I wish people would just laugh at them, and tell them how fucking ridiculous they look and then promptly leave their asses behind and move on. Instead, we get news articles about a minority of people who have shit opinions about things they have no understanding of.
Kamela’s early campaign of just calling Trump “weird” was all about this, for some reason she dropped it in favor of kissing the asses of the Cheneys for no payoff.
I wish people would just laugh at them, and tell them how fucking ridiculous they look and then promptly leave their asses behind and move on. Instead, we get news articles about a minority of people who have shit opinions about things they have no understanding of.
We tried that with GamerGate, and it didn’t work. Keeping bad people away from levers of power requires constant diligence; we cannot simply dismiss and move on, because then while we are looking away, the trolls continue to build their base. I’m a strong believer in the power of memes in our modern digital age. Try to write a bunch of articles about a problem like this, and most folks will only absorb the pithy headline. Some will read the article, but mostly only college-educated folks. Instead, make a meme about it that distills the logic of your opponent down to its ridiculous conclusion, and suddenly everyone gets it. (this isn’t to say we should never write an article to explore the nuance of a point, just arguing for the value of leftist memes)
We have the discussion out in the open so that the kids and other uneducated folks can read a variety of opinions. If we don’t, the trolls swoop up and try to turn them into incels.
I’ve only just started today, so these are my first impressions of the initial 10 games:
Barbuta: such a strange little game! First impression is very hostile and strange, but it keeps luring me in with it’s puzzle-like complexity. Discovering new stuff in this one is super satisfying.
Bug Hunter: seems interesting, but did not want to hurt my brain with the strategy aspect, so on hold for now
Ninpek: precision platformer auto-scroller, I am really bad at this so not really for me
Paint Chase: amazing little game, really fun paint battler with cool powerups
Magic Garden: this one got its hooks in me, a great twist on snake and pacman with a risk-reward mechanic. Highly recommend!
Mortol: this is so creative! Still at the start, but using your own body as a tool to be used by your next “lives” is amazing.
Velgress: made me think of playing Doodle Jump on my Nokia Slider phone, good times.
Planet Zoldath: spend literally 1 minute in this, something on a planet, then my brain wanted another impulse :)
Attactics: really cool, sort of real time strategy game. I really like it, but feel like I need to play it more to understand the strategies better.
Devilition: chain reactions of blowing up demons! Quite a head-scratcher, but really satisfying when you start your demolition and everything goes as planned!
Dave The Diver: you run a sushi restaurant and go diving to catch fish. The writing is quirky, it’s full of interesting characters and there’s no time limits except for some events. I’ll spend days just fishing for the restaurant instead of doing any “story stuff”. I picked a steam key on CDkeys for £7 and I can already see myself pouring 40 hours in this thing if I want. The trailer if anyone is interested
Journey - This game brought me to a sort of Zen, it is calm and peaceful and was just a wonderful experience that didn’t out stay its welcome. By the end of it I just felt like I had had a nice uplifting experience.
Fallout games - Yeh this may not seem like an uplifting game experience for most people and I would generally agree but on a personal level I do find them uplifting by the end of them for the following reason. I have always picked up the modern fallout games when I have been quitting one substance or another in the past. There is something about the desolation of the people and the environment within those games with mirrors the desolation I felt withing myself at these times in my life. Working through the stories draws me in and helps me forget about whatever it is my body is telling me I “need” even if it is only for a few hours at a time. Multiple times though these games have helped me get through those feelings and so therefore for me they have a certain uplifting quality, like a weird unexpected safe space.
I kind of feel a lot of 8 bit era games haven’t aged the best. But there are a few that I love. Of course smb3 is really outstanding. That game is timeless and really showed how well Nintendo can make games. While I may personally prefer smw, smb3 was in my eyes the first to perfect the side scrolling platformer.
Mother is another game from the era I enjoy a lot. It hasnt aged as well as smb3, but it’s still a fun game to look back on. I feel the game was a bit ahead of it’s time, and with a few gameplay changes I think it would still be worth playing for any jrpg fan today
I’ve been watching Jeff Gerstmann work through and rank the NES library over the past year, and I agree with your sentiment. It seems like there are only like 10-20 NES games that actually hold up, and the rest of the library is either “good for the era” or absolute garbage.
I’d argue that is true of any generation, a few games are must plays and endure as such, then there are many that are just okay even at the time and then a bunch of crap it’s hardly worth playing.
The “floor” for how bad a bad game can be has gone up as the generations have gone on. There’s always a few stinkers, but most PS2 games are objectively better than like half of the NES library.
Like, half of the NES library is games riddled with bugs, or they are licensed games where the devs barely knew what they were doing so they just cranked out a piece of software that barely qualifies as a game. I’m not talking about the games that we remember. If you remember an NES game, even if you remember it as bad, I am 99% certain it isn’t one of the dogshit games I’m thinking of. I’m not talking about like, Excitebike or Bubble Bobble or whatever. Those are classics, even if they’ve aged poorly. I’m talkin games like, Fester’s Quest, or Mickey Mousecepade, or Jordan vs. Bird: One-on-One, or Time Lord. Games where just playing them feels bad.
But there are games that have the same problems today, they just look better because they have higher resolution assets but as still riddled with bugs and control issues.
I think the difference is that in the 8bit generation yhe majority of the game were bad relative to each other. The peak of the bell curve for 8bit was between mediocre to kinda bad games.
While there are more games in later generations, it feels like the console manufacturers took more control and regulated what was published. Bad games happen now because of shitty business decisions and bad story writing. You dont see garbage being published just because you can.
