I’m absolutely baffled as to why more than one game I’ve ever played had fishing in it.
I love the X series (despite the unfortunate name), but the literal real-time days you spend waiting for money to appear in your account are still more engaging than any fishing minigame ever.
I agree with fishing mini games, it’s almost never anything like actual fishing, but some sort of weird experience that requires a combination of precise timing, button mashing or both.
That being said I think it’s insane to me that Nintendo crammed a fishing mini game in basically every Zelda game except for BotW and TotK, the two games where it would actually make sense. I just wanna chill and throw out a line. It’s every other zelda game where I just did the minimum amount required to get a bottle or whatever I needed.
I don’t mind the fishing mini game in Breath of Fire 3. You can see all the fish and it’s just a matter of skill not patience. That said, it’s optional (the only fish you need, I believe you can buy) and trying to 100% it is a chore I’d rather not do again.
I’d also make that complaint about adjustable difficulty, but to speak to the game progression, I have to agree.
Games should be teaching players what they’re getting into from the very beginning. The tutorial should be “When you do everything right, this is how easy the game is. When it’s not this easy, it means you’re doing something wrong”. That “wrong” thing could be messing up a mechanic, not upgrading your character enough, or you’re trying to go to a later area too early. It’s a teaching moment.
So many games today, at “Normal” difficulty, will throw players into combat encounters where they just basically kill everything in one hit. So players in the tutorial think “This is a bit too easy, I’m going to up the difficulty to Hard”, but then they don’t realize that everything gets harder when you exit the tutorial, and then over the course of the game the difficulty keeps outpacing your progression.
As far as the difficulty slider goes, I think it’s always better when harder modes just make you easier to kill, rather than enemies being more difficult to kill. There’s often a good balance that can be struck between the two, but too many games just opt for just making enemies tankier and tankier, which ends up turning the “difficulty” slider into a “time/resources waster” slider.
I enjoyed Blue Prince, I’m exactly who it was made for, but it was definitely much worse than people would lead you to believe.
The game makers had no respect for players’ time. You solve one of the large, run-independent puzzles and it all clicks, then it could take you several hours to playtime to luck into the conditions to actually test your solution. Everything takes longer than it should. It’s obvious that I’m going to toggle security settings every time I’m in the Security Room, why do you make me go through this slow as hell PC every time? It’s not for realism because no PC back then had such fantastical functionality, so why not make the PCs load screens faster? How does the slowness enhance the experience? Why not just put buttons on the wall you can toggle for the security settings, at least? There were times where I figured something out, and rather than spend ten hours trying to actually do the thing, I just looked up that part of a walkthrough to get the next info.
Really interesting game, but I did some napkin math and I wasted 25 avoidable hours during my playthrough (long unskippable loads and such) that could have been spend completing an entire different game.
It’s a huge part of why I quit Destiny 2 entirely. A game that doesn’t respect the player’s time and pads it with RNG on top of RNG to extend playtime feels awful.
I absolutely agree with you, I got to a point where I had solved the “main” puzzle, but was struggling to complete other puzzles (that I knew the solution to) simply due to room draws.
I wanted to love the game, but it held itself back on the RNG design. It can be so detrimental to the game that I wouldn’t recommend it to most people.
I bought into the review hype, bought the game, then realized about two hours after the Steam refund window expired just how tedious this game felt to play.
I really wanted to like it, but it stopped being fun and started being so tedious that I uninstalled it.
I bought it ages ago but finally decided go give it a go. From the first day I could tell it wasn’t gonna be a game for me. Note-taking is basically mandatory, and it seems so easy just to get fucked out of a run by RNG.
Narrative seemed interesting but I feel like the whole “ability to decide what room you’re going into” thing should be weaved into the story off the bat.
Neat concept but not for me, but I think since I’ve owned it for so long I’m outside of the refund window.
Same. The game is fantastic but the RNG is only cool on paper and falls apart just a few hours into the game. The methods they give you to influence your luck are just not enough to do much at all.
It’s really frustrating when you are trying to do something but you constantly have to do something else because that’s what the game is giving you.
I cheated at the end and gave me infinite rerolls for rooms so I could create the layout I needed in that moment. Much better that way.
