined their franchise with cheap gimmicky 3D at the time, and that damned controller.
I’m not so on board with the rest, being a massive dark souls fan myself, but diversity makes us stronger and all that, you do you.
I think any game you grew up with gets a nostalgia level assigned to it and it's easy to overlook certain flaws. For me, OoT felt like a step back, but I had been playing PC and Amiga games lot (I hated Starfox for this same reason). I'm sure I have the nostalgia glasses for some games, but I'm old enough that I think many wouldn't even know them, hah.
Exactly, lttp was perfection and we already had decent 3d with mouse and keyboard controls on PC, it was a major step back. I guess that was just Nintendo nintendoing what Nintendo nintendoes.
I remember showing Ocarina to my dad and excitedly telling him it’s the peak of gaming and nothing would ever beat it’s graphics! Think I completed the game in 26hrs non-stop without sleep.
I’ve seen it since and it’s so blocky I struggle to see how I ever liked it. So I will appreciate the memories instead. :)
The N64 controller is my favourite ever controller. Bizarre shape but I had so many hours racked up on it in my teens that it holds a special place in my heart.
Which Roguelikes do you like? I’m the same - hate them all for being overly difficult. Except original ADOM which I played constantly.
I think "rogue-lite" or something like that is a better term for what I like. I'm currently playing "Against the Storm" is one a coworker recommended recently and I'm enjoying so far. Spelunky 2 was OK. There are probably a couple other's I'm not remembering at the moment.
GTA V - I disliked the characters, story was uninteresting, and gameplay felt like a downgrade from GTA IV; graphics were the main attraction there, and that’s not enough for me
Borderlands - my fastest “nope, not for me” game I’ve played; I don’t like loot in games, and that’s basically the entire point of the game
Skyrim - found it very bland coming from Morrowind; side quests weren’t as interesting, which is pretty much the entire reason I liked Morrowind
any competitive FPS (Apex Legends, COD, etc) - I play most games once the get the story, mechanics, etc
What about loot do you not like? I don’t mind random loot to a degree, but I’m not a big fan of games where you have to wait for a drop with max stats or whatever. Give me a loot pool with randomizations if you want, but no random stats (e.g., if it has fire that always means the same amount of bonus, or whatever)
TL;DR - I’m a fan of tighter, focused experiences with a strong element of puzzle solving, and I’m generally not a fan of sandbox-y experiences.
Some of my favorite games are Zelda, Ys, or Half Life. Loot in those games is typically an intentional part of the progression, and the gameplay feels like an action-y puzzle. Resources have a specific purpose, and wasting them has consequences.
Using a slightly different weapon, item, cosmetic, etc doesn’t excite me at all, I am mostly there for the story and gameplay. To me, shopping feels like poor game design and essentially covering for the player missing something important. So games with extensive store/inventory mechanics feel poorly designed, on average.
There’s one big exception here: if the economy of the game is integral to the core loop. For example, I love Recettear, which makes loot and inventory management a core mechanic in an interesting way. I’m also working on my own game with a player-driven economy (e.g. if you sell a lot of something, you get less for each additional one, it’s cheaper for AI/other players to buy, and NPCs will slowly distribute the items around the game world).
On those same lines, I generally don’t like things with crafting, enchanting, etc, unless it’s an interesting, core gameplay mechanic. I’m very goal oriented, so the journey is less important than the destination, so I like constant “mini-destinations” (boss fights, puzzles, etc). I almost never replay games, unless there’s a different set of challenges to explore (e.g. I loved each of the three characters in Ys Origin, but won’t bother playing Morrowind twice).
Yeah, I’m not a fan of loot that offers incremental benefit, but I do enjoy loot that offers a meaningfully different way to engage with the game (be that a new ability in a metroidvania or some new weapon in a soulslike)
Yup, I love the ability-based progression in Zelda, older Ys, Metroidvanias like Ori and Hollow Knight, etc.
I don’t like loot for the sake of loot. For example, Borderlands prides itself on having 16-17M weapons (they’re procedurally generated). That’s not interesting to me, that’s tedious. I much prefer the Half-Life approach (14 in original, 10 in Half Life 2), where each weapon fills a niche and you pick based on what you need.
