I don’t think I ever played 2, but in 1 you literally had to get high scores to progress, so “arcadey” is definitely the right word.
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super turbo was the pinnacle of fighting games and everything has been downhill since
the true heart of fighting games has to live in some backroom late night '97 matches between devs on an unfinished widescreen build of 2i
I basically got a N64 for OoT and I abandoned the game the first two or three times I tried to play through it and didn’t actually play through the whole thing until at least a decade later. Part of it is that despite being “big” for the time it felt awfully vacant, going from the relatively packed overworlds of LttP, LA and even the original to a big empty valley with a single ranch in the middle of it.
But mainly I dropped it those first few times at the same place, the goron town/cave thing, and had to literally force myself through it on that final playthrough.
Still at the end of the day it is a solid game and influential as hell, but even at the time on a first time playthrough there were parts of it that were just a drag.
…I liked Twilight Princess more than it by a comfortable margin, but that was probably due to my issues with OoT being more frontloaded and my issues with TP being in its back half.
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it’s not that I disagree but it’s that TF isn’t RTCW last time I checked
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whatever the rifle gun that muzzle launches grenades in enemy territory is is the best fps weapon
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Hell yeah, RTCW was hella rad too
getting nostalgic about spamming the “I’M AN ENGINEER!!!” voice and plantronics sending my clan free headsets now
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I absolutely recognize my enthusiasm for it is unjustifiable, but I really love Hearthstone. It deserves every accusation of skinner-boxism, and card packs are the birthplace of lootbox philosophy, but since it has supplanted my desire to play Magic: the Gathering, it’s saving me a lot of money. It is a flawed game and Blizzard is a garbage company, but I really love how often expansions result in a lopsided metagame that I can penalize.
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The story told by Fallout 4’s settlement mechanics is one of a hopeful future which seems pretty trucking rare for how much the post apocalyptic genre enjoys wallowing in its own misery. Its linear story wasn’t great, but it did finally hit the correct balance between “Let me tell you my great idea for a novel I plan to write.” and “You can build whatever you want!” that absolutely no other game where you can erect a building has managed.
God I hope DQ Builders 2 gets it right.
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I’ve got such a hard on for that game, it’s not even funny. I love what they did with the story, with the god of creation and god of destruction teaming up
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It’s flawed, problematic, and although some positive think pieces have been written about it lately, I’m okay with being one of the bigger fans of Far Cry 2. It’s a purer shooter than its sequels and I think doesn’t lean quite as egregiously into exoticism. The collectibles are fairly minimal and power-creep feels reasonable in that you’re just getting better guns instead of Leveling Up Into A Murder God. I loved it when shit constantly went awry and I would have to hightail it into the jungle trying to not get my ass shot off. That slide maneuver you can do also just never got old.
I haven’t played anything else in the series since 3 but I’m sure I’ll get around to trying something out.
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Y’all having found something enjoyable in Twilight Pri-THIS ISN’T A ZELDA THREAD
Sonic Adventure fucking rules. I am 120% Burning Fest with Astromech running around the Mystic Ruins for hours as recently as last year on the busted up PS3 version. Sonic Utopia is now real and give me a giant area just to run around in.
Man video games rule.
In the same way Mario Sunshine is incredible as a verb set.
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What’s a verb set?
things you can do in a game. run, jump, shoot, poo, etc.
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Grabbed by the Ghoulies is really good at fucking with player expectations and I love it.
Wii Sports. The golf is one of the best golf games. What a great lesson in UI design, so simple and clean, I like the green display more than every other golf game I tried (including Hot Shots and Mario Golf).
Sonic 06 is wild. I can’t help but love its ambition.
I think Fallout 4 is underrated as an open-world FPS with a lot of neat stuff to pick up. Just play it on Survival difficulty like a videogame, like Far Cry. Gloss over all the writing and flimsy suggestions of dialogue interactivity and agency (aka role-playing), if you can. You are a (wo)man with a gun in a big deadly square theme park and it kinda works and I should play it more. And you can take a break to put towns together if you feel like it.
You’ve probably already played all the other good FPSRPGs anyway if Fallout 4 bothers you.
edit: I forgot that Fallout 4’s whole gameplay intro (before you get out of the vault) is unacceptably long and dumb and low-rent and kills my desire to play the game (I never got very far into it) every time, and I should just capitulate and get the “accelerated start” mod
edit 2: damn I am doing a really bad job of loving this game
Game intros are hard to love sometimes. Maybe most of the time. The best intro is the Doom kind where you’re just dropped into the game and can just go. It’s not cinematic but it works.
I played FF7 today and the very start is cool, when you get off the train and blow up the Mako reactor. It doesn’t tutorialize you too much. It just tells you how to run, how to climb ladders and how to save. You find weapons and materia and potions and you just have to figure them out yourself. If you don’t that’s cool too, you can still make it through the opening.
But then comes the Cloud and Tifa flashback and the music, the dialog, everything really works together to make the whole thing feel so… corny? Before that the game had this nice depressing, ecopunk tone and suddenly everything turns into a folk song. That’s the first time the game kind of struggles.
Intros are hard, is what I’m saying
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tbf mgs4 isn’t actually a bad game. It’s just bad by mainline metal gear standards
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