it had some problems last time i tried playing it as a rom, however, that was in 2008 or 2009?
I would assume that goalposts have been moved big time, i.e. would give it a shot before hunting down a slim PS2
(also also — the fat PS2 has the option of using a HDD, that might also help significantly with loading times! 
)
Shopkeep and alchemy sims are also like this. There’s a field RPG portion where you gather treasures/ingredients, and a town system where you process them under time constraints.
Check out the Atelier series especially, which has multi-character parties. In most of the series you have only one alchemist who does all town activity and the other characters are combat extras on the field side, but I heard Nelke and the Legendary Alchemists in particular had multi-character management on the town side too.
i really feel like it should be illegal for people to do interesting gameplay innovations within the anime lingerie witch subgenre
I do enjoy those times when you’re a little guy who runs around in a menu
this is a large part of why post super, metroid doesn’t do much for me
Little guys running around menu talk is making me wonder if anyone thinks Little Big Planet is significant in any sense. I just have an uneven beige colored feeling about the whole thing, and I played a lot of it back on PS3.
I think LBP was significant in that it allowed the industry to see UGC happening to at least some level of success. It was part of a long trend of “we’re gonna make everything in our game user generated content!” that has since died back quite a bit. I worked in bizdev during that time as a very young producer grunt and I was exposed to a ton of UGC hype occuring amongst the capitalist class I guess. It was pretty exhausting. The modern legacy of this is of course Roblox, which survived the decline of that trend by becoming an extremely abusive marketplace, lmao.
I think the reason it feels less influential now is that this trend has died back so much and people might feel less like it is a great example of future possibilities
oh, huh, i feel really silly because the game i work on is absolutely apart of LBP’s legacy when you frame its significance like that.
internal monologue thumping brain-desk shouting you owe your livelihood to sackboy, so show some gratitude!!!
I would be super interested to read a journalistic deep dive or even academic deep dive into why UGC was such a big deal during the early part of my career. What did it have to do with attitudes about “stem education,” millennial familiarity with creative software, the shit kids were learning about computer science and games careers in high school, etc? I am sure that you can trace these evolutions of “making a tool that’s a friendly way to make OTHER things” through not only games, steam workshop, etc, but a wealth of mobile creative apps, weird gimmick social media platforms, etc… I remember there was a little AR animation app I used to use back around 2018 which allowed me to superimpose animated line drawings over video of the real world and walk around them and stuff.
So there was a glut of little creative apps to make mobile games on your mobile device, to make little animations and videos and so on, and of course most of them failed… Tiktok however, with its wealth of video editing features in-app, could be the biggest remnant of this. And in games, Fortnite and Roblox are both doing pretty good. But most of the game stuff just ended up with the engines democratizing themselves and releasing full featured editions with different pricing for small projects. I’m wondering if the reason some of this stuff died down is that people had easier access to tools that allowed them to make real videogames anyone could play outside the walled garden of a paid game like Dreams or LBP.
I think LBP’s gamefeel being kind of poor has always hampered that game’s impressions despite how much its concept captivated people. I also feel like it (and even moreso Dreams) showcases that huge amounts of freedom and power in the creation tools is not necessarily conducive to retaining the attention of a mass audience. I think more constricted tools that allow you to make variations on a specific set of mechanics (mechanics that people like anyway, unlike LBP’s floaty platforming) is easier for most people to digest and understand. Lots of people are really interested in creating things, but most people don’t have the time, energy, or interest in creating every facet of a game from scratch. I’ve always felt Dreams’ biggest failing since its beta was the lack of a good set of templates for people to build off of.
I have no idea how Roblox and Fortnite mod creation works though. Clearly whatever they’re doing works.
Edit: My favorite time in creation was playing the demo of MTV Music Maker on PSX and just randomly plopping samples onto the tracker. It almost always sounded good!
One reason I’m fascinated by YIIK is that everyone complained that that game made you do rpg stat allocations by running around a “mind maze” as a little guy and entering into various subchambers and rooms to determine what stats to upgrade and it absolutely sounds like it’d get funnier the more repetitive and needlessly spatialised those segments happened to be, imagining having to take a tiny elevator each time and then navigate a maze of corridors just to put a single point in INT, maybe this will me what gets me to finally play that game and start down the road of becoming a true YIIK apologist, a road that’ll end when my wife suffocates me in my sleep with a pillow
Roblox and Fortnite definitely offer a bit more structure, like you say. I think Fortnite is the best example of what you’re describing. Roblox is very open and chaotic but there’s accessible genres that sort of… just exist on Roblox, like “Obby” levels, that these kids are probably taking as the inspirational example of a template to start from, even if the engine isn’t giving them one to work off of like a template
Yeah, even with “limited” creation tools, people will always find ways to bend it to uses outside the box. Like the auto-levels in Mega Man Powered Up and Mario Maker or Trackmania. Those are essentially art films, but they’re still built on on top of the same fundamental gameplay experience everyone collectively understands.
Anyone remember Modnation Racers? I feel like it was the first game that came out after Sony formalized their marketing tagline “Play, Create, Share”. Put those same creation tools into Mario Kart and it would explode.
one of my ex’s child was extremely into LBP2, ended up playing that one quite a bit with’em
and yeah the gamefeel is just rather poor. it was neat seeing how broad a range of ideas could work in the game, but ultimately none of them were particularly enjoyable to engage with
after megaman legends 2 i think im going to play bioshock infinite to see what all the fuss is about
five months of concepting, modeling, hard surface texturing, animation, sound design. disgusting, i cant wait
there’s fuss about it?
after experiencing the highest highs of the medium i want to rocket ass-first straight to the rock bottom of videogames
Not in this universe but in one of the other infinite universes. Spoiler sorry.
