Cyberpunk scratched that itch for me to a surprising degree. It’s not a perfect match, but it felt closer to the original than the sequels did somehow.
Hot take: Nintendo Switch Joycons. They’re a nice and clever concept but in reality they’re bad.
Too small even for casual games. The Wiimote was much better at it.
Very expensive at 80 € per set. Yes, you get two of them but in most games outside of Mario Kart you also need both. And even then they’re fine at best.
4 out of 4 of my controllers got stick drift. Nintendo had to be sued into repairing them.
It’s a conventional GameSir controller that has a Switch mode among others. The split design of the Joycons rarely plays out, most of the time it makes the controllers unnecessarily complex and thus expensive IMHO.
You mean both hands have to grip one controller opposed to having a Joycon in each hand? That split-design can be an advantage, but IMHO doesn’t cancel out the shortcomings of the Joycons. I find them still too small and not grippy at all.
Single joycon is barely usable, but the Wiimote was terrible for sideways holding.
Its shape was clearly never intended for it, and the d-pad was absolutely awful, one of the worst I’ve used.
The d-pad worked as buttons (which was how most games used it, in vertical mode), but for movement it was very stiff and almost impossible to get diagonals. For a console that featured virtual console heavily and needed a lot of classic controls, that was very bad design.
I hate the Joycons so much. The clicky buttons are terrible, the split dpad sucks for games that use it for movement, the sticks aren’t great either for precision (ignoring the drift issues), and I find them painful to hold.
I know people who like them exist given the sales. But not only do I not play or like sports games - no one that plays games in my social circle does either.
It’s like the Venn diagram for people who play RPGs and those who play sports games is just two circles.
I do find it kind of odd that some people only play the latest sports games and nothing else. Also NFL Blitz on the Dreamcast is one of the best games and I’ve never watch a game irl.
The judgemental attitude and self victimization detract from your post. You’ll find people to be friendlier and more helpful to you if you manage to tone it differently.
Anyway! It sounds like you want games that prioritize being interesting over being popular? Dwarf Fortress would be my immediate thought.
The obvious answer is Pathologic. You play as one of three possible characters in a black plague-infested town in the russian steppe, trying to help people and survive.
As days go by, the situation worsens and, in order to survive, you are forced to make very hard decisions. Can you spare the food for the others? Will you rob someone of their medicines? Will you risk going to the most dangerous parts of the city, where the stench of infection permeates the air?
Making it to the end of a day is a genuine accomplishment in this game, considering all the work you have to do to stay alive, and that the game really doesn’t care if you live or die. It won’t hold your hand to make sure you get through to the end; it’s entirely possible to make it through 10 days and then back yourself into a corner where you have absolutely no hope of survival, short of loading a save from a few (in-game) days ago. Or perhaps to save yourself the agony of replaying several hours of the game, you end up in terrifying, desperate scenarios where you have to sell your only weapon for a few scraps of bread, or murder a child for the medicine he’s carrying while you’re about to die from infection. That’s true horror right there.
It’s not an easy game and it’s not a good game, even. It’s old and dated and janky, but it’s also full of charm and personality. I wouldn’t say it’s a game meant to be played, as much as it is an experience worth going through. You won’t have fun playing the game. Even if you can overlook its pain points, it’s an objectively oppressive game that will make you feel miserable from beginning to end, and increasingly so. I wouldn’t say it’s for everyone, and I don’t mean that in an elitist way. Some people simply won’t stand this much bleakness during the time they are supposedly spending to find entertainment.
From what I heard, Pathologic 2 is basically a 2019 remake of the original, so it should be prettier, less janky but still basically the same game, right?
I have heard very good things about it, but I can’t talk for myself, as I haven’t played it. My only recommendation is to stay away from the console versions of the game, as I tried it on Xbox One and it was unplayable (heard the same about the PS4 port, too). Maybe it’s better on next gen, but I wouldn’t risk it.
Two things worth mentioning:
The remake only has one character, the Haruspex. If you want to play as the Bachelor or the Changeling, you’ll need to grab the original game.
There are difficulty settings in the remake. I would leave them as default, as I think the difficulty of the game, and the conflicting decisions you’ll need to undertake because of it, is an integral part of the experience. That being said, if you really like the game and want to see it through, you can tweak the difficulty a bit, and accessibility is always a plus in my book.
Again, this is just hearsay as I haven’t played it, but from what I’ve gathered, Pathologic 2 is more a retelling than a faithful remake. Same setting and same ending, but a different road, so to speak. You could play either one and then move on to the other if you like it.
Interesting are all the points you share. I’ve never been so convinced to try a game even after being explicitly told it’ll not be fun. Give me that sweet pain.
