You’re the first person I’ve seen say Mario, which I find surprising.
For me, it’s Super Mario World, including romhacks. It’s platforming perfection. I particularly like the SMW Central level competition compilation romhacks since you can skip the levels you don’t enjoy.
Spyro is another one I come back to, especially now with the remastered version.
Diablo 2, with mods now, is another. “Stay awhile, and listen.” I sure will, old man.
For a long time, it was Counter Strike and Team Fortress, but I don’t really play FPS games any more so it’s been almost a decade for me at this point.
Simon Tatham’s Puzzles is a fantastic set of FOSS puzzle games. They look ugly, but they have easy intuitive controls with good instructions for many different puzzle games. (40, I guess?)
I think they also have potential for creating lots of variations in dialogue pre-run in a database, and manually checked by a writer for QC.
The problem with locally-run LLMs is that the good ones require massive amounts of video memory, so it’s just not feasible anytime soon. And the small ones are, well, crappy. And slow. And still huge (8GB+).
That of course means you can’t get truly dynamic branching dialogue, but it can enable things like getting thousands of NPC lines instead of “I took an arrow to the knee” from every guard in every city.
It can also be used to generate dialogue, too, so not just one-liners, but “real” NPC conversations (or rich branching dialogue options for players to select.)
I’m very skeptical that we’ll get “good” dynamic LLM content in games, running locally, this decade.
I think it’s slightly different for a few reasons:
It’s almost completely unregulated. Gatcha games, slot machines, loot boxes, and the like are all literal gambling, yet have mostly skirted gambling laws and other regulations.
The in-game UX is unregulated and is designed to encourage spending and obfuscate costs. Games themselves are designed around maximum addiction. Then they include time-limited items/deals to encourage FOMO. Hell, the only reason Diablo 4 is a live service game is so people who buy skins have a (forced) audience to show off to.
What happens on screens in virtual spaces may not be monitored by parents (or schools) at all, as closely, or as easily. Parents may not even know their child is buying in-game items and skins, or not understand how it’s different from buying games/DLC.
The ads themselves are also mostly unregulated. Children’s TV ads are tightly regulated in a lot of the world, but digital ads have carte blanche to advertise to children directly.
Social media acts as a magnifier, with high-status steamers and other content creators rocking high-priced skins acting as game-specific niche “celebrities”/influencers, and are also completely unregulated.
I worry for my kids that they will face a lot of pressures that just didn’t exist for me in the 80s and 90s.
As a newbie, I was rushing to figure out all the mechanics fast enough to unlock the greenhouse in year 1. It was a bit of a stressful optimization game trying to max out every single day.
Since I unlocked it, cash is rolling in so fast I don’t even know what to do with it anymore. I just hit Spring in t year 2 and it’s really chill, now. I’m thinking of selling most of my animals since It’s repetitive needing to pet them and make cheese/mayo every day. I might just cheat and get a couple auto-petters to make it even more relaxed…
I haven’t played much since before Ascendancy Classes were added to the game, so I’m well out of the loop (although I do keep up with some of the news), so maybe I’m still emotionally attached to the studio I started following in alpha.
That said, I don’t really have a problem with their business model. They need to get paid, and they don’t sell game-breaking MTX, beyond needing a map tab, a currency tab, and a premium quad tab. I don’t regret the money I spent on supporter packs; I got over a thousand hours out of the game.
$30 cosmetic microtransactions are reasonable in Path of Exile, imho. But it’s free-to-play, and most of their MTX are purely cosmetic.
To get the “full” experience, I suppose you’ll want to drop a retail-box-price on a supporter pack to get some stash tabs, but you can reasonably play the game to end game content (30+ hours of play time for the first time for a new player, I’d guess?) without spending a cent.
But MTX in a game that’s over $100CAD on release? ಠ_ಠ
I enjoyed it for quite a while. Last I played, the meta gets a bit stale at the higher ratings, but it’s a really great game up until diamond ranking, at least.
I’ll probably buy the full version when it releases.
I hadn’t heard of the game before, but this looks really cool. From what I’ve gathered over the last little bit watching videos:
It’s a turn-based tactical board/war/role-playing game based on “the best game Games Workshop ever made”. It’s set in a brutal post-apocalyptic fantasy world with permanent injuries and death, so there’s always tension that you could lose a unit permanently in any battle.
Negative reviews for the game are largely based on the randomness of the system; you need to carefully plan defensive strategies and use positioning effectively to mitigate the risk of bad rolls. You are expected to lose your team and restart. Often, when you first start. This isn’t so much a game to “beat”, as a virtual boardgame to play and see how far you can get.
It sounds like it’s a pretty complex system, too, where you need to carefully balance your team’s synergies and stat points to minimize risks. It sounds like there’s a very high skill ceiling to work towards.
This definitely isn’t a game for everyone, but I think it might be a lot of fun for me!
But you said yourself that you miss out on a lot of gaming sessions because you won’t buy EA games. If the game is fun, then who cares what it’s labeled? Presumably, your friends think the game is fun enough to play in its current state.
I don’t really understand the problem with “Early Access”; just make a decision based on whether the game is currently worth what they’re asking for it.
Steam is different, though; many games have no DRM and even more just have Steam’s DRM that’s already been cracked globally and is super quick to patch. They also maintain access to paid games even after they’re delisted.
AFAIK, the only problems with maintaining access to Stream games are software-as-a-service games when servers go down (MMOs and multiplayer servers, basically) and music with expired licenses (fuck the RIAA and copyright law for that one; not much Steam can do about that.) I have many delisted games in my library and I can download them any time I want.
Sure, Steam could go down, at some point. Maybe. But it’s not a big concern.
Shigeru Miyamoto is a legend. He comes off as very humble in this interview, too.
Nintendo must be unique in their retention of talent long term; it was really cool reading the part of the article talking about the intergenerational teams, with original designers working alongside developers who played their games as children. Can you imagine going to work with those responsible for your childhood favourite games?