Your age 30 is fine. Age is always an excuse, but mostly not true.
It’s fine for single-player shooters, which are less demanding, but speaking as someone who has packed on some decades, your reaction time definitely becomes a noticeable factor over the years for competitive multiplayer games. I definitely can’t play competitive twitch shooters nearly as well as when I was 18, which is about when your reaction time is at its best.
That being said, there are shooters where twitch time is less-critical or roles or play-styles that focus less on it.
And I don’t see how someone couldn’t learn to play with a dual-stick or trackpad (or trackball, for that matter), which is what I think OP is talking about. I haven’t had any problems picking up new input methods…that just takes time. Took time to learn when I was 18, too.
I mean, twin stick gamepad or to lesser extent touchpad just isn’t going to be as good as a mouse for an FPS. A good mouse player will beat a good touchpad or gamepad player.
And the problem with the Deck is that it has a PC game library, and a lot of those are designed with a mouse in mind. Console FPSes usually adjust the game difficulty so that playing with twin sticks are practical. Enemies give you more time to slowly turn around without inflicting enormous amounts of damage. Auto-aim assist is common. Ranges are shorter. Stuff like that.
If this is a single-player game – which it sounds like you’re playing – you can reduce the difficulty to compensate for the input mechanism.
There’s an input mechanism that some people developed for twin-stick gyro controllers called Flick Stick, which someone else mentioned; Steam Input supports this. The mouse is still going to win, but it’s an improvement over traditional pure-stick input.
There’s also some input mechanism which I think was different from the “Flick Stick” approach – though maybe I’m wrong and misremembering, didn’t have an interest in exploring it – that IIRC someone put together using Steam Input. The way it worked, as I recall, was that one could tap the thumbstick in a direction and it’d immediately do a 90 degree turn. The idea was to provide for a rapid turn while keeping sensitivity low enough to still permit for accurate aiming. But I’m not able to find the thing with Kagi in a few searches, and it’s not impossible that I’m misremembering…this was only a single video that I’m thinking of.
I don’t think that there’s any trick to learning this, just playing games and picking it up over time. I mean, I was atrocious at using a keyboard+mouse when I first started doing it, and ditto with twin-stick FPSes.
You could also attach a keyboard and mouse, though I think that that kind of eliminates the point of the Deck, at least as long as one also has a PC to play on – it might make sense for someone who just uses a Deck and a phone.
is there an easy FPS game where I don’t have to move or shoot too fast
Play games that are designed for consoles or which have a gamepad mode, rather than a keyboard+mouse PC game. They’ll be tuned for controller limitations. Like, can you play Halo comfortably with the Deck? That was designed for a gamepad originally, and it’s available on Steam (though I’d note that it requires a Microsoft account, which you may-or-may-not be willing to do).
This also talks about some limitations of thumbstick aiming (if you’re using thumbsticks and not trackpads). It might be possible to tweak some of these, like sensitivity or dead zone, but I’d assume that for a given game, the developers have already chosen pretty reasonable defaults.
For those who haven’t played the series, VATS is an alternate aiming mode where one can pause (or in later games in the 3d series, greatly slow) the game, select a certain number of targets depending upon available action points, and then have all those shots taken in rapid succession, with the game aiming.
I’d say that VATS is kind of a “path” than a purely alternate input method in those games; you need to make a VATS-oriented build, though it’s true that it makes it possible to play the game with minimal FPS elements. Like, in Fallout: New Vegas, VATS provides major benefits close-up. While VATS is active, there’s enormous damage reduction applied to your character, IIRC 90%, so for short periods of time, they have enormous damage output and little risk. They can also turn rapidly and target multiple enemies, probably better than a player manually-playing could. At close ranges, VATS is just superior.
But VATS suffers severe accuracy penalties at range. Whether-or-not a target is moving doesn’t affect VATS accuracy, but range does a lot, whereas with manual aiming, whether-or-not a target is moving makes a big difference and range doesn’t matter much. As a result, VATS isn’t great for sniping, which is also an aspect of the game. You can do it (especially, oddly-enough, with pistols, in Fallout 4, where the Concentrated Fire perk lets later shots in a flurry of pistol shots at range be very accurate.
