Sorry to hear things are rough for you. I hope whatever is causing it improves!
Mine is an odd choice, or maybe not, but its the first thing that came to mind: Night in The Woods
It’s about a girl that comes home from college to her old dying town. I know that doesn’t sound terribly uplifting, and there’s some downer stories mixed in there, but overall I found it a very heartfelt and uplifting game, because the main character’s friends are the most wonderful bunch of people, and you hang out with them and go on little adventures throughout. It’s got a cool creepy mystery story going on, but the game is mostly about deep friendship, family, and overcoming struggles with their help, and I found that very uplifting and worthwhile.
Perhaps RPG’s with a party, like Mass Effect, Baldurs Gate 3, Fallout New Vegas (many companions with their own stories to find and tag along), Star Wars: knights of the old republic, dragon age.
Some shooters like the later Band of Brothers games, valkyria chronicles or the Mafia series you may enjoy as well.
In Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis, there are multiple paths to choose to complete the game, and one option is to choose a fun companion come with you to help you throughout.
The gameplay of VNs doesn’t particularly appeal to me, though it’s not offensive either, so I can be won over by a particularly good story. So far, the best VN I’ve played is Snatcher for the Sega CD.
Snatcher (nice use of negative space on that cover) is one of Hideo Kojima’s earlier titles, and his insatiable desire for long cutscenes/story lends itself to VNs. As with many of Kojima’s works, it’s heavily inspired by whatever western movies he would’ve seen at the time. In this case, Snatcher is heavily inspired by Blade Runner.
You play as Gillian Seed, an ex-scientist with amnesia that’s now working as a Junker (the equivalent of a blade runner) in Neo-Kobe, a cyberpunk metropolis that’s not quite as dark and dreary as Bladerunner’s, feeling more like something out of Akira.
The game features a lot of voice acting, some of it actually surprisingly good for a game of that time (early 90’s), and it has a particularly fantastic FM soundtrack courtesy of the Genesis’ soundchip, and even some redbook audio for the intro. I’d recommend listening to the soundtrack even if you have no intention of playing the game.
The story for the game can get surprisingly dark and gruesome at times, though overall has a more 90’s anime up-beat vibe, and is one of Kojima’s more linear and coherent tales. The characters are pretty fun to talk to, and the writing was compelling enough to make me push through some of the more dated design decisions (you sometimes will have to click the same action/dialog 3 times or more, with no additional feedback, before something unlocks to progress the story).
The gameplay is a bit more involved than a standard VN, sharing some attributes with an Adventure game. In addition to being able to move around the city and various buildings (skillfully drawn with some of the finest pixel art of the era), the player has access to an inventory and can investigate various parts of a scene. There’s a small combat mini-game that will sometimes spring up that was designed for use with a lightgun (The Konami Justifer) but thankfully works just fine with a standard controller), and is used sparingly enough that doesn’t overstays its welcome. In fact, I’d say the combat is surprisingly well integrated into the story, and helps add a bit of tension, since you never know when it’ll pop up (I imagine it would’ve been quite immersive back in the day with the lightgun, since you’d have to quickly drop your controller and physically ‘draw’ it to defend yourself).
Snatcher is a short game, usually averaging about 4 or 5 hours for most people, but that’s all it really needs to tell its tale, and by the end I was thoroughly satisfied.
The Sega CD version is the only one that was translated for the English market, and AFAIK is no longer legally available to purchase anywhere. With physical copies being rare and demanding a premium ($200 or more), I’d recommend emulation to experience it.
If any of that sounds appealing to you, I’d certainly recommend giving it a try! And if you do, good luck, Junker!
I agree that Bethesda’s RPG writing is amateur at best, and I can’t dispute that there can be some good points in Dishonored. But at least for me, a mark of bad writing is that I find myself unable to care about the outcome for any of the characters in a story, and in Dishonored, I personally didn’t care much about any of the character’s struggles or personalities, as they were all pretty one-note. I can’t recall a single character’s name from Dishonored except for Corvo, since I found it novel to hear Stephen Russell as a main character again (big Thief fan, which incidentally I would point to as a game with excellent writing).
There was one instance in the main base/hub of dishonored 1, where there’s a short excerpt of a story about a whaler in a book, I think in the room where Emily was supposed to chill out in. I thought the writing of that little short story was so compelling, I sat back in my chair after I finished it and thought “Why isn’t this game about that?”, because I felt it highlighted how boilerplate the actual game’s story was in comparison. So in that way you’re right, the micro-writing, the world building, the atmosphere, is all top notch. I just wish the characters and plot were able to match it, as then it would be a masterpiece.
I should mention that I’m pretty difficult to impress with writing in video games, as I don’t think most of them can compare to the quality of writing available in books except for a handful of examples such as Thief, Gemini Rue, Mafia, and the original Deus Ex.
I wouldn’t say the writing for dishonored is terribly strong. The first game has a pretty bog standard plot, and the set up for the second was quite contrived. The gameplay and world are their strengths.
