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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2581 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 9, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Nintendo is overrated in the way Disney is overrated — brand power and nostalgia do a lot to sell and market their games. That said, look at the AAA gaming scene over the last 5 and what developers are left that haven't devolved into slop mills pushing out incomplete, buggy, soulless games? Nintendo, From Soft, maybe CD Projekt depending on how charitable you want to be towards Cyberpunk. Nintendo holding onto their reputation for this long speaks to something beyond nostalgia.

I share a lot of your criticisms of Breath of the Wild though. They spent so much time on the (admittedly amazing) world design and physics engine that dungeons, loot, enemy variety are all undercooked. Something I've noticed about it is that the non-gamers I know absolutely adore the game. They love the freedom and playing around with the cool physics system to see what you can do. More traditional gamers I know get tired of the copy-paste content after trying to play the game like a traditional Zelda and wind up much more negative on the game.

That said, look at the AAA gaming scene over the last 5 and what developers are left that haven't devolved into slop mills pushing out incomplete, buggy, soulless games? Nintendo, From Soft, maybe CD Projekt depending on how charitable you want to be towards Cyberpunk.

This is certainly true and it is why I unironically Only Play Indie Games. I grew up in a time where Newgrounds games were becoming increasingly popular, and as a result have always had a bent towards the more idiosyncratic styles of small teams and individual creators. And as high-quality tools to create games have slowly become more democratised and readily available over the years, there has been less and less reason for me to turn towards AAA studios for... anything, really. You can now find really well refined games coming out of independent studios now without any of the soulless, manicured, decision-by-committee feel that AAA titles tend to have. Indie games have always been able to pursue more distilled and targeted visions as they are usually geared towards smaller consumer niches, instead of aiming for wide appeal, and in addition the small size of their operations allow for less compromise.

Does Nintendo stack up favourably to many other AAA studios? Yeah, but considering the absolute disappointment that is the AAA gaming scene in general I'd argue that's not saying much.

Can you tell me some of your favorite games from the last few years?

I usually enjoy indie games I have played, but I don't go to the online places where I would hear about them. Really, I've been hosed on discovering new games since Tips and Tricks magazine went out of business.

You didn't ask me but I have some recs too.

  1. Oxygen Not Included (2019). Probably my favorite game of all time. Don't let the cutesy art fool you; under the survival / colony sim surface this is an incredibly addictive engineering sandbox game. Tame a volcano for a steady supply of aluminum! Build a geothermal plant powered by the magma in your planetoid's core! Construct a giant counterflow heat exchanger to boil crude oil into petroleum for your power generators... which produce water as a byproduct... which can be purified and fed into oil wells for more crude oil. Build little rockets to colonize other planetoids, and figure out logistics to ship resources around for your megaprojects. Exploit the hell out of the game's physics. Or, you know, just tame the magic critters that eat weird magic plants and grow shearable plastic scales. The expansions add a lot and are well worth the price.
  2. Anything from the (now defunct) Zachtronics. Engineering / automation / programming puzzle games of many flavors. My favorite is still probably their first title, SpaceChem (2011), despite its lack of polish, because of how insanely hard (and rewarding) some of the levels are. If you want something more forgiving, there's Opus Magnum (2017); for silly assembly programming fun there's TIS-100 (2015) and Shenzhen I/O (2016). I have heard good things about Exapunks (2018) but never got around to it because of the titles above and below.
  3. Obligatory Rimworld (2018). You probably know this one. Colony sim. It's good. I haven't played with the latest expansion though.
  4. Seconding Baba is You; best non-Zachtronics puzzle game I've played (and probably better than half of the Zachtronics ones too).
  5. Also Obligatory Terraria (2011 but somehow still getting free updates) If you played many years ago but not in the last few, it's worth trying it out again.
  6. Slay the Spire (2019), despite being way too popular, is also Actually Good, but it is even more Actually Addicting so I'm not sure I'd recommend it.
  7. Noita (2020) is a roguelike platformer spell programming sort of thing and I am so bad at it (mostly because I am bad at the roguelike platformer part). It has an enormous world full of zany secrets too.
  8. Understand (2020). Another puzzle game, but this one is like doing IQ test pattern finding questions. Except actually fun? If you like this sort of thing, you will love it; if you don't, then you will be incredibly bored but at least it's only 4 bucks.

Yeah, sure thing. I don't know which genres you're most partial to, but here are some games I think are particularly well done, along with a short description of what they're about.

1: SOMA (2015)

SOMA is a horror game by Frictional Games, a studio best known for pioneering a game mechanic where you can essentially only run and hide from enemies. They primarily broke out with the game Amnesia: The Dark Descent which blew up on Youtube everywhere in the heyday of Let's Plays. Ever since then, they've mostly tried to recapture the pure horror vibes of Amnesia, but there was a brief moment where they decided to make a horror title with more existential sci-fi leanings.

Frictional's game designer, Thomas Grip, has stated that SOMA was hugely inspired by hard sci-fi authors such as Peter Watts and Greg Egan, and it really shows. It's by far my favourite game of theirs, and if you're playing one game on this list, make it this one. Go in completely blind. You won't find a better game narrative anywhere.

2: Baba Is You (2019)

I feel like Baba Is You is one of these indie titles I don't have to say too much about because of its ubiquity, but Baba Is You is a sokoban puzzle game where you push statements around an endlessly manipulable game world in order to satisfy a win condition. The game allows for constructing statements that allow the player to change the very characteristics of the level, to the point that you can yourself define the win condition of many levels.

It is not easy, and is one of these sadistically difficult puzzle games which you'll find yourself banging your head against for hours. According to Steam I've wasted 47.5 hours of my life on this game's puzzles alone.

3: Growing My Grandpa! (2022)

Now this is a weird one. Growing My Grandpa! is a short game by up-and-coming indie creator Yames that exhibits a strange hybrid of influences coming from Virtual Pet games, 90s adventure/edutainment games and Cronenbergian body horror alike, and the result is an extremely surreal and unique game that has absolutely no parallel elsewhere. The gameplay is fairly sparse, innocuous and repetitive, as is par for the course for a game based around a virtual pet-like mechanic - but it gets contrasted against an increasingly eerie, grotesque and uncanny plot, a dichotomy that's exploited as both a source of humour and horror in the game.

This game is very esoteric. It's not for everyone, and I can imagine people being really put off by any combination of the mechanics, the visual style, or the writing. In my case, I think his work is enticing enough to want to donate to his Patreon, which is fairly unusual for me.

4: INSIDE (2016)

INSIDE is a dark, cryptic platformer from developer Playdead. It draws many elements from their breakout hit Limbo - child protagonist, bleak atmosphere, abstract plot, many ways to die in bloody fashion - except it's executed better in virtually every way. As is usual from this developer, there's not a single line of dialogue and there isn't too much explanation provided to contextualise the events of the game, and much of the story is told through the environment.

A major draw of INSIDE is the art direction and music, which is executed beautifully throughout - it's a very atmospheric and potent game, and despite the lack of a clear through-line for the situations the game throws at you there is always a sense of intentionality behind every design decision that keeps it coherent.

5: Inscryption (2021)

This is a roguelike deck-building card game from Pony Island creator Daniel Mullins, and it's yet another title where it's best to know as little as possible about the game gong in, because suffice to say, it does not stay in that genre for very long. Despite appearances in the beginning, it is a plot heavy game - while the story is certainly a (I'd say intentionally) campy one, it provides the framework for a lot of very interesting genre-bending that gets executed quite smoothly and cleverly.

The element of surprise is crucial in this game, and the only reason I'm giving this much away about it is that I am aware of people who completely didn't anticipate the later shifts in the game, and were fairly disappointed by it since they went in expecting one thing and got another.

Forget everything you just read. This is a perfectly normal game.

There are many more quality games that have been released over the past few years, but these are the ones that currently come to mind which I actually think try to do something really interesting and intriguing with their setup, even if sometimes they are a little rough around the edges. Note I have a bit of a bias towards plot-focused, generally bleak games (with the exception of Baba Is You), these are my own genre preferences showing through and they might not align with yours.

I might just be a fan, but I don't think Nintendo is particularly overrated. To me, they really are the best at what they do.

There's really no other company that consistently makes games that "feel" as good to play. Maneuvering the character in Mario, Zelda, Pikmin, and Splatoon feels responsive, smooth, and intuitive in a way I haven't seen from any other game maker. They're also really great at making games that simultaneously have a low skill floor and a high skill ceiling.

God of War, The Witcher 3, and Horizon Zero Dawn are some of the biggest Sony titles, but to me the character movements feel sluggish, jerky, and unintuitive. They can have beautiful worlds and good stories, but I don't really enjoy existing there nearly as much.

Bungie is similarly good at making games that feel good - say what you will about Destiny or Destiny 2, it is fun to shoot guns in those games. Unfortunately, they are also pretty iffy these days on translating those good fundamentals into games that are overall fun.

Prototype and Warframe are pretty fun on the speedier-combat side, though they do share similar issues with the gameplay loop struggling at times.

God of War, The Witcher 3, and Horizon Zero Dawn are some of the biggest Sony titles, but to me the character movements feel sluggish, jerky, and unintuitive. They can have beautiful worlds and good stories, but I don't really enjoy existing there nearly as much.

Have you tried From Software games? I can' think of any studio that that makes third person melee feel as good as they do.

I played around with Dark Souls a bit, but I didn't get far enough to really judge. I usually only play video games when I'm mentally drained so I never stuck with it long enough to "git gud". Elden Ring is at the top of my list for the next time I have an extended gap from working.

Nintendo is the only game company left that I'd consider a preorder from.

It is telling that Nintendo's worst received titles tend to be games that they either rode into the ground (New New New Super Mario Bros. U & Knuckles Featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry series) or just didn't finish (Sunshine, the newer sports games, and to a point ToTK).

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