Yeah my list is basically how I would answer if my wife asked “what games should I play?”
Luckily for everyone I will never be asked this question
K&L2 - handful of crime fiction tropes pasted into a smear of dull, leaden trauma
Defender - desperate thrusting against inertia (you caused your own damn self)
M ∞ - pretentiously overladen blasting; lava baths???
M&B:W - heroic fantasy boiled down to brutal economics
SSIII - SLASH/BUST
4 Likes
I’m really excited to dick around with stuff like samsho3 that I haven’t played in years next month
Oh goodness, I just realized why I like our dnd game so much
But only on the arcade version that is in every arcade in Disney World.
Shadow of the Colossus
Shining Force 2
Little King’s Story
Machinarium
Link’s Awakening
2 Likes
I don’t know that I would ever end up dating someone with no video game literacy, but I don’t think that’s too hard of a challenge. Like, Night in the Woods, Kentucky Route Zero, World of Goo, Tetris, and I could probably fill it out with a twine game if I put some thought in.
Edit: or maybe a arcade racer. Everyone can play Extreme-G
1 Like
To understand me/get the feel for who I am?
- Megaman 2: To understand how much I tried and failed as a kid, and that time in my early 20s when I felt like a goddamn adult human for once.
- Devil May Cry 3: To see that I will sometimes get way to involved in some arcane bullshit if it feels fun enough, despite whatever silly shit is draped over it (more hardcore suggestion for this one: Deathsmiles)
- Gran Turismo 2: To see how I deal with being alone.
- Killer 7: Just aesthetics, man.
- Guardian Heroes: To feel the joy of co-operating with someone and occasioanlly also completely sabotaging them on accident.
I feel like I am missing some, but sure, that works.
1 Like
Silent Hill 4 The Room - the most thought chewing SH while also being pretty dumb. I am multi dimensional in what I can enjoy a thing.
Death Smiles - i can enjoy something for it’s core even if the apperances are off putting.
Dog Days - It’s fucked I hate it. There is comedy and humor in the bleak. Horrible situation can be horrible but also really funny in it’s absuridty.
Riven - I take atmosphere above all.
Killer7 because I have posted on SB for 11 years.
5 Likes
Dragon Warrior: this is more about my artistic sensibilities than my real-world personality, but it’s still important! Dragon Warrior opened my eyes to the importance of form, and to this day “maybe-unnecessarily strict adherence to formal constraints” is one of my most valued aspects of any art
Space Funeral: it’s Earthbound, but shorter and easier, it’s my exact type of humor and sensibility about the world
Panzer Dragoon II Zwei: the rest of the games may give the impression that I’m a goofball, but I actually do take myself, and the world, and the important things in life, very seriously. In fact, the games that have made the strongest impression on me, on a gut level, are this, Ikaruga, RSG, and Souls games–sometimes, it’s time to put aside jokes and just be serious about something that matters
Metal Gear Solid 3: self-explanatory, I think. MGSV might be even better, but it requires much more contextualization (both re: the plot of the series and re: what it means to me)
Universal History of Light: Increpare’s games in general really resonate with me?? I’m not sure what exactly this game would say about me but it’s probably my favorite non-puzzle Increpare game (aside from maybe Queue, but that would be a bit much)
5 Likes
Odell Lake
Mixed Up Mother Goose
Where in Time is Carmen Sandiago
Taboo: The Sixth Sense
Beat 'em and Eat 'em
7 Likes
Really though, just VideoHeroeS.
A pile of Gary Busey movies and camcorder footage of a mystery couple’s cruise ship trip fell on my the other day while I was trying to find matching socks.
God Hand - I love watching action figures collide in interesting ways and I have an undying passion for cartoony action and humor.
Disgaea - How I like to be alone and it’s just my kind of flavor of anime bullshit and humor.
Guilty Gear Overture/series in general - Most of my love of heavy metal sounds was through this series. I have a hard time connecting with most actual metal music but through the filter of Ishiwatari I feel I’m able to appreciate better.
