Second this. It’s a puzzle game that is all about communication. One player is in the room that has to solve the puzzle, the other player is in a different room that has the solution to the puzzle.
This is a game that you don’t play being able to look at each other screens.
Just a warning, I’m a wimp and got scared in one specific scene/puzzle. It’s a very minor horror theme, ended up having to have my husband sitting on the floor next to me facing the other way to complete it cos I got too scared. Loved the series though, amazing games.
There’s just not many story mode games that compare to Larians for co-op. Besides take two/a way out, I haven’t found any RPGs that are worthwhile (borderlands was the closest I guess but the gameplay is boring)
Yeah, you’re right to highlight warcraft although I don’t think it’s a clean line with Warcraft between dune 2 and c&c. C&C was probably around 2 years into development by the time Warcraft came out, and my assumption is most of the actual game design was pretty finalised by that point. Though I’m sure some minor influences made their way in, I don’t think Warcraft massively affected the kind of game we got in the end.
But yeah that’s not to diminish the contribution of warcraft to the genre, there’s loads of games that followed copying the Warcraft style of RTS, even as part of the c&c series in the end with Generals.
Towards the end of the decade Total Annihilation would be released and it’s modern day fan made remake, Beyond All Reason, is really good. Sad there’s no campaign though, I really loved the TA campaign
gonna be real, WC1 was not a huge title at the time. I think a lot of people look back, rightly, at WC3 being one of the greatest RTS of all time and then think the whole series was lauded at release, but Warcraft: Orcs and Humans was just okay.
Oh my God this is so much nicer. I was getting so sick of trying to navigate the category and having the same live action free to play games appear every time. I have some games that I can remove from my ignore list now
Absolute size isn’t really in the criteria for a planet though. Pluto isn’t a planet because it shares its orbit with lots of other icy bodies in the Kuiper belt.
Do you mean the Trojans? They’re excluded from the mass calculation of ‘clearing the neighbourhood’ because they’re in a resonant orbit - their orbit is a consequence of Jupiter’s mass.
I don’t know. I don’t think we should make excuses for Jupiter just because of its size. Pluto’s doing the best it can. Could any of us do any better, so far out from the sun?
Thanks to your comments, I went looking at more about Jupiter’s influence on us and read that most of the other planets are more in line with Jupiter’s orbital plane than the Sun’s equatorial plane (which sounds impressive, but maybe only makes complete sense since the planets would have all initially formed from the same disk). Anyway, thanks
That’s really interesting!
I just discovered a theory about the cause of the ‘late heavy bombardment’, which is thought to have delivered water to earth via comets.
Essentially the gas giants all orbited much closer, but Jupiter and Saturn got into resonance and flung Uranus and Neptune way out (and Saturn too). Uranus and Neptune flew out into the path of a heap of ice, and their gravity pulled the ice into an orbit that collided with the terrestrial planets.
There are entire genres that I think in many ways have passed younger gamers by.
Point and click adventures were the biggest thing in the world at one point. The classics are the Lucas Arts entries, like Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis, The Dig (both based on unused Spielberg pitches), the Monkey Island games, Full Throttle, Day of The Tentacle and Loom. You’ve also got Myst and Riven (Riven being the far superior of the two), and my personal favourite, The Longest Journey, which has an absolutely stellar story and really compelling protagonist with a lot of depth to her. Also, positive queer representation in a nineties game, holy shit.
The next lost nineties genre is the space sim. The kings of the genre were Wing Commander and X-Wing/Tie Fighter. Then you’ve got Privateer and later Freelancer. For the Wing Commander games read a summary of 1 and 2, then jump in with 3, the first to feature FMV with Mark Hamill as the player character (genuinely an excellent performance too, he took the role really seriously and saw it as every bit as important a scifi property as Star Wars). John Rhys Davies (Gimli) and Malcolm McDowell also make appearances.
