One Game For SButt To Play

King of Posters
22

i thought a while about this, and it’s a good question you’ve postulated with this thread.

What do we want the community to play?
One thing is clear, about 90% of the games i like to play should not qualify, because most are, if we’re honest, pretty forgettable or replaced by another installment that does X better (and sometimes Y and Z worse, but that’s another topic…) - namely most racing games, when release n+1 comes along, my recommendation would be outdated by default.

Then there’s the question what do i want all of you to experience?
I love, say, experiencing PS2-era Irem games with their wonky engines and heart in mouth-itude, but that’s no reason other people should suffer in 2020 just to see a few nice scenes if they don’t click with it.
Same goes for racing sims, they can feel like torture to normal people just wanting to play a game, and not invest 100 hours to get good enough to enjoy it.

So i want y’all to feel like it’s worth it to play the game, should be easy to pick up, give you a sense of excitement and you can leave it behind when you’re done. No strings attached.





… ttbh, that’s quite hard.

i tried to remember what the latest game is that i absolutely feel should be played by friends, family and the world at large, that i ask people to play when they come over.
The last one that made me feel like this was/is Baba is You.
Should everyone play it?
Hell no, you can get so frustrated playing it!

…
you see, i struggle to find a game i find agreeable.
Gotta go back to the basics then, something that everyone should have experienced is stuff sticking to a katamari. It doesn’t dven need to be a specific title, well the F2P mobile crap aside, it’s just the feeling of fulfilment you get when something sticks to your katamari with that trademark ‘ploink’ - sfx.

If it doesn’t catch on, that’s OK. Just having experienced that is enough for you, and the world.
:notes: Bada-ba-daaa :notes:

:classical_building::factory::mountain_snow::bullettrain_side::flying_saucer::racehorse::rabbit2::baguette_bread::cake: :red_circle::running_man:‍♂

5 Likes
23

i played this with a friend for a bit a couple years ago

i have to admit i sort of had fun hating on it

i remember my partner came in and she looked at it and was like idgi, is this for kids, and thinking about that made me kind of miserable

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24

Oh, it’s very hate-on-able! Like, I think 90% of the game is naff but…it only makes me like it more. It’s so low stakes, I can’t find anything really offensive about it. In recommending this, I think the worst that could be said is, “This shit is boring” and then it can be put away and forgotten if it doesn’t click.

25

my disqualified choice would have been Anodyne 2 but since there’s already a thread/significant discussion about that game on here i’ll pick something different.

my first choice would be David Kanaga’s “dog opera” Oikospiel Book I since i’m just super curious how different people here would react to something so out there and different from usual game design approaches. this game, by the way, is on the itch.io bundle for racial justice and equality so if you bought that you own it. and if you do own it, i certainly recommend at least trying to play it for a bit.

my back-up choice would be the game Cosmic Top Secret, which i’ve been intending to play more than like 30 minutes of for years but never got around to it. the concept/approach just seems super interesting and unique and i’ve seen very few people talk about this game at all in spite of the fact that it’s gotten awards/nominations from several festivals and such.

3 Likes
26

Avara, in 1997, on a 56k modem, with your first Reality Fragmentation Detected! warning popping again and again in the text window.

or I guess

Myth: The Fallen Lords. Not Myth 2: Soulblighter, with its quality of life improvements re: unit clumping, and archers with knives, and less sui/homicidal dwarves with reduced fizzle rates that almost never throw 4 duds in a row because there’s a light drizzle so when, finally, the fifth bottle explodes, the fizzled four are relit + flung in a pattern inflected by every subtle rise and dip in the terrain you don’t register until the moment they funnel those grenades into wiping out 79% of the units currently in play. Most of those units were yours. Most of them were veterans who’ve survived across several levels and you forgot to save when the map loaded. You’ll never get them back.

Truly appalled I can’t find a gif that’s specifically Myth 1 and specifically accidental chain reaction friendly “fire” explosion storm on this, our internet.

Of course the only reliable way to play Myth 1 on a modern machine is to install Myth 2 w/ Project Magma, then install the Fallen Levels map pack, and make sure to run them with Myth TFL Physics checked so your dwarves are properly recalcitrant, etc.

https://media.giphy.com/media/wZFEsVIeQcIliMihpM/giphy.gif(image larger than 10000KB)

I think these games were where/how I first became aware of Games As Spaces For Systems What Slam Together. Every level was a little 3D diorama with a single (sometimes as small as 1280x1280!) bitmap for texture and every projectile was a physical object, affected by every other physical object or simulated force. Sometimes the physical objects could be body parts, thrown by a ghol to taunt your dwarf, who’s been shuffling around muttering + throwing danger-close explosives w/ single-minded determination while you micromanage some some archers 20 feet away. You’re pointing the camera in the wrong direction and the game decides all these Loud Explosions don’t need to be fed to your speakers. The dwarf finally blows up the ghol. The dead ghol’s sword flies through the air and hits the dwarf in the face, taking his last sliver of health. The dead dwarf drops all his unused satchel charges just in time for a wight to stumble out of the marsh and explode itself beside the dwarf corpse/charges propelling them into the archers you thought were so important. On the bright side, the explosions also take out whatever they’ve just started running away from?

