A Link to the Past. Basically gave the Legend of Zelda its identity, so many staple mechanics, so much lore, comes from this game. First appearance of the Master Sword, the idea of Ganondorf as a king of thieves/sorcerer before becoming a pig monster, Kakariko village. The creation myth with the three golden goddesses came from here. In fact, there’s a passage in the manual that basically reads like the design document for the next 30 years in the series, look it up. Gameplay is polished to a mirror shine, and it’s amazing how it has lasted with the randomizer community.
Ocarina of Time. A sequel which referred to previous entries and expanded on the lore without shitting on it. Imagine that! It’s amazing how right they got it as basically the first attempt of a game like this in 3D, even if controller technology had some evolving to do.
Breath of the Wild. While it does get a bit samey since there’s only so many enemies to encounter, and exploring the world will result in finding shrines or koroks, the openness with which it approaches puzzles aka “just get to the goal, we don’t care how.” I find very refreshing compared to the previous “you’re in a room with a lock and a key. Bet you can’t find the only existing solution to this puzzle” dynamic the games increasingly had.
My bottom three:
Skyward Sword. The artwork is charming, the soundtrack has a few gems in it but is mostly short repetitive and annoying loops, a lot of the gameplay elements are just blatantly recycled from Twilight Princess. The mysterious floating girl who flies back a distance when Link approaches to lead him somewhere would have been more effective if the Zora Queen’s shade hadn’t done it a few years earlier, and I fully expected Fi to explain the collect the light fruit games by saying “Yes Master, ‘this shit again’.” Combine that with the frankly terrible motion controls crammed in as much as possible and the “Master, I have detected a 97.3333% chance that the man you just talked to said that he lives here in town” nature of it all…fuck this game.
Adventure of Link. Nintendo Hard via outright unfairness, not much story, not much lore, and rather meh graphics.
Tears of the Kingdom. Never before has a game been this much mile wide and inch deep. The story barely exists, there is more content in the Hudson & Rhondson’s daughter storyline than in the main story quest. There are two different crafting mechanics added to the game, plus the one from Breath of the Wild, but none are really explored because there’s no room, there’s no time. In addition to the original map, there’s the entire sky and the entire underground, both full of basically nothing. They could have gotten two games out of the concepts found in this one and explored the individual mechanics a lot more, but no. This game is a mile wide and an inch deep.
I was starting to get nostalgic for an old game called Riddle of the Sphinx, found out there’s a remaster of it on Steam…that is apparently put out by one of those shady fucking churches, so nope.
I’ve been playing the hell out of Satisfactory lately, I’ve had the game beat for awhile but I’m buying all the trophies. I want to FULL CLEAR the game in early access before the 1.0 release and I’m building up coupons for the Golden Nut.
When I think back on my time with AntiChamber, I don’t really think about the ending. I really think of the beginning up through getting the green gun. It starts leaning farther into the direction of Talos Principle or Portal at that point.
To me the game was about the experience of coming to terms with this strange new world you’ve found yourself in, and the THIS IS AN ALLEGORY wall tiles. It’s impressive how long the developer managed to keep that schtick up.
So did I, which is why I listed it among good games that have no replay value. I enjoyed the thing that it is, I appreciated the visual style, it’s well performed…it’s one of the better walking simulators. The ending is controversial, which I take to mean it’s a work of art.
Please Don’t Touch Anything. What genre does it even belong in? It would have been a flash game if made 10 years earlier. You’re left at a console with a single large red button, and told to wait for a minute and don’t touch anything. Depending on how you interact with this console, there are many different things it can do/behaviors it can have, and your goal is to find all the different endings. It was entertaining, I don’t need to own it anymore.
Shenzhen I/O and TIS-100. Both Zachtronics assembly-em-up games, which…I don’t think there’s absolutely zero replayability, because you might redo the level you just did or go back to an earlier one with a solution you just learned from a later level, but I don’t know finishing these games feels less like beating Bowser at the end of Super Mario and more like graduating from high school. I’m done with that phase of my life and I can now move on.
