Every Zelda game is a sisyphean adventure where you never really defeat the evil or restore Hyrule, you just reset the board for the next evil apocalypse.
The newer zelda games are interesting since you can see how the world has changed between botw and totk, but on the macro scale you’re definitely right. Most zelda games have formula of “all is well, bad guy appears to threaten realm, link saves the day, back to normal”. BOTW was an interesting way to change that formula - hyrule isn’t restored after you beat ganon, but things change with new settlements being formed and so on in totk
oh, nice. I like getting high and playing surprising games, it usually makes the experience even more pleasant. But I never did LSD, and I’m not sure I could handle it. How does it affect playing something like Stanley Parable ?
Well, it was just funny. It kind of fucked with my brain, but i think i managed to get through the entire game in about 6 hours. I would not play Last if Us, Resident Evil etc, but I also once had a blast in RDR2 on LSD! It was after I had completed the game.
Would love to try something similar to Stanley Parable - I’m looking at Don’t Press The Button! for my next trip in October.
I just played through Pentiment and even on the fastest speed dialogues were painfully slow. It wouldn’t fix all the other pacing issues, but the text popping up instantly would be a huge improvement.
I loved that game and I love the setting and art, but it's soooo much reading. And I love reading, I really do! But it began to wear me down near the end.
I have very mixed feelings about it. I also adored the art and setting, and I really appreciate the historical research that has gone into making it. And there were some well written characters in there.
But man, the game is sloooooow. The last act in particular was like pulling teeth. Reading is fine when what you’re reading about is interesting. There were so many banal, shallow and uninteresting conversations in there that really tested my patience.
I like that BG3 let’s you skip the voice dialogue but I wish there was an option to speed up the voice acting because I really love the voice acting and the story is great but I find myself spacing out during long cutscenes. I don’t want to skip them I just want them to speak quickly!
I’ve been replaying Dragon Quest Builders 2. The game isn’t voiced, most of dialogues are classic RPG text boxes that you can speed up and skip, BUT. There are special lines of dialogue that are “voices” in a character’s head.
They are unskippable, and they’re like a dozen words each that stay on screen for about 20 seconds or more. Some of those dialogues have about 6-7 of those. It’s unbearable, and it’s genuinely the worst part of starting a game again. Hell, it was the worst part of doing it the first time, too.
Somehow English localisation created this, in Japanese the messages go a lot faster. Though even those couldn’t be skipped, because… fuck you that’s why.
I don’t. You are exposing children to those exact mechanics and normalizing that behaviour. Without further thought in the future they will go for increasingly scammy shit tactics.
Seriously, you played behind your mom’s back. As did I and everyone else. Be careful, talk to her about the shitty tactics. She has to be aware of them, spot them, and know how they work to be able to avoid them. The hardest part will be for her to actually believe it. Those life service shit uses the most disgusting psychological tricks.
Or she will spent all her money behind your back someday.
We all had our tricks, and children will always be cleverer than their parents.
We all know that decent games exist, somewhere. But the amount of effort it would take to wade through all the shovelware and gacha to try to find an even halfway passable game on Google Play simply isn't worth my time.
And with the mobile market being what it is, it arguably isn't worth it for developers to try and sell any serious game as mobile-first, because it's so difficult for those types of games to succeed when mobile gamers want gacha and those that don't simply aren't playing on mobile. If it's truly worth my time, it should be ported to other platforms.
Word of mouth is certainly a large part of it, yes. People talk about successful games. One way or another, the games I like make it onto my radar when I see buzz about them.
But what are the most successful games on mobile? What are the games mobile gamers talk about? Gacha. It's all gacha. Whatever else is out there, nobody's talking about it and I'm never going to see it. Nor do I have any reason to go searching through a toxic cesspit in the hopes that maybe I'll eventually find something, when it is far easier to look elsewhere, on platforms that haven't been thoroughly corrupted by the race to the bottom.
But again, the real takeaway I want to stress is that the market has been this way for long enough that both gamers and developers know the well is poisoned, and it will never be unpoisoned. The fact that mobile has become dominated by gacha has reinforced itself - everyone not interested in gacha has left the platform, and mobile developers will keep selling more gacha because that's what the remaining audience wants. They even know that the average mobile gamer won't spend money on a more ethical business model.
I know that developers know that I know that this is what mobile is. The way I see it, mobile itself has become a red flag. If a game is trying to be more than gacha trash, well why don't the developers have the sense to put it on other platforms where non-gacha gamers are? If not, they're shooting themselves in the foot and I have no pity.
Here’s where you and I differ: I don’t trust word of mouth. I don’t trust canons. I don’t trust marketing. And frankly, I don’t trust the so-called “gamers” who repeat the same tired narratives.
Instead, I dive deep—into the bowels of app stores, into archive.org, anywhere I can find games no one else has played or talked about. Then I judge for myself whether they’re worth a damn.
That’s how I’ve uncovered hidden gems, and why I know most of what passes for “good taste” is just groupthink dressed up as expertise.
The only people with real taste? The ones willing to seek things out and form their own opinions. Everything else is just noise.