A common Undead Army Fodder Unit (Tough But Slow, Grist For Dorf) just has my Last Name? It happens. The Glen Cook fan-fiction is OK.

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27

I would never force any of the crap i like on to another poor soul. Please dont play deep water for ps2

28

Ya Myth has some truly ludicrous gibs.

I love how the whole game is just constantly tricking the enemy into falling into ambushes. I regret never getting into the multiplayer where you couldn’t save/reload or set the game to 1/8 speed. I imagine that’s where the real mind games started!! Weird how nobody’s ever made another game quite like it.

3 Likes
29

The last time I played A Myth multiplayer was probably around the turn of the Willenium. I would have been 17/18? 5-player King of the Hill, and I started on the The Hill, which I quickly vacated because I really didn’t want to be hammered from four sides/wiped out in the first few. Moved most of my units down a lane I hoped would be low-traffic and stashed some corpseboys in water. “Healed” some wights to get their, uh, organs, and had my ghols pick them up. Then I started sending them around, listening for fights.

I found one! Two players bashing each other while a third picked at them with arrows! A ghol threw paralysis wightchunk at what was left of Big Fight and my warriors/dwarves cut/blew them up. It went ok. I used my other body part on the archers, killed them, discovered the rest of that player’s units were nowhere to be found. The two players that had lost already started typing CAMPER @me in chat.

I took my units back to The Hill, where the other two remaining players were fighting. Brought the zombies out of the water. Mismanaged my dwarves and remaining archers. Lost. I had started the match with “I hate the hill” because it was a common joke/meme for anyone who started on the hill to complain about starting on the hill, whatever the map. It sucked to start on the hill! Everyone who didn’t win that match decided the reason they did not was: I left the hill, because it sucks to defend the hill, and I knew I was not up to defending the hill.

The other three losers said: if you leave the hill, you’re a Camper. We do not abide by Campers in our sacred gamespace!

The winner didn’t seem to find my acts particularly criminal? Anyway it made me Very Anxious and I never logged on to bungie.net again. :sunglasses:

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30

What… does camper mean in this context?

31

Shrug certainly didn’t camp, but I guess picking off the survivors of another battle was seen as dishonorable

32

Online Myth Context was always “finds quiet corner of the map to hide in until most of the fighting is over, then mops up easy victory.” Which is kind of like… moved from my spawn point, control of which is the ultimate goal of the game, then moved to disrupt the first fight I found, then repeat for… ultimate defeat?

I definitely avoided a fight, and tried to position my units for Future Utility as I engaged with the other players in ways that were tactically advantageous (paralyzing much of a fight that was already in progress, sweeping the archers of the third party that were already picking at them), but that’s… the game?

It’s a tactics game?

After my initial repositioning I was engaging with other players the whole time? Up until I lost?

I was unable to square this circle (wait, then how do I play the right way?) and that plus my teenage social anxieties meant I just never played again.

33

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34

wait they had a pejorative term for people trying to play tactically in a tactics game?

Decamping from a bad position to a stronger position is just… what you’re supposed to do isn’t it?

35

it’s possible this was just internet salt curdling into instinctive internet bullying In The Moment and their very strict interpretation of Leaving The Hill As Camp Action was not a bungie.net universal.

It didn’t take much to drive me out of a gamespace.

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36

Oh I’m certain that’s what it was. I just never understood how people acted in multiplayer games. I kept getting told I was using a ‘cheap’ weapon when I played The Specialists in the early 00s, even when I wasn’t winning (merely placing in the top 5 at best, and usually worse than that) and I keep thinking “did they have a point or were they just grousing over the one time they died to this ‘noob cannon’” years later

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37

Lolll loved that autoshotty.

38

Oops shrug’s thread revival made me forget about the thread rules oh noooo.
I watched shrug play Myth recently and decided it was definitely not a game for me.

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39

that wasn’t the weapon I was using lol, I just liked to snipe people with a raging bull because it had like no damage dropoff in that game

40

2 be fair 2 myth (2?) I was definitely playing very badly

2 be fair 2 rudes (2?) watching myth played badly probably gives you a good sense of the aggro (both ways!)/positioning/murderdorf/wait where’s my camera pointed? what’s that sound? management tightrope that is A Myth Campaign

41

no more heroes

7 Likes