Antichamber. The video game equivalent of a Piet Mondrian painting. It’s an abstract and brain knitting non-euclidean first person puzzle game that uses its surreal mechanics as a metaphor for the journey of life itself, and halfway though you get a gun that shoots cubes and it turns back into a video game. A lot of the actual impact of the game comes from how it comments on the epiphany you just had, and that effect is spoiled somewhat by “Oh I remember this part.” I will note there is a speedrunning community for this game.
Firewatch. There are some games where you’ll watch a Let’s Play, decide you want to have a go, so you’ll buy and play the game. Not Firewatch; a Let’s Play gives you 96.4% of the experience. It’s a walking simulator that probably should have just been a short film. I’m not even convinced it is a “video game” because…how do you play it well or poorly? Like do we need a new term like “narrative software” or something?
Microsoft is like Alphabet - why would you adopt anything they make? It’s going to be abandoned with no support long before the devices are worn out, to include desktop and laptop PCs.
It’s funny…I bounced right off Minecraft but I like games like Satisfactory and Factorio.
A lot of people play Minecraft as an outlet for creativity; it has an end game with a final boss and a victory condition, but most people don’t even try to “win” Minecraft, they want to build cool things. Well between my electronics bench, my wood shop, my 3D printer and my various creative, design and programming software suites, I already build a lot of cool stuff, so that itch is already scratched.
Those factory building games come with a clearly stated goal: “You’ve crash landed on an alien planet with a hammer and a pistol with 100 shots. Build a rocket.” I’ll spend months of my life building a gigantic complex of individual factories connected by an intricate rail network to accomplish that goal. I’ve heard this kind of thing described as “problem solving gameplay” rather than “puzzle solving gameplay.”
As you say I don’t hate Minecraft, I’m often awed and inspired at the things people have built in it, but it’s not for me.
“The inverse square root function in the C math library isn’t fast enough. That’s okay, I’ll write my own algorithm that abuses floating point numbers in a way that gives me a close approximation a bit faster.”
Back in 2013 or so, Microsoft launched the Windows Store alongside Windows 8, and was making some noises that sounded a lot like shutting out independent software stores like Steam and requiring everything on Windows to be sold through the Windows Store.
Valve reacted to this by saying “Welp I guess it’s time to start investing in gaming on Linux” and launched Steam Machines, little PCs designed to be connected to a television to bring the Steam experience to the living room couch. They ran a modified version of Debian Linux along with their own tweaked version of Wine that could run some Windows games alongside several (including Valve’s own library) that shipped Linux native versions.
The project itself was a bit of a flop; they relied on other companies to make Steam Machines, like Alienware and such. But a lot of things came from it.
Valve demonstrated they had the wherewithal to take the gaming market with them if Microsoft got too greedy.
Big Picture Mode, Steam Link, and the beginnings of Proton among others came from the Steam Machine project.
The Steam Controller came from this project, which I’ve heard GabeN talk about as a major learning experience they drew on during the design of the Steam Deck, aka why the Steam Deck has perfectly conventional controls.
They spent most of the 20teens adding steady improvements for Linux gaming to the point that we switched from having a list of games that ran on Linux, to a list of games that don’t run on Linux because that became easier to manage. Then they launched the Steam Deck, an unqualified successful Linux gaming platform. Then I came here, and then it was now, and then I don’t know what happened.
Unity, as a business, as a stock investment, as a C-suite and board of directors, is rotting in its casket for all I care. I have committed to never buy game built in Unity whose development started after September this year.
This whole debacle wasn’t an engineering problem; it’s not the software development staff’s fault.
I spent a ton of time in Kingdom of Loathing. I kept an old laptop that still had a flash enabled browser for a few months to play Bloons Tower Defense 4.
There was this game, I forget the name of it, but you had to build and drive little vehicles to overcome challenges. It was technically amazing for a Flash game, and I’d love to have it back.