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.
Friendly tip: For singleplayer games, you can always disable the game’s built in AA solution and use reshade for AA instead. If you have extra GPU power you can also use reshade to add all sorts of other graphical effects if you’re willing to fiddle around with things to get it looking good.
If you have an NVidia card, sometimes PCGamingWiki has instructions for tweaks you can do in Profile Inspector to adjust how the driver applies AA to a game too.
Yeah, AAA for quite a while now has really only had any impact on graphics, and maybe on how playtested it was. That is one hell of a load bearing maybe. No correlation to quality on any other metrics.
And that people will hopefully riot about paid mods again. The Skyrim framework flew under the radar because of clever timing. There’s no way it goes un-noticed on their newest flagship game.
Common in a good bunch of games. Happens when the game tries to use an animation that’s scaled for a larger 3D “skeleton”. It’s trying to use an animation here that’s sized for an adult Sim, so when the animation says “hands go here, elbows here, shoulders here, etc” it stretches to the adult proportions and makes this unholy mess.
See also: Smash Bros Brawl’s Longchu/Gannon-chu glitch/mod of Pikachu’s 3D model with Gannon’s moves and animations, Zelda Twilight Princess speed runs where you activate cutscenes for human form Link while in Wolf form so you get to watch what looks like a mangled twitching roadkill wolf propped up on top of a horse.