And of course, the classic nineties FPS, a genre that feels very, very different from modern FPS games, though there have been some good attempts to recreate it. You know Doom, and Wolfenstein 3D (the latter does not hold up; the former absolutely does), but also check out Heretic, Hexen, Rise of The Triad, and most importantly, IMO, the Marathon games. These were the precedessors of the Halo series, and they combined really solid action with a genuinely amazing story. It’s the kind of big, high concept that you rarely get in movies, TV shows and games, with a world that the writers clearly put a tonne of thought into, and some characters who will stick with you long after the game is over.
Finally, some stuff that doesn’t really fit any of the above. Crusader: No Remorse and Crusader: No Regret are isometric action shooters with some fun storytelling and LOTS of explosions. If you get them on GOG be sure to download and read all the supplementary material, it really fleshes out the world and the characters. System Shock probably doesn’t even need mentioning with the recent remake, but the originals truly hold up, especially with the UI and controls polish Nightdive added. Syndicate and Syndicate Wars are very hard to explain, but they’re really fun (That said, I’ll give an even stronger recommendation to their modern spiritual successor, Satellite Reign, which deepened the gameplay significantly while still retaining all of the spirit).
There’s plenty more, obviously, but that’s what immediately comes to mind as worth checking out.
Oh yeah, the Crusader games were fun. They probably also aged well. OK, their controls are really annoying and weird, and you kind of have to “cheat” a bit in that game at some points (e.g. by shooting an enemy outside of the screen, so it can’t shoot back, otherwise some situations are really hard). But yeah, fun games, great action, many explosions and mayhem. And since it’s isometric 2D graphics there’s nothing really bad about them either. Except maybe for resolution or aspect issues. Also good sound/music.
Starwars Knights of the old Republic 1 and 2 they are on steam and kotar 1 can be played on a phone. AC blackflag. Dragon age origins. If you want a more specific recommendation based on a old gaming system let me know.
I’ve not played Forbidden West, but I’ve played all of Zero Dawn. I’ll just say, as much as I like the game (I do, quite a bit), it’s bad at being open-world.
Most narrow paths are only related to quests, and if you try exploring them before you need to go there the game punishes you by making it a chore to go and to leave for no gain. Also, the terrible message “you’re out of bound, turn back now or we reset to your last save” is one of the worst failure at world design ever. It pops up constantly if you’re just trying to explore.
And yes, I tried playing HUD-free for a bit (I had a great experience doing that on Breath of the Wild). As you said it’s almost impossible, the environment, while looking good, is way too messy to spot the small details you’re supposed to… Unless you turn on the magic compass and GPS.
In other games, paths and important items are highlighted with lighting and clear and functional visual cues. Beside the infamous yellow paint, HZD does almost none of that efficiently.
You need to make a bulleted list because your lists came out as jumbled paragraphs. At a minimum you need to put two spaces at the end of each line to preserve line breaks.
I’ll fix it since you put in all the effort to write that up.
One time purchase:
Peglin ✨
Luck be a landlord ✨
Forager
Dicey dungeons
Dead Cells (optional DLC)
Bloons Tower Defense 6 (out of the way IAP) ✨
Terraria
20 minutes till dawn (has a non premium option with some micro transactions)
Free:
Antimatter dimensions (long idle-ish game) ✨
Legends of Runeterra (just play the story modes) ✨
Team fight tactics (cosmetics only)
Plague inc (and probably rebel inc, but I haven’t played that yet) ✨
Super Auto Pets (cosmetics and extra optional sets) ✨
Star on the ones I’d specifically recommend for casual play
I reached Challenger on Teamfight Tactics in a couple seasons and I’ve gotta say it honestly gets a bit tiresome how often they change the game. Mortdog and Co do a great job on balance but you just can’t swap from set to set that often and expect things not to break. Plus they like to nerf the things I like the most, and that’s inexcusable.
I also didn’t really care for it as mobile game because you can’t hop in and out, you start a match you need to finish the match and they’re not short. Even the “quick” mode is like fifteen minutes long.
In other words? Great desktop game for people that don’t mind the meta changing entirely every six months. Great “mobile” game if you want to kill no less than thirty minutes.