In Postal 2 there's a platforming section and, because I suck at platformers, let alone in first person, so I was saving a lot. After a few very short and successive saves, the dude made fun of me for saving so much.
Also in Portal 2, just a lot of GlaDOS lines in general.
Protagonist has got to be Bayonetta (though it’s based only on the first game). Her character growth in the first game was so good, even if the plot was a little convoluted. Never finished the second one since I didn’t like playing on the Switch and never played the third one. Hope her character is still good though.
Honorable mentions are Kassandra from Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite, and Stelle from Honkai Star Rail (though this one is mostly for the absolutely ridiculous dialogue options we get to choose).
Favorite female antagonist is hands down GLaDOS. Such a fun, sarcastic, and likeable villain.
You have one of, if not the best starting points for Final Fantasy in the whole series on this system with X. Just play it. There’s no mainline numbered Final Fantasy game that ties together. They’re all separate stories. A few share a common setting with Ivalice, but that’s about it. Hop on X now. I know there’s a PC version, and that’s probably the recommended way to experience that game at this point, but I don’t really care how you start it. If you ever wanna experience Final Fantasy, FFX is the one a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooot of people will say start with.
Radiata Stories - a looker even for a PS2 game.
NFL 2K5 - the greatest NFL game ever made.
Jak and Daxter - This console’s Crash Bandicoot.
Rachet and Clank - I actually have the same problem you have with Final Fantasy with this series. Just pick one.
Need For Speed Underground 2 - One of the best arcade racing games ever made.
Burnout 3 Takedown - Same as above except you crash the cars instead of pimp them out.
SSX3 - Some say Tricky is better, I like them both but usually give 3 the edge.
Soul Calibur II - Best Soul Calibur game IMO
Dragonball Z Budokai 3 - Played the shit out of both this and Budokai Tenkaichi 3
Probably the best list imo. I remember picking Radiata Stories up, at random, for my birthday. It blew me away. The story, combat and recruitment mechanic are different from everything else I experienced at the time.
And a few suggestions also:
Def Jam: Fight for NY. Lowkey my favorite fighting game, with 4-players simultaneously beating the crap of each other.
Battle Stadium D.O.N… Fighting/smash bros style game with the biggest jump stars at the time (Dragon Ball, One Piece, Naruto).
Dokapon Kingdom. Board/rpg game with a lot of fun mechanics.
Fuck yes, Fight for NY was amazing. I love the idea of a fighting game where you have to end the fight, not just knock the other guy’s health bar down to zero so he falls over. So satisfying to put your opponent down with a haymaker or chucking him in front of a subway train
Re: Final Fantasy games not tying together or having continuities.
Yes. Except, ironically, specifically Final Fantasy X, which had a direct sequel in X-2. Final Fantasy XIII also managed to have a direct sequel in Lightning Returns. Thankfully, if you care to think of it that way, it was crap and can be safely ignored.
Anyway, have an upvote for not blithely suggesting that everyone start with VII.
Yes and they’re all neatly contained in their numbered entry which is why I say no mainline numbered games tie together. And all the 2s are optional IMO. Especially X-2, which always seemed like a cash grab to capitalize off of X’s success to me. As much as I love, love, love X, I’ve never touched X-2 and probably never will.
Link special character was best special character… because… it was a great meming time when people realized there were what appeared to be the silhouette of his tower and bases visible during certain moves.
That’s the thing. PS2 at one time was the best selling system of all time. I forget if that record still holds up. I know the DS oversold it, but thats not a tv console.
Point is, with any console that had that big of an impact on gaming, it’s going to have a ton of bangers that still hold up 20+ years later.
And boy howdy if that ain’t true!
I’m honestly surprised there aren’t independant projects releasing new PS2 games today, in the same way you see occasional new releases for NES and Game Boy Color.
Jak and Daxter are better played via OpenGoal - a modern open source engine implementation that runs natively on Steam Deck and includes fixes, graphics improvements, proper widescreen, etc.
NFS Underground 1 is better than the sequel IMO. The open world is empty and tedious filler vs just loading directly into the tracks.
Best NFS on the PS2 is Hot Pursuit 2 however. Made by Black Box, it’s vastly superior in every way to the other console versions and the PC version made by a different company despite sharing assets.
