Yeah, I’ve never played Madden online. That’s very much a couch game to me still. Not that I’ve played it much in years. I picked up my first copy in over a decade a couple years ago when it was on sale at the end of the season.
I haven’t seen it mentioned and feel like it should count, since it really just had a solo programmer working with a graphic designer and musician, but RollerCoaster Tycoon and RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 took a big chunk of my gaming time.
One I haven’t seen mentioned is Puerto Rico. One thing I like is there is essentially no random chance to this game; everything that happens is a result of choices you or your opponents make.
Despite including a numpad like the Intellivision controller, the GameStation Go doesn’t currently include any games from Atari’s recently purchased Intellivision library. But [YouTube reviewer who was hands-on at CES] GenXGrownUp says including those titles—alongside Atari Lynx and Jaguar games—is not “off the table yet” for the final release.
I only know of the Atari Lynx from reading about the history of Chip’s Challenge but I’d be interested in seeing that.
Portal and Portal 2 are some of my all-time favorite games. They’re about the only games I enjoy watching other people play, primarily when they’re playing for the first time—it kind of lets me relive that wonder of the first play through. Going through those with my stepdaughter (only 10 at the time) not long after I married her mom was a highlight of my life and really helped us form our own bond. As we progressed through I realized that chamber 17 was going to be rather traumatic for her because she was going to absolutely love the weighted companion cube, so we stopped playing for a few days while I ordered a stuffed weighted companion cube and gave it to her right after the level. As we neared the end of the game I explained to my wife about the Cake. She owned a bakery at the time and we presented kiddo with a cake like the one seen at the end of the game when she won. We did Portal 2 as well, me watching as she played the solo campaign and then we did the co-op together. I’d highly recommend it for any parent who likes gaming to share these with your kids.
I guess it depends which version you watch; I think the U.S. and Canada versions are 44 minutes without commercials, but yeah, it does have some filler. When someone’s actually good at the strategy it can be interesting hearing them talk through their plans.
The biggest difference of the TV show versus the home game is the home game just ends whenever all the killers are found. The TV show has to reach a set number of episodes, so there are mechanisms built-in to make sure there’s always at least one traitor up to the final episode.
If you enjoy the game you should check out The Traitors with its many international variants. I was surprised to read that the productions provide psychologists to help the contestants as it gets traumatic, but when I watched the first UK season there were a lot of people getting into emotional distress.
There have been a lot of people cast who really shouldn’t be on the show; it’s just a game!
Not too much earlier; Wikipedia says the game was invented in 1986 by psychology student Dimitry Davidoff, a psychology student at Moscow State University.
I started working in local TV news 17 years ago. I figured out pretty quickly there’s enough actual news happening to fill the 24-hour cable channels, but sending out reporters and photographers (maybe even producers) is expensive. It’s much cheaper to just have somebody in the studio blabbering on about a few things and trying to stoke reactions from the audience. It can even build a bigger audience than actual news.
Sports radio and TV is an even bigger (though less damaging) example of this. They have a lot of time to fill when games aren’t on, and a lot of times they just put someone on who will give the dumbest take possible just to get the audience mad and have an argument with someone else in the studio or even let the audience call in to argue.