Nintendo games do that a lot. Most Mario games (some of them in Charles Martinet’s voice), StarFox, Metroid (with occasional thumbs-up/waving at player), F-Zero…
I am against all game design patents in general. You shouldn’t be able to file a patent on game mechanics, like no movie director could have filed a patent on, say, the idea of sequence shot.
Game content (art, characters, etc) is already protected by copyright. Patents have absolutely no business in this.
You’d be lacking shortcuts obviously, and very rarely (mostly when you ask for it) you might be prompted to input a name for something, but almost everything else has mouse controls.
Now that I think about it, there are two keys that might be a bit inconvenient not to have, spacebar for emergency pauses (there’s a screen button but it’s harder to hit in a bind) and shift that let you queue an order instead of replacing the current one.
My random suggestions right now for stuff I like and is played with mouse would be:
Rimworld. Almost any top-down PC management or (not too fast paced) strategy game should work, but, I really like the crazy random shit that happens to the characters you’re slowly getting to know in Rimworld.
Almost any of the Zachtronics games, if you like to torture your brain. Open-ended sort-of-engineering puzzles.The bigs ones like Spacechem, Opus Magnum and Shenzhen IO in particular, last call BBS for a bit more variety inside one game. Not Infinifactory, since while it doesn’t have any kind of fast paced action it still requires navigating in 3D so mouse only wouldn’t work.
I’d heard the reason for the Xbox One was that some marketing genius noticed people were calling Xbox 360 “the 360”, and thought they would call that one… well, the One.
And then everyone laughed and went ex-bone instead.
Humans are bad at probability, and that’s mostly why they gamble too.
Every wheel draw is supposed to be independent (it’s not totally so because computer “random” is really a pseudo-random algorithm, but close enough). So every time you draw, the odds are 1:4. Previous draws don’t matter.
On an infinitely large number of draws, you’d see a 1/4 success rate. This doesn’t mean you can’t fail a dozen times in a row (the probability of that is (3/4)^12, about 3%… It happens).
If anything Firaxis’s take on XCOM has made turn based tactics somewhat mainstream again, and Ubisoft has already tried to surf on this trend once with Mario+Rabbids.
Thinking about those I’ve played, I don’t think remakes have ever detracted from the original to me.
The first time I finally completed Metroid 1 was shortly after Zero Mission (which had the cool effect that the locations of some power ups was still fresh in my mind).
I also enjoyed Samus Returns despite it missing the point of Metroid 2, and that didn’t make Metroid 2 worse in retrospect.
Kind of similar with Majora’s Mask 3D, Mario 64 DS…
I’ve never hold up a first play because of a potential remaster, especially not if it was not announced.
I have hold up a few replays when rumours of a remake are floating around though (like I did with Skyward Sword). I stopped a halfway through replay of Xenoblade Chronicles when they announced Definitive Edition. With how long XC games get if you try to do everything… Yeah.
Still lacking a definitive version in English of the original, Tales of Phantasia, as far as I know. The playstation version with skits and stuff was Japanese only.
The only officially localized version was GBA… and its epic tale of the legendary war :
8 (DX but really my favorite parts of it were already on Wii U). 8’s tracks are incredible (not the booster packs one, those are a mixed bag and none really reach base game/Wii U dlc level).
Wii comes very close though. It’s the first to have good item balance IMO, it gets rid of the left-right bullshit to drift, and circuits are quite fun too. And some bikes are a blast, though to the point of being overpowered.
I just think of 8 as “we took everything good in Wii and made it a bit better”.
You may be familiar with the old management game Theme Hospital. Two Point Hospital was a modern take on that, and they extended the concept to university campus and now museum.