141–150 of 252 posts
A time before micro payments. Games built by artisans that loved their product and gave it their everything. Great times.
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Age of Empires 2, Sim City 3000, Diablo2 and Red Alert 2. Released in the span of 3 years. What an incredible era. Can’t shake off the feeling that 3D took away as much as it gave gaming. Also can’t believe it’s just my age-based selection bias.
When I talk to people older than me they think some of the NES games were the best ever released. But I look at the graphics and I just can’t get over it.
The same is true for MSDOS games, Genesis, 2600, MSX, PS1/2/3/4, XBox, GB, GC etc etc etc. The majority of games out there are just not good or have aged poorly on the graphic/playability front. I personally would recommend only a very small handful of games on the NES. Also one issue with some of these older systems is they were meant to be played on a 15-20 inch PAL/NTSC screen with interlacing. You splat that across a 65 inch OLED they tend to look bad. Your brain is good at making up the detail.
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High content, big budget, games still exist, e.g. Elden Ring + Zelda (as someone mentioned) are two recent releases. There's also plenty of sim games in the indie market, Factorio, Banished, Frostpunk. Then things that are close to the market like They Are Billions, Kenshi, etc. to name a few I've personally had time to play. Kenshi is a bit rough around the edges, but absolutely brilliant in terms of sandbox play. T…
Let’s not forget all the Paradox games: City Skylines, Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron. Very much content over graphics.
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I think that's because surprisingly, it's still a marketable/profitable game. If only it weren't, then maybe it would eventually be open sourced. Only flaw I find is that due to it's age, it wasn't really designed with maximum concurrency in mind, and doesn't utilize the full capabilities of modern hardware, so the simulation slows to a crawl after a certain size.
The game actually does support decent threading, but it relies on old RDTSC behavior and will crash on modern CPUs if you allow all the threading to run. I nagged EA a lot to Open Source SC4 or allow fans to fix bugs on Windows version, but they are stubborn :( The Mac version is published by Aspyr that has rights to the source and to release updates. For example the Mac version is 64bit now. Windows version is 32bit…
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Age of Empires 2, Sim City 3000, Diablo2 and Red Alert 2. Released in the span of 3 years. What an incredible era. Can’t shake off the feeling that 3D took away as much as it gave gaming. Also can’t believe it’s just my age-based selection bias.
You're definitely onto something and it's not just an age bias. I can think of a few 2D games released in the previous decade that continued this trend: Terraria, Stardew Valley, Factorio, Rimworld, Celeste, Hades.
mic drop
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That was my problem with the game as well. You don’t really have all that much freedom and there isn’t that much emergent behaviour. You just replay the same road builder scenario where the only interesting part is designing intersections. I’d love to see a city builder game with an extremely powerful policy builder feature. Let me design new rules and see how the city responds. For example, let me implement congesti…
Cities skylines has the policy builder feature like you describe. One of the policies you can implement is congestion charges. You can set the policies city-wide, or in certain districts. In the latest builds with the newest DLC, you can even ban cars completely with pedestrian only districts/roads.
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The ability to import a SimCity 2000 map in to SimCopter was amazing for the time, imo. I remember flying around cities I had worked really hard on thinking how the cross over between the two games was really cool.
Absolutely! I remember adding a bunch of rail to my cities just so I could do more train rescues or catching robbers on the trains. It was huge fun at the time…
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Let’s not forget all the Paradox games: City Skylines, Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron. Very much content over graphics.
The others help your point but Cities Skylines is memed because it's graphics over substance as it's basically a city painting game with shallow mechanics that most people use to make little city dioramas which is still fun but not deep gameplay.