So what, you just buy games at random and hope maybe you landed on something good? Without anything that would make for an informed purchase? Sounds like a horribly inefficient way of running headfirst into Sturgeon's Law.
But usually, I’m a deal hunter—I scour for discounts, read descriptions carefully, study screenshots, and watch gameplay footage. If it grabs my interest, I pull the trigger.
Surprisingly, most of the games that catch my eye turn out to be pretty good.
You should give it a shot. Ignore the hype, forget word of mouth and influencers. Dive into something completely new and different—you might just be pleasantly surprised.
I do. But to me, step one of filtering out Sturgeon's Law is looking in the right place - platforms that are not overflowing with so much poison that I already know I'm unlikely to ever find what I want.
Every game that ever gets released when you check gaming forums within the first month of a game’s release lol /s
Im joking. I get the sentiment that a finished product should be fully complete and inspected by a QA team before release. But still, the fuckin extreme hatred ill see for the game and its studio, regardless of the company’s history, is soooooo fuckin wild. And almost everytime when I get to the point of buying the game, ill check the steam reviews and it’ll be mostly positive after like one patch release.
I’ve been curious about this recently after seeing all the reviews for MindsEye. I’d never heard of it until a few days ago, yet all the reviewers I pay attention to are talking about how it’s the worst game ever, while the footage they show makes it look fine. I haven’t played it, so I can’t disagree with them, but the vitriol for something that appears to be completely average is surprising.
There’s a lot of videos and articles like this one discussing how Stage 1-1 of Super Mario Bros for the NES is a cleverly designed tutorial for the core game mechanics.
my hot take is that even though portal is a masterpiece this song is so cringe because i associate it with unfunny “the narwhal bacons at midnight” type redditors
the counterpoint to me not liking a song from a Video Game because it of its association with Internet Culture has to be something other than “get out more”
I feel like the association of Portal with that era and that type of person, even though I think most of them probably became different people with age, even though I was practically one of them, makes the song a little harder to enjoy. I am aware of Ellen McLain’s (GLaDOS voice actress) opera creds and think that’s super cool though.
Sorry to the composer, it is not your fault. Similarly, I think maybe the same thing happened with Undertale. I think I played before the fandom got a bad reputation, so it and its songs are not quite tainted in my mind, in fact I’m a big fan of the game’s use of leitmotifs (am I using the word right?) and really enjoy its music, but if I came in after I saw the fandom, I might like the work less through no fault of the composer.
Right? I grew up in oblivion so when Skyrim came out with its dull brownish greys I was super disappointed, still can’t really get into the game that much. Then a miracle happened and the Witcher 3: blood and wine came out. Toussaint was such a breath of fresh air, it reminded me that why I loved fantasy games was to feel like I was in a fantasy
There is another comment that says this, but for clarity there is a franchise called “Total War” that has multiple editions which is exactly what you are looking for. They also have the ability to control the specific battles on the field like an RTS or you can play it with the battles operating like Civ. I personally really like the Total War Warhammer 3 edition (but I’m a Warhammer fan).
Op, this is it. The franchise has been around for decades and covers many historical eras. Recently they got into fantasy and did well with it, though personally I prefer the historical titles with the dynamic dueling.
Like Dr_Nik said, battles are either RTS style that you can choose to control, let ai take over and observe the battle instead, or you can autoresolve and skip a battle entirely. The overall gameplay is similar across each game, but the mechanics and ai behavior vary wildly across titles. If you don’t like one game, pick up another and you’ll probably love it
I will throw in another vouch for this series. It is exactly what you’re looking for. I haven’t played any of the more recent entries but I’ve heard they’ve been received very well. Total War: Rome 2 is a classic, but for something more modern I’ve heard only good things about Three Kingdoms, though I haven’t played that one personally.
Agreed with this. Started in the CIV world with 5, then a buddy introduced me to Rome:Total War and it was like finding crack. I still like to take over all of Europe at some point once a year.
Just a heads up OP, the games are limited to regions of the world, it’s never the full globe.
Minecraft. You think that there’s no way to play Minecraft “wrong”, right up until you accidentally fall into the 4-block wide valley that I’ve cut through the entire map or walk into the liminal space that I’ve mined out just above bedrock. Fuck cutesy cottages and Minecraft in minecraft- let’s just build superstructures that disappear beyond the draw distance of the map. Fuck creative mode- let’s do it while we’re facing down mobs day and night. Fuck explosives- do that shit with a pick like a goddamn man. You haven’t really seen confused rage until your child discovers hundreds of unexplained and unexplainable brutalist towers extending into the distance like the gravestones of alien gods when they thought you were building a farm over the next hill.
Shit like this I have only seen in a Manga once, forgot the name, but basically bunch of robots that humanity made were let loose without humans(they died) and they kept building giant megastructures for no reason without stopping It’s just absolutely surreal and I just love it
There’s a great level of detail mod that can keep distant structures and terrain loaded in. I think it’s called Distant Horizons. That and a render performance improvement are the only mods that I play with, makes such a big difference.
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