Games you should and will never play

King of Posters
67

Recreational Essence

1 Like
68

I totally know what gameplay means. It has irritated me for 10 years there has been a dumb crusade to stamp it out. A real mole hill of a battle.

69

it is an ugly word though

70

For what it’s worth, I have a similar natural reaction to the word “game” as a verb that others have to “moist” and “booger”.

71

Also Grandia 2 is a cool game and don’t understand why it gets so much flak. It is a fun anime adventure.

72

Ludoessence

73

So don’t use it, personally.

I hate the word-phrase “pet peeve,” so I try to replace it with “peccadillo” or avoid using it. But I don’t write articles about how it’s holding back our society.

Honestly, I associated it with clambo, who wrote an article about it that someone once posted here as an example of one of his good articles. But I’ve noticed that other people also feel some distaste for it.

I mean, look: you can certainly mount a campaign to modify societal discourse so as to supplant “gameplay” with something else. You could possibly be successful, I guess. But I don’t know what the purpose would be.

Honestly, the only way I can see this being a worthwhile pursuit is if you are actually writing theory about how video games work and you have a rhetorical need to separate the way we interact with games into specifically defined qualities. Then, sure: coin some words. That’s typical in theoretical writing.

But if the goal is to replace “gameplay” with a word that means the same thing with the added bonus of not-being-“gameplay,” then I need to know what deleterious effect “gameplay” is having on our pastime.

'Cause all I ever hear is “it sounds dumb,” which is a lot like saying, “I’m afraid that people think my hobby is dumb.”

74

I know my hobby is dumb, that’s why I took over this website

2 Likes
75

I made a thread for this: The Great "gameplay" Debate

76

SHMUP

77

and least we forget, c’mup

78

It always made me sad in high school when I would tell people I was into “shooters,” and they thought I meant FPSes. “Shmup” became necessary when the 360 ascended.

79

Ess Tee Gee. Right?

1 Like
80

Shooting
T (?)
Game

81

Don’t ask me, Japan did it.

1 Like
82

Geez Cuba, what am I, som NERD?

Go play a “belt scroller” whydontcha.

83

For the record, I finally played some of Earthbound. It’s astonishingly dark. All of the suggestions of domestic abuse… yikes.

I’d booted it up several times over the years, but I think I always turned it off because I couldn’t figure out what to do after being denied access to the meteor crater that first night.

…

Yeah.

So, this time I played until I got to the town. Now I’m not sure if I’m going to push past this.

84

I actually really enjoy Mother, and have started it twice in emulator and both times lost access to my save in one way or another, probably before the halfway point.

I don’t like the default random encounter rate more than the next guy, but I remember thinking that the rebalance ring item that someone hacked in makes it feel too easy. I forget what the specifics are. I think it lowers the encounter rate so ups the rate of leveling to compensate–something like that.

Making the battles less risky turned them into the sort of petty annoyance that they are in most other JRPG’s, which I thought detracted from the game as a whole. So yeah: I ended up just suffering through the constant battles on both playthroughs but still had a good experience.

85

Oh, yeah. I don’t mind random battles when they’re there for a reason. They add a procedural level of drama to Dragon Warrior and Phantasy Star II that otherwise would have been tough to create at the time. Where I have a problem with them is when they’re there just because, well, that’s what RPGs do, right?

Mother, to the best I can see, looks like it falls into the first camp. They have a narrative purpose.

86

Oh yeah: I’d definitely place Mother in that camp, which makes sense because it was a contemporary of those games.

I actually feel like a lot of Mother’s antiquated trappings contribute to its thematics. I’d guess that a lot of modern players wouldn’t be very fond of the dungeons that are essentially picking between two forked paths repeatedly until you hit a dead end and then having to navigate your way to another exit, based on vague recollection of you previous paths. But for me, that sort of design foregrounds the relationship between memory and forgetting as thematic elements. In the dungeons, halls become each other and you’re led towards not trusting your memories. In a game that’s about nostalgia I think that’s pretty relevant.

That said, I know that every time I play Mother, I’m going into it super-primed to extract a meaningful experience from it, so my perception of the game is pretty biased.

1 Like