In Fallout 76, VATS provides such dramatic damage benefits that I’d say that it’s impractical to play a non-VATS build – VATS is required to get damage up to a reasonable level later in the game.
EU won’t commit to answering whether games are goods or services.
I think I’d have a category for both.
You can’t call an SNES cartridge a service, but similarly, you can’t call, oh, an online strip poker service a good.
I suspect that most good-games have at least some characteristics of a service (like patches) and most service-games have at least some characteristics of a good (like software that could be frozen in place).
I think that the actual problem is vendors unnecessarily converting good-games into service-games, as that gives them a route to get leverage relative to the consumer. Like, I can sell a game and then down the line start data-mining players or something. I think that whatever policy countries ultimately adopt should be aimed at discouraging that.
I’m with you on wanting the big, upholstered chair, but also liking the desk.
I kind of wish that easy chairs at desks were more of a thing. As it is, a typical desk doesn’t really fit them: you have “office chairs” and “living room chairs”, and the two don’t meet much. Couple problems:
A big and top-heavy chair is gonna tip more easily, so you have to extend the base and casters.
A big chair isn’t gonna roll as easily, so you can’t push back from a desk.
For years, I’ve been thinking about switching to a table or workbench with a higher top or something.
I think that the answer probably has several elements.
Maybe the desk can just…go away. Desks are important for paperwork, were important for supporting heavy CRTs, but I rarely actually need one now.
Monitor goes on an table/desk/floor-mounted arm. I’ve been diong that, and I’m happy with it, but still have the “cubbyhole” desk from the CRT era. Maybe just swing the thing into place every time you sit down.
Keyboard and mouse need to be attached to the floor or chair, not the desk. This is a bit harder. There are keyboard and mouse trays, but if one reclines in a chair, they also tilt the tray, which I don’t want – the mouse surface has to remain horizontal. If you can live with a trackball or trackpad, that might be tolerable. It might be possible to have some kind of leveling attachment that fits over the arms, or have a free-standing keyboard/mouse tray that fits over the chair, pole on each side of it. Something like this. If reclining adjusts the required height of the keyboard/mouse and the mount is freestanding, then it has to be trivial to adjust the height.
Linux PC. Almost entirely on a desktop, though I’ve got a few games (Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, Caves of Qud) that I’ll play on a laptop.
Very limited use of Android, if I’m away from a computer, for the mobility.
I’ve owned a few consoles, but the experience has consistently disappointed me.
Loading times are worse (well, maybe this has improved, but historically was a pain)
I can’t as trivially flip over to a wiki in a web browser. I smack a button, I’m on another workspace on my PC.
For some reason, a lot of “deep” games that one spends a lot of time learning, like strategy and milsims, don’t have much of a presence on consoles. I like a lot of entrants in those genres.
Games cost more than the PC. I mean, sure, the console vendor loses money on the hardware, has to make their money back on the games, but that especially makes consoles a bad buy if you’re going to get a lot of games.
The PC has more potential to be upgraded (though I’ll concede that consoles have generally improved here).
I’m not constrained by what the game developer wanted me to do; I can drop in with a memory editor and cheat in a game, can add mods to the game, have control over save state, etc.
The drawbacks of a PC are things that don’t really bother me:
You’ve got setup and configuration, which I’m gonna do anyway.
You’re more-likely to hit driver or hardware compatibility issues than on a console.
As for mobile…
I would be potentially willing to pay a lot more for mobile games than I do, but the entire commercial game infrastructure on Android is tied to getting a Google account, and I refuse to do that; I don’t want Google logging and data-mining what I do. So I almost-exclusively use open-source software on Android. And most good mobile games have made it to the PC.
Honestly, I was kind of unexpectedly disappointed with Android gaming (and this is even based on what I see in the Google Play Store).
