81–89 of 89 posts
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Request for service: Dad Game Reviews. Games that are fun to play and more engaging than the mindless idlers and puzzles that are out there today but support meaningful episodes of 30-40 minutes.
I think Wired used to have a column like that.
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I feel the Internet has quashed my enjoyment of single player games ... it’s like I gotta have a multiplayer competitive at all times , if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears , Meh who cares not fun haha
Interestingly, the Internet has quashed my enjoyment of multiplayer games: so many people are playing them, there's no chance I am going to be able to compete, given that I only play occasionally. When "multiplayer" meant "lan party" or "friends come together and play a skirmish" you actually had a chance, but now? Not so much. I really prefer single player games with a nice story and an action that's not too hectic…
You had maps like wilderness survival and troll tribes, which, if you've played Don't Starve, feels largely derivative. Footmen Frenzy, Dark Deeds, Sheep Tag, Uther Party (Mario Party ripoff), LAOP, Parasite, Mars Survival, Risk knockoffs, etc. It didn't matter if you sucked at these games, because most people sucked at them; the playerbase for each custom game was pretty small. A good time for novelty - I'm hoping reforged brings back some of that magic from that scene. I played LOL after moving on from Blizzard games (Wow was never my thing), but it wasn't the same. Also, very toxic. Not a great game for casual players.
I haven't played a big-budget game in years, but I decided to give RDR2 a try, specifically because reviewers described it as slow and boring. I think it's great, for the exact reason that other people think it's slow and boring. It's specifically designed to quash your tendency to speedrun or minmax: It requires you to simply come along for the ride. On the one hand, this is a bit annoying sometimes. On the other ha…
i played red dead redemption for hundreds of hours, both in single player and in the online multiplayer, which was a blast. i haven't even finished red dead redemption 2, and have found myself very bored with the story and side missions. it's the same formula rockstar has used for years, and the AI is as superficial as ever. it can be a real slog riding around between missions. even though the guns look great, they and the aiming system is not as fun as red dead redemption.
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I feel the Internet has quashed my enjoyment of single player games ... it’s like I gotta have a multiplayer competitive at all times , if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears , Meh who cares not fun haha
I don't feel that way about single player games, but I do find narrative based games less enjoyable than story-less games/story-poor games where the game play mechanisms are at the forefront: like Enter the Gungeon, the new XCOM, Prison Architect, Oxygen Not Included, KSP etc. Games with stories and narratives feel like chores and are restrictive.
"This game allows you to pluck chickens / pay respects / become a porn star, that was never possible in a game before!!!", but it's really just that you can press a button to trigger an animation.
That's fun for a while, but seeing a bunch of games and programming a bit, it kinda becomes transparent and samey, and those little touches of realistic decoration are also reminders that they had time for that $animation, but not for this $mechanic. Some people see redheads and blondes and brunettes, I see committees.
Here's a crazy idea: Replace all models by their hitboxes and all textures single colors, remove all ambient sounds, remove all padding from dialogue and let NPC just name the variables they need to have met, and what variables that will set as a result, and so on. A game or a simulation would of course look and sound terrible, but it would still work, while a interactive movie kind of "experience" will be reduced to next to nothing.
Take chess for example, playing with beautiful weighty pieces is certainly more fun than with, say, pieces of paper with letters on them. But if you're good at chess and longing for a good game of chess, you would rather play against an opponent with a similar elo ranking as you with pieces of paper, than against a child or a random number generator with nice chess pieces.
We can rank sciences by "hardness" all day, but the thought of "hard gaming" seems oddly offensive, why? I also noted that no comments seem to reference the article, which is understandable since it's such a fluff piece. And none of the comments are pointing out any gameplay challenge, clever AI, nothing.
> After a few hours, you can almost feel the ego diminution, the sense of “merging with nature or the universe” that Michael Pollan describes in How to Change Your Mind. (And at $60 for a copy, Red Dead Redemption 2 is cheaper than psychedelic drugs.)
60$, then "a few hours" until that effect kicks in, and you become one with "nature and the universe" on the screen.
Just wow. I would feel insulted by that. That's such a low view of both the universe and the time of a person.
> The soundtrack helps, too. You hear sounds of nature, long ambient notes in the wilderness, or the Irish-influenced strain of an antique banjo from a nearby campfire. “We have 192 interactive mission scores, and we thought about the music constantly from the time we brought in [composer] Woody Jackson in 2015,” says Ivan Pavlovich, Rockstar’s music supervisor. “Sam was always asking early on, ‘What’s the feel [of the game]?’ ”
Oh yeah, telling people how to feel about things, what would a good game be without that, right?
> Rockstar’s goal is to “slip as much art under the hood without players noticing it — but they don’t have to notice it,” says Dan. If you want, you can bypass much of the story with just a tap of the controller. “It can just be mud, blood, and gore.”
Mud, blood and gore with cutscenes, or just mud, blood and gore... what about gameplay? All the immersion on the one hand, then slo-mo and auto-aim on the other, and plenty of chores to keep your stats up. A huge map, a million NPC with a few binary flags each, and hours of voice acting. What did I miss? All I heard on youtube is the same I read in this thread, "you can go fishing or hunting" ("move to location X and press button Y"), how it's so immersive and detailed, etc. etc., but nothing about solid gameplay.
Just today I started playing it, and it's really impressive. It's like being in a Cormac McCarty novel. I imagine the pacing, realism, and atmosphere is not for everyone, but if it is your cup of tea this is (so far) a masterpiece in single player gaming.
why?
Just today I started playing it, and it's really impressive. It's like being in a Cormac McCarty novel. I imagine the pacing, realism, and atmosphere is not for everyone, but if it is your cup of tea this is (so far) a masterpiece in single player gaming.
"a masterpiece in single player gaming." why?
Personally, I've never seen a game with this focus and this level of scope and quality.
I used a video's frames of myself playing RDR2 to train a neural network. I then showed it a photo my son took of some cows at the in-law's place. Here's what happened: https://photos.app.goo.gl/sDTofashQdDSUJMdA The network was trained with https://nanonets.com , if anyone is interested. Interesting stuff, given the knowledge came from synthesized horses. I did not train or segment any other entities other than Arth…
I haven't played a big-budget game in years, but I decided to give RDR2 a try, specifically because reviewers described it as slow and boring. I think it's great, for the exact reason that other people think it's slow and boring. It's specifically designed to quash your tendency to speedrun or minmax: It requires you to simply come along for the ride. On the one hand, this is a bit annoying sometimes. On the other ha…