This is a game that isn’t here for the game play. I think if you are paying at all attention to the boring dystopia, or climate collapse communities then this will hit in a way that is hard to define.
Its a golf game. Simple, could be played on a phone really, but you have to have the sound on for this one.
You are a member of the elite refugees who have fled to Mars and only return back to Earth to use the husk of a planet for a round of golf. And your companion is a lone radio broadcast from Mars of what they have left, which is stories and the rare music that was saved.
The combination of overwhelmingly good world building and consistent vibe even down to the level names and journal entries hits like a train and made me cry at least a couple times.
It made me feel nostalgiac for a world that has not yet come to pass and is a great on sale pick.
NandGameis a browser puzzle game, where you start of by building basic logic gates from relays and progress from there all the way trough processor design to compiling high-level languages. It does not hold your hand too much, but the invidual puzzles progress so incrementally, it feels almost magical how easily you learn to build computers and compilers.
It’s basically capitalism as a game, but for the Genesis/Mega Drive era it was a surprisingly fun game. When I was a kid I played this before I even knew what McDonalds was, and many people I know thought I was crazy when I talked about a game I played where you collected the Golden Arches while being guided by Ronald McDonald on an environmental quest.
In a way, I do feel sad about that game. Big AAA offerings take a lot of time for a studio, and the reviews say there wasn’t too much wrong with the gameplay. When they first started development, they probably didn’t know how bloated the hero shooter genre would be.
A large part of what’s wrong with Concord is the development time that it took, and I hope it serves as a cautionary tale to try to make game development leaner and more sustainable.
I’m stoked about Deadlock. I used to play Super Monday Night Combat constantly, until it shut down.
I’ve been waiting like 10 years to get a decent game that fills that void, and Deadlock seems to finally be it! I personally couldn’t be happier with their choice hah.
I should have been more clear; I don’t like gender stereotypes and I am not pushing her towards anything. I’d be perfectly happy for her to play any game she likes, as long as it has no adds or micro transactions.
I literally typed the description she gave me of the game she wants.
What if you’re a dummy thicc femboy with boyboobs?
You might think this identity is just a meme, but it’s not. And while some percentage of that is queer people secure in their identities, some of it is also questioning trans girls who aren’t comfortable selecting “female” yet but will try out exploring femininity through the “femboy” meme.
As an enby, I’ll pick body B most of the time, but I don’t like being called female. I’ll put up with it in an old game, but if a studio decides to not misgender me, I’m nothing but happy. I agree 100% that more options would be nice. But assuming that game companies aren’t going to spend money on artists to make diverse bodies, why yuck the yum I experience when a game at least tries to not misgender me?
Jurassic Park: Trespasser invented physics engines in fps games as we know it. The game itself was a buggy mess and a financial disaster. The player’s health was shown on the main character’s boob for some damn reason. However, they did have the basics of a very good physics engine, and Valve took a lot of their ideas and incorporated it into Half Life 2.
Man, Trespasser is an example of a game with some pretty wild ideas about immersion and puzzle solving in a first person shooter game that the tech just wasn’t quite able to pull off. If anyone is curious there is a positively antique Let’s Play on YouTube that discusses the game’s development, its relation to the wider Jurassic Park franchise, cut content, and, of course, the game in context. I think it may have come from the old Something Awful forums, and it remains, to my mind, the gold standard for what I’d like Let’s Plays to be. Worth checking out if you’ve the time.
Prince of Persia: realistic animations with weight. also popularized a platformer subgenre, which was called cinematic platformer but unfortunately the life of the subgenre was cut short due to the advent of 3d.
Diablo: ARPG genre, and even more so loot rarity system (especially the four tiers common/rare/epic/legendary) and affixes in loot as well.
Half-Life: a lot of good things, sure, as pointed out by other comments, but I will also never forgive valve for popularizing the game not fucking starting for ages.
Rogue and maybe more so Nethack: roguelike mechanics.
some really obvious ones are Tetris: falling block puzzles and Sokoban: pushing block puzzles.
also now pretty much obsolete but Overwatch: loot boxes. they existed before, but Overwatch made them an industry standard.
i don’t think they were as influential no. overwatch loot boxes were not only a monetization venue but also the main leveling system. whether you paid or not you always played toward a loot box. and couple with the game’s massive success and popularity it opened the floodgates to this form of monetization to be a standard.
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