Okay, the touchscreen isn’t a fantastic input medium for a lot of game genres, but I thought that stuff like multiple-choice choose-your-own-adventure games and gamebook-type games would see a huge renaissance, but some of the main games in that line have been…not that great; Choice of Games has a lot of titles, and some of the writing is good, but the gameplay mechanics are kinda disappointing.
Turn-based strategy games seemed like a good fit for the touchscreen, but as with the console, deep strategy games also haven’t been hugely in evidence. As best I can tell, there’s a strong focus on games that you can drop into for a few minutes while waiting in a line or something and then drop out of…which is fine, but really constrains the experience. I guess deckbuilders are okay, but the PC does fine there too.
A lot of Android games aren’t super-considerate of the battery. Some games that I like on the PC, like real time sim games (Oxygen Not Included or Dwarf Fortress) require constant load and just wouldn’t be a great match for a phone running on battery, even if they were present.
I’m not really into games that leverage location, which is one thing that a phone can do that other platforms can’t. I could maybe believe that there could be games that could leverage multi-touch support to do things that PCs can’t and really get a lot of good out of it, but I haven’t seen that.
The screen has major limitations in that few Android devices have a large screen (so they can’t expect to control a large portion of your visual arc) and on a touchscreen, your hands are going to be obscuring part of the screen, making things even more difficult for the developer.
Touchscreens have gotten better, but they just don’t have reliable, rapid response to input the way that the mouse-and-keyboard (which a PC is guaranteed to have) or a gamepad (which a console is guaranteed to have) have.
Android phones can take external peripherals, but it’s hard for a game to expect that they be present, especially since not everyone wants to haul a lot of hardware around with their phone. So you can get game controllers, earphones, a keyboard, or even an external projector, but it’s hard for a game to expect that you have them available.
The Outer Worlds is in the same bucket as Starfield, but with fewer space-specific elements. Starfield has light space flight combat, though it’s not very sophisticated, more of a minigame. And Starfield has zero-G FPS bits. Oh, yeah, and you mention The Outer Worlds having fixed gravity – Starfield does have variable gravity. But if you removed that, you could make either Starfield or The Outer Worlds not set in space and it’d basically play the same way. Maybe you’d have to come up with some alternate explanation for alien animals and flora, like bioengineering or something, but lots of games have done that.
Whatever the merits or flaws of Star Citizen as an individual game, I do think that the sheer amount of cash dumped into the thing by backers does demonstrate that there’s legitimately demand out there for a game in the space flight combat genre.
I just want a good cockpit sim with HOTAS support that doesn’t make me want to scoop out my own eyeballs whenever I think about loading it up again.
Atmospheric flight combat sims, and I haven’t played either much, but maybe Il-2: Sturmovik: Great Battles or DCS? Those kind of fit the “slap a lot of money on the counter, and we give you a hard sim with a lot of levers” bill.
I fucking love flying ships in that game with my HOTAS
I have a HOTAS setup too, along with pedals. And I’m kinda with you on wishing that there were good space flight combat HOTAS games. But…I’m skeptical that it’s gonna happen.
You need to have enough people running around with a dedicated throttle and flightstick to get sales up enough to make it worthwhile to focus a game on it.
I feel like the decline in flightsticks may have been a factor in moving away from the combat flight genre (both space and air-breathing), that the late '90s/early 2000s may be permanently the heyday.
My guess is that there are a number of factors:
Gamepads got analog thumbsticks and analog triggers. They aren’t ideal for flight sims, but that’s enough analog inputs that most people who aren’t absolutely devoted to the genre are going to just live with a gamepad rather than buying a bunch of extra input hardware that can only be used with that game.
During the 1990s, joysticks such as the CH Products Flightstick, Gravis Phoenix, Microsoft SideWinder, Logitech WingMan, and Thrustmaster FCS were in demand with PC gamers. They were considered a prerequisite for flight simulators such as F-16 Fighting Falcon and LHX Attack Chopper. Joysticks became especially popular with the mainstream success of space flight simulator games like X-Wing and Wing Commander, as well as the “Six degrees of freedom” 3D shooter Descent.[27][28][29][30][31] VirPil Controls’ MongoosT-50 joystick was designed to mimic the style of Russian aircraft (including the Sukhoi Su-35 and Sukhoi Su-57), unlike most flight joysticks.[32]
However, since the beginning of the 21st century, these types of games have waned in popularity and are now considered a “dead” genre, and with that, gaming joysticks have been reduced to niche products.[27][28][29][30][31]
The XBox gamepad became very common as a convention on the PC, whereas up until that point, it was more-common to have all kinds of oddball inputs, and it was expected that a player would set up the controls on a per-game basis. I think that not having to do input configuration made gamepad-on-the-PC more approachable, but it also made it harder to sell people on games that require actual input. HOTASes are still in the “setup required” family (and it’s good that they have the flexibility, as you can’t have a one-size-fits-all HOTAS setup). Maybe you could have Internet-distributed profiles for different hardware, choose something reasonable out of box, kinda like how Steam Input works.
Ubiquitous Internet access has made multiplayer more common than it was around 2000. If a game supports competitive multiplayer, then having configurable input (and macros and such) may be undesirable, because you want a level playing field. Game developers may not want to permit for a variety of inputs if it doesn’t make for a level playing ground and they’re doing multiplayer. There’s some game that I recall (Star Citizen?) where I remember players being extremely unhappy about changes being made that favored mouse-and-keyboard players over flightstick players.
Newer combat aircraft are fly-by-wire. There’s no mechanism to let one “feel” resistance, and so not much reason for flight sim games to do so either. For a while, there were force-feedback joysticks (we typically use “force feedback” today to refer to rumble motors, but strictly-speaking, it should refer to joysticks that push back against you). That was never a huge chunk of the market, but it was a reason to get dedicated hardware.
I assume that modern aircraft don’t need trim adjustment; having trim controls is another thing that you can add inputs for on-controller.
For space combat games, manipulating the throttle doesn’t have the significance that it does with an air-based combat flight sim. Like, you aren’t constantly storing and releasing kinetic energy as you ascend and descend. You don’t have much to crash into. Stalling isn’t a problem. Exceeding aircraft speed maximums isn’t a problem. A lot of space combat flight sims aren’t “hard sims”, so you don’t need to worry about things like engine overheating the way you might in Il-2 Sturmovik: 1946 (though I suppose that one could introduce dynamics for that; Starfield has a “peak maneuverability” speed, so there’s an incentive to reduce speed to do a turn before speeding back up).
Many space combat sims aren’t simulating existing hardware; developers are only going to introduce mechanics if it significantly adds to the gameplay. In Il-2 Sturmovik: 1946, I have a ton of controls that are there because they reflect real-world mechanical systems. Armored cowlings over air intakesthat can be set to variable levels of openness. Prop pitch. Fuel mixture. The only real analog I can think of in space flight combat sims are maybe “system energy levels”.
HOTAS is really limited to PC gaming. It’s not incredibly friendly to other video game hardware. With a console, you need to have the input hardware mounted somewhere, something that a living room couch isn’t as amenable to as a desk. With a mobile phone, you want to have the hardware with you, and so size is at a premium; I think that few people are going to want to lug around a throttle and flightstick with their phone, even if the hardware can technically handle it.
Some games are doing VR (e.g. Elite Dangerous) and in VR, I think that if the world does go heavily down the VR route – which it has not yet – that it’ll be likely that there will just be virtual controls using VR controllers rather than dedicated HOTAS input devices. The concept of only seeing the ship kinda isn’t an ideal match for the physical controls. Yeah, you don’t get tactile feedback, but it gives you a lot of flexibility in ship control layout. Now, yes, there’s a VR+HOTAS crowd like you; going all the way with inputs and outputs. But I don’t know how many people are willing to put the money down for a top-of-the-light flight sim rig, and video games have fixed costs and variable revenue, so they benefit from scale, getting a lot of people pitching in money. You really don’t want to target just a small market if you can avoid it.
I think that the best bet for broader HOTAS support down the line is one of the two:
Go low-budget. Yeah, a lot of flight sims are AAA…but I’m not sold that they absolutely need to be. I’ve played some untextured polygon games that are pretty good (like Carrier Command 2). I understand that BattleBit Remastered is considered pretty highly too. That’s a big whopping chunk of assets that just don’t exist. And if you do that, you can target a much smaller audience and still make a reasonable return. Just focus on flight mechanics or something. Maybe down the line, if there’s enough uptake, sell some kind of DLC with fancy assets.
Push HOTAS support out to some kind of game-agnostic software package. Like, say there were enough people who really wanted to play HOTAS games. Have an open-source “HOTAS app” that provides most of the functionality: distributing input profiles, linking together collections of devices, setting indicator LEDs, etc. The game just links up with that app, and doesn’t attempt to handle every device out there. It exposes a bunch of input values that can be twiddled, and some outputs. There’s some precedent for that kind of software; Steam Input, or (not input-specific) VoIP apps with game integration, like Teamspeak. Buttplug.io basically fills that “third-party open-source middleware” role for outputs for adult video games and sex toys.
Either way – push HOTAS out to a separate cross-input-device, cross-game software package, or going lower-budget, reduces the need to be mass-market, which – in 2024 – HOTAS isn’t.
There’s also a few “fleet command” games. These aren’t really “combat flight sims” like the above, because the player isn’t experiencing a flight sim from the ship, but like the “space RTS” genre, the third dimension really alters the dynamics. Maybe they’re somewhat-analogous to a naval fleet combat sim.
The only example of this genre that I’ve played would be Nebulous: Fleet Command, but I understand that there are a few more out there.
One thing that I think that they did right in Freelancer was to cheap out on the not-in-ship content.
X4 put a lot of work into building up an out-of-the-ship environment that lets you walk around space stations, and I just don’t feel that it added a lot of the environment. There are a lot of things that I’d rather have had done relative to X3.
I like Starfield, but as you point out, unless “space game” means “space-themed”, it’s really not the same genre as some of the other games in here. It has space combat, but it’s little more than a minigame. It’s not trying to be a space combat-oriented game. It does have some zero-gravity first-person-shooting combat sequences, which is kinda nifty, but
Of course, the same apply to Stellaris – it’s a 4x game that’s space-themed.
I haven’t played Mass Effect, but my understanding is that something similar would apply.
For me, the genre has more to do with games being comparable than the theme.
So, if I were gonna compare top games, I think I’d maybe do space 4x games, space combat games (and maybe subdivide those into Newtonian and non-Newtonian physics), and first-person games set in the far future, maybe a few other divisions (e.g. I’d certainly call Kerbal Space Project a good “space-themed game”, though it’s not a combat game). I’ve enjoyed all those sorts of games, but I’d be hard put to compare a game in one genre to the other…it’s like asking “what’s better, a steak or a banana split?”.
Non-Newtonian space combat flight games
This refers to games where you’re flying something that works kind of like an aerodynamic fighter in an atmosphere, but in space. If you turn, your spacecraft moves like flying in a fluid, and your whole spacecraft’s velocity changes.
This was a really big genre in the late-90s and early-2000s, but it saw a major dropoff over time. It was also big in TV series an movies – stuff like Star Trek and Star Wars.
It’s not really a “hard space sim”, but it has a lot of conventions aimed at making it pretty and exciting. Some conventions in the genre:
Space looks a lot like the kind of false-color photos that NASA puts out (note that other genres are not immune to this either).
Often has “Star Wars lasers”, which are visible, slow, and make sounds going by.
Sound transmits through space, so you get explosions and such being audible.
Fighters play a major role, and combat typically takes place at extremely close ranges (relative to our best guesses at what real-life space combat would look like), in World-War-2-style dogfights. The job the human has is usually in significant part the same as a WW2 pilot would have in a dogfight, lining up the weapons, maybe managing “ship energy” or some other such system. There are likely missiles, but these are used at close range, and don’t have high-off-boresight targeting. There’s typically some kind of CIWS or flare-countering-infrared-homing-missile analog.
Forward-mounted weapons are common, though usually not exclusive.
There’s usually some form of “warp drive” to deal with the kind of distances in space in a meaningful amount of time.
The pilot is usually in an environment analogous to a 20th-century air-breathing jet fighter: there are glass windows looking out on space, and visual identification of targets plays a real role.
Carriers often show up.
There are often torpedoes or analogs – hard-hitting weapons that move more-slowly.
It’s often the case that there’s some form of energy shield which can readily-regenerate and blocks a certain amount of weapons fire.
Tractor beams often show up.
Usually issues like utilizing gravity wells or something don’t play a major role in the game.
It’s common to have some form of engine sound. Engines often look a lot like rocket engines – like, there’s visible combustion products coming out the back and a roaring sound; sometimes you’ll have ion thruster-looking things.
The “space trading” genre is probably a subgenre of this; I don’t know of any “space trading” games that don’t also have space combat as an element.
I think that the genre is in significant part a mix of American cultural elements from the WW2-to-maybe-post-Vietnam era. A lot of the stuff is analogous to carrier combat plus having futuristic-themed forms of weapons common in air-to-air combat in the 20th century.
Those are all conventions developed over time by Hollywood and comic books and video games to make games work and appealing. Some of them work pretty-differently from reality (or what our best guesses are as to likely future space combat). But they’re pretty fun (at least, in my opinion).
I miss this genre, myself – there are a relatively-few games that have come out recently, and personally, I think that it’s people missing games in the genre that drove Star Citizen’s funding. I think that one reason that it was such a big deal in the late-90s was the confluence of cultural elements and the fact that space can be relatively-cheap to render, compared to atmospheric combat flight sims; you don’t need a lot of texture memory to make things look good, and hardware was often kinda limited then.
Newtonian space combat flight sim
This is a bit more of a catch-all, but it generally eschews some or all of the above (particularly the “flying through space is like flying through fluid”) and focuses more on the “hard sim” side.
This is a strategy genre; space isn’t really critical other than in that there are many isolated, habitable worlds to conquer.
Master of Orion and similar fall into this genre.
Space RTS
Not a lot of entrants here, but I think that Homeworld permitting for the use of a third dimension does meaningfully change the RTS genre.
Space sim
I’m not aware of a lot of games in this genre, but I can’t really fit Kerbal Space Project into another category, and it’s undeniably a space game.
Space-themed games
I’m kind of using this as a catch-all, but there are games in many genres that are set in the future and have space as a theme, but play pretty much analogously to games set in a present-day theme. Maybe there’s a bit of stuff that they pull in that wouldn’t happen in a present-day setting (e.g. Starfield’s zero-g FPS combat), but you could basically reskin most of the game and have it play the same way in a present- or past-setting.
I mean, there’s probably still some niche, but the niche can get pretty small.
Movie theaters kinda did this before the arcades did. Used to be that it wasn’t normal to be able to watch movies at home, but once that happened, the space for movie theaters got a lot smaller.
One reason for the decline in ticket sales in the 2000s is that “home-entertainment options [are] improving all the time— whether streamed movies and television, video games, or mobile apps—and studios releasing fewer movies”, which means that “people are less likely to head to their local multiplex”. This decline is not something that is recent. It has been observed since the 1950s when television became widespread among working-class homes. As the years went on, home media became more popular, and the decline continued. This decline continues until this day. A Pew Media survey from 2006 found that the relationship between movies watched at home versus at the movie theater was in a five to one ratio and 75% of respondents said their preferred way of watching a movie was at home, versus 21% who said they preferred to go to a theater. In 2014, it was reported that the practice of releasing a film in theaters and via on-demand streaming on the same day (for selected films) and the rise in popularity of the Netflix streaming service has led to concerns in the movie theater industry. Another source of competition is television, which has “…stolen a lot of cinema’s best tricks – like good production values and top tier actors – and brought them into people’s living rooms”. Since the 2010s, one of the increasing sources of competition for movie theaters is the increasing ownership by people of home theater systems which can display high-resolution Blu-ray disks of movies on large, widescreen flat-screen TVs, with 5.1 surround sound and a powerful subwoofer for low-pitched sounds.
