Or fan game developer. Or data miner. Or gaming youtuber. Or game tournament staff. Or the former actors of their various official “news” video segments. Or former American contractors for them (lots of “fun” stories from the 90’s and 00’s).
And how can we forget? Their 11th hour backstabbing of Sony on the planned CD addon for the SNES, choosing instead to go with Phillips to make the CD-i, is the whole reason Sony even entered the console wars. Out of fucking spite. The Playstation was originally planned to be a SNES addon like the Sega CD.
God that makes me feel old. Yeah, Garry’s Mod is literally named that because it’s his mod. He started making it as a teen, released it for free for a long time, and then leveraged it into a job and company (FacePunch, they also made Rust a lot later).
I think Garry’s Mod 10 was the first paid release, and he and his team have just been updating the paid version since.
The game’s official site used to just be his blog, and I believe he still posts semi-regularly about game development, running a company, and life stuff. Always seemed to be a real stand up guy.
Wow, that’s certainly a take. How are they worse than Sony or fucking Microsoft? Microsoft was under IRS investigation at one point. They dragged thing out resulting in multiple millions of taxpayer money being wasted, ruined the professional careers of the lead names on the investigation, bribed politicians to cut so much funding from the IRS that another investigation of that scale is simply not possible, and bribed other politicians to sway laws in their favor to help make what they were investigated for much harder to pursue charges on.
Do you have any substantive shit that the other big names aren’t guilty of as well? I’d love to hear it!
What got me was the Triforce hunt. Nearly no guidance/signposting, constant trips back to tingle, then back to a warp point, then sail around, rinse repeat. Ugh.
Oof. Yeah, if you’ve only played Phantom “go back to the same temple for the tenth time” Hourglass and Breath Of The Wild with it’s almost non-existent story, I can absolutely understand the disappointment.
Phantom Hourglass was pretty disliked even by fans at the time. The touchscreen control focus and the damn ocean temple re-runs were quite contreversial.
Breath of the Wild was the series’s first attempt at open world, non-linear gameplay and is incredibly different from other games in the series. Very light on story and characters. Unfortunately they’ve confirmed open world is the planned standard going forward.
The real “core” 3D games are Ocarina of Time and Twilight Princess. For 2D, A Link To The Past and Link’s Awakening.
Twilight Princess is probably the most accessible for someone not super familiar with the franchise, and the least burdened by old school design decisions. It’s what I would consider the pinnacle of classic 3D Zelda. Took all the good stuff from the two N64 games (what most people seem to think are the best) and polished the hell out of it.
Which they walked back and hacen’t tried again since. Their latest console is also still backwards compatible with games from the first xbox.
I’m legitimately hopeful. Won’t ever stop the best option from being piracy and open source emulators on PC, but Microsoft’s track record for backwards compat is sparkling.
Sure, it’s not true hardware based backwards compat. It works by using the disc as a key to download and run a full copy of the original game + an emulation layer customized for the specific game, so if you don’t have internet or they pull the plug on their store servers you can’t just use the disk alone. If you lose the disc or it breaks, you have to buy the game again from their online store. Also, I’ve encountered some crashes and minor emulation issues with some titles. Poor, poor Kotor.
It’s sad, but that’s still leagues better than their competitors in the console market.
Sony makes you buy the old games again on each platform. Standard “Virtual Console” type shit. Thankfully, they usually do this by making a general emulator that homebrew folks can later shove non-supported games into.
Nintendo. Nintendo. Are you shitting me? An ongoing subscription to keep access to the same 30 year old games you’ve been reselling since the Wii?
You can use homebrew to shove other games in, but you risk a ban from their online services. Also, if you’re already doing homebrew, the consoles they offer games for this way on the Switch are more than easily handled by Retroarch running as homebrew.
Mario 3D All Stars? Take all the time and money to get a half port half emulation solution working on the Switch for one Gamecube and and one Wii game, sell it as time limited, don’t include the direct sequel to the Wii game that was built on the same fucking game engine in the package… and then never use that tech again? Are you fucking kidding me?
That last one shouldn’t surprise me too bad though. They managed to emulate the N64 on the Gamecube, and only used it for Legend of Zelda. Once in a limited preorder bonus for Wind Waker, and also in a limited Nintendo Power magazine bonus disc for subscribing.
It’s also important to remember that being aware of the psychological effects of something does not make you immune to those effects, or even consistently lessen them in a measurable way.
Metal Gear Solid V (on PC with mods that greatly expand/enhance free roam, and add more side ops)
Tomba 1 and 2 (Tombi in the EU)
Chrono Trigger
Megaman Legends (love the sequel, but haven’t ever completed it, life keeps getting in the way)
Castlevania Syphony of the Night
Sonic Adventure (it’s trash, but fun trash, especially with mods)
Sonic Mania, Sonic 3 and Knuckles
Minecraft
Some that I haven’t come back to in a while, but I’m overdue:
Ape Escape
Crash Bandicoot (1-3)
Spyro (1-3)
Digimon World 3
Any of the GBA or DS Castlevanias
Actraiser
Rayman 2
Megaman Battle Network series(3 and 4 are my favorite entries)
Dissidia Duodecim
Zone of the Enders 2
God Hand
Wipeout Pulse/Pure
Pretty much any Kirby game
Most of these games I find just plain fun. Thanks for asking, I was starting to get burned out and not finding stuff as fun, but writing this out has me hankering to revisit some old favorites again.
The last one I know of is WobbleDogs, but I’m not sure how much of that is in depth virtual pet vs haha funni streamer bait.
Pretty sure there’s a fan made chao garden game that came out last year. Can’t speak to it’s depth or quality though.
A real mad genius move would be to make a linked desktop game and phone app, like how you could download chaos into the VMU from the Dreamcast Adventure titles and into the GBA Tiny Chao Garden from the GameCube remasters. Get the in depth experience on PC and the tamagotchi/digimon pedometer pet stuff on mobile.
Do all sorts of cross promotion with other indie games, like how Team Fortress 2 used to have special cosmetics unlock if you owned certain other games.
As far as “pocket” pets go, there’s a few Digimon “remakes” for Android. Digital Tamers: ReBorn was a good one. I think it’s free on itch.io
Lego Island was one of my first PC games, and I spent absolute ages in it. Still have my CD. As an adult I find it a little too zany and wacky for an in-depth revisit, but as a young imaginative ADHD boy it was an amazing little sandbox to run around in. So many different ways to interact with things, ways to customize your island through different characters changing stuff when you clicked on it, and just enough mysterious things to keep the imagination going.
I’m looking forward to the decomp that MattKC is working on for it.
Outside of that, I played a TON of the old flash and shockwave games on the Lego website. I felt so cool knowing extra lore around the mask of light movie because I had been playing the Bionicle flash game. They also had a lot of neat puzzle games.
The concept of the programmable Spybots, and the K’Nex programmable kit really jump started my interest in programming as a kid too.
For me it’s this plus the level of focus I feel like I need to not get my shit kicked in.
Maybe I’m just bad, but there’s a good number of encounters where a few bad moves can put you in a slow spiral to defeat. Plus there’s just a lot to consider at any given moment, it’s a deep combat system.
When my only time to play is after my kid is down for the night, a lot of the time I’m looking to relax and not think super hard.
People forget, you never owned the games you bought, physical cartridge or not. The instruction booklets state that you bought a license. It’s the bullshit argument console manufacturers use/used to go after emulation developers.
Having a copy of the game that can’t be fucked with by errant updates to the game files or by updates to the device you use to run it is a wonderful thing, but don’t lie to yourselves about the legality of ownership. That’s been a busted clusterfuck for longer than most users on here have been alive.