91–100 of 166 posts
One of my all time favorite games, because as a ~10 year old I can think of nothing cooler than playing Luke Skywalker in a sci-fi top-gun movie about saving earth from murderous Cat Aliens. :) Privateer 2 was a more ambitious and interesting take on the same theme, I loved that one too.
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I believe it was WCII which had a framerate which was dependent on the speed of the processor. I remember trying to play it some years after it came out, and you literally couldn't understand what was happening on screen because it was too fast.
Both WC 1 and 2 depended on processor speed, but WCII had a slowdown feature (I believe it was Ctrl-+ and Ctrl--) that allowed you slow it down.
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I think it's just the novelty of things. And the free time aspect. I remember playing Dragon Warrior on NES late into the night with friends. Grinding away to get that next item and leveling up to fight bigger monsters. It was really fun, really exciting. A few years ago I got an emulator and fired it up. Played about 5 minutes before I couldn't continue. Just didn't have the desire to grind away. And the emulator ha…
This week I reconnected to the MUD I used to play 20 years ago. I'm amazed it's still running. I've forgotten nearly everything. I've been having a blast these past few days exploring the vast world. There's nothing that Google can tell me about it. There's still people playing (and building) it, so I can ask for help - my old clan is still going even - but there's no instant fix on everything. I don't know how long…
I've lost something. When I was a kid, buying a new game was nearly impossible; If I was lucky, I'd get one for a birthday present or a Christmas gift. Occasionally a cool friend would lend me a copy of something. For a very short time, I lived about a mile away from a video game rental store and I'd sometimes be able to convince an adult I was responsible enough to return the game and spend my own money renting a ga…
Games lasted longer twenty years ago. It was easier to immerse in the game for this reason. Nowadays, blockbuster action games give you twenty hours of gameplay give or take. Even RPG games are shorter these days. Baldur's Gate took me weeks to finish. I can't remember the last time I played a contemporary game that lasted that long.
There are just as many great games, they're just not the ones advertised to you.
I've lost something. When I was a kid, buying a new game was nearly impossible; If I was lucky, I'd get one for a birthday present or a Christmas gift. Occasionally a cool friend would lend me a copy of something. For a very short time, I lived about a mile away from a video game rental store and I'd sometimes be able to convince an adult I was responsible enough to return the game and spend my own money renting a ga…
I feel the same. I used to be able to get uncountable hours of gameplay out of simple demo's of games because I didn't have the money for full games. The examples that come to mind are Cavewars and Fallen Haven. Both strategy games with a time limit. My brother and I would play the demo level over and over again and try to progress further and further within the set time limit. In a way it was like speedrunning but t…
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I think there's a lot going on here. Some of it is just general maturity and experience. Things that were novel when you were a child wear off when you're older. Those achievements that you aimed for as a child (having 'perfect' gameplay) may seem less meaningful when you're an adult, especially in the context of other real world achievements. The loss of "novelty", to me, one of the most challenging things about agi…
Seconding this. I think the game that most set my world alight as a kid was Star Control II. It was a wonderfully realised world of spaceships, alien races, battles and a sprawling story line. It blew my mind. But if I was presented with a game of similar magnitude today I'd have a pretty muted reaction. (I also probably wouldn't have time to play it!). I feel the same way about many things, like (to keep on the spac…
I remember being really bored with choosing the ships by hand and so reverse engineered the Ship Team format and wrote one of my first "for myself" programs in Turbo Pascal to generate random ship combinations.
Few years ago I replaced SCII story mode and found it to be a total delight, especially now that I recognize the fine humor in English.
And now I have two sons about the same age that I was, and they got hooked on Melee as well and would play each other and myself, bringing warm happiness to my heart. One of them drew some ships for me on paper and they're on my corkboard in here, making me smile every time I look to the left.
I wish there was a SC3!
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The problem here is that it is basically impossible for a modern game to achieve the magnitude of those old CRPGs if you just mean that in the sense of how big the universe is and how much story it contains, but with modern AAA standards. The man-hours required to create all that content would be ridiculous. That being said, if you count the totality of the Mass Effect trilogy, including all its DLC, I think you do g…
You don't need to create everything with modern AAA standards. Games like FTL show that you can achieve a lot with much less effort. You just need to be bolder. And i think being bolder is the hard part: games these days are more timid in their aprroach to than they were in early 90s, like always trying to stick to a working formula. Mashups of different genres like SC2 are somehow nonexistent.
Off the top of my head:
- Outer Wilds (an entire solar system is a puzzle stuck in a time loop)
- Hades (a roguelike where dying progresses the story)
- Slay the Spire (a hybrid deckbuilder/roguelike where different runs can produce drastically different gameplay and builds)
- Dead Cells (a hybrid Metroidvania/Roguelike with Diablo-style random weapon/item spawns that force the player to use different strategies with every playthrough)
- Into the Breach (from the guys who made FTL)
- Undertale (a fourth-wall-breaking RPG in which you can talk your way out of any battle, with multiple endings)
- Signs of the Sojourner (a narrative deckbuilding game where your cards represent different types of conversation)
- Her Story (a game all about watching pieces of footage from a deposition about a death... or is it a murder?... and trying to figure out what happened)
- Baba Is You (a puzzle game in which the rules are also objects in the game that can be moved and changed)
- Hypnospace Outlaw (a simulation of an alternate-reality 90's internet)
- The Stanley Parable (a game about following directions, or not following them and irritating the narrator)
- The Beginner's Guide (a narrated tour through the games of another developer, possibly without their approval)
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I dunno... The Mandalorian has achieved everything that the prequels and episodes 7-9 were unable to; it did exactly the things folks said were impossible. While I've been a fan of Discovery for the most part, and it occasionally shows glimpses of promise, it's largely not "Star Trek." The story telling is simply just not rooted same soul that Trek has been built upon. I'm okay with change, but not so much with creat…
> I dunno... The Mandalorian has achieved everything that the prequels and episodes 7-9 were unable to; it did exactly the things folks said were impossible. That's a good way to put it. Entirely agree.
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Seconding this. I think the game that most set my world alight as a kid was Star Control II. It was a wonderfully realised world of spaceships, alien races, battles and a sprawling story line. It blew my mind. But if I was presented with a game of similar magnitude today I'd have a pretty muted reaction. (I also probably wouldn't have time to play it!). I feel the same way about many things, like (to keep on the spac…
Star Control II was THE defining game of my childhood. After completing the quest - with difficulty, since my command of English then was not what it is now - my brother and I spent countless hours in Melee mode. I remember being really bored with choosing the ships by hand and so reverse engineered the Ship Team format and wrote one of my first "for myself" programs in Turbo Pascal to generate random ship combinatio…
:)
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Seconding this. I think the game that most set my world alight as a kid was Star Control II. It was a wonderfully realised world of spaceships, alien races, battles and a sprawling story line. It blew my mind. But if I was presented with a game of similar magnitude today I'd have a pretty muted reaction. (I also probably wouldn't have time to play it!). I feel the same way about many things, like (to keep on the spac…
Star Control II was THE defining game of my childhood. After completing the quest - with difficulty, since my command of English then was not what it is now - my brother and I spent countless hours in Melee mode. I remember being really bored with choosing the ships by hand and so reverse engineered the Ship Team format and wrote one of my first "for myself" programs in Turbo Pascal to generate random ship combinatio…
The driving factor is that some ships were virtually impossible to defeat in a skilled player's hand so we had to resort to random selection to be even remotely fair to everyone.