Everblue 2 for the PS2 is one of my all-time favorite games. I play it about once a year. The original was an EU only release thst I didn’t get to play until a few years ago. It also had a sort of spiritual successor with Endless Ocean 1 & 2 for the Wii, made by the same developer. However, the first one didn’t have any of the treasure finding mechanics and there was no real threat to the player at any time. Neither series really let you walk on land, so to speak. The Everblue games do have above water parts, you return to the island between dives to talk to people, sell treasure, sleep and such, but they’re prerendered images that are more like a point and click adventure. There were a couple pc games I played around the same time that were made by independent developers that never really took off.
As a pc gamer, I disagree with the premise. PC gaming doesn’t have a mascot squad because PC Gaming isn’t a monolith, whereas Nintendo (or Xbox or Playstation) is.
You want THE PC gaming mascot? It’s Steve from Minecraft. No other character, not even Doom Guy, comes even remotely close.
Game prices? I understand the Nintendo cult is always stiff. But for the last 10 years these people bitched about $70 games. And now they are just throwing excuse after excuse defending $80 games now. But the lie I’ve been hearing is “Sony has been selling $80 games since the PS5 came out” No… No it hasn’t. There is not one base PS5 game for $80 ever made.
I’m very much against this and always have been, but I think not everyone has been. Some people will buy these games at any cost, especially when it comes to Nintendo and children. Children don’t understand the true costs and parents just want a happy kid and think it’s not that bad of a price for their kid to be happy. Most probably don’t pay attention to the price to see that it once was $50 and now is $80 for the new games.
It’s infuriating for me because my boycott effectively means nothing when these people exist. But no matter, I’m happy with my PC and waiting on emulation when it comes to play these games.
Man. AS a parent I didn’t even think about parents! With my kids it just comes down to if I can afford it or not. My son wants WWE 2K25 but it’s just too much right now. But yeah I could imagine there are a lot of parents and grandparents that just don’t care and get whatever for their kids.
Game of the year. Also, if it didn’t have the RNG component, it would be a worse game. A puzzle game that inherently prevents you from stubbornly blundering down one thread is genius design, the fact that the house forces you to look at rooms you aren’t looking for leads to so many natural “aha!” moments and encourages you to be actively tracking multiple story/puzzle threads at once.
So few puzzle games care about also being good games, and I can confidently say that if Blue Prince didn’t have the excellent roguelite-inspired gameplay loop at its core I’d have dropped it without even giving it a chance. Giving you “stuff to do” as you process the lore and puzzle hints is the secret sauce. The game’s themes of inheritance tie in perfectly to the strategic mastery curve of learning how to influence the manor. Having a source of “payoff” emotions other than “solving a puzzle” keeps the moment to moment gameplay fresh, and if you’re playing it for long enough that stuff like allowance tokens and stars stop feeling like rewards, you’ll also have access to so many luck-mitigating tools that I can confidently say it’s a skill issue if you’re still fighting the drafting system.
The natural progression from “the objective is to wrangle the house into giving me what I KNOW i want” to “the house is just like this, and I can search it to find new things to want” to “I know how to make this house sing” is perfectly executed ludonarrative harmony. You learn the rooms so much better when you’re forced to walk through them on consecutive days. Upgrades and rarity tweaks give you so much power. The drafting system isn’t a barrier to you solving puzzles. It’s a strategy game that you can be good or bad at. And a lot of people that are frustrated at that system’s existence are refusing to treat it as something you can get good at. It’s a Dark Souls boss fight - practice with intentionality, explore solutions and ideas, fail frequently, learn from failure, be rewarded with mastery.
People just aren’t receptive to the idea of “challenge” in a game that isn’t precision timing or stat sheet optimizing. The house mechanic of Blue Prince is a relatively challenging strategy game, and part of the challenge is recognizing how to interface with it at all. A lot of people come to the game ready for challenging puzzles but not a strategy game, and for those BP will feel like “RNG getting in the way of my puzzle solving”. That’s fair, but I’d liken that attitude to coming into Elden Ring and complaining that all these boss fights are in the way of the lore. Strategy games might not be your thing, and maybe you didn’t know BP would be one, and that’s okay. But for those that like challenging strategy games and intricate puzzles, there’s nothing quite like Blue Prince.
You’re missing many of the most iconic games on PC, namely stuff like League of Legends, DOTA, WoW, Overwatch, Runescape… Kerrigan is the only one you’ve included that kinda fits this group.
Now, to be honest, I haven’t touched most of these games myself, so I can’t tell you their mascots. But at least the MOBAs are bound to have one.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne