Yeah pacman and pong were seminal but so was elite on the BBC, and Populous which I think was on the spectrum. Also unreal tournament, silent hill, vice city, homeworld, doom 2016, beam ng, I enjoyed em all but I can’t decide. Ppl here have done much more gaming than me, I’m wondering what you all think is the best game...
The answer to that question depends on your tastes, your current situation (amount of free time, mood, etc…) and many more. There’s no such thing as the “best” when it comes to a subjective piece of media.
I can’t even decide on my favourite game, because what I like and what I want to play depends on the aforementioned factors. I may be interested in a strong narrative today, on puzzles tomorrow, and on a crazy platformer game next. Different games resonate with me differently depending on when I play them.
Games that really stayed with me are (in no particular order) Xenogears, Metal Gear Solid, CrossCode, Digimon World, Oddworld Abe’s Odyssey, Ace Combat 4-6, The Talos Principle, Ori and the Blind Forest, Threads of Fate, and I also spent a crazy amount of hours on Stronghold, Advance Wars: Days of Ruin and Medieval II Total War. There’s, like, at least half a dozen different genres in that list and all those games are very different from one another, but all had different qualities that resonated with me for one reason or the other.
This feels like the Morbius re-release. Big Rigs is (in)famous for being one of the worst/most broken games ever made, who in their right mind would pay for it?
I don’t think I agree. I feel like the game is so short and incomplete that you can see everything it has to offer by playing it for 10 minutes - or watching a YT gameplay.
The game has one map, no collisions, no AI. I think I remember it having different playable “rigs” but they are mechanically the same, so there’s no point.
At least with a game like Oblivion you could play it for 20 years and stillfindnewones. Big Rigs doesn’t have near the same “energy”.
Fun fact, Ace Combat 5 has a similar “going at ludicrous speed” bug (We have to go faster, We have to go even faster), but it also has an entire (actually good) playable game attached to it.
How many years of development has this game had? I wonder if it’s another case of Microsoft Mismanagement™ or if it’s actually so huge and detailed that it’s actually worth all of this time spent in the works.
To be fair, I don’t think any of the MS releases ever suffered from bugs at launch. At least from my experience, they always worked pretty consistently on release, aside from maybe a few exceptions - I remember ReCore having excruciatingly long respawn times, Redfall suffering from stuttering and inconsistent framerate, and Ori 2 not being as fluid as the predecessor on console when it released, but all these were still perfectly playable at launch.
I feel like their problem is always the quality and quantity of the content. I wonder if the middling reception of Avowed convinced them that the game requires a bit more work to compete in the crowded and very competitive landscape of open world RPGs.
Quite the big step for gaming rights in the EU. In the last page, the document also mentions “whales” as “vulnerable people”, adding that a game targeting them specifically may run afoul of EU legislation when precaution are not taken to protect them from their impulses.
This may have a gigantic ripple effect in the industry – or it may not, if the industry decides that targeting whales in the US and China is more profitable than bowing to the EU.
As you’re most probably used to by now, this is just my initial warning that what follows is my ranting and rambling about both Steam Deck-specific(ish) news, and general gaming news I’ve spotted and seems interesting to me....
The soundtrack is fine. It works very well in its context and I still hum some of its tones every now and then, but that’s mostly it imo. The end credits song is one of the best end themes I’ve ever heard in a videogame, though.
2025 is the year of the X360. First the decomp tools, now this. Maybe we can even expect a serious attempt at emulating the system on PC? Xenia is still not good, unfortunately.
I’ll be honest, it doesn’t just “look like Advance Wars”. It looks like a rip-off. I love AW but I wish they went with a more original art style, like Wargroove did.
As you’re most probably used to by now, this is just my initial warning that what follows is my ranting and rambling about both Steam Deck-specific(ish) news, and general gaming news I’ve spotted and seems interesting to me....
About the GoG store’s second class treatment: it’s always worth it to email the publisher and ask them if they plan on updating their game on GoG!
I did exactly that a few months ago when I wanted to buy I was a teenage exocolonist - emailed Finji and let them know that their game was not up to date on the platform I wanted to buy the game on. They replied rather quickly and the game was updated a few days later. It was very nice because the game was on sale and, thanks to their quick reply, I was able to not miss the sale.
AI techbros will have you believe that you can solve world hunger, cure cancer, and colonize Mars with a few prompts on ChatGPT.
Yet their AI is still incapable of answering two prompts consecutively without making shit up, or drawing a human without turning it into an eldritch abomination.