If you’re not sure what StopKillingGames is about, the creator of the campaign, Ross Scott (of Freeman’s Mind fame) made this short video to give the rundown.
That was a fun review, I like the style you went for with it!
I played this back in the day on the 360, which didn’t seem to have the bugs you encountered. I recall having a pretty good time with it, and it was short enough not to overstay its welcome. The jumping mechanics and training for it were unique at the time, and I thought it was a nice twist on the WWII formula.
The lacking narrative (or at least, I don’t remember one, or any characters) hurt it, as it felt sort of like I was playing a multiplayer game alone at times.
I also thought it was neat how the sniper rifles were more accurate/less wobbly if you slowly squuezed the analog trigger, I’m not sure I’ve seen that elsewhere.
But yeah, good review, I’d honestly enjoy reading more from you.
It’s extremely difficult for me to enjoy most 8-bit games, as there’s very little there to intrigue my tastes. However, there are a few standouts that I still play to this day on an emulator handheld, like H.E.R.O. or Mr. Do!
The good ones generally have a really solid little gameplay loop that’s quick to get into, with tight controls that let you get into a flow-state easily, and a difficulty curve that isn’t infuriating (something far too common from that era). The story heavy games from that era usually had mediocre or terrible writing paired with repetitive grinding gameplay, so the classics like Final Fantasy are sadly off limits for me.
H.E.R.O. is one of my favorites since it has somewhat uncommon gameplay where you control a man with a helicopter pack in a mine, avoiding various hazards to rescue a trapped miner at the end of each level. It rewards memorization, which is a knock against it, but even though I’ve played it heavily, I keep coming back to it as I never can quite remember the layouts of the later levels, and once control of the backpack is mastered, it just feels good to zip around all of these creatures and caverns of instant death without nicking yourself. I’m not sure how someone who has never played it before would feel about it, since it can take a while to get the hang of the controls, but I think it holds up pretty well from that era.
It also received a pretty massive number of ports to various consoles and home computers. The original Atari 2600 version is good, but personally I found the MSX port to be the most polished, and it adds some nice additional graphics as well.
The remake has much better gunplay and graphics, and overall has been ‘smoothed out’, but personally I think the new casting choices were unbelievably bad, and take all of the soul out of the game.
If you can get past the jank of the original (and get the community patch to add the old music back in), I personally think the original is the better game by far, but I was a huge fan of the original, so I’m biased.
Are there really that many companies screwing over consumers? I’d appreciate if Stop Killing Games actually kept a running list of which companies and which games are anti-consumer.
Before Ross started this campaign, he’d been steadily creating a video series dedicated to cataloging games that are killed for the past 8 years, called Dead Game News. Here’s a link to a playlist of the series, and you can see the titles of the games that have been killed in the title of the episodes. The Crew is certainly not alone, it was chosen to be a centerpiece of the campaign because it had so many people who owned it, having a fairly high profile shutdown, and being a super clear-cut example of a publisher actively disabling a game that clearly didn’t need to be.
I’m also not sold on the idea that a ban is the only way to protect consumers.
Instead of banning it completely,
I want to point out that outright banning live service games has never been suggested or wanted in this campaign. The proposed solution is to make it a legal requirement to have an end-of-life plan for live service games that are not subscription based. This would effectively mean the publisher/developer would need to account for the need to make the game playable after they decide to end support from the beginning of development, and make choices that would make that possible (choosing software and licenses that won’t conflict with an End-of-Life). Alternatively, they could either make it not require a central server at all, or make it subscription based.
While the game is supported, they would still be able to run it however they please, their profit model would not be banned, the only thing that changes is what happens when the game is no longer profitable enough to support.
I’m in favour of the Buddhist idea of impermanence. Everything is temporary and trying to make a game exist forever is as silly as trying to live forever.
There’s nothing wrong with that, but many people have the philosophy of preserving our history, so as to learn from it, and for future generations to experience. I personally am very grateful that I can read the thoughts of someone who lived a thousand years before me in a book, thanks to fanatical archivists who preserved it. It’s the closest any of us can come to experiencing a time machine, the very concept can fill one with awe. Nothing will last forever, but I and many others derive meaning and value from keeping history alive for future generations to learn from, to enjoy, to ponder. Us preserving things in our corner does not disturb someone else from living with impermanence, it is only there for those who wish to partake.
Boycotts are fickle things, sometimes gathering a following big enough to make a corporation cave, but many other times, not getting any steam at all.
And even if a boycott is successful against one company, it doesn’t mean they won’t try the same thing again, or try their usual ‘do something extreme, then walk it back to where you originally wanted it’ two-step, which is generally very effective at getting what they want. They know how to manipulate the public to their desires, they have whole divisions dedicated to that (though sometimes even they get caught unawares). If we went this route, the issue is that this tactic is done frequently enough that people would likely get boycott fatigue. “Ugh, another campaign? Another publisher screwing us? I just can’t anymore.”
At least against corporations, actual consumer protection law is a much more reliable long-term solution to an enemy that will try every tactic to avoid real, effective change in favor of the consumer.