So did I, which is why I listed it among good games that have no replay value. I enjoyed the thing that it is, I appreciated the visual style, it’s well performed…it’s one of the better walking simulators. The ending is controversial, which I take to mean it’s a work of art.
Please Don’t Touch Anything. What genre does it even belong in? It would have been a flash game if made 10 years earlier. You’re left at a console with a single large red button, and told to wait for a minute and don’t touch anything. Depending on how you interact with this console, there are many different things it can do/behaviors it can have, and your goal is to find all the different endings. It was entertaining, I don’t need to own it anymore.
Shenzhen I/O and TIS-100. Both Zachtronics assembly-em-up games, which…I don’t think there’s absolutely zero replayability, because you might redo the level you just did or go back to an earlier one with a solution you just learned from a later level, but I don’t know finishing these games feels less like beating Bowser at the end of Super Mario and more like graduating from high school. I’m done with that phase of my life and I can now move on.
Antichamber. The video game equivalent of a Piet Mondrian painting. It’s an abstract and brain knitting non-euclidean first person puzzle game that uses its surreal mechanics as a metaphor for the journey of life itself, and halfway though you get a gun that shoots cubes and it turns back into a video game. A lot of the actual impact of the game comes from how it comments on the epiphany you just had, and that effect is spoiled somewhat by “Oh I remember this part.” I will note there is a speedrunning community for this game.
Firewatch. There are some games where you’ll watch a Let’s Play, decide you want to have a go, so you’ll buy and play the game. Not Firewatch; a Let’s Play gives you 96.4% of the experience. It’s a walking simulator that probably should have just been a short film. I’m not even convinced it is a “video game” because…how do you play it well or poorly? Like do we need a new term like “narrative software” or something?
Microsoft is like Alphabet - why would you adopt anything they make? It’s going to be abandoned with no support long before the devices are worn out, to include desktop and laptop PCs.
It’s funny…I bounced right off Minecraft but I like games like Satisfactory and Factorio.
A lot of people play Minecraft as an outlet for creativity; it has an end game with a final boss and a victory condition, but most people don’t even try to “win” Minecraft, they want to build cool things. Well between my electronics bench, my wood shop, my 3D printer and my various creative, design and programming software suites, I already build a lot of cool stuff, so that itch is already scratched.
Those factory building games come with a clearly stated goal: “You’ve crash landed on an alien planet with a hammer and a pistol with 100 shots. Build a rocket.” I’ll spend months of my life building a gigantic complex of individual factories connected by an intricate rail network to accomplish that goal. I’ve heard this kind of thing described as “problem solving gameplay” rather than “puzzle solving gameplay.”
As you say I don’t hate Minecraft, I’m often awed and inspired at the things people have built in it, but it’s not for me.
“The inverse square root function in the C math library isn’t fast enough. That’s okay, I’ll write my own algorithm that abuses floating point numbers in a way that gives me a close approximation a bit faster.”
Back in 2013 or so, Microsoft launched the Windows Store alongside Windows 8, and was making some noises that sounded a lot like shutting out independent software stores like Steam and requiring everything on Windows to be sold through the Windows Store.
Valve reacted to this by saying “Welp I guess it’s time to start investing in gaming on Linux” and launched Steam Machines, little PCs designed to be connected to a television to bring the Steam experience to the living room couch. They ran a modified version of Debian Linux along with their own tweaked version of Wine that could run some Windows games alongside several (including Valve’s own library) that shipped Linux native versions.
The project itself was a bit of a flop; they relied on other companies to make Steam Machines, like Alienware and such. But a lot of things came from it.
Valve demonstrated they had the wherewithal to take the gaming market with them if Microsoft got too greedy.
Big Picture Mode, Steam Link, and the beginnings of Proton among others came from the Steam Machine project.
The Steam Controller came from this project, which I’ve heard GabeN talk about as a major learning experience they drew on during the design of the Steam Deck, aka why the Steam Deck has perfectly conventional controls.
They spent most of the 20teens adding steady improvements for Linux gaming to the point that we switched from having a list of games that ran on Linux, to a list of games that don’t run on Linux because that became easier to manage. Then they launched the Steam Deck, an unqualified successful Linux gaming platform. Then I came here, and then it was now, and then I don’t know what happened.
Unity, as a business, as a stock investment, as a C-suite and board of directors, is rotting in its casket for all I care. I have committed to never buy game built in Unity whose development started after September this year.
This whole debacle wasn’t an engineering problem; it’s not the software development staff’s fault.
I spent a ton of time in Kingdom of Loathing. I kept an old laptop that still had a flash enabled browser for a few months to play Bloons Tower Defense 4.
There was this game, I forget the name of it, but you had to build and drive little vehicles to overcome challenges. It was technically amazing for a Flash game, and I’d love to have it back.
My favorite thing about Illusion of Gaia has to be the fact that the manual contained a complete walkthrough of the game, at least in the North American release. Unless it was the same energy as “the dumb Americans (who invented the genre and introduced it to the East) don’t understand RPGs, so we’ll make Mystic Quest really simple and dumbed down for them” I don’t know why they did that.
Also, I was like 13 when I got my used copy of Soul Blazer…is there a more melancholy game on the SNES?
Yeah as another Firefox + Ublock Origin user, I came in here to say I’ve noticed a lot of game wikis announcing they’re migrating off of Fandom, and I’m curious as to why. I’m OoTL.