The original Super Mario Bros. and SMB 3. The first console I got to play as a child was the NES at my grandparents’ house. Every couple of years I get a nostalgic craving and it’s usually those two games I return to. Also, there are many great rom hacks available if getting bored of the originals.
That’s awesome! I was born after the NES era, so I’m just now going back and checking out more 8-bit and 16-bit era games. I did of course play Super Mario Bros. and SMB 3 on my 3ds though, the platforming on SMB3 is still solid today.
Perhaps Starsector? It’s a top-down sandbox rpg. I personally find the lore and world-building interesting. Has great mechanics, and you can really get into the nitty-gritty when it comes to ship and fleet builds, you can basically do anything you want, whether you want to do solo stuff or form an empire. It also has a fantastic modding community.
Came here to suggest it and here it is, the newest comment! The modding scene is insane, too, for such a relatively small and unknown game.
I love Starsector. I just wish it was written in something more performant than fuckin’ Java. But, if it were, there probably wouldn’t be the mods for it there are today.
One of these days, I’m going to get around to writing a quest line of my own. Honest.
Yeah, Starsector is probably my favourite lesser known game. There’s a mod/tool called “Mikohime Java 24” that’s supposed to help a lot with the performance, but I haven’t had a chance to test it myself. Would be great to see another quest line, if I had the skills I’d love to make a mod myself lol.
Stellaris. As a hyper-aggressive, warmongering, Rome-obsessed species of lovebirds. All the organic aliens have been turned into GMO livestock and all the machine aliens have been forced into slavery. I bomb the planets into oblivion not because I need to, but because I imagine my pretty birds would enjoy doing it.
The game is great, eagerly looking forward to smartwatch support as someone who doesn’t bring their phone on runs but otherwise having a good time with the game
What I really remember about the game was how fucking shitty the microphone was. I literally went through 9 of the fucking things before I just gave up on it. They would just stop working for no good reason. Quite possibly the worst hardware accessory for the Dreamcast.
Maybe if they made it for PC I might actually get to have some fun for more than an hour or two with it, since I’d be able to use a good microphone.
…I think you might have just been thinking a game released in 2000, so probably in development in 1996, and running on dreamcast hardware would ever do great things with human voice translation.
I’ve only ever had 1 mic. It still works today. I mean the software was never great at understanding, but you gotta remember it’s essentially a glorified tamagachi with hardware ambitions that were probably pushing the breaking point of technology of the dreamcast.
I know it was the mic itself in my case, because the accessory also could be used in Quake 3 Arena and a few other online games for voice chat and it literally just stopped picking up sound after some time.
It wasn’t that seaman would just hear me wrong. The thing was cheaply made so it doesn’t really surprise me. But it also sucked that there wasn’t any other mics for the system, like there were VMUs.
Looks cool, and I'll check it out on release. If you want beta testers though, make it easier to sign up. I'm not going to write an essay just to maybe get beta access.
I don’t use steam too much, but I did get Minishoot Adventures, and it’s excellent.
It’s like if Zelda was a bullet hell. The base difficulty isn’t too hard, but it’s challenging enough. And you get to explore and do dungeons. It’s really fun.
Thanks for the recommendation! I hadn’t heard of it before but bought it on sale today. Looks pretty good and I appreciate they have options for people who suck at bullet hell games 😆
When you die in this game there’s no real penalty other than going back to the last checkpoint. So even if you leveled up or something you keep that, you just might go back a few screens. It’s great!
It was! Just beat the true boss and got all the powerups. I don’t think I’ll do all the arena stuff, but it was super worth playing, especially for the price.
Don’t know about CRPGs in particular, one way or the other. But in general I agree with you op.
If you level up, and it means your stats go up and all your enemies level up and stay at the same balance with you, it’s pointless. It still affords a moment of happiness ‘cool I levelled up’, but in a much less satisfying way.
The point of level up early in RPG video games was, to my knowledge, so that any one with time and patience could beat a game regardless of skill. The idea of level scaling is almost the exact opposite, to remove the advantage of levelling. They cancel out and both player level and enemy level should be removed if that’s happening.
That’s assuming a 1:1 unversal scaling though, which is rarely the case. In the details it can be tuned to something worthwhile - which enemies scale, how much they scale, etc.
Still, my thought is when games want level scaling, they should consider why. If you want players not to overpower enemies via stats, maybe get rid of the stats (or don’t change them on lvl up). Levels can still augment your player with new spells, unique abilities, or more options. Or maybe more carefully consider the placement of enemies and what their default level and stats are set at. Or maybe consider a lower level cap, or a lower range of stat values.
The possibilities are wide open, but level scaling done poorly can make level ups feel like a punishment.
I think the place they are getting the bit about patience from is specifically dragon quest. Where the devs intentionally positioned it in opposition to other games of the time that required you to get good so to speak.
I read an interview a few years ago, I think with Yuji Horii about the design in dragon quest being set up specifically so that by sinking time in you would eventually overpower everything and progress, even if you never improved at the game mechanics. I couldn’t easily find it again when I looked to link it but maybe I will be able to later today.
Yep, that is indeed what I was thinking of (though I don’t have a link handy either).
Didn’t mean to imply that’s where experience levels were invented. The clarification is appreciated though.
And even thought I was alluding to that DQ comment, I’m sure it wasn’t the first game to adapt experience levels, and across the board making things easier wasn’t always the impetus.
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