I’ve been playing Battlefield-like Wild Assault, and each time I die, the difficulty of reviving me helps me to realize how out of position I was. Other times when I was popping from cover and got hit by a rusher, a teammate quickly retaliates and then revives me.
The game also has some crazy moments with the healer’s ultimate, which revives people they’re standing on while the healer can keep shooting.
I had this exact issue with the first two Dark Souls games. I explored, but did not find the “intended path forward” that would give me a gradual difficulty curve.
This is why I think a better game formula is: Give players some kind of overt objective marker or in-world guidance for their primary destination, but also point out they’re going to start having a very hard time if they never explore for themselves.
The excitement of F1 racing is unattainable to most people, which is why it makes sense as a game, but bikes are pretty tame. However, one thing that makes bikes interesting is their smallness, ease and simplicity. The Yakuza series has started picking up on giving protagonists such small vehicles, including a skateboard and a segway, and they make much more sense within those worlds than full vehicles.
I feel like this could be envisioned as part of a larger open-world game, not as the vehicle itself as a means to fun. Something like: You have an open world game, and it has cars, and they are faster than your bike. But they are far more nimble, can go in tighter areas, and can be stored in larger vehicles used to get around. So, something like picking the Gravity Gun in Half-Life 2, they’re a tool that’s fantastic for making use of the environment for better results, but not a “first-order strategy for movement”. This is even sometimes how they work out in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
The only real lesson here might be that both Western media as a whole, and the Eastern anime industry, have regressed a lot. Rambo in particular is marked by tragedy with the way sequels warped him into a false image of raw masculinity. Many anime authors have even said as much. But the Eastern gaming scene appears to still have some very dedicated auteurs.
It’s even sort of harmed the feminist movement for Western media to be so simple - often showing women as unemotional, infallible badasses to try to “equal the score”, ultimately just causing people to hate them and even misconstrue women as being the issue with those movies.
But I’m also glad to get more examples of poignant Western media; I felt upset that I could only think of Eastern examples, when I know there are some great ones made more locally.
It’s hard to tell which extreme is going to surprise people first with Valiant Hearts.
Like, it’s a WW1 game so of course you’re expecting it to be brutal. Then, it’s cute to have so many stories of soldiers not based around killing people - just adventure, puzzle-solving, making friends across country lines, as well as the heartfelt letters written.
Then it gets to Chemin des Dames, and holy shit, not even the most brutal shooters evoke the unfathomable amounts of death happening in those meat grinders. Neither element would’ve hit so hard without the other giving you that kind of whiplash.
I didn’t quite get that feeling with Breath of the Wild, but I’ve certainly had those moments where the theme of a ruined world absolutely ruined my emotional stakes, so I can understand it.
The opening lines of Nier Automata are nihilistic and signal 2B’s desire to just get death over with. Nothing in the whole game’s story brought this feeling back in the other direction, and as a result of an adventure spanning a gray and brown “Abandoned city and death” the optimistic ending absolutely didn’t hit with me. Hard to identify why my response was so different from everyone else’s.
The pointlessness of a fight amid a ruined world is also what makes me not care about a lot of uber-dark Soulslike games. I don’t see much of what I’m saving in most of those, and learning the lore behind all of Dark Souls’ endings reinforces that feeling.
If you’re able to get a good internet connection, you could run anything on Geforce Now’s list. Not the most optimal gaming experience, but it can be satisfying enough.
To give something more specific I enjoy, try Backpack Hero. It’s a roguelike on the easier side, built around making absurd combos.
That might be underselling how big the series is - not to mention that many of them have been completely re-done in HD so they’re no longer on GBA graphics.
These are generally pretty big games. A lot of “mystery” games are about one mystery, but every AA game has at least 4, the last of each game being a giant epic journey.
I mean, if digital games were always excluded from this form of preservation, and digital game cards are just a step up in terms of store discoverability, I think it did.
They’re obviously incredibly inferior to full game cards. They’re not much better than digital games, but they’re better than “We’re not releasing on Nintendo Switch because no one will see us in the eshop and since the game sells for $10 we can’t afford game cartridges.”
I might’ve tried out Nikki if it’d been okay with some amount of “sexy” outfits - like, I know not to expect any bikini-model type of garb, but there’s still a midpoint that could feel appealing but also classy.
Either way - still a gacha game with a pretty incomprehensible story.
Honestly, I suppose FF7 is another great example, but I was thinking of the Trails in the Sky remake due out in a month or two.
Sorry if that’s a vague spoiler. It wasn’t even something I knew about the game playing through, but the slow-impact delivery of it worked fantastically.
To clarify, the idea would be to have smaller studios each independently making games. So for half a year, one studio may only have the responsibility of a single 3-hour demo.