A lot of people love loot in games, such as in MMORPGs, Bethesda-style RPGs, and Diablo-style RPGs. The latter is the most frustrating because many people mean Diablo-style when they say “ARPG,” whereas I mean Zelda/Ys-style.
I’ve never been a fan of the direction the Fallout series took after Fallout 2. FO Tactics and BoS aside, Bethesda’s handling of Fallout 3 and onwards really didn’t resonate with me.
As someone who enjoyed the story and RPG aspects of the earlier games, the shift to fast-paced shooter mechanics was off-putting.
Back in the day, getting my ass handed to me in Quake III, Half-Life, and Unreal Tournament wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs, just something to endure. Discovering turn-based combat where I could strategize and plan my moves, rather than relying on quick reflexes, made me actually enjoy gaming. The shift away from that gameplay style made the series lose its appeal for me.
I think there are two age groups of Fallout players. Those who started with the original games, and those who started with Fallut 3.
I’m young enough to have started with 3. I did go back and play the original two, and I absolutely see what you mean. New Vegas was somewhat better, despite still being a shooter, probably owing to the fact that it was written and designed by the remnants of the people who worked at Interplay when they made Fallout.
Haven’t played it. I tried 3, and played through 4. But from what I’ve seen anything released from 2004 onwards is purely action role playing.
Researching my original comment (yes, I’m a professional overthinker) I stumbled upon the wasteland series. It seems that the original fallout was based on this series, and that it still has proper turn based combat.
I honestly don’t get what people love so much about that game, the combat is simple and kinda sloppy, boss and enemy variety is non-existent and traversal is a joke.
I get that the story is good but it’s not so good that I can look past everything else, it even has a few big issues like the amount of times the game throws a dumb obstacle in your way to justify some fetch quest like the black mist.
Maybe the change of style helped? IDK I remember I enjoyed it a lot, but yeah, the enemy variation was its greatest fault, I hope they fixed this with the sequel, that I haven’t played.
I don’t dislike it, it’s brilliant, the epitome of SupergiantGames’ beautiful craft, but I just can’t play Hades, it released after I had already burnt out on Dead Cells, Curse of the Dead Gods, Grime, Enter the Gungeon, Blasphemous, Gunfire Reborn, and whatnot, I can’t bring myself to play it because I had already explored the genre so many times…
I haven’t actually noticed this happening before now. My immediate reaction is if it is changes driven by the original creators I’d feel quite positive about it. Love to see personal growth. When driven by the studio though, I’m a bit more skeptical.
Either way, this is why modding should be protected. Let folks play historical/modern/hyper-weird versions of the game they love.
When driven by the studio though, I’m a bit more skeptical.
This is a really good point. When it’s in the hands of the creators, you’re still dealing with people who know what they were creating.
A lot of the stuff that people complain about are hamfisted attempts by corporate flunkies to make the game “appeal to a wider audience” as opposed to actually caring about removing unnecessary or offensive material in a constructive way that doesn’t lessen the original impact of the piece of media.
Corporations never decided that women, black people, latinos, and LGBT were humans with inherent value to them simply from existing, but rather, they decided that “Oh shit, we’re leaving money on the table by not marketing to these groups or hiring them.” It’s all about dollar-signs. It’s why corporations will fly the Pride Flag in June on Twitter… Just not on their Saudi Arabia Twitter corporate account. The corporates don’t care about the issues, they just care about getting your labor and your money, in other words, extracting value from you.
And attempts to extract value from you are where hamfisted attempts at making pieces of media “more appealing to everyone” by trying to shove as much strained “diversity” (the corporate kind, not the real kind) in there as possible in hopes to increase sales.
…on the other hand though, some of the original creators simply never grew up and are just obstinately wanting to continue to offend people for no good reason other than getting off on triggering other people. Like I’d have more hope from a remake from Neil Druckmann over John Romero, for example.
I was excited to play the remake of my all time favourite game Mafia 1, but it only lasted for about 20 minutes. They put utterly pointless additions in and the AI was somehow way dumber despite being 20 years newer.
I think I read about that remake. Did they also change the soundtrack or am I tripping? I loved Mafia 1 back in the day, and the Django Reinhardt songs in the original were iconic.
This is exactly the game that came to my mind when reading title. I loved old Mafia, but the remake? It’s not a bad game, but it lost like 90% of atmosphere original had. Like those cop chases that are utter joke that doesn’t belong to the game.
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