We had the original. The logical puzzles are quite clever. My sisters and I got a bit obsessed with it and completed it together.
Yes, you can complete it, by bringing ALL the possible combinations to the village. That’s 625, and you can save 16 on each trip, if you don’t lose any on the way.
There’s a short congratulations video if you save them all. I was honestly surprised they made one, given the commitment it required.
I’m not sure why there hasn’t been a business simulator where you could live up the glamorous, extremely vicious, exploitative, and horrible life of a movie studio owner in Old Hollywood.
The Movies, 2005.
Technically not just old Hollywood, it goes through the 20th century with technological advances and world events that change movie trends.
Since it’s a business management game from Bullfrog Lionhead, it did have some grit to it, though mostly sarcastic rather than very dark.
I welcome new takes on this though, the movies didn’t age well in some aspects (aspect ratio most notably, ah ah ). I know of Blockbuster Inc that tried to remake that already but the reviews are not great. I’ll try this one.
Not single-player, but snipperclips is good, relaxed puzzle fun.
Goals are visual and easy to understand, each player controls a shape and they can cut each other to try and fit a predefined “hole” together. There are some physics puzzles based on cutting your shape in clever ways too.
Mistakes have no consequence and often lead to funny interactions. You can’t really lose, you just reset your shape and try again.
One of the first VR games I played was No Man’s Sky, on base PS4. Very low res and frame rate, teleport movement possible on foot but obviously not while flying spaceships. And I may have tried spinning a bit (that’s a good trick).
Got very sick, very fast.
Nowadays I’m mostly fine playing continuous movement, even relatively fast-paced one. Tunnel effect helps, when it’s available.
The only problems are on badly designed games (like those with forced, unpredictable “cinematic” camera movement, don’t do that in VR for fuck’s sake).
I play a lot of rhythm games, and I do play a lot of Beat Saber specifically now. Ragnarock and Pistol Whip (well this one is rhythm-adjacent) are two other VR music games I enjoy.
But I’ve never had a worse case of sore arms than back when I played Donkey Konga on the gamecube for the first time. I was hooked and played for hours. I didn’t notice anything while playing, but my arms were killing me for the whole night after that .
Note on Donkey Kong game boy, it starts with the 4 arcade levels then adds about a hundred more levels taking advantage of new moves and turning into more of a platform/puzzle kind of game.
This is really the starting point of what became Mario Vs Donkey Kong (which is another good GBA game to recommend, actually).