Maybe not exactly what you’re looking for, but I’ve been playing Gloomhaven Co-op recently. Dungeon delver, turn based strategy with RPG elements and an interesting mechanic for managing your attacks and movement through an encounter.
If you like ITB, check out their other game FTL…and while you’re at it, check out Cobalt Core which was one of my favorite games of last year (even though it’s from 2023)
I’ll recommend Frostpunk and Frostpunk 2, too, but they’re a different kind of strategy to what you’ve posted.
I don’t track or rank joy like that, but discovering the dark world in The Legend of Zelda a Link to the Past is definitely up there. Just realising the world had this whole extra dimension to it.
I still love dimensionality / hidden depth in games.
Playing Left4Dead2 versus with 8 friends, running my own custom ‘Random’ mod. That game was so great to play matches in with the right people - and very fun to code sourcemod plugins for as well.
Me and my cousin played FFXI starting in the beta. I got the game for free at official launch and we played for a long time. But the greatest moment of gaming excitement is when we got the peacock charm drop from a super rare NM. I’m pretty sure it was the rarest, most valuable item in the game at the time. The NM was deep in a maze, and had a huge spawn window. I think it was something like an IRL week or something, and even if you managed to tag it from the countless other players camping it, you still had a very low chance of the drop.
I spent the night at my cousins one weekend and we went to bed one night after camping it for hours and left our characters logged in at the spawn point so we could check the combat logs to see if anyone got it while we were asleep. When I woke up, it had not spawned, but my cousin had already got up and left the cave. I was surprisingly alone in that room for the first time ever. No other players. After about 30 minutes, it spawns. I’m alone, and not strong enough to kill it by myself. My cousin somehow managed to make it from Jueno to the maze (like at least a 10 minute run) before anyone else showed up, and we got the kill and the drop.
We were literally screaming and high fiving so hard that his step mom thought we had won the lottery or something.
We both put it on at least once just to say we had, and sold it for more money than we’d ever imagined. We then bought the best gear for our characters and felt like gods.
Never even made it to max level, but holy crap nothing has ever come close to that level of excitement in or out of a game.
I still play ffxi to this day and I fully remember moments like that. Good nostalgia but I’m also glad they don’t make games like that anymore. FFXI itself has been modernized to remove this kind of grind and is still getting new content updates. You should check it out again.
Me and that same cousin got together and played it again 3 or 4 years back and got to 99. The grind at max level is just too strong to keep my interest. He, however, got into the ffxi horizon fan server that’s pretty much exactly like original XI, but with some QOL additions and an added hardcore mode. He got summoner to level 75 in hardcore mode and died like 2 days later. You don’t lose your character, but there are some cool items you get from hitting certain level milestones that you do lose. One of which was a ring with a teleport spell on it that had unlimited charges and only like a 20 minute cool down that you get st 75. It also does a server wide announcement when a hardcore character that high dies, so everyone was messaging him. He got super bummed and quit.
Just a small thing… I must have played Civ II for hundreds and hundreds of hours as a kid. Then one day a large civilization in civil disorder had its capital taken and one half of the empire seceded as a brand new civilization. I yelped… one of those joyful wtaf moments…
the ending of outer wilds, figuring out that the treasure really was the friends we made along the way, will always stand out to me as the most magnificent, joy-filled moment in my 25+ year gaming experience.
Meeting [redacted] on the [redacted] was such an unexpected and powerful moment for me as well. I don’t even usually get into lore that much in games, but Outer Wilds is so well done I nearly cried in that moment.
Beating most any “hard” video game is always a great feeling just due to the sheer hours that go into it. In some cases, you have to develop the memory and skill to do the whole thing in one sitting. I can’t count how many from the NES era fit this criteria. Top of that list are: Contra, Bionic Commando, and most Zelda and Mega Man games.
The best one happened in the middle of my Dark Souls play-through. I kept having to quit playing after short sessions, as skill and vigor checks kept wrecking me. This lead to anger and rage that just made it impossible to proceed. Once I made the connection that I could concentrate more and flow through combat more easily while calm, I changed tactics to calming my own mind and keeping it that way. The game just “opened up” after that. From there on, it was much more about meditation and breathing than equipment and leveling - skills I now carry with me everywhere. DS literally made me a calmer and more resilient person.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne