I am a late fan of this series. I used to have a Gameboy color as my first gaming device, but never actually sat down to play a Mario game fully until Super Mario Odyssey on the Switch. I really liked it, but it wasn’t a 10/10 for me like for other people.
For me the unexpected match came in the form of Super Mario 3D World. Something about the simplicity of the level design (short levels with 3 collectibles each) combined with the amazing coop make this an all time favorite game of mine. I also adore the music and general tone and creativity. It really had an almost therapeutic effect on me, I’ve seen more immediate effect on my mood than any of the anti depressants I’ve tried :D.
I have Wonder but it’s a bit to strange at times for my tastes (even though it is incredibly creative it isn’t as relaxing as 3D World was for me)
Long time fans of the 2d games really enjoy Wonder as the movement mechanics moved back to a faster feel from pre-New Super Mario Bros. My favorite will probably always be Super Mario World because the movement is the most responsive in that game and I also like to play ROM hacks for it and that community is wild.
New Super Mario Bros ended up with a sluggish movement by comparison and dominated 2d Mario for decades.
The big draw for many people in Mario is movement mechanics and that’s why Odyssey is so popular as well. The 3d platforming with Cappy just feels right. Like a missing extension that we never new we didn’t have.
Kind of overrated? I mean, it was cool to see a bit more of a palatable cinematic presentation in real time to go along with the late 90s PC jank, and that theme did kick ass, but it's less groundbreaking in context than I think people give it credit for. And it doesn't hold up nearly as well as System Shock 2, in my book.
System Shock 2 is begging for a remake with actually functioning netcode for multiplayer way more than the original.
Bioshock would eventually iterate on this, but the RPG systems of System Shock 2 are so, so deep, and I always appreciated that you could still get attacked by enemies while trying to hack machines. It made doing things like hacking feel very dangerous. Bioshock literally pauses time for you it’s so weak by comparison.
I'm not of the opinion that more simulation and more "realism" are always better, but I would absolutely take a System Shock 2 remake, especially after the System Shock one (1 one?) turned out great.
it’s less groundbreaking in context than I think people give it credit for.
Are you seriously going to tell me that the open-ended structure of Deus Ex, coupled with the RPG elements and interactive environments wasn’t groundbreaking for the time? There wasn’t anything quite like it back then, so much so it basically created the genre of Immersive Sims as we know it today.
Hell, you could trace basically any first person shooter with RPG elements from after 2000 back to Deus Ex, it’s the gold standard for a reason. The closest thing we had to this kind of game back then was Strife, a Doom clone with a basic quest system and inventory, even System Shock 2 is less dynamic and open-ended than Deus Ex.
The closest thing we had was the System Shock duology, since both predate Deus Ex. Deus Ex was basically accessible System Shock. Having dialogue trees and NPCs without losing the open-ended nature of System Shock's more dungeon crawl-y approach was the real selling point. Well, that and the trenchcoats and shades. The Matrix was such a big deal.
But even then, each of those elements were already present in different mixes in several late 90s games. Deus Ex by some counts was one of the early culminations of the genre blending "everything game" we were all chasing during the 90s. The other was probably GTA 3. I think both of those are fine and they are certainly important games, but I never enjoyed playing them as much as less zeitgeist-y games that were around at the same time. I did spend a lot of time getting Deus Ex to look as pretty as possible, but I certainly didn't finish it and, like a lot of people, I mostly ran around Liberty Island a bunch.
I played more Thief 2 that year, honestly. I played WAY more Hitman than Deus Ex that year. I certainly thought System Shock 2 was better. Deus Ex is a big, ambitious, important game, for sure, but I never felt it quite stuck the landing when playing it, even at the time.
The closest thing we had was the System Shock duology, since both predate Deus Ex. Deus Ex was basically accessible System Shock. Having dialogue trees and NPCs without losing the open-ended nature of System Shock’s more dungeon crawl-y approach was the real selling point.
You’re clearly misremembering System Shock if that’s what you think. Those games were just Ultima Underground with guns, especially the first. Deus Ex was soooo beyond dungeon crawler, it was almost a full blown RPG by modern standards, it had big hubs with multiple NPCs that you could talk, quests with alternate endings that sometimes changed later sections of the game, highly interactive environments, level design with lots of verticality and hidden paths… System Shock had nothing of that.
Really, if anything Deus Ex owes more to Thief in the gameplay department than System Shock, the interactive environments and very detailed level design, even the stealth were straight out of Thief. It clearly has some inspiration from System Shock, especially with the augments, but even those were more useful in ways to allow you traverse the environment than the former. Calling it an “accessible System Shock” is reductive at best.
Hah. I almost wrote that I also think the two Ultima Undergrounds are better than Deus Ex despite being much older and having an objectively very clumsy interface. Then I thought that'd get us in the weeds and pull us too far back, so I took it out.
Look, yeah, Deus Ex rolled in elements from CRPGs and had good production values for the time. But all those things were nothing new for an RPG, they were just new for a shooter. Baldur's Gate and Fallout were a few years old. The entire Ultima franchise had been messing around with procedural, simulated worlds for almost a decade at that point, which in the 90s was a technological eon.
And yeah, System Shock had created a template for a shooter RPG, they just applied it to a lone survivor dungeon crawly horror thing, rather than try to marry it to the narrative elements of NPC-focused CRPGs, which is admittedly a lot more complicated. And Deus Ex was fully voiced and had... well, a semblance of cutscenes. In context it's hilariously naive compared to what Japanese devs were doing in Metal Gear or Final Fantasy, but it was a lot for western PC game standards.
But it wasn't... great to play? I don't know what to tell you. Thief and Hitman both had nailed the clockwork living stage thing, and at the time I was more than happy to give up the Matrix-at-home narrative and the DnD-style questing for that. The pitch was compelling, but it didn't necessarily make for a great playable experience against its peers.
I didn't hate it or anything. I spent quite a bit of time messing with it. That corny main theme still pops up in my head with no effort on demand. I spent more time using it as a benchmark than Unreal, which I also thought wasn't a great game.
Also, while I'm here pissing people off, can we all agree that "immersive sim" is a terrible name for a genre? What exactly is "simulated"? Why is it immersive? Immerisve as opposed to what? At the time we tended to lump them in with stealth games, so the name is just an attempt to reverse engineer a genre name by using loose words that weren't already taken, and I hate it. See also: character action game. Which action games do NOT have characters?
I only played the two “new” ones. They were both good, fairly interesting, but not amazing. It’s hard to say, but it just felt like something was missing from them. Maybe it was a lack of things to do between missions beyond finding my way into a few random apartments for no real reason?
It’s worth noting that I’m generally not into stealth games, I get impatient and just want blood, or think I can sprint past a few guards without being seen. (I think I fucked up in the police station in HR, and the entire interior of the building was just corpses)
Out of the two human revolution was a bit better but there wasn’t much between them.
I did like the aesthetics and general mood of the games though, and cyberware will always be cool.
I still would have played the next one if it hadn’t been cancelled sadly.
I would suggest against GMDX for a first time playthrough, it changes A LOT. From the aesthetics, to the gameplay, to the sounds, the mood, the feel of the game, and the viable approaches in each level, there’s so much that’s changed it just isn’t the same game anymore.
You’re much better off with the Vanilla Fixer tool, Transcended, or Zero Rando (I’m the dev). You could also use Revision and toggle every setting to vanilla, but make sure you also disable the HDTP models, and disable Shifter and Biomod too, and definitely set the maps to vanilla.
The Sims 2 Castaway is basically the proto survival crafting game. It’s kinda cool to see the classic Sim stats get used in such a different way. I sometimes wish EA would return to those days of selling spinoff Sim games like Castaway and the Urbz, rather than just dumping every single new idea they get into one game as DLC.
I liked 1 but played so much sims 2 back when I was in school. It is still really relaxing for me, so from time to time I come back and build a house with a crazy family in it.
I remember trying to play Earthbound when I was younger. The story is fascinating, I really want to love the game, but the actual gameplay didn’t really grab me. I remember getting to the first major town area and getting my ass beat by the gangsters or whoever that you need to fight there. Never made it past that point.