Gitaroo-Man - I can still barely play an instrument but this got me interested in trying and kinda romanticized the power of music to me.
.hack//GU - Probably a better game for this list but it was there at the right place and time in my life when I just made my first attempt at higher education. Got me to start thinking about my connections with people a bit more than I did.
Extras:
Nier - A similar situation to GU it was the game I was playing when I started college a second time. It was just a heck of a video game that tickled (and stabbed) me in many ways.
DMC3/Bayonetta/MGR - These are the kinds of games I will always want to play. Let me press buttons and let me press them better.
2 Likes
Mine is pretty boring:
Night in the Woods - I’m a middle American dude who had troubled-but-loving relationships with friends/family/college/adulthood.
Dark Souls - brutal but fair, sprawling, dark but praise the sun
Double Dragon 2 - just a good game
Final Fantasy 3 - outside of wishing Amano’s mecha were rendered better as sprites, this game is aesthetically everything.
The Moon Fields - I’ve been actively working on this for ~5% of my life, so…
3 Likes
all list threads should strive to speak thoughts, really
that said, I’ve practically lost my voice here, so I might as well shout out something self-indulgent.
-
knytt underground
---------------------
every screen a different delight making full use of a mash-up aesthetic, an exploration platformer that makes sprawl work with shortcut challenges and severe interconnectivity. an interweaving of both of nifflas’s styles makes movement enviably joyful and unique despite the ever-exhausted genre of platformers- this game is something I wish I could have made. -
frequon invaders
-------------------
the first game to make me think about game design was a colourful rendition of groping around in the dark. the sheer abstraction of the game unique from basically any other work gives hope that video games can get away from the standard conceptualizations of video games, even if it is through gimmickry. -
crypt of the necrodancer
---------------------------
the closest yet to the platonic ideal of those readily-misunderstood trappings: one of the finest procgen permadeath murdermazes is set to a beat. execution pressure and emphasis on simple behaviours combined freely, in short runs, frees the genre from every fault whether filler or spoilers or bad luck. I started game development within roguelikes, and I would have lived a better life if this one had been part of the canon. -
birdland
---------
one of the few manifestations thus-far of my second puberty is that despite attempts to present myself as a broken wraith (of a melodramatic millennial) I also am not-so-secretly a horrible sucker for sappy modern sapphic fluff. angst and medium experimentation are both flexed in comfortable and creative ways, too. -
…
—
somehow I can’t come up with a fifth, as the other immediate contents aren’t something to impose on others whether another bombastic timesink of toothsome details defined by history (monster hunter three ultimate) or a precisely-textured optimization-invoker defined by games (labyrinth of touhou 2). probably something that directly invokes designwork, like getting over it (from what I’ve watched of the start) or something I’ve made that can stand by itself (gods, don’t let this be just that smbx episode by the time I’m somehow in a relationship again).
7 Likes
The games from my childhood that are still beautiful to me outside of nostalgia and that I know I could sell anyone on tell you all you need to know about my love for dumb mechanics and edgy OCs
Digimon World 4
Custom Robo 4
Pokemon Colosseum
Soulcalibur 3 (but specifically Chronicles of the Sword, the only game mode that matters)
Morrowind
4 Likes
sell me on world 4
So the first thing to know about the Digimon World series in general is that literally the only consistent part of it is that every game is about Digimon.
World 1 was a tamagotchi raise-your-digimon game, which is what most digimon games are because well digimon are already just tamagotchi so
World 2 was a dungeon crawler where you are a person logged into the digimon world and travel with a party of 3 mons who battle all at once in an encounter. This would be the basis for the DS Digimon World games (“DS”, “Dusk”, and “Dawn”)
World 3 was a straight up Pokemon ripoff
But World 4. World 4 is the first (and I think only) game in the World series where you don’t play someone logged into the Digimon World, you are a Digimon. It’s also a top-down dungeon crawling action RPG that allows up to 4 players in co-op. The scaling for multiple players is kinda fucking brutal, with bosses taking you out in two hits or less for the entire game.