Game preservation could be fixed with open source emulators and fixing copyright laws so that I’m allowed to download a game nobody has profited from in two decades, but that’s not appealing to big corporations.
Mildly surprised to see another installment in this series after all these years, but I’m pretty excited.
For those who don’t know, Styx is a AA stealth game where you play as a goblin assassin (the titular Styx). It spawned as a spin off of another fantasy game (Of orcs and men) where you played as both the goblin and an orc warrior, which was unfortunately a bit too janky for my tastes.
The focus on stealth of the following installments really benefitted the series, imo. While they still carry a bit of janky-ness (as many AA titles do), they are nevertheless a lot of fun! The story in the first one was very good as well. I still haven’t finished the second one, so I can’t comment much on it.
The first two games are also currently discounted on Steam and GoG ($2 for the first one and $3 for the second), and I think they are very much worth that much.
I started at 7 and looked forwards to every iteration of the series since then, 8 was more of the same with a weird story, 9 was cute and a good throwback, then I went back to 6 which was a masterpiece, 10 was emotional and beautiful, 12 wasn’t great but had cool worldbuilding, being a FFT fan....
If you kind of liked the XIII games, I highly recommend Lighting Returns. Time limits make me deeply anxious but that game’s timer is VERY generous, especially because you can stop time pretty much forever. I 100% my first run in, like, four days out of thirteen.
The story is wacky as hell (I honestly didn’t care much after XIII-2), but gameplay’s solid and exploration is fun.
As for the last question, I think that they should go back to their roots. They pivoted away from the JRPG genre with each title, but recent successes from similar games (such as Persona 5 in the AAA department, and Sea of Stars in the indie category) proved that people still crave a more traditional turn-based system.
I really enjoyed Tunic for the same reason as you! It has nice and cozy vibes but manages to challenge the player without ever feeling too cheap or overwhelmingly difficult, in both combat and puzzles. I really was reminded of old-school gaming, in a good way.
The only thing I disliked is how cryptic the last few puzzles were, to the point that I doubt the vast percentage of the player base would be able to figure them out without resorting to a guide. I certainly wasn’t. I love puzzle games and I love games like Talos Principle and Crosscode. I guess I just didn’t like how meta-gamey some of the solutions (and the reward for the puzzles) were.
PS. Another great post and the formatting is excellent. Congrats!
As a preface, I used to do this a lot on Reddit. My hobby (sounds odd) was to make a little old-school-blog-style post, detailing what I found interesting in gaming in the last week or so. I got a name for it, for a time, but having long-since abandoned reddit I thought I might try the same thing here, if you’ll indulge me!...
As a fellow enthusiast with an obsessive-compulsive drive to write about my hobbies (not necessarily video-game related, but quite similar) i know that these things take a while to write, especially when you take the time to format everything correctly, link the sources, etc.
So I wanted to echo the others here and say that I really appreciate your work here. It was a fun way to start my day, and I’m looking forward to your next post :)
Sony has stopped releasing games on GoG ever since they required login to the PSN. For example, you can buy God of War and Horizon Zero Dawn on GoG, but you can’t buy Ragnarok or Forbidden West.
They lifted the requirement a few weeks ago, but the games still have not been released on GoG, and at this point it’s doubtful they will.
It did. It’s also on Switch and on Windows/Xbox as a Play Anywhere title on MS Store (buy once, get to play on both platforms). But from what I remember, FFIX was the one that needed the remaster treatment the least, as it plays fairly well on any emulator. FFVII and FFVIII, on the other hand, get more bearable with the built-in speed up button (which, yes, you can do on an emulator as well, but then the music gets sped up too and it gets annoying).
Are they? Genuine question. Some of the FF titles I’ve played in the past were technical marvels on their respective consoles. FFXIII still gives modern games a run for their money on the graphical department, despite being 15 years old at this point. Not sure how they fare up nowadays though.
The era of traditional video games is just over for Gen Z. They aren’t just playing games anymore, instead, they are rewriting the rules. Forget about what we used to play with static storylines and pre-designed worlds.
I was hoping for this after the Resident Evil bundle from a few months ago.
The way Dino Crisis 2 managed to turn the tankiness of the RE/Dino Crisis gameplay into an action-packed shooter is stunning to me and I love that game dearly. Replayed it last year and it holds up surprisingly well!
Now let’s hope for a Pararisite Eve GOG release! :D
Racism and bigotry is so intrinsic to the world building of HP, that I find it kind of impossible to completely avoid it even by pirating the game to give no money to JKR and her allies.
