dodonpachi…
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sucks air through teeth
Damn.
There’s a few approaches here that kinda resonate with me.
- Introduce them to Warframe and let 'em just… vibe their way to having their feet under them.
- Have 'em play Guilty Gear (Accent Core, Xrd, Strive… just play Guilty Gear)!
- Throw them at Armored Core 6 and remind them to keep in mind at all times the phrase “Who dares, wins.”
I think Rudie’s suggestion of introducing them to Kirby’s Adventure on NES has a lot of merit, though, and is probably a lot more humane than anything I’m gonna come up with. It also does a great job (IMO, plz dont flame me) of immediately creating breadcrumbs through the power system for players to latch onto for self-directed goals. I know way back as a kid I kept playing less to beat the game and more to see what powers were around the corner more than being concerned about progression or anything like that.
I really want to introduce them to Armored Core 4: Answer, but I feel like there’s not really a good way to do this. Emulation for it is pretty well aces these days, but I feel like I run into enough people who don’t know how to copy and paste (as a concept) that I don’t want them having to deal with emulators.
Of my listed approaches, I kinda like the Warframe approach the most, as it by far has the greatest flexibility to tailor the experience of it to be what you want in terms of difficulty.
Eventually.
. . . .
…the market stuff is one of the more egregious parts of it here, though, and it does throw FOMO at you in a “Blindside the base,” kind of way infrequently in a way that tends to be infuriating. The “Any build not designed to power farm level cap is bad and you’re bad for playing it,” folks are equal parts extremely loud and obnoxiously present too, though generally not representative of the broader player base IME.
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this was my dad except his game was mario golf for the gbc not tetris
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my real answer is manhole of course but id still lie and say all games are like this
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Bad Day on the Midway by the Residents
I don’t think the world needs any more games players that can’t appreciate the music and writing of the residents so I am trying to filter them out
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I think Mario 64 would be a good one - it’s 3D and built for people who have never navigated in 3D before so it doesn’t make any assumptions and still has a sense of wonder and magic to it.
1 Like
jumping up and down excitedly Oh! Oh! Oh! One more, just gimme a sec.
X4 - Free Play. Drop 'em into the 'verse and just let 'em find what appeals to them.
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Lock them in an extremely humid room with two harsh LCD monitors, one displaying NiGHTS into Dreams, and the other displaying Descent. They must control both at the same time. Tell them they won’t be released until they beat both games, but actually release them the first time they ask to use the bathroom. When they come out of the bathroom, you are nowhere to be found, but the LCDs have been replaced with a wood panel CRT, an NES running Kirby’s Adventure, and a box of luxury chocolates. They never see you again.
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My partner played RPGs (mostly PC) and other things, but did not play any action games. Their current progression
Diablo 3 → Diablo 4 → Monster Hunter Wilds → Elden Ring
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I’ve never played a single video game before, but I’d really like to. What should I start with?
“Don’t.”
if they persist, give them Takeshi’s Challenge with assurances that it’s the pinnacle of the medium and nothing else comes close
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Just realized this question is structurally the same as “what one videogame should we recommend to Roger Ebert that will both delight him and convince him games are actually art?”
I think that whole debate showed the question is essentially unanswerable. Or doesn’t need answering, because almost every adult at this point has actually already played a videogame they like (say, Wordle). It just happened not to turn into a hobby spanning many different games, and that’s fine. (For Ebert, the game he already liked was Cosmology of Kyoto.)
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true but… its fun for me to think about
if i was trying to do an Ebert and more specifically show someone an Artsy Game, like if their interest was less in something mechanically intensive and more immediately engrossing, i would pick like, Riven. i would probably have to stop myself from being a big hipster dork and instinctively recommending the original over the remake though lol (but i think the original has aged like a good ale)
if visuals weren’t as important to them as something literate i might go with a classic IF. Like A Mind Forever Voyaging or something by Emily Short (ive always been partial to Metamorphoses)
column A column B pick would be Disco Elysium. i guess that game can be surprisingly mechanically complex but it’s all in service of dialogue and worldbuilding, not like tactical combat or something
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fuckit I take my answer back. New answer is… Baroque for the Saturn.
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People have recommended Disco Elysium to me and I probably have a hundred other things to do before I consider playing it.
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As someone who was hyperbolic in my praise of it when it came out, yeah DE is not that important to play, its merely pretty good after years of really bad adventure games
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roger ebert would have been on board with videogames if he played like dead or alive xtreme 2… rip roger ebert he would have loved DOAX2
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Ebert would’ve loved stellar blade
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Roger Ebert would have changed his tune as soon as Annapurna made its name. He’d be writing pages and pages of exuberant praise for Maquette or some shit like that. There just weren’t enough middlebrow games for him back in the day.
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Ebert would’ve gotten mo-capped for Death Stranding if he were alive today
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Shadow of the Colossus then Dark Souls
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