Several factors contributed to the decline of the drive-in movie industry. Beginning in the late 1960s, drive-in attendance began to decline as the result of improvements and changes to home entertainment, from color television and cable TV to VCRs and video rental in the early 1980s. Additionally, the 1970s energy crisis led to the widespread adoption of daylight saving time (which caused drive-in movies to start an hour later) and lower use of automobiles, making it increasingly difficult for drive-ins to remain profitable.
Mainly following the advent of cable television and video cassette recorder (VCR), then with the arrival of DVD and streaming systems, families were able to enjoy movies in the comfort of their homes. The new entertainment technology increased the options and the movie watching experience.
And, they apparently did a similar-to-D&B’s, more-adult-oriented shift to try to mitigate losses:
While exploitation films had been a drive-in staple since the 1950s, helped by relatively limited oversight compared to downtown theaters, by the 1970s, several venues switched from showing family-friendly fare to R-rated and X-rated films as a way to offset declining patronage and revenue, while other venues that still catered to families, began to show R-rated or pornographic movies in late-night time slots to bring in extra income.[citation needed] This allowed censored materials to be viewed by a wider audience, including those for whom viewing was still illegal in some states, and it was also reliant upon varying local ordinances controlling such material. It also required a relatively remote location away from the heavier populated areas of towns and cities.
They should probably be more wary of the likelier—and grimmer—alternative: becoming something closer to most of the other casinos in America, where no parent would ever dream of throwing their kid’s birthday party.
I haven’t been to a Dave & Busters in ages, but I’d guess that their existing business model may not be in great shape. What did they offer? A restaurant with an attached arcade aimed at adults.
Generally, arcades have not done terribly well. There used to be a lot of video arcades all over out there in the 1980s. Video game hardware has gotten a lot cheaper, and a lot of people just have it at home now.
Last I looked (which was not recent), the kid-oriented Chuck-E-Cheese and the adult-oriented Dave & Busters tried to compensate with hardware that had a high hardware cost and couldn’t readily economically be brought home, like light guns, enclosures that enhance immersion (e.g simulated motorcycle seats to ride on on motorcycle games). But for at least some of that, VR setups are probably a partial competitor, and they’re a lot more available.
Many of the setups are aimed at letting multiple people play games together, but wide availability of broadband and VoIP and good headsets has made it easier to play games remotely. That won’t replace all of the experience of playing against someone else in person, but it is a partial substitute.
According to the NRA, on-premises traffic hasn’t returned to its pre-pandemic highs. But drive-through and delivery orders have grown so much that together they now account for a higher share of customer traffic than on-premises dining, for the first time ever. Meanwhile, the only parts of the day with growing foot traffic are the morning and late night, when customers are likely to be on the go.
Like, they may not be able to keep doing what they had been doing.
I’d say that in my experience, retro games or games with a retro design philosophy tend to be more enjoyable and replayable.
I don’t like chiptune music, where music is designed to sound like it’s being played on an old console’s frequency synthesizer.
I think that there are some good arguments for low-resolution pixel art in terms of reducing asset cost while still having a playable game – the brain is good at filling details in. But I don’t think that that applies to music, that there are good cost trade-offs.
And while I don’t have a problem with low-resolution pixel art graphics, I do have to say that for some of the successful games that I’ve played with it, I’d really like to be able to buy an HD graphics pack. I’m kind of surprised by how infrequently it is that I’ve seen game devs do that. Cave Story did it. I’d like to see some games like Caves of Qud have HD DLC.