ITT write words (maybe like 100+ of them) raving about a game you love
8 Likes
i like how in age of empires 2 you can play in a bunch of different ways and the game just acommodates for it.
there are real championships worth tens of thousands of US dollars for the technically best players in the world and they engage with insane speed and efficiency. you also have, like, middle-age guys who just play campaigns because they enjoy the voice acting and world history. people who play it like its simcity, dottingly making their little village with their little guys for hours, either while fighting against the computer or literally just making virtual dioramas. you can make your own campaigns, with higly detailed events and rules, with your own stories and game design. you can play with friends for hours in competitive matches or coop campaigns.
aoe 2 is an interface of infinite potential, it feels. the comfiest videogame as far as i’m concerned
19 Likes
I love that Anodyne feels like an old, dusty NES cartridge that has been left to rot in a closet for 25 years. It’s not overtly “glitchy”, although that’s also true later, it’s more like everyone in Link’s Awakening moved to another part of the world and all that’s left behind is memories and monsters. Anyone who still lives there is really holding on to something that’s probably not worth holding on to.
It’s just so desolate and lonely. Rarely can a top-down Zelda clone evoke that kind of moodiness. I don’t think it’s perfect, but I love the atmosphere.
100
11 Likes
Despite Blizzards best efforts, Overwatch 2 is fun as hell to play. I just love being Mercy and flying around, I can’t go back to tf2 after that. Each character feels strong and fun to play. I just wish that people enjoyed team voice chat as much as I do!
5 Likes
loving the specificity of the pitch mechanics in super mega baseball 3. Basically you select your pitch type and target, then you can throw it as a normal or “power” pitch (which rolls some dice internally on whether you fool the batter). your reticle will move around as you wind up. for power pitches you also have to hold and release the button to get the best power and accuracy. it’s got just enough mechanics without being overwhelming. I love how the camera is behind the pitcher , it gives you that painting the corners experience like on TV.
feels really amazing to set up a batter with two outside strikes and get them to whiff on the big change up inside, especially when you get that bonus for “Fooled”. there’s some sophisticated batter modeling based on your previous pitches, batter traits and tendencies that activate in appropriate situations (e.g. whether they’re a Whiffer with two strikes or a Tough Out), and your pitchers stamina and Mojo (confidence). very nuanced difficulty management as well (you can set your “Ego” difficulty for pitching independently of hitting, fielding, and baserunning)
anyways the mechanics really fade into the periphery in a wonderful way when you’re in the zone, I don’t know how they do it but they achieve this level of transparency where you don’t feel like you’re gaming a system but rather gaming the AI opponent. as your pitcher stamina goes down, your stuff gets slower, your control gets shaky, but if your player is On Fire Mojo-wise then you can still gut it out for the eighth inning. Very cool feeling
also love that’s it’s a sports game where I can play as a female character without feeling like it’s a lesser experience, because gender is purely cosmetic and I don’t have to deal with bioessentialism and subsequent dysphoria in a video game world
11 Likes
I love that disco elysium is very clearly made by people who have a long history on The Organized Left. I love that all the stupid little in-jokes about communism and communists are things that I feel in my bones. whenever I’m on a long annoying DSA call, “0.000% of Communism has been built” plays in my head. I am starting to think that Kras Mazov fucked me over personally. I’m glad the game is large enough to contain multiple readings blah blah but I love that it was made specifically for my type of person. that infra-materialism vision quest moved me deeply despite how silly it seems. sometimes being a socialist is really is like believing the ridiculous card bridge can hold up on its own, because people are fundamentally good.