When it comes to spells and weapons in World 4, each Digimon has certain weapon types that they gain XP for faster, and have their own spell lists. In FF2 fashion, you get better with these things by doing them, and the amount of XP it takes to go up a level goes down with each subsequent level. You’ll do like 3 dungeons before you ever see a weapon level go from 1->2, but it takes literally like 4 hits to go from 700->701. These also all cap off at a certain point based on character level. When your spells hit certain levels, you completely lose the spell you had before and get the new one, which is not always immediately better. Wargreymon goes from dealing like 80 damage with a homing fireball to 10 damage in a tiny AoE around him.
Now theres a line between what I wrote this morning and the edit I’m making now to wrap up my thoughts and talk about this game more
The game is split into four different worlds, but each one has multiple sections that have their own puzzles or weird locomotion segments to get to, and each world has more bosses than the last that you have to fight to get all the keys to unlock the final dungeon of the world which is almost always at the deepest hardest to traverse part of the world itself.
I would talk about all of the worlds in depth but at that point I’d just start a thread delving into every little part of this game because its a lot
The best representation of the weird locomotion is the first world’s raft mini-level where you only can use pistols and have to destroy the systems closing the dams in front of you and destroy the missiles trying to blow up your raft and save all of the fairies
The other is world two’s train where you have to piece together what turns you’ll need it to make, and then ride on top of it, and hit the right switches as they appear overhead while also fighting an onslaught of baddies jumping on top of the train with you
The first world is exactly what you expect out of an rpg - it’s slime and gobbo digimon and you’re slashing right through them. But by world two you start encountering glitches and start fighting viruses and dealing with curses and world 4 is literally just viruses and is this bizarre purple and black labyrinth
I should also mention your inventory and bank storage are both very limited, so item management is hell and that’s part of the joy. My dad and I each take an hour minimum inbetween dungeons to manage our shit
When you leave for a dungeon, you choose 3 weapons (Slot A and B and a backup) and your armor, and there’s no changing them atall.
Now for the greatest part of this game for me - the GUIs while you’re actually dungeon delving. When you pull up use items or your spell list, they totally cover up your health and mana. You have to navigate them with the ‘c’ stick and use I believe the right shoulder button to actually use things from them. But the best part is while you’re navigating this tiny menu and also still fighting shit, if you ever get hit, the menu closes out. Your character literally gets distracted from what they were doing because when they take damage. It’s amazing. and makes reviving your friends impossible in many situations
Anyway that’s the short rant of why I love this game I’m not going to fix or reread any of it
8 Likes
Okay, I’ve been thinking about this ever since I shitposted about Bubsy several posts ago
It would be too easy to peg down my 5 favorite games, so instead, I’ll do something far dumber
-
The Cliffhanger Edward Randy
Edward Randy is the best video game ever made, a perfect, janky mess of questionable controls, a weird scoring system that conflates directly with your energy, dumb plot ripping off a bunch of movies and a general sense that everyone working on this game cared too much and they created a shambling mess of “Strider, but without those pesky sections in between the cool parts”. You know it has to be good if a bunch of guys from Treasure like it. If you play this and aren’t immediately in awe of the raw insanity on display, then we cannot be friends. -
Valis
I like bad games. I like the Genesis. I like anime, but not enough to like the arguably better Super CD version of Valis, wherein half of your actions will reveal the heroine’s panties. I like bangin’ FM synth jams (I think they’re bangin’). I like dumb games I can sit down and polish off in twenty minutes so I can go back to whatever it is I do all day. The Valis Experience. -
Diablo II
I enjoy repeating myself. -
Phantasy Star Online
I enjoy repeating myself. -
Gravity Rush
I WANT TO MARRY KAT
9 Likes
We don’t talk about Killer7 and Godhand thst often anymore but pretty neat how often they were on our lists.
Someone insane find the most common games.
Just kidding it’s Killer7.
2 Likes