What are you missing without it? If you don’t missing anything, I wouldn’t bother. The Nitro Deck seems to add back buttons for example, but they’ll probably be limited to simple button mappings, nothing fancy like you could do with Steam Input for example.
Never liked XBox controllers. They feel fat and clunky, especially trying to use the bumpers, I feel like I have to strain my fingers. I also hate the way the sticks feel in general, theres something about the friction curves that’s just… off. Idk how to describe it. Also, no gyroscope. I will praise the triggers on the XBox one controllers though. I like the shape and the amount of travel they have, I think they rock for racing games.
My favourite controller is the Dualshock 4. Haven’t had a chance to try the Dualsense but even that looks a little bloated. The DS4 is lean, has all the features I want, and those thumbsticks are the best I’ve used on a stock controller. You can practically use them like a trackpoint on a laptop, they’re very precise and great for use with a linear response curve in shooters with zero deadzone.
I survived it for a few hours but ultimately succumbed to your issue exactly but with the added annoyance of having to get in and out of the car repeatedly. Not my game either…
First time I played it I hated it. That was just after finishing the previous one. I came back to it like 6mos later and it was fantastic. Just needed a break I guess. The controls do suck a bit at first and it takes some getting used to.
Many retro games are better. AA games were made with heart back then & that made it possible to make games that are incredible both in terms of artistry, grandeur and gameplay. Games like Baldur’s Gate 1-2, Chrono Cross etc are not possible in today’s climate.
On the other hand we have been handed indie games like Celeste and Hollow Knight, so I don’t know. Amazing games still exists, it’s just not really comparable.
Man, TimeSplitters 2 is the goat. Still play it every now and then. Some levels weren’t that great, but the characters, multiplayer aspect and just the overall “goofyness” of the game really make it stand out
There definitely is a lot of crap that came out back in the day that we tend to forget, but there were also very different popular strategies for game making.
One of the most significant for me is the degradation of choice in RPGs. Many, certainly not all, of the RPGs I played as a kid and as a teenager would have elements of their story that could diverge to some degree based on your actions. The most typical results were things like a different ending or an otherwise hidden scene. Silent Hill was a good example of this. But you’d also have a lot of games where your choices immediately and totally altered the way things play out, like Planescape: Torment or Baldur’s Gate. Your choices could affect not only the ending, but a whole lot on the way. Hell, the first Fallout game served up some major unforeseen consequences for an action that on the surface seems like a pretty straightforwardly good idea.
But ever since Mass Effect I’ve noticed an emptiness in choice making, and recently I saw an article that showed me why.
If you follow the branching choices in those early games like a flow chart, the choices on it were often significant divergences that don’t ever meet back up with the original iteration of the quest. But modern design techniques try to be efficient, so you’ve got a branching point at the point of choice, then it rejoins the main quest, and then later on it branches off briefly to check what you did and react to it, before going back to the main quest as though nothing happened.
It’s such a letdown. If you only play once and never save scum it’ll seem fine, but the lack of depth becomes readily apparent so quickly. It’s not like nobody’s still doing big branches too, but you can tell when they default to this and it feels so empty.
I’ve enjoyed Baldur’s Gate 3, but one of the things I notice, especially in act 3, is how slapped together some of these branching choices are. Also, as cute as the die rolling mechanic is, the constant clear and random success/failure state of all branching choices just leads to endless save scumming. The game doesn’t handle it like a divergence in one way or the other, it straight up tells you you failed.
In D&D the die rolls are fun and tense, but they don’t become this totally separate gambling subgame. Sometimes it’s important to get a bad die roll, and sometimes the result in terms of fun is way better than getting a good die roll. I never got that impression from BG3. It felt like a bad die roll meant missing content rather than getting different content, and I think that’s largely because of the literal framing of the die rolling UI and the associated sounds. A more neutral UI where you don’t know the DC of what you’re rolling for and it doesn’t scream at you that your roll wasn’t good enough might let people RP out the failure a little better. Comedy doesn’t hurt either, and is a great tool for DMs seeking to alleviate some of the pain of a bad roll.
Anyway, point being, I think there are some problems with modern game design philosophy that stem from seeking efficiency and greater visual fidelity and audio complexity over engaging game design. Shitty graphics and limited processing power mean you have to make decisions to bring the player into the world and get them to forget that their character’s head is like 8 pixels or whatever. So they have to exploit humanity’s adeptness at pattern recognition, but they also have to make what they’ve got count. They’re not overloading it with bloat and random branches just for the hell of it. A branching story was a branching story because they really wanted it to be.
I’m probably like 50% talking out of my ass, but I feel like if we had Tim Cain here with us he’d agree with me.
Though indie games do seem perfectly capable of avoiding this corporate optimization shit.
I think nostalgia plays a pretty big factor in retro games. Like, yes, I agree that enshittification marches onwards and the state of the industry today is pretty lame.
Every time I’ve gone back to a retro game I find myself vaguely disappointed. Quality of life has come a long way, and development is iterative so it makes sense that games made twenty years ago are lacking some features that make life easier for the player. Things like fast travel in metroidvanias, or inventory and quest management, or just trying to remember what it was I was supposed to do next in an RPG are often quite lacking. Or at the least, they’re not up to today’s standards.
Survivorship bias plays a pretty big role here too. We remember the good games that stand out from the rest of them, and we forget about the crap. There was shovelware back then too, maybe not to the degree of the modern app stores with F2P games loaded with microtransactions and dark patterns, but they were there too.
Anyway, long story long, the trick in whatever generation you play seems to be to find games that respect your time as a player. I’d also recommend checking out indie games, they’re made with love, and you can find all kinds of retro-styled where you can tell the devs were passionate about games of the era.
Here’s a short list of games I’ve enjoyed that give me that retro SNES feeling:
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