Any tips, if I wanted to pick it up again? Is this a game that expects you to grind? I found the early game to be really difficult, and I’m not usually one to be turned off by that but I really felt like I was hitting a brick wall and I think I must have missed something fundamental.
Yeah, you do have to grind a bit. Nowhere near as much as some games (looking at you, basically every Final Fantasy game) but the leveling is designed around you doing some extra fights for XP. Every new area generally has a "grind spot" that is moderately to incredibly obvious, typically some grouping of enemies that are enough to fight but not enough to overwhelm you, placed within reasonable walking distance of a bed, hotel, or other way to refill your HP/MP for cheap/free.
For the first town, before you take on the punks roaming the streets you should get some levels fighting crows, dogs, and snakes up near your house. Once you can kill them in two turns or less head into town and try taking on a single punk. If you survive that fight without being nearly dead, keep fighting punks. If you almost die, go heal up and farm a little more. And if you DO die... well you only lose half the money you have on you, so as long as you keep most of it in the ATM you haven't lost much of anything.
“Skip the grind” romhacks are the only way I play a lot of JRPGs. I don’t want to mindlessly battle to advance in the game. I have better things to do with my time, like playing a wider selection of games. I don’t need games’ length padded!
Not sure if it’s needed for Earthbound, but I’d probably just use it anyway. Most games set up a good leveling curve, so double XP shouldn’t break the game even if it’s unnecessary.
If you want to bypass grinding entirely then you'd need something like that, but it might trivialize certain parts of the game. Won't trivialize all of it though since several of the key fights rely on strategy.
I was curious, so I looked it up: Earthbound has a fairly gentle XP curve. Double XP takes you from level 33 to 40, assuming you play the same.
I haven’t played Earthbound enough to remember if there’s grinding, so idk if it’s necessary. In general, I tend to find the existence of double XP romhacks is usually enough to indicate that I’d rather use them, based on my playstyle preferences. Someone thought it was beneficial enough to put hours of work into!
Earthbound is eternally on my list of games i play through every couple of years. Its such a great game. Some aspects of it are a tad clunky by modern sensibilities (inventory management, going through the menus for a lot of things, etc.), but overall it holds up really well. Also if you liked earthbound, mother 3 is also 100% worth playing. Mother 1 (or beginnings, or whatever you wanna call it), is hard to recommend to anyone but the most diehard fans, though.
I like earthbound the most of all of em, but thats purely for nostalgia reasons. From a critical perspective, i think mother 3 is the superior game.
Earthbound and the whole mother series are some of my all time faves. Mother 3 in particular is so outstanding it is a crime it hasn’t been localized! I have the osts in my regular rotation. Earthbound is probably my favorite for nostalgia reasons since I played it well before the others, and I like its format a bit more than the chapter based format of 3. However 3 is probably the more polished and better game
Favourite game - 1, it was the first one I played and the one I’m most familiar with.
Least is 3, it was the first game I encountered with day 1 dlc, so didn’t get any. Last ME game I bought too, Jokes on me I guess because I got the remaster instead.
I enjoyed KOTOR/II before it and I was hoping for more of the same, more HK-47 really. No HK but the play is familiar: go to a planet do some quests, X person wants to talk and on to the next.
Mass Effect 2 and 3 are up there with some of the best shooters I’ve played. It’s just so smooth. And the weight/CDR system is incredibly simple yet impactful. I’ve played through 3 several times. Yes, the story beats weren’t always great. Still fun.
EDIT: Since we’re posting favorite builds: Sentinel gang. What’s that, I have access to literally everything you need to beat any enemy? Yes please.
Can we take a moment to appreciate how Metroid II really did the groundwork for what Super Metroid perfected? I don’t think SM would have flown to the heights it has had Metroid II not taken the risks it did.
Edit: this wasn’t intended as a reply to a comment and should have been it’s own comment!
Such an incredible gaming experience with absolutely no words.
I also love Abzū, which is kind of like a sequel to it, but also not really.
I did try and get my girlfriend (non-gamer) to play Journey and she did not enjoy it at all, which made me realise a large part of why I love it is that it doesn’t hold your hand, and it assumes you are adept at gaming in some way.
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