I honestly just think that most people have bad text analysis skills/lack of proper reading comprehension. The book is told by the perspective of a specific character, and that character says “the sky is green”, so people believe it because they can’t detach the POV from what they are reading. It happens every time, such as people believing that the Space Marines are the good guys, or that the fascist dictatorship in Starship Trooper isn’t that bad after all.
The movies whitewashed a lot of bad stuff, and I still felt creeped out by them when I was a kid. I’m happy that some people is finally coming around to understanding it now that JKR is more vocal of her outlandish political views.
Unfortunately, it looks like a remake of Sigma 2 with the gore added back in :(
Kind of pointless when we already had Sigma 2 in the remastered trilogy that’s already available everywhere, while the OG Ninja Gaiden 2 is stuck on Xbox consoles. Still nice to see Ninja Gaiden news though.
It’s almost certainly the HD remake of old Stronghold Crusader. They recently announced that the HD remake of the original game sold very well, so they probably want to keep moving in that direction - especially since the OG Stronghold and Crusader games are still the only good games that they produced in over 20 years.
I wish some big-name YT/Twitch personality helped raise awareness for the petition. It’s ending in a few months and if nothing changes, I don’t see it reaching the required signatures in time.
I’ve been playing some retro games recently (PS1 and prior) and I’ve been discovering a lot of games that I never thought I would enjoy. Particularly 90s arcade shmups and arcade style sports games....
I replay it every other year. It was one of my first games ever, started playing it when I was 5 or so and kept grinding on the same save file for more than 10 years.
For those interested, the Maeson patch fixes all the bugs that afflicted the game on release and adds a lot of QoL improvements, including persistent music across screens (in the original game, the music resets every time you change screen), diversified evolution lines, and rebalanced progression.
I replayed it last summer with the Maeson patch and it was very enjoyable while still keeping the “core” experience intact.
It may be surprising, but most of the difficulty of the game comes from it being very cryptic. Once you understand the underlying mechanics, the game is not hard. You are thrown into a completely foreign world and are asked to just figure it out; and most people go in expecting Pokémon mechanics, which doesn’t help at all.
What it’s worth remembering when playing it, is that the game encourages you to fail and try again. Your Digimon dies of old age and reverts to an egg every few in-game days anyways, and while it’s technically possible to complete the game with your starter Digimon, new players will probably repeat the cycle a few times at minimum.
It can be off putting at first, but it does provide the advantage that it doesn’t matter how many mistakes you make, you can just retry next time, and you actually have it easier each time, because you keep all your items and progression, some of the Digimon’s stats, and of course the knowledge you’ve gathered up to that point.
The Maeson patch doesn’t fundamentally change any of that, but it does remove some of the bloat. Just a few of my favourite changes:
Battling against wild Digimon is a waste of time in the original game, but with the patch is a perfectly viable way to farm money and learn new techs.
Exploring in the original has you filling your bag with mushrooms, but the patch allows you to find actual useful items that will help you raise your current or next Digimon.
Made a few mistakes on the way, and now you’re stuck with a Numemon, Sukamon, or another Digimon you don’t like? Just buy a Reset Radish to revert to an egg and try again (younger me would’ve loved that item).
Removed “trap” options, such as providing a fix to the “bonus try” in the gym and making evolution items useful, thus encouraging the player to try out things instead of punishing them for doing so.
it was easily a net positive as training a champion had much larger gains than a baby.
As long as you don’t do it for the first few generations! All training stations get silently upgraded if you train a Baby I or Baby II digimon there a few times each.
So now it’s possible to actually hit all marks? Because I couldn’t get it with fucking save states.
Yeah. In the original game, the slots are rigged so that you have a set chance to either hit three symbols in a row (40%) or three jackpots (10%), and if the guaranteed chance doesn’t trigger, you automatically fail.
With the Maeson patch, you still have the rigged chances to win, but you can also attempt to win the minigame manually if the rigged chance doesn’t trigger. Imo it’s a bit too good (I liked it better the way the Randomizer handled it, by removing the rigged chances altogether and only allowing the player to win the minigame manually), but it’s still an improvement on the original.
I honestly have no idea how I’d approach writing the script for a movie about Shadow of the Colossus. It’s one of the few games where the sense of discovery, wondering alone in a desolate landscape is such an integral part of the experience, that removing it and turning it into a movie would ruin the experience imho.