Design platformer levels with your friends, then race them to the end, locally or online. Points are only awarded if someone died, so make the level extra dangerous!
Really great party game, kids love it. There’s a constant push-pull to make the level just hard enough. It kind of breaks down though if somebody has made it effectively unwinnable for everybody and you can’t find a way to unblock it. Otherwise though, it’s a fantastic game.
The „laws“ that predatory, autocratic, overpowered nation states veiled as „companies“ push down our legal system are not the will of the people, nor are they based on „justice, fairness and equality“ as stated here so they are not laws.
No way lol, dark souls 1 is likely the most difficult in the series because it doesn’t hold your hand at all, and it’s very easy to get lost. There’s a reason it people kept comparing any super hard game to dark souls despite the fact that DS2 and DS3 were fairly accessible.
I haven’t played ds2 or 3 yet, but found ds1 to be easier than fallen order / sekiro with how you can level up your way through tough enemies even if you dont take the intended route
I really disliked the ability to get lost combined with the challenge in Dark Souls. In most games, if I come upon an area that’s extremely hard, it’s clear that I’m not supposed to go there yet. But with Dark Souls, I know it’s supposed to be hard and had a harder time gauging if there was somewhere else I should be going.
I was about to recommend the same. Dark Souls is hard to get into, but it will train you to play a Souls like game like a Souls like game. However Elden Ring might be a good intro into the genre too, and is a bit more modern and accessible too.
I actually didn’t encounter anyone saying Dark Souls and like games being an ARPG. Dark Souls like games are usually called Souls like. The problem is, that the term RPG and Action are not a distinct genres. This is a long standing issue in gaming, long before 2000s even. When I was a teenager, some people called Zelda an RPG, others said Action RPG, some people (me included) said its an Action Adventure. Genres and terms that are vague and broad will always clash with others. Don’t let me begin what Secret of Mana (SNES) actually is.
Look at Racing games. There are Mario Kart and Gran Turismo, two very different kind of racing games and both still are. What about motorcycle racing or classic racing games like Rock’n Roll Racing (someone remember? this is what Blizzard did before they became Blizzard!).
OK, so you see it’s a mess of terms. Diablo isn’t a new game, it evolved from previous games that were similar and mixed in from other genres. How do you classify such a game in an already existing set of genre terms? It’s kind of an Action RPG that existed before, so its natural to put it into such a category. Look at all those RPG games, they are all RPG but still vastly different. BTW I never heard of bullet heaven, but that sounds really funny. It sounds like an anti name for jokes. And being the one with the bullets might even fit into the category funny and fitting name.
If have a new name for Diable like games, it will clash with other genres again. You put generic terms like Loot or Build into it and so on. What if a Diablo like game isn’t that grindy? Or does not focus much on Loot. We have been through this with various other genres. Therefore I would not even try to invent something and not take genres too seriously. It’s a mess. You can’t getting it right by adding more mess to it.
Exactly. Nowadays almost any game becomes and RPG. The terms are fluid. BTW I wouldn’t myself call Dark Souls anything like a Metroidvania, because my personal understanding is that the focus of Dark Souls is not quite on the backtracking and learning new abilities. I mean our discussion here shows again why game genres aren’t useful anymore.
We nowadays use the tagging system, which allows us to give any number of “genres” and combine them individually for each game. Even though we don’t agree on all terms, it’s still better having a single genre like ARPG associated with a game.
I actually didn’t encounter anyone saying Dark Souls and like games being an ARPG. Dark Souls like games are usually called Souls like.
That is because everyone uses the term “Souls-like”. But if that term isn’t used, then they are all labeled as “Action Role-Playing Games”:
A Soulslike (also spelled Souls-like) is a subgenre of action role-playing games known for high levels of difficulty and emphasis on environmental storytelling, typically in a dark fantasy setting. -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soulslike
If Zelda is an RPG then so is Halo. Master Chief and Link both have exactly the same number of thoughts in their heads. I would argue Halo ODST is more of an RPG than any Zelda game.
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