Ommmm I know that is why I got a steam deck? I love video games that don’t force you to buy a super expensive gaming rig.
I don’t really fuck with emulation though I want to (dunno where to get roms honestly) but there are so many banger indie games out there that barely use any resources to run, and honestly simpler graphics is almost always better for gameplay, development, and even aesthetics because it forces developers to adopt a style with their simplified vision of reality instead of just making things look super realistic.
I hate modern strategy games where the map is super pretty and 3D but impossible to read and all the menus are animated with tiny little buttons and hard to read text against textured parchment backgrounds…. it is clear as day that giving those game developers a more powerful computer to develop on was actually a catastrophic mistake in terms of UI readability.
Eh, there’s a huge number of shovelware for every console generation, plus less than stellar titles. The thing is that, due to all the years piling up, the amount of good stuff just increases.
True, but back then games were made to stand on their own instead of being a poorly thought out monetization machine.
I mean Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing was shit, but at least they only expected you to pay for it once… and you can still play it, you don’t have to wait for a lobby to fill up before it lets you into the game, a lobby that will never fill up because no one’s playing Big Rigs: Over The Fucking Road Racing
The developers who made Big Rigs probably wouldn’t have the budget to make an AAA game nowadays. A better comparison would be indie games, and there’s more of them (or it feels like it) due to easier development & distribution. (Which does involve shovelware). Even excluding Indies, AA games without subscription models are plentiful too.
Edit: (AAA games are a better example of being worse, I haven’t played them but comparing Assasin’s Creed or Metal Gear back in the day to now is better to show the bad practices. Thankfully, like I said, there’s just a ton more games and you don’t need to play the crappy ones)
The people who published Big Rigs are still out there publishing terrible mainstream license games such as the new Kong game and the new Avatar: TLA game (yes, really). They’re called “Game Mill”, and they are exactly what their name is, and their games are some of the worst on shelves. They don’t keep any employees very long and they have them work on games before they even get an order so they can slap the license into the game last-minute.
Games from 1999-2007 aged really well. I’ve been playing Aliens vs Predator 2, No One Lives Forever and a bunch of GameCube, PS2 and Xbox games on my Steam Deck.
If you can deal with the extreme tedium of making an entire roster of "Jacob Paterson"s (changing letter casing here and there), you’ll be steamrolling everyone. Kinda ruins the fun of the game, but I find it really satisfying to watch >700ft home runs that clear the entire stadium and hear Kuip and Krukow endlessly call dinger after dinger. Pure dumb fun :D
Makes me wish the Deck OLED wasn’t worth blood money on this side of the pond.
I’ll be interested to see how the Orangepi Neo reviews when it releases, it’s the only handheld I reckon can hold a candle to the deck, though I suspect Orangepi’s track record of record shite support will derail that one.
It’s not a perfect replacement and single player only if that matters, but have you tried Transport Fever 2? It’s got a TTD feel with beautiful modern graphics.
No online play meant game had to be played with people sitting next to you. You had to socialize;
No updates meant games had to be finished when sold, none of the early access or battle pass bullshit;
Games were made hard to artificially give longer play time but this resulted in sense of achievement when you beat the game;
Booklets were actually awesome because you had lore in your hands which was written in a way not to spoil the game but hyped you to play further so you could get to that content.
Sure for the most part it’s nostalgia, but technology brought as many, if not more, bad things as it did with good things. We’ve seen games get much better than old games and we’ve seen them much worse.
Actually there is a company called limited run games I think that goes all out and prints physical copies of some indie games with instructions and bonus stuff. It’s pretty awesome but takes a while to get it.
Fun anecdote. The PAL version of Digimon World 1 had a serious bug that prevented your progress to recruit Ogremon, which you needed to recruit Shellmon, which you needed to recruit a bunch of late game digimons, and made your access to several areas extremely harder. A 100% completion was impossible. It was still such a neat game tho.
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