It is all to easy to miss the immense benefits of accommodating accessibility for those of us who don’t need them though.
Most people would generally agree that NASA working on the hard problems of going into space has benefited a wide variety of industries and sciences that aren’t directly related to space travel. Most people would generally agree that athletes competing at the absolute top of a competitive sport benefits everyone who plays the sport both from developing better form and techniques and from the technology and science related to the sport becoming more competitive over time. Those benefits often extend far beyond the sport. A sports doctor being focused on getting you rehabilitated from an injury so that you can specifically play sports again might be a much more effective doctor at returning your body to health than a normal doctor who just wants to get you relatively mobile again so you can get make it into work. That sports doctor is likely using science and methodology that was developed at least partially to help professional athletes rehabilitate their injuries.
I hope we get to a point soon where most people would generally agree that accommodating accessibility needs for people with relatively “uncommon” disabilities benefits a similarly wide range of people and things. If a restaurant has to make their door wheelchair accessible, when someone has a medical emergency inside the restaurant and EMTs are trying to wheel the patient out the door as quick as possible to save their life, the effort that went into making it so someone can get into the restaurant who is in a wheelchair all of a sudden spontaneously improves the life of the victim by helping them get to the hospital faster.
This isn’t a narrative that will just happen about accessibility (especially in video games), we have to keep pointing it out to give it life.
Its an isometric tactics style game that plays like the tabletop RPG it is designed around. It’s a lot of reading, so if you’re not into that stay away, but man… I remember when I beat it I was like “Fuck… Did I fuck up? I think I may have made some wrong decisions. I feel awful now”
I also love the setting it takes place in. For some reason fantasy always takes place in the past. Medieval elves, and dwarves, and Orcs etc. ShadowRun is a dystopian/cyberpunk future where all of these races exist. As if the fantasy world didn’t stop existing after the medieval era.
I really need to replay Dragonfall and Hong Kong. Never finished either just due to unfortunate circumstance outside the game but thought highly of both.
Detroit: Become Human has some pretty tough decision trees. Not just in how you have to find the options, but even when you only have a few, it’s difficult to choose one because none of them are wrong (or right, for that matter).
Papers, Please seems incredibly easy, but then you’re given a choice like “this person doesn’t have a permit but their husband did and they say they will be killed if they have to go back; do you do your job or do you take pity on them?”
Jeopardy. The newest one I know of is multiple choice and some of the answers are hard.
MGS5? It’s not a choice, but damn do I have to take pause every time I get to the part where you have to put down your entire army while they stand saluting you because they’re infected by vocal chord zombie parasites. You never even talked to these people to get to know them and it’s still like “fuck man these are my friends…”
Including Jeopardy in a list of games like this is the kind of awkward “technically correct” dissonance I’ve come to expect from AI. What a weird inclusion.
I didn’t sleep the night after I played that part in MGS5. “We live and die by your orders, Boss” while morosely humming the Peace Walker theme – it’s like Kojima was trying to make the player share Snake’s PTSD.
Granted you have to have VR for it, but Beat Saber has pretty famously never gone on sale and never will, but it’s an unbelievably good game that super worth it.
This reminds me I need to start playing beat saber again.
It’s very disappointing that Telltale went down. The Wolf Among Us by Telltale is also great, and, over a decade later, it’s finally getting a sequel some time this year.
I’ve played games that thanks to patching, do not resemble the game I played any-more. TF2 is a good example of that, I can’t go back and play the game I played, it doesn’t exist any-more.
I think they made a classic mode, but that’s just one stage, I want to play the game I played the most which was a few updates in, but before it got silly.
The “u” in uTorrent is actually [greek letter mu](en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(letter)), which as a SI suffix is pronounced “micro” and means one millionth (10^-6)
State of decay 2 lethal difficulty. You pretty much can’t fast search. You can’t have a follower because they start brawls needlessly by attacking zombies and they don’t disengage, making running away from brawls impossible. And without a follower a feral spotting you is pretty much a death sentence. Add the insane food usage, overly eager plague hearts / sieges and the undying hostile npcs and I have no idea how people play that
New Vegas fits this bill, even quests with “happy” endings leave a sour taste in your mouth, or you putting everyone equally in a shitty situation because you abstained from choosing who to favor. Outer Worlds from the same devs has some quests like this, but the main quest itself is very obviously good people vs evil mega corp.
When playing with friends/alone? Great! Customization is never a bad thing, and it enables groups with varied skill levels to still enjoy the game. Online multiplayer? Hate it hate it hate it.
One example: a lot of fps games are cross-platform these days, and I’ve never felt good about the things they do to balance mouse vs controller. I get why they attempt it, but it feels less like “balance” and more like they’ve created two different classes of players, controller being the close quarter players and mouse being the mid/long range flick shooters.
Another is any game that adjusts comeback mechanics during the course of a match, because I’ve never understood punishing someone for playing well
Another is any game that adjusts comeback mechanics during the course of a match, because I’ve never understood punishing someone for playing well
The idea behind it is aiming for a close ending for a variety of skill sets by trying to balance things as the last minute, but it certainly feels like punishing anyone who does well early on.
Some implementations are kinda fun when they seem like actual balancing, but only if they are early enough for the winning team/person to be able to address and not some unstoppable surprise on the last lap/few seconds of a match like a blue shell in Mario Kart.
I think accessibility options in games are fantastic and as long as they’re optional you can do no wrong.
I think the best thing, that’s still not as common yet, is the ability to custom map game controls within its settings. Steam’s own software can do this pretty well, but there should be support for that in every game up front.
Not only does it make it easier for people missing limbs or dexterity to play games, but it makes it easier for any person to tweak the controls for their play style.
I really hope we see more support for features like this because they can be so useful to everybody.
Wrong kind of handicap. You are absolutely right in everything you said above, but it seems OP was referring to PvP games where one player has the option to have more health or do more damage than their opponent. It’s intended to even the playing field when ones pair is more skilled than the other.
I play a lot of puzzle games. Some of them are pretty hard (the later levels of Tametsi take quite a while to crack).
But this one is on a completely different level. If there is a more brutally punishing sokoban-family game on existence, I have no idea what it might be.
Stephen, if he exists, is most likely condemned to roll sausages eternally in hell, for the sin of making this game.
Baba Is You is fantastic, and I think its difficulty curve is much, much more reasonable in the beginning than Stephen’s Sausage Roll. I haven’t finished it, but I didn’t utterly bounce off it either.
it’s also important to consider that recreating an entire game like Tunnel Rush Team Fortress 2 would involve legal and intellectual property considerations.
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