Making a Portal mod is much different than possessing and using the original source code of a game. I don’t understand why they thought they could get away with such a high-profile title as TF.
BG3 winning the GotY was something we all could see coming I think and even though it’s not my personal pick I’m hard pressed to argue. It’s a great game, it opened up many in the mainstream to a new genre and Larian is a great company with consumer-friendly policies. It’s hard to be mad.
I’m very glad Alan Wake 2 got a couple of awards, though. Hopefully this recognition means Remedy keeps pushing the boundaries and keeps going with their crazy mixed media and weirdness. We need someone doing innovation in the AAA space.
I am a little pissed they lost out on best music to FFXVI though.
FFXVI’s soundtrack is pretty great tho, especially the tracks for the Eikon fights. NGL I would have honestly gone insane playing that game if not for the soundtrack and (less so) the combat. The story makes no fucking sense.
I’m more salty that people are saying AW2 didn’t deserve Best Game Direction, because I think it absolutely did. Alan Wake’s plot and the vision they went for would have been absolute nonsense in the hands of any other studio.
I just love what Remedy did for the music, and I’m not just talking about Poets of the Fall. Having a bunch of established artists write original music based on a bunch of story related poems written by Sam Lake was such a cool idea and makes the end-of-chapter songs land so well. But the competition was tough, for sure.
I haven’t heard those comments about Game Direction but I can’t understand that at all. The direction is absolutely first class, from the tension-release work to the cinematic shots and framings to the double-exposure overlaps and the reality rewriting and dream logic of the Dark Place. It was a masterpiece in my opinion.
A lot of these games are working off of an assumed learned collective memory.
Think of movies, and their tropes. How do you understand that when a movie cuts to black for a second, and then suddenly shows a new location, that we did not just teleport? That the black cut indicates the end of a scene, and the start of a new one?
Think of how many games assume you know which button pauses, which opens the menu, which buttons move the character and which ones make you jump. Now, add another layer of controls. And another.
BG3 is also working with an assumed collective memory from DnD. Assuming you already learned about class vs race, and cantrips vs lvl spells, and turn order, etc.
It sucks when you miss large games that establish these things, but its also how art forms evolve. Games just dont yet have a way to easily re-teach them.
Yeah, if you’ve played DnD 5E I’d say you’re already well on the way to knowing how BG3 works technically. If not, it’s prolly a bit of a learning curve but the game does start soooorta slow at level 1, though 4 characters is a lot. Look up some common archetypes!
Think of how many games assume you know which button pauses, which opens the menu, which buttons move the character and which ones make you jump.
Button bindings are almost always listed in the settings menu. And many games WILL explain those controls, usually with an option to toggle them on/off.
Often, yes, but not always, and thats only become a recent trend.
And just as many games dont, or only explain where their controls differ from the cultural expectations.
It applies to mechanics too, but thats harder to talk about without actual examples in front of you, and I dont have any good contrast examples off the top of my head
I wanted to say Outer Wilds too simply to have OP join us in our search for that high of another player experiencing this game for the first time. Nothing quite like seeing the game “click” when they finally get those big plot points.
I didn’t realize it had gotten that bad. I bought 2x16gb DDR4 RAM in 2021 for $204 CAD. I bought the identical set for $69 in 2024. The same set (this is all on Newegg) today is $279. That is insane!
Same but I upgraded to 4x8 a while ago so I have 4x4 just sitting here and it’s worth like 20 western money units (pick a currency, doesn’t really matter)
Like one AI deal bought half of Samsungs global output next year. There are many others. It takes a couple of years to bring new facilities online. This is a capacity issue, not competition.
The best part was: this was even in the installer! When setting up your sound card, there was a test button. If it worked, you heard “your sound card works perfectly”. But if you kept pressing it, eventually it would say “enjoying yourself?” And if you kept going after that, in an angry voice, “it doesn’t get any better than this!”
Ah old Blizzard, when even the installers had character.
Portal 1 and 2 are both phenomenal. But my feeling at the end was less “Wow that changed my life” and more like “damn it’s over, I wish there was another game like that out there”
tbh it’s better this way.
Why?
Because nobody could ruin the story on the 3rd attempt. BUT asssuming they could make the 3rd installment a prefect fit to round it up: Gimme
If you check steam, there’s 2 or 3 portal games outside the legit 2 that are super fun. One valve even approved as canon IIRC. One of them you go back and forth in time with a third portal type. One of them is even multiplayer.
I made the mistake of trying to go back and play Portal 2 during the pandemic, and the themes of isolation, neglect, abuse and gaslighting just weren’t as funny in 2019.
bin.pol.social
Ważne