Can confirm! My daughter is getting pretty good at video games and our video game time together is some of my fondest.
Any parents looking for a good co-op game, I can’t recommend Wobbly Life enough. It’s basically kid-friendly, multiplayer GTA with zero predatory mechanics. It’s a flat $15, and goes on sale sometimes. There’s loads of content, and more coming out pretty regularly. We’re 55 hours in and nowhere near exhausting the fun.
Exactly. If people missed playing those games so much, they’d be playing those games. NES games are trivial to emulate.
And this is the ultimate in survivorship bias. Super Mario 3 is often touted as the best game of an entire generation. There are a lot of mediocre NES games.
The Talos Principle 2. It’s a cerebral, first person puzzle game by the makers of Serious Sam. The first one was amazing! One of my favorite games. The reviews make it sound like this one is at least just as good. It’s not even that old and already 40% off.
Metroid Dread, Stardew Valley, and Baldur’s Gate 3.
The former on Yuzu’s last build on a nice 32 inch monitor with a big controller that doesn’t cramp up my hands. It’s pretty hard, but I did just get past a part I hear a lot of people quit on, so there’s that. I can’t imagine trying to play it with Joycons. I’d probably snap them in half.
Can’t recommend that one without also recommending Ico and especially Shadow of the Colossus before it. Shadow of the Colossus may be my favorite gave ever even. It’s so good. I really wish Sony would release all three on PC or something. I still haven’t played The Last Guardian because the last Playstation I owned was a PS3.
Stardew Valley is getting there for me. I usually burn out on a game at 80 hours, or whenever the credits roll and there’s no more fun content to pursue. I’m creeping up on 200 hours in SDV, and I often feel like I’m playing it because I have to harvest those blueberries to make mad cash to get that 10M clock that prevents decay on my farm. It’s starting to feel like a job, but then, I still fire it up when I’m looking for something to play because it’s just comfortable and easy to get into the groove. I think I really need to give it a break, but I just keep coming back.
I was coding Indie games when it came out. The number of clones in the community was just disgusting. There was even more than one Flappy Game Jam. If Flappy Bird can be credited with one thing, it’s that it made a whole bunch of inept coders think that they too could get rich by making super simple mobile games.
Tametsi just barely eked out being my most played game of 2023 over, duh duh duh!! Elden Ring. Yes, it took me longer to finish a $1 Minesweeper clone than to finish a massive Fromsoft Soulslike. Haha!
I bounced off Crosscode hard. Which sucks because I wanted to love it. The pacing and difficulty were all over the place. And making the puzzle dungeons a race between you and other characters just made me hate them. I want to stop and think! After dying to a particularly nasty boss I was trying to beat as fast as possible so I could maybe eke out a win in the dungeon, I ended up cranking the difficulty all the way down, and was the last out of the dungeon anyway. I put the game down and haven’t looked back. That was about 25 hours in, and nothing of consequence had occurred with the plot by then, anyway. I might go back sometime and see if it gets better, but it left me pretty sour.
I love the entire 16 bit era, and JRPGs, and action RPGs, and Crono Trigger, and difficult games, but Crosscode just took all those elements and somehow made them unpalatable to me.