I’m not hating on the movie before it even releases, mind you. I’m just saying that I certainly wouldn’t know how to do it, and that it seems, to me, an odd pick. Would 100% watch it if it’s good.
Happy new year guys!😀 Just now, it hit midnight here, and it’s officially 2025. I was playing Pennon and Battle, and I realized it’s the last game I played in 2024!! That gave it a different kind of meaning. Now I’m curious, what was the last game you played in 2024?
It’s been almost twenty years and I still can’t find a game that gives me the same chills. I was hoping that they’d release a Medieval Remastered the same way they did for Rome Remastered, but it didn’t happen.
I hear that the 1212 mod for Attila Total War provides a more “up to date” experience for today’s standards (graphics, historical accuracy, AI, diplomacy). But I can’t fathom playing Medieval without Duke of Death.
It wouldn’t be his place to provide a solution if he was arguing that the practice is a problem and prehaps pushing for further study. It is his place because throughout the video, he tries to argue that solving the problem is not only possible, but easy - and yet, despite supposedly being easy, his best solution is to basically propose that the industry self-regulate. That is the main issue I have with this video.
He is not proposing that the entire industry must self-regulate and that it’s the only solution to the problem. He is saying that this specific instance, the CS skin market, could be solved by Valve taking a firm stance, which not only they are not doing, but are actually working against, such as them side-stepping the regulations imposed on them by the French government.
I’m all in for stricter regulations on gambling by government agencies, but that doesn’t mean that the people side-stepping those regulations aren’t to blame too. While they are not doing anything technically illegal, they are purposefully operating in a grey area to profit off vulnerable people.
And how would they do this without screwing over normal users and victums of the casinos in the process? They can’t get money from these casinos, nor collect casino records to redistribute scammed money. All they can do is disable trading or their marketplace, effectively seizing the poker chips (or metals balls, following Coffee’s pachinko comparison) but doing nothing about the money casinos have taken from victims nor preventing the casinos from either walking away or re-investing in a new casino. To prevent new ones from popping up, you could disable all trading and marketing, but now you’re punishing 132 million users for the acts of a couple thousand.
They can’t do anything about the money the casinos have already made, but can stop them by making further money. That happens pretty much all the time in every market.
They could, but A) this is just one game on their platform, and B) this would leave them directly competiting against those who don’t regulate themselves and can make and reinvest significantly more. This is exactly the situation that Coffee argued was systematic and needed to be adressed further up the chain previously.
A) The video is explicitly about Counter Strike and the gambling market surrounding that specific game; not the whole industry. I agree a more systemic approach (ie. on a government level) should be advisable, but until that day comes, Valve could put an end to this specific problem, which they are currently choosing to ignore because they are profiting from it instead;
B) Valve makes literally billions and can invest to their heart’s content. They are not a small indie dev.
Again, exactly like their competition. The recent talk of Balatro’s PEGI rating being a prime example, with the industry self-regulation body declaring that virtual slot machines and loot boxes aren’t gambling but featuring poker hands was.
Cool, their competition does it too. Two wrongs don’t make a right.
This is the problem I have with this video. Valve is being held to a different standard, and told to self-regulate while others in this very series are having blame redirected away from them because its unreasonable to expect them to self-regulate.
Valve literally created the market. If you take the bigger share of the profit, you also take the biggest share of the blame. Casinos are obviously bad, but they are ultimately leeching off the system that Valve put in place.
I’m just saying what they could do if they were willing to. Your argument was that:
A) Valve should not stop casinos from profiting off vulnerable people, because they have already made money off those people and it would somehow be unfair to stop now, which to me sounds ridiculous.
You are using this as an argumentation that the government should ban them instead of Valve, but the end tesult would be the same. The casinos would walk away with the money, and the victims would be left to cry over it.
B) Poor Valve could not compete with their competition if they didn’t have the money they are gaining from their gambling-adjacent market, which to me sounds even more ridiculous. When Epic attempted to pry open the market using one of the biggest and most successful games ever as a leverage, they largely failed because the Steam user base was too entrenched. Steam is literally printing money right now and they don’t need the CS skin money to compete with anyone.
Best game ever?
Yeah pacman and pong were seminal but so was elite on the BBC, and Populous which I think was on the spectrum. Also unreal tournament, silent hill, vice city, homeworld, doom 2016, beam ng, I enjoyed em all but I can’t decide. Ppl here have done much more gaming than me, I’m wondering what you all think is the best game...