15 Likes
it’s a videogame forum cliché, but panzer dragoon saga is a miracle. i’ve had to restart so many times due to emulator and pc issues and i don’t even care because it feels so good to be back in an infinitely scrolling expanse of glittering water punctured by towering abstract architecture, or a chunky sculptured town lit in ice cream or earthy hues according to the time of day. no other game so embodies its unity of towering ambition and easy breeziness, and somehow it doesn’t bear any of the weight of its traumatic production. a game made of grace notes, absent any histrionics. there’s a hidden sidequest that ends in a girl quietly giving the protagonist a completely useless amulet as a symbol of her feelings. i’ve seen criticisms that it’s too simple mechanically and doesn’t push its unique combat system to its limit the way the virtuosic rail shooters do, but it feels perfectly tuned to the game’s singular calm, smooth tone and tempo, offering its battle rating system to encourage optimization without interrupting the flow. it’s one of the great Easy Games.
23 Likes
loren schmidt’s untitled (the flower game) helped me learn to drive… process of embodiment seems to be taken for granted in most explorations of “game feel” in discourse or in games themselves… the flower game’s trick is in having you control, in a circular playing field, multiple symmetrical avatars at once, contending with symmetrical obstacles and asymmetrical goodies. dodge one obstacle with one avatar and you dodge them all. but since the goodies are asymmetrical you must mentally hop from avatar to avatar, re-orient your hand-eye… i guess all games with simultaneous multiple avatars play with embodiment in this way but this is the most elegant & mesmerizing example to me. everything blurs together in its visual style (bullets with their trails etc.) as though to foreground the perceptual field over literal clarity. also because it’s technically also a drawing machine but w/e. gameplay and controls are a little barebones & infuriating but i think it adds a hacky prototypical je ne sais qwa to the whole affair.
(copied from a review i posted on backloggd. pre-prepared raving??)
9 Likes
I am sometimes fascinated by buildings, such as the illustration of a house at the top of this webcomic page. I love that Minecraft lets me stop staring at this thing and instead go into creative mode and make my best approximation of the building, and then diverge from that design to make something my own, something bizarre and inhospitable, and be satisfied. I probably could have used those six hours of my life for other pursuits, and I have no interest in survival mode or setting up automated resource harvesting or accomplishing any of the achievements it has to offer, but I was very happy to make what I made last night.
13 Likes
every time i play last blade 2, i’m once again struck like it’s my first time seeing it. it’s so beautiful. aesthetcally, every stage and character is full of life and detail. mechanically, every action feels good, especially the parrying around which the game is built. and together they form a perfect whole.
also hibiki breaks down into tears if you play as her and win the last round of a fight with a killing blow. i think she actually gets progressively more distraught if you keep doing it in a single player arcade mode run! one of the coolest things i’ve ever seen in a fighting game.
7 Likes
Heat Signature is perhaps the best game ever made, because I’m really good at it. It lives in my bones like nicotine, but it doesn’t give me lung cancer.
It’s the perfect mixture of skill, strategy, dumb luck, and comedic failure. Any game that lets you fuck yourself over in so many ways (setting off alarms and now 30 guys want to kill you, shooting out windows and getting sucked into the vacuum of space, bouncing a bullet off a shield and shooting yourself in the face, accidentally exploding an entire sector (and getting sucked into the vacuum of space), accidentally turning a turret back on so it shoots you, killing a guy with a sword who explodes when he dies, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc.) but also lets you get out of so many fuck-ups through ingenuity and equipment (slowing down time to avoid the 30 guys who wanna kill you, piloting your pod remotely to catch yourself in the vacuum of space, using your own shield to reflect bullets back at guys, hacking turrets to kill your enemies, using exploding enemies as a distraction,etc. etc. etc. etc. etc. ) is gonna end up being one of my favorite games.
I’m a little too good at it now unfortunately. I know all the mechanics by heart and can basically take on almost any challenge entirely unarmed without even resorting to hijacking a ship and entirely blowing up the enemy ship, so it’s a little too easy. But I like that the skill ceiling is honestly not that far from the ground. Very few games let me achieve total mastery like Heat Signature.
It also really encourages role playing by giving characters different traits, good or bad, and letting you (me) build a back story for them as you (I) play. see:
Great game, perfect game, I love it, it will live in my heart forever.
8 Likes