Twisted Metal 2 was insanely fun and if you had it for the PC, it was even better. I had 6 different computers set up in various rooms in my house for TM2 parties since you could LAN everyone together. Couldn’t cheat off of other peoples screens either.
It’s still out there I believe, though it’s not the best port.
I disagree, to me the corr of the mainline games is the Pokedex and region, the actual battles being turn based has always just been a negative to me.
In my opinion saying the turn based battles are critical to being mainline is like saying the saccrin and frankly bad writing is critical, sure it’s always been there but that just makes it a persistent problem not a feature.
I’m kind of confused by that sentiment, because the Pokedex and region are the things that change from game-to-game?
And like, sometimes the writing is bad and saccharine, but not always. It’s subjective, but Gen V is widely considered to have pretty good writing. Gen 1 is pretty understated and well-grounded analog to post-WW2 Japan, with Team Rocket acting as a family-friendly version Yakuza.
I’m also not sure why turn-based games are a negative. Like… From board games like chess, to tabletop games like D&D, to strategy games like Civ, to card games and card videogames like Slay the Spire and Balatro… For me I view turn-based vs real-time as a tool for game designers to wield, not just a strictly positive vs negative thing.
Turn-based has serious positives. It’s less impactful to be interrupted, which is important for handheld games. I find it easier to play when I’m not sober. It’s also easier to play while active - I’ve played through multiple main line games on a treadmill, but even Scarlet and Violet has too much active real-time movement for me to be able to stay coordinated while doing that.
I agree gen V had good writing, it’s a shame they forgot how to do that immediately after (This is part of why I fear them returning to turn based, they have back slid before)
Sure turn based has merits, even if you have to dig to find them, but it’s boring to me.
Board games being turn based are a completely different story, when you play a board game you are playing with a person, you’re talking to them, watching their body language and communicating the whole time.
Turn based in a video game is staring at a screen waiting until you have something to do again. It feels like a relic of a different time, when it wasn’t technically feasible to have live action Pokemon battles like the one in the show.
As for turn based being a tool, if course it is, but the setting and surrounding media and lore keeps claiming Pokemon battles are exciting and fast passed. You know, the opposite of turn based.
The problem is that the battle system is slow. Other games in the genre know how to speed things up. Pokemon insists on providing information one message box at a time. If they fix that, they could make the game feel faster.
Just emulating the old games and running them at 4x speed is an incredible QoL improvement.
Instead of implementing more options to speed things up, GameFreak instead decided to remove the option to disable animations.
I have been saying for years they need to split the franchise. From an anime perspective, before they retired Ash I was calling for them to let him age into a teenager, and for them to create a new character for a show for younger kids. For the games, i want them to split into 3D action RPG’s that play like the Legends games and Scarlet/Violet while the main games stay 2D and turn-based. Right now it seems like they’ve been adding new shit to the main games out of a fear of getting stale rather than to actually serve the games.
They seem to be doing some of that, with Pokemon Champions removing the burden of competitive play from the main games in the future.
My wife said the same thing. She is not a fast gamer, she likes the slower pace of Pokémon. I also have been forgetting the game is not turn based as zoning out during combat, or in a wild zone.
I know that Pokemon is, ostensibly, a children’s game. But there is a niche in my life for games I can play when I’m not sober, and being turn-based greatly facilitates that for me.
It has the following gameplay types that you can switch to and play as long as you like:
PvE missions where you and other humans (team or randos) battle AI
PvP missions where its you and your team up against anther human team
Free Space missions that you can complete solo or in teams
Free Space exploring where you can jump system-to-system and explore without any objectives
The game studio, Gaijin, is Russian-based and has a tank game War Thunder (infamous for real-world military leaks) and a vehicular combat game called Crossout, though I’ve never played them.
Anyway Star Conflict is free-to-play, pay-to-win (PvP), but if you play the PvE and open space parts you don’t need to invest any money to have fun. You can stick to the lower ship tiers for casual gaming, and switch between fighting styles and ship roles easily. You can pilot blazing-fast interceptors, balanced mid-size fighters, heavy-hitting frigates, or super-slow but massive destroyers, and customize each one with a huge selection of weapon types, shields, and auxillary syatems. The underlying fighting principle is kinda like rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock, so an interceptor can easily solo a destroyer, a destroyer can take out a group of frigates, frigates outpower fighters, fighters hunt interceptors, etc. And the same goes for weapons and shields too, with thermal, EM, and kinetic types and their shield counterparts. If you venture into a space region infested with pirates who use kinetic weapons and thermal shields, then equip your ship with weapons of the opposite type of their shields to maximize damage, and equip shields of the same type as their weapons to minimize damage.
Anyway go try it out and let me know what you think!
Some of my other picks have already been mentioned so I’ll go with an obscure answer: Cpt. Olivia Rhodes from the VR game Lone Echo.
She is by far the most realistic and immersive NPC I have ever had the fortune of experiencing. The storytelling and immersion in Lone Echo is S tier. The game itself is in my top three VR games with Half-Life Alyx and Boneworks.
Everspace 2 might be what you’re looking for. It’s fighter piloting and npt battleship style combat bit it’s one of the closest feels I had to what Xwing vs Tie Fighter was back in the day. You can drift and swap end for end just like XvT.
You might also like the spaceship portions of Star Wars Outlaws. I’ve been having fun in there, too.
0451 was a door code in the first level. It’s become iconic since then.
The first game is pretty dated. Most people didn’t like the graphics. I did, but I’m weird. I still think Unreal Engine 1 is beautiful. Just… jagged. The remaster will not be much better. The remaster is just important because we’ll be able to play DX1 on Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch. I can play the original PC version on my Mac, but I’m hoping for a native Mac port since it’s Aspyr and that’s what they were doing before, but to be fair, they were doing Mac ports of Xbox 360 games when both Mac and Xbox 360 used IBM PowerPC chips (in other words, half the work was done for them already since they had the same CPU architecture). But that’s true again since the Mac has the same ARM64 CPU architecture as the Switch and Switch 2, so in theory anything that can run on the Switch can also run on the Mac (and, point of fact, Switch emulators generally work better on Macs because they only have to emulate the code, not the chipset).
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