I really want to like them. They are everything I want in a game. Open levels you are free to approach however you like, a possible stealth approach, nice attention to detail and one of the later games even had native Linux support. But I never could get hooked to the story like other people seem to be.
I came to the conclusion (based on other games and media as well) that I just don’t like cyberpunk dystopias. Maybe because we’re in one, Miss Turner.
You know, you bring up a really good point, honestly.
My friend had a similar complaint about Baldurs Gate III.
“Why so much body horror and gore? When I was growing up and playing DnD, we were never exploring that kind of stuff. DnD can be so much more than just body horror and gore.” Not verbatim, but you get the idea.
As much as I love BG3, I don’t actually disagree with his sentiment at all.
There should be an opportunity for people to play similar style of games that aren’t so gory or depressing or both. Not every stealth game needs to be cyberpunk and depressing.
I know multiple women who mainly got themselves a PC to play Sims back in the day and who are now in senior IT roles because once they got the PC they kind of “sticked with it”.
That is something we indeed should thank The Sims for.
I know this is a controversial take, but I really intensely do not like Half Life.
I have issues with it from a narrative perspective. I have no idea who it is I’m fighting or why. It feels like an incredibly forced “oh, we need an excuse to throw some baddies at the player” premise.
But the main problem I had was mechanical. It’s just not a fun game to play. The gunplay was fine, but then it forces itself to throw a bunch of puzzle and platforming mechanics at you, and just…why? It’s so, so terrible at them. Running up to the edge and jumping will more often than not really in you falling because of a misalignment in perceived location and where the game’s engine says you are. Boxes, which you have to move around to solve the puzzling, fly around at a million miles per minute, making the fine control needed to successfully solve the puzzles very, very difficult. And ladders…don’t even get me started about ladders.
I couldn’t bring myself to finish the first Half Life, let alone start on the sequel.
I’m not a big shooter player. I had played a fair bit of Battlefield 2 multiplayer, the CoD4 campaign multiple times, as well as games like Star Wars Battlefront 2 (the first game with that title…) and Mass Effect (I think at the time I had played only 1 and 2).
I actually thought I had played the Source version of it, but my Steam history says otherwise. I was playing the OG version, in 2014.
I think you have to take it within the context of when it came out. CoD4 and Mass Effect came out 9 years later. There wasn’t anything like HL in 98. Enemies that talked to each other and flanked you? Unseen before. Does it stand up to games now? We’ve learned so much since then. But I think you’d be hard pressed to find a modern shooter that didn’t trace its heritage back to HL.
Sure, and I am in no way suggesting that it was a bad game in its day (especially now that I know at least one of the issues I had with it was a bug introduced long after the fact). But I am suggesting that it doesn’t hold up nearly as well as some people like to insist it does. It’s the “Seinfeld is unfunny” trope, except that that relies on the idea that people today don’t find Seinfeld very funny; the difference is that I regularly see people saying that yes, Half Life is still an excellent game if you play it today.
And for what it’s worth, the game I have put the most hours into on Steam (and by 2x the 2nd place game—which is a more recent entry in the same franchise) was released just 10 months after the original Half Life. Granted, I’m playing on a 2019 remaster with upgraded graphics and some new QoL features, but it’s the same basic game, and had a vibrant community still playing on the 1999 version all the way up until the '19 remaster. It’s a game that I think really does hold up very well today, albeit in an entirely different genre.
Haha yeah, when I was young I played a fair amount of Age games, but never playing them in their normal intended fashion. A lot of using the cheats, playing the campaigns on easy mode, and some custom scenarios that largely don’t use actual economy management that’s at the core of the game.
Only got into the more competitive side of the game after the DE release in 2019.
The thing with pushing stuff and it moving really fast was actually a bug in the steam release. It finally got fixed last November for the 25th anniversary update.
I think you should give HL2 a chance. It can be enjoyed even without the first game. You have already played the first game a bit, so you know the deal (experiment gone wrong, aliens everywhere). HL2 takes place 20 years after the incident.
There’s fewer annoying platforming sections for instance. The puzzles also involves proper Havok physics, which is easier to manage.
The story is also a step up, with proper named characters. The baddies are also better developed and has a better reason to be the baddies.
Segments as in levels. So in segmented, you can try for example level 3 “Unforseen Conséquences” as many times as you like, and then pick your best time. In this way you can stitch together all your best times to make one segmented run.
Unsegmented I suppose just means a standard speed run: all in one session. If you get a bad time on level 12 you have to start all over at level 1.
If you get a bad time on level 3, you have plenty of chanses to recover on the next 9 levels.
Or, perhaps if you have a fantastic times on levels 3, 7 and 9 that earned time can be used to compensate on level 12, making the time possibly still good enough.
The original Metroid on NES was so freaking good back in the day. I’m in my late 40s at this point and I still hear songs or themes that make me go “that reminds me of Metroid”. The music was iconic.
And it’s gotta be said, the original reveal that the hero of the game was a (gasp) girl! I am sure it had an effect on my young impressionable mind. And the good kind of effect, the kind that makes you realize girls can be bad ass too. So awesome!
Journey is one of the most sublime works of art in the video games medium. I have it tattooed on half my fucking arm.
I got similar feelings of awe from Citizen Sleeper. They’re vastly different games, but they both blew me away for what the “games as an art form” could be.
Its basically a perfect game. It never feels dated and has one of the most horribly catchy songs ever created by man. Its weird that it’s so fun, its like as simple as you can really boil down a game, its literally just arranging blocks into lines. But it just clicks with the human brain on some deep level.
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