Three very different games I actually took notes for :
La Mulana. In the “modern” version you have limited memory space to save some of the many texts you find, but you’ll need more than that to solve the puzzles anyway. Good luck trying to scribble the weird pixelated symbols on your notes, too.
I play Shin Megami Tensei games with notes to optimize fusions, when I have a particular demon in mind and I want them to inherit the right skills. Later games let you see fusion results, but only one step ahead.
And then there’s spacechem. I love Zachtronics games in general, and all the following ones tend to be progressive in difficulty and let you experiment from a good enough solution to better solutions. As the first, less refined one, spacechem is special. Before long it needs planning and calculations to even get something that works.
Some games fix this issue by making the player trigger the change they want and bring the fight to the big powerful threat themselves, on their terms.
In fact one of my favorite RPG has the player characters being the ones trying to end the world as they know it.
I do think the extreme example, the old RPG trope of the big bad looming over in the red-tinted sky and being just minutes from firing the world busting laser while you finish your quest list, is rather cringe. Maybe don’t invoke this in a game where time is basically irrelevent.
I think they’d already lost their way a long while before that.
They started as indies grouping together to get visibility, at a time when Steam still curated every game and accepted maybe 4 games a month (yeah, hard to imagine today. It’s still hard to be noticed, but for the opposite reason). Back then they distributed only DRM-free games too, with eventually a Steam key option.
At some point they opened their own store and started including big publisher games, and really became just another store, and mostly a key store too. They spew some bullshit about not being specifically a DRM-free store, but really “DRM-agnostic”. “We don’t restrict publishers’ choice of DRM, they can be DRM-free if they want!”
And I’m like, dude, it’s not a stance, Steam technically doesn’t either. You may need the client to install but plenty of games don’t run on any DRM, not even Steamworks.
I’ve played Tales of Monkey Island. If you’ve played Telltale’s version of Sam and Max, it’s pretty much the same kind of take. Probably suffers quite a bit from the episodic format, and puzzles are a bit straightforward compared to classic monkey island games. Fans of the series mostly consider it a huge letdown.
Can’t say anything about the more serious parts of the Telltale catalogue, I’ve never played those, but for having played this, the 3 Sam & Max seasons and Back to the Future, there was certainly a Telltale formula that started annoying me after a while. They went less and less subtle about crafting their dialogues so they all lead to the same answer, they clearly wrote their stories with an objective to reuse character models and assets, and they still used that in-house engine that looked and controlled terribly, barely improved through the years.
Maybe it’s because I played them too late, but while I mostly had a blast playing HL2, the first one never clicked for me.
I know, it’s been very influential and new when it released, but it was still quite straight a FPS game. Whereas HL2 is like a crazy theme park of different ambiences and mechanics.
Animal Crossing is a special case (and one that made a lot of people angry back when the game released).
One console is tied to one “island”, which means all accounts on the same switch play in the same town. Each has got their own house and inventory, and can contribute to the island in some ways…
But only the main account, who started the save, is “resident representative”, which means they’re the only one who can build or relocate stuff, and who can start community projects needed for the island to progress.
So yeah, all other players have an inferior experience. Which is a bit of a baffling design for a family game such as this.
This is not the case with the sega games we’re talking about. The announcement specifically mentions the games will still be available to download if you bought them before the delisting.