Earthbound. Was playing it as a kid and didn’t have a guide. Final boss, was losing. Hit “pray” in a panic because I was out of options. And then it does the whole thing, and something about overcoming impossible odds with the power of love and community gets to me.
Also the ending of the binding of Isaac where you hear his parents fighting. That dredged up some feelings I didn’t know were kicking around down there!
There’s a jump between your first paragraph and the second. In the first one you said you wanted to play with your friends. But in the second you got the worst of Internet boys.
I also wanted to play Morrowind with my friends. We got Elder Scrolls Online but that’s a monkey’s paw wish. I wanted drop in multiplayer and an experience more like left 4 dead. I don’t want randoms. I want my friends. I don’t want a big always online persistent world. I want the single player world, but with my friends.
If I keep going I’m just going to reinvent Baldur’s Gate 3 multiplayer. That’s basically what I wanted back when. Not the MMO shit.
Hell, even the dark souls “summon a friend in” is like 70% of what I wanted.
I make games a fallback activity. If I can go be social, I’ll pick that instead. I date people so I try to spend time with them.
I set timers. Every hour or two the timer goes off, and I have to go do something else. Either something productive like an errand or just something not on the computer.
I have a full time job. I never play games when I’m supposed to be working. I work from home so it would be easy to fire up the other computer and play a little between work stuff, but that’s a horrible idea so I don’t.
I have a self imposed bed time. I had to use an alarm for this for a while but now it’s just habit. Also I’m getting old so I get tired sooner.
Probably difficult for technical reasons, but it would be cool if I could rewind the game arbitrarily in games where you can quicksave/load. Like I can save and try the thing and reload if I don’t like the results, but it’d be neat if I could just rewind.
Maybe they should come up with better names because people aren’t going to get better about this. Instead of high graphics, call it “16vram mode” or something.
One of the worst arguments I had online was me saying that’s great in single player but not unilaterally in multiplayer, and people got mad. I still think about it sometimes.
But generally yeah, agreed. Caves of Qud added a roleplay mode so dying sends you back to town instead of forcing a new game, and it’s real nice even if it’s not the traditional rogue like.
Yeah I figured it was going to be a Bethesda game, and those usually frustrate me. I didn’t buy it. Maybe in a couple years when the Ultimate Edition is on sale I’ll try it.
I’ve been thinking lately that a lot of people are way worse at reading comprehension than I would have guessed. Like, there’s a large chunk of the population where reading is difficult and uncomfortable. Of course they prefer YouTube.
We’d rarely encounter these people on a text first medium like here.