I’ve a dual boot with Linux + Windows, my games are isolated on Windows where I’m not logged in anything important. I can just encrypt my Linux partition for a possible vulnerability. But I really think that it’s hard to happen, at least it never happened to me, I’ve pirated before a few times.
Also it’s allowed to pirate on my country, it’s just not allowed to redistribute it, so I don’t need a VPN.
Just download from trusted sources and it’s fine. At this point I’d rather to trust the community providing pirated games than big companies harvesting my data.
I didn’t have a good experience with Linux, I tried twice, I’ve a laptop wit hybrid GPU AMD + NVIDIA, and NVIDIA is painful on Linux. I loose a lot of performance playing on Linux, tried Fedora last time, OpenSUSE before that.
Thats why you usually use a VM / dedicated computer to download / check pirated software. Its annoying… But less annoying than the shit that ubisoft / EA does…
Using a VM to check pirated software, but then running it on your main pc if you don’t notice any malware (I think that’s what you are saying?) is not safe.
Running untrusted software only on a vm or machine that you don’t care about with zero personal info is safest.
At least from Lutris you can run your games (pirated our otherwise) genuinelly sandboxed with something like Bubblewrap or Firejail, which as far as I can tell you can’t do in Steam (unless you sandbox Steam itself, which is problematic if for example you want to deny networking to some games but not others).
IMHO, if you sandbox them it’s actually safer to run pirated versions of games in Linux than running the official versions from Steam with no sandboxing, at least for AAA games since pretty much all those companies have done or do abusive shit.
Gaming in a vm is possible, high end multi-player game in a vm is more complicated because of the performance penalty and the anti cheat (again the same problem) honestly I don’t know how good this solution could be
Regarding the “Trying to prepare in advance” part. Download a complete SNES Rom collection from archive.org and an installer for SNES9x. The collections are around 1GB and include hundreds of games. Lots of them with Co-Op or two player modes.
I think there are broadly speaking three main categories of let’s players: hypemen, analysts, and tryhards.
Hypemen focus on being boisterous, high energy, and fast paced. They focus on entertainment value above all else, even above the game itself.
Analysts take things a bit slower. They aren’t trying to be the best at the game, but instead like to play a variety of things and talk about their experience playing or insights related to the game.
Tryhards are usually either pro gamers or very close to it. They usually play a smaller number of competitive games trying to be very skilled at them. The enjoyment of these streamers comes more from seeing someone excel, and potentially learning from them if you play the same game.
My point with this is all of these routes are proven ways to engage an audience, so having interesting things to say isn’t a necessity.
That being said, this is an entertainment medium we’re talking about. If you aren’t entertaining in some form then I don’t think you’ll find much success. It’s a learnable skill, so don’t be discouraged if it doesn’t come without practice
Only possible thing I could maybe add or tweak would be… expand ‘hypemen’ a bit more to include… well, at least an attempt at some kind of comedy.
Maybe split this off into its own group?
A lot of earlier gaming youtubers… at least seemed to be trying to more or less do live playthroughs or after playthrough reviews that… basically just tried to either ad lib, or write a script with as many relevant jokes a possible.
I keep emphasizing ‘tried to’ and ‘attempted’ because many of these schticks just… sucked, lol, or quickly fell apart into a depressing cynicism spiral.
Granted, you seem to be focusing mostly on live streamers, specifically lets players, as opposed to the older, sort of gen 1 of youtube video game content people, where a lot of it was just… i dunno man, i just recorded myself playing a game, shrug.
…
Also, at this point, there may be at least two other distinct kinds of… video content about playing games, types of people, excluding esports amd speedrunners, but nvm anyway:
…
Roleplayers.
There are a lot of streamers that just pick some roleplayable game or roleplay mod or whatever of a game, and I think that’s … kinda its whole own thing, where a lot of the content/style is … i dunno, you could call it maybe a real time soap opera generator, a number of these people will actually learn or construct a whole fleshed out voice and personality for their character… but also a lot of roleplayers will more or less just basically be asshole trolls/bullies.
…
‘I am bad at games but cute’
Many vtubers, pickmes, also not pickmes but actually interested in games, but also very unfamiliar with them.
This is a whole other style or genre, where the appeal comes from… well, theoretically it could include other extremely naive / inexperienced noobie video gamers, but realistically, its mostly the appeal of viewers parasocially having a mostly submissive but also earnest psuedo girlfriend.
Probably worth noting that this can be a consistent schtick, or can… often evolve into ‘hype(wo)man’ or ‘tryhard’.
This is imo distinct from just being cute and also being any other kind of streamer… because the ditzy cute naiveity is strongly emphasized, often to a ludicrous degree, as well as the lack of skill and amount of unforced errors… and this is the whole point, to evoke sympathy.
…
Also, now that I think of it, this could maybe qualify as distinct:
Meme/Joke/Ludicrous self imposed goals or restrictions video game player.
The whole concept of this is to basically attempt to do something completely absurd in a game, to play the game ‘wrong’ in a way that is at least in broad concept, humorous on its face by how ridiculous it is.
Like uh i dunno… play through RDR2 but you have to never use a horse, ever, or play through Morrowind without ever increasing any of your stats, naked playthroughs of Dark Souls, aim for some nonsense/meme strategy in Hoi4, play competetive Madden or Fifa where your entire team is 4’ 6" and weighs 600lbs, kill yourself as fast as possible in a game that is designes for that to not be able to happen, win a racing game going entirely in reverse the whole time…
Just wacky zany shit.
Usually this translates better to a youtube format thats cut down from a livestream, but those livestreams can get decent numbers as well, and you can also tie in your viewers to the whole thing, maybe they get to decide some new absurd task or make some decision for you at some point.
Thanks! I think you’re right that there could definitely be more granularity to what I said. I was trying to go as broad as I could, which of course leaves out a lot of detail. Good thoughts about other possible categories. I don’t disagree with any of it.
I actually haven’t ever seen the roleplayer category you’re talking about, but I’m intrigued. Is there anyone you’d recommend?
If I had to give a name to the joke streamers you mentioned, I’d probably go with challenge streamers. I think that definitely falls outside of the categories I said, but I also see a lot of streamers that do fall into the three I made up dabbling with that kind of content here and there, so there’s probably some crossover too.
Hey, I took your framework and ran with it, collaborative effort =D
But uh sadly no, perhaps ironically, either I’ve aged out of really enjoying livestreams, or the… content and or platforms have basically just become quite generally off putting to me, I haven’t really watched any livestreams or livestreamers in a few years now, beyond basically a bi-annual check in, followed by a sigh, lol.
So I don’t really know any current roleplay type streamers I could suggest… but it theoretically wouldn’t be too hard to find one?
Basically, you’d wanna look for some kind of … serious, adult only roleplay community for some game, and then see if any of them stream.
Ideally, just uh, instantly nope out of any RP community that has its own MTX scheme of any kind, those basically all devolve into bickering and cliques and internal power struggles … in the actual community, outsidd of the roleplay.
Also ‘challenge streamers’ yes, good, this is much more succinct than my ramblings, haha!
And yeah, you’re right that… these aren’t all perfectly exclusionary boxes, they can mix and match a bit, blend somewhat… but they are all perhaps good basic conceptual starting points for some kind of… grand unified theory of videogame oriented content or something.
EDIT:
Fuck, I just finally actually read your username.
Thats clever, I like that =P
Ok, bed time for me, I’m nodding off, uh, woof, lol.
I mean that children (squeekers) are not allowed in these RP comms/streams, because they very often tend to be extremely immature and petty, and very often just… ‘RP’ as a self insert, powertripping bully/troll/outright fascist, do shitty shit like stream sniping to intentionally ruin other people’s RP.
But uh, that’s my personal preference away from such content.
Such content is… imo, depressingly… often quite popular.
I am trying to more emphasize that there are some examples of what I would say is more quality, diamonds in the rough.
I never got super info their videos, but I think the DreamSMP would count as the roleplayer category. Honestly, when I think about my childhood Minecraft YT channels, Aphmau was the main creator of RPG-like “tell’s a story though Minecraft” content (MC Diaries, MyStreet, Dreams of Estorra [RIP 😭], etc ).
Anyway yeah, there’s a subcategory of people who I think like to roleplay in their games and make a creative, original story out of it. I think another modern example would be the Your Average Hylian, a channel that makes silly content focusing around LoZ, like “What Hyrulean ads would be like” or “Hyrule Cooking Show Parody”
I am not super familiar with the actual content and nature of these streams, but if your descriptions are generally accurate, then yeah, these all sound like good examples:
You throw yourself into a gameworld by genuinely treating it as reality, more than as a game, like TTRPGs where the RP is more than ‘murder hobo’ or ‘i am an extremely obvious joke/gimmick/reference character’.
I remember randomly stumbling upon, at one point, a Japanese youtuber who did / is doing a playthrough of Kenshi, and then goes back and sort of invents dialogue between her party of characters, to try to build an interesting storyline and do character development, out of what is basically a reactive sandbox… they’d voice the characters with an AI gen, or perhaps more old school voice generator, have the dialogue in english and japanese subtitles, kind of uh… ren py story based game or like fire emblem style cut scenes, interspersed between clips of gameplay footage, sometimes superimposed on top of it.
Now, this was very niche and isn’t really representative of what is popular or hugely succesful, but it is an example of another way that you can approach some kind of video game rp content to… more or less try to make something like an anime out of it.
The whole Gaza situation is a wasp’s nest that nobody should poke without knowing damn sure what they are doing. There are multiple big players playing chess with other people’s life there, and you could lose a lot.
But given the complexity the chance that the situation is resolved and thus something is won is very small.
Yes, it’s terrible what is happening. But unless you have a lot of resources and a big army you are not in a position to muscle all the parties involved into submission, which is what will be required at this point.
I just wanted to have actual, official ones shared!
This one is not official, it was done by a girl who goes by https://www.instagram.com/p/CQZUoIJrW26/?hl=en&img_index=1, she just tried her best to make a photo in the ‘style’ of the old Y2K era, and the days of PS2 ads and…everyone ended up believing it was real. She did such an amazing job of it, this one often gets shared as if it were done for Sony.
And…to be fair, the actual official ones got way worse than those I included:
Heh this post blew my mind twice in one package: I was definitely one of those that believed it was a real ad. I distinctly remember some discussions about the serialized nature of it or not. So as you said, super well done.
But secondly, the official ad you posted instead has three nipples at once? And one male two female on top? That almost seems weirder to me.
I don’t care about toxic players and I never spend a dime on any live services… my chief issue is that I have to work for a living and online game matchmaking mix me with people (children) who’s primary stressor in life is trying to print out homework that doesn’t look like ChatGTP wrote it.
It saddens me that my country (Italy) has such a low percentage of signatures. Most of us are either ignorant of anything happening outside of our borders, or straight up doomers who don’t believe anything can ever change for the better.
Big congrats to my fellow northern cousins. I was expecting Poland, who has a healthy videogame industry, to gather a good enough number of signatures, but 160% is wild! It’s refreshing seeing so many people joining the petition - It’s not even about videogames: this initiative will have huge repercussions on the lifespan of other, unrelated products and, in general terms, planned obsolescence.
I think it’s been very hard for us to spread awareness into countries where a majority don’t also speak English, as the organizer and much of the coverage is only in English.
If you know of any big Italian gaming YouTubers or streamers that might be receptive to helping or talking about the campaign, could you reach out to them about it with a comment?
Unfortunately, that’s not my area of expertise. I don’t follow streamers or YouTubers (Italian or international), nor do I have a close enough relationship with any of them that I’d be able to talk to them and convince them to mention this petition to their fans.
The one and only time some friends and I attempted to interact with a few local content creators (to publicize our free fan games we poured hundreds of hours into and NEVER attempted to monetize in any way), we either got ignored, insulted, or received vague answers that went nowhere. It soured me towards Italian content creators and vowed to never interact with them again.
One thing you can do: In person organising. It’s something the campaign has been really bad at. Have some flyers printed up and start handing them out. I don’t know the Italian school schedule, but if universities are still in session they might be good targets.
I did it last year, first at Gamescom and then at a local uni and I think it helped spread the word.
Here are the up-to-date numbers, the threshold percentages are now better than shown the image in the post but there’s still a long way to reach the total of 1 million
bin.pol.social
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