Big Rigs, the infamous truck racing game, is coming to Steam this year (www.destructoid.com)
Fable delayed to 2026 (www.gamesindustry.biz)
Very likely will be a launch game for MS’s new handheld console....
Key principles on in-game virtual currencies | European Commission (commission.europa.eu)
Quoting someone from another site:...
Digimon Con 2025 (www.youtube.com)
This year’s Digimon Con was packed with great content! Nobody made a post about this, so here it is....
Steam Deck / Gaming News #6
As you’re most probably used to by now, this is just my initial warning that what follows is my ranting and rambling about both Steam Deck-specific(ish) news, and general gaming news I’ve spotted and seems interesting to me....
Chrono Trigger Is Timeless (www.dcgameblog.com)
Any Xbox 360 Can Now Be Hacked with Just a USB Flash Drive (www.youtube.com)
Fast-paced turn-based tactics game Warside for fans of Advance Wars launches April 14 (www.gamingonlinux.com)
Threads of Time - Humble Games Showcase 2025 Trailer (www.youtube.com)
Steam Deck / Gaming News #5 (lemmy.world)
As you’re most probably used to by now, this is just my initial warning that what follows is my ranting and rambling about both Steam Deck-specific(ish) news, and general gaming news I’ve spotted and seems interesting to me....
Forza Horizon 5 Will Require a Microsoft Account to Play on PS5 (xcancel.com)
No, Phil Spencer, Having AI Mock Up An Old Game Is Not The Same As Preserving It (www.techdirt.com)
Upcoming Xbox Console Update Reportedly Resetting System Back to Factory Settings (gamerant.com)
Styx: Blades of Greed | Reveal Trailer (youtu.be)
Are modern Final Fantasy games bad?
I started at 7 and looked forwards to every iteration of the series since then, 8 was more of the same with a weird story, 9 was cute and a good throwback, then I went back to 6 which was a masterpiece, 10 was emotional and beautiful, 12 wasn’t great but had cool worldbuilding, being a FFT fan....
Steam Deck Gaming News #2
To start with:...
Steam Deck Gaming News (lemmy.world)
As a preface, I used to do this a lot on Reddit. My hobby (sounds odd) was to make a little old-school-blog-style post, detailing what I found interesting in gaming in the last week or so. I got a name for it, for a time, but having long-since abandoned reddit I thought I might try the same thing here, if you’ll indulge me!...
BREAKING: Warner Bros. Games is shutting down Monolith Productions, Player First Games, and WB San Diego, sources tell Bloomberg News. (bsky.app)
Warner Bros. is also canceling the Wonder Woman game....
God of War trilogy remaster announcement set for March 2025 (lemmy.world)
Final Fantasy 9 and Final Fantasy Tactics remakes are reportedly still in ‘active development’ (www.videogameschronicle.com)
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles for iOS shuts down over "unfixable bug" (www.theverge.com)
Digimon Story Time Stranger - Announcement Trailer (www.youtube.com)
Sony finally surrenders: PSN accounts will be 'optional' for games on Steam, but they'll give you free stuff if you sign up (www.pcgamer.com)
Dino Crisis 1 & 2 just got enhanced PC re-releases, courtesy of GOG (www.eurogamer.net)
Hogwarts Legacy - PC Modding Update (www.youtube.com)
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 | Release Date Trailer (April 24) (www.youtube.com)
NINJA GAIDEN 2 Black | Official Launch Trailer (www.youtube.com)
Games Done Quick from home is a waste of time
New Stronghold Game Teaser (www.youtube.com)
What are we thinking, new game or HD remake of stronghold crusader?
Stop Killing Games Petition to UK Relaunched (petition.parliament.uk)
The original petition failed due to two issues:...
Favorite retro games?
I’ve been playing some retro games recently (PS1 and prior) and I’ve been discovering a lot of games that I never thought I would enjoy. Particularly 90s arcade shmups and arcade style sports games....
15 Years After It Was Announced, The Shadow Of The Colossus Movie Is Alive And Has A Script (www.thegamer.com)
what was the last game you played in 2024?
Happy new year guys!😀 Just now, it hit midnight here, and it’s officially 2025. I was playing Pennon and Battle, and I realized it’s the last game I played in 2024!! That gave it a different kind of meaning. Now I’m curious, what was the last game you played in 2024?
Coffeezilla does a third part of his CS:GO gambling expose...where he squarely puts the blame on Valve (www.youtube.com)
Valve refused to comment for the video.