I don’t know if you’re asking sarcastically or not, but I’d mention Divinity 2, Baldur’s Gate 3, Witcher 3, and those are just the most popular/universally acclaimed. I feel all three of them offer the same sense of adventure and exploration in an open world map, with actually interesting side content, engaging combat system, and voice acting that doesn’t scream “we’re being held in the recording room against our will, please save us”. They are also relatively bug-free, or at least not broken the way Bethesda titles are.

Back in the days, I think Gothic had the same clunky gameplay but at least offered a much deeper worldbuilding and more interesting choices.

You can also widen the search by changing the parameters. The thing that sets Oblivion apart is that it attempted to do a lot of things, but everything is either shallow, poorly executed, or outright bugged. If you take a look at other titles that did some of the things Oblivion did, there are countless that executed those ideas a lot better. Fable 2, Dragon Age, Avowed for example, and again, I’m only mentioning the most famous ones.

I’m honestly surprised that so many people longed to return to Oblivion. The game’s as bad now as it was 20 years ago - janky combat, horrible dialogue, bugs galore. They gave it a nice coat of paint, but the moment you transition from dialogue to gameplay, you go back to the same animations from the original game. It’s kind of eerie looking at a game with modern graphics and such dated gameplay.

There are so many games nowadays that do what Oblivion attempted to do, so much better.

It’s not my cup of tea, so I can’t speak by experience, but a friend of mine tried WEBFISHING and loved it.

Cool to see an indie game from a new studio getting so much praise.

Obligatory “I’m not American”. I’m a bit confused by this. Can anyone sue the president over an official act? Is that a thing? Didn’t the Supreme Court basically say that he could walk outside, shoot a bystander, go back home and face no consequences?

As far as I know, lawsuits that involve rich/powerful individuals and another side with way less cash than them is to just postpone the hearing or drag it on long enough for the poorer side to give up or go bankrupt. Even if it actually succeeded, suing the president is something that could be escalated until it gets picked up by the currently right-leaning supreme court, isn’t it?

Yeah, under 50% of the required signatures and it’s just a few weeks from expiring, there’s no chance this will succeed unless some big-name influencer gathers support for the petition, which at this point I doubt will happen.

It made some people talk about the problem, though. That’s a step in the right direction.

PugJesus and The_Picard_Maneuver are single-handedly keeping half of Lemmy afloat.

I agree. In the days immediately following the APIcalypse, people attempted to move all their favourite niche communities to Lemmy, but the site’s active userbase isn’t there yet for that kind of content - much to my displeasure: I was only active in two/three niche communities back when I was a Reddit user, but they are pretty much nonexistent here, so I’m forced to include more generic communities in my Lemmy feed to keep it from drying up.

Oh, that’s sad. No point in staying subscribed, then.

https://sffa.community/c/sffgaming?dataType=Post&page=0

Sffagaming is for sci-fi games, but I haven’t seen a post in there in a while.

https://lemm.ee/c/the_talos_principle?dataType=Post&page=0

https://lemmy.world/c/residentevil?dataType=Post&page=0

Communities for Talos Principle and Resident Evil, but again, they aren’t active.

https://lemm.ee/c/gamemusic?dataType=Post&page=0

Community for sharing game music. Not very active, but I see posts in my feed every now and then.

https://retrolemmy.com/c/TipOfMyJoystick?dataType=Post&page=0

Fairly new community to help people looking for a specific name they forgot the name of.

Sorry for not sharing the generic link, I’m on mobile and that’s the link my app generates when I click on “share”.

Absolutely, iii was my most anticipated showcase this year and they delivered big time. Katana Zero DLC was the highlight for me, but I got two more wishlists from the rest of the video as well.

Last year’s showcase was good, but this one blew my mind. I’m already counting the days for next year’s.

The showcase itself is 1 hour long, the rest is interviews/devs commentary for some of the games.

I’m so happy I could die. Big props to the developer for making it free. I’m gonna buy the game again regardless.

Dying Light had a mediocre story and repetitive gameplay, but the parkour mechanic was what made it interesting in the long run. Jumping around and climbing stuff was so satisfying.

As for side scrollers, Ori might not be the most difficult platformer I’ve ever played, but it certainly was the most fun, thanks in no short part to the fluid and dynamic movement of the main character. The camera is also very wide, to allow you to see the road ahead clearly, which is not something that all platformers do right, surprisingly enough.

I don’t blame them. Nintendo fans buy anything at any price. I don’t see it being different this time.

Mario Kart 8 never goes on sale and sold 70m copies; Pokémon Scarlet/Violet sold 30m despite looking and playing like dogshit; they sold Skyward Sword HD, the remaster of a 10-yo game, at full price and still placed a few millions.

Nintendo is basically like Apple at this point, the brand is enough to convince people to spend more than they would for the competition, regardless of quality. I personally know a lot of people who loudly groaned/complained at the price announcement, but will still buy it day one, just like they always had in all these years.

And people terminally online should stop pretending the Steam Deck is competition to the Switch 2. It couldn’t even compete with the Switch 1, which was five years older, had worse performance, and had been easily emulated for years at that point.

Not much to say but this is the usual comment to thank you for your wonderful posts.

Enjoy Rome! Be sure to try our Carbonara at some point! :P

A subscription seems like the exact opposite of what GoG stands for. I buy a game, I own it forever. How does a subscription improve that?

I’m not well versed in finance. Is this good news for Ubisoft or bad news?

Yeah, community-made Pokemon games really hit some heights in recent years. Too bad Nintendo is so opposed to the homebrew scene.

I had lots of fun with Pokémon Odyssey last year, patiently waiting for the final update that should come this year as well. As I said, 2025 is packed!

Between this update, the new Digimon Story game and LumenTale, looks like this year will be packed for monster collector enthusiasts.

And Pokémon, I guess, but I lost interest in that franchise years ago.

So sad about GoG’s revenue drop. It’s my store of choice and I genuinely find it more unintrusive than Steam, but if it keeps going like this, I wonder how long it will exist. Hopefully they manage to turn things around.

I really liked GI and i was saddened by their closure. Quality journalism (gaming and elsewhere) is dying, substituted by AI slop, paid influencers and clickbait articles.

Hopefully a few of the good ones remain. This is a step in the right direction.

The answer to that question depends on your tastes, your current situation (amount of free time, mood, etc…) and many more. There’s no such thing as the “best” when it comes to a subjective piece of media.

I can’t even decide on my favourite game, because what I like and what I want to play depends on the aforementioned factors. I may be interested in a strong narrative today, on puzzles tomorrow, and on a crazy platformer game next. Different games resonate with me differently depending on when I play them.

Games that really stayed with me are (in no particular order) Xenogears, Metal Gear Solid, CrossCode, Digimon World, Oddworld Abe’s Odyssey, Ace Combat 4-6, The Talos Principle, Ori and the Blind Forest, Threads of Fate, and I also spent a crazy amount of hours on Stronghold, Advance Wars: Days of Ruin and Medieval II Total War. There’s, like, at least half a dozen different genres in that list and all those games are very different from one another, but all had different qualities that resonated with me for one reason or the other.

I don’t think I agree. I feel like the game is so short and incomplete that you can see everything it has to offer by playing it for 10 minutes - or watching a YT gameplay.

The game has one map, no collisions, no AI. I think I remember it having different playable “rigs” but they are mechanically the same, so there’s no point.

At least with a game like Oblivion you could play it for 20 years and still find new ones. Big Rigs doesn’t have near the same “energy”.

Fun fact, Ace Combat 5 has a similar “going at ludicrous speed” bug (We have to go faster, We have to go even faster), but it also has an entire (actually good) playable game attached to it.

This feels like the Morbius re-release. Big Rigs is (in)famous for being one of the worst/most broken games ever made, who in their right mind would pay for it?

Quite the big step for gaming rights in the EU. In the last page, the document also mentions “whales” as “vulnerable people”, adding that a game targeting them specifically may run afoul of EU legislation when precaution are not taken to protect them from their impulses.

This may have a gigantic ripple effect in the industry – or it may not, if the industry decides that targeting whales in the US and China is more profitable than bowing to the EU.

It’s always a brighter day when I can wake up and read your gaming rants :)

The soundtrack is fine. It works very well in its context and I still hum some of its tones every now and then, but that’s mostly it imo. The end credits song is one of the best end themes I’ve ever heard in a videogame, though.

Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross and Xenogears are the holy trinity of JRPGs for me. Every fan of the genre should play them at least once in their lives.

2025 is the year of the X360. First the decomp tools, now this. Maybe we can even expect a serious attempt at emulating the system on PC? Xenia is still not good, unfortunately.

I’ll be honest, it doesn’t just “look like Advance Wars”. It looks like a rip-off. I love AW but I wish they went with a more original art style, like Wargroove did.

From the glimpses of the battle system, graphics and animations are truly insane. Incredible work from the devs.

About the GoG store’s second class treatment: it’s always worth it to email the publisher and ask them if they plan on updating their game on GoG!

I did exactly that a few months ago when I wanted to buy I was a teenage exocolonist - emailed Finji and let them know that their game was not up to date on the platform I wanted to buy the game on. They replied rather quickly and the game was updated a few days later. It was very nice because the game was on sale and, thanks to their quick reply, I was able to not miss the sale.

Still waiting for MS to do something right this whole generation.

AI techbros will have you believe that you can solve world hunger, cure cancer, and colonize Mars with a few prompts on ChatGPT.

Yet their AI is still incapable of answering two prompts consecutively without making shit up, or drawing a human without turning it into an eldritch abomination.

Game preservation could be fixed with open source emulators and fixing copyright laws so that I’m allowed to download a game nobody has profited from in two decades, but that’s not appealing to big corporations.

*Upcoming update for console insiders

Insiders may get bugs because that’s what the insider program is for.

Mildly surprised to see another installment in this series after all these years, but I’m pretty excited.

For those who don’t know, Styx is a AA stealth game where you play as a goblin assassin (the titular Styx). It spawned as a spin off of another fantasy game (Of orcs and men) where you played as both the goblin and an orc warrior, which was unfortunately a bit too janky for my tastes.

The focus on stealth of the following installments really benefitted the series, imo. While they still carry a bit of janky-ness (as many AA titles do), they are nevertheless a lot of fun! The story in the first one was very good as well. I still haven’t finished the second one, so I can’t comment much on it.

The first two games are also currently discounted on Steam and GoG ($2 for the first one and $3 for the second), and I think they are very much worth that much.

If you kind of liked the XIII games, I highly recommend Lighting Returns. Time limits make me deeply anxious but that game’s timer is VERY generous, especially because you can stop time pretty much forever. I 100% my first run in, like, four days out of thirteen.

The story is wacky as hell (I honestly didn’t care much after XIII-2), but gameplay’s solid and exploration is fun.

As for the last question, I think that they should go back to their roots. They pivoted away from the JRPG genre with each title, but recent successes from similar games (such as Persona 5 in the AAA department, and Sea of Stars in the indie category) proved that people still crave a more traditional turn-based system.

I really enjoyed Tunic for the same reason as you! It has nice and cozy vibes but manages to challenge the player without ever feeling too cheap or overwhelmingly difficult, in both combat and puzzles. I really was reminded of old-school gaming, in a good way.

The only thing I disliked is how cryptic the last few puzzles were, to the point that I doubt the vast percentage of the player base would be able to figure them out without resorting to a guide. I certainly wasn’t. I love puzzle games and I love games like Talos Principle and Crosscode. I guess I just didn’t like how meta-gamey some of the solutions (and the reward for the puzzles) were.

PS. Another great post and the formatting is excellent. Congrats!

As a fellow enthusiast with an obsessive-compulsive drive to write about my hobbies (not necessarily video-game related, but quite similar) i know that these things take a while to write, especially when you take the time to format everything correctly, link the sources, etc.

So I wanted to echo the others here and say that I really appreciate your work here. It was a fun way to start my day, and I’m looking forward to your next post :)