Honest question: if the story doesn’t matter that much to you, what do you value in a game?

If it is clear that the topic is Impressionist art, I would not go. If I buy the ticket to see Expressionism and get Impressionism instead, I would fell upset.

(Actually, I’d go either way, I love art)

Regarding difficulty: I’ve lived through the 80’s, where difficulty was ramped up to make the game last longer, as you only had precious few kilobytes to fill with content. I’ve grown to hate difficult games.

It is your right as creator to go that way if you wish, but it is my right as player to hate your guts if I buy your game and it kills me over and over again in the first minutes.

One factor they don’t seem to consider is that they are competing for a finite resource: consumer attention.

There has never been so much content to consume: not only games, movies, series, music, books, podcasts, and even old games.

New games have to compete with and stand above all that content to justify the price.

As others have said, purchase power is down, people subscribe to more services (net, mobile, streaming music and video), all that bites into the available budget to buy games.

Bottom line: it’s getting hard to justify spending that amount on a game you don’t have time to play.

Only nerds and dweebs and losers play single player games.

Some people actively avoid multiplayer games to avoid obnoxious, entitled kids.

Thank you, I’ll give it another try.

I stopped playing because it is a bit too hard for me. I keep getting killed by spiders. Maybe I’ll give it another go.

I was very happy with The Print Shop. You could print huge signs and banners by stitching smaller pages together. Fun times.

To me it is the inverse of socializing. It’s an escape to a world where I don’t have to deal with people.

Faraway 1, 2 and 3.

Really chill first person puzzle game.

There was the Homebrew Channel back then, but it seemed to have gone offline. I assumed people just lost interest and moved on.

Based on what you said I did a quick search and found that there’s still an active community around the console, so thank you!

I’m updating my Homebrew Browser to see what’s new.

Any platform that restricts how and what I can run in it has inherently less value to me. This is why I mostrly avoided consoles all my life.

The only console I bought was the original Wii. The games were extremely expensive, and they disabled all the services that made the console useful after a few years (weather channel, news channel, store).

Fortunately I added a few SNES, PCEngine, Genesis/Megadrive and Gamecube emulators otherwise I would now have a very pretty white doorstop.

The Halo series.

I like shooters, so I got the full bundle and I tried hard to like it.

None of the games gave me a lasting impression. The plot didn’t stick with me, the enemies were weird, the guns felt weak and flimsy, the rooms kept repeating in some sections and it got very boring. There were some fun bits with the vehicles, etc., but overall the experience was… pretty much average.

I was expecting something like the Half-Life series, but this wasn’t it.

Well, for starters, games are going to get more expensive.

That is their prerogative. Mine is not buying overpriced games.

Now that you put it like that, I think what puts me off is all the melee and glory kills. Not my cup of tea. I need my social distancing from hellspawn. That, and the puny amounts of ammo. When I play a boomer shooter, I want to shoot. If I wanted melee, I’d play Mortal Kombat or something.

Different tastes.

The simplicity, artwork and playability appeals to me.

Finally installed Doom 2016. It’s nice, but the gameplay is not clicking with me.

I’ve sunk nearly 800 hours on it.

Good luck.

Thanks for the warning.

I have the original Talos plus the DLC and love it but I’ll wait some years until I have the iron to run the remaster.

I never uninstall it, in fact I have several copies: Steam, GOG…

I guess so.

The first two (mainly the first) had that special something you get in indie games.

Torchlight and Torchlight 2 are great games and even have mods available.

I hear 3 and Infinite are not, though.

I’ve been online since the time my modern had to scream at my phone line and this is the first time I encountered that particular TLA.

Amen.

Here are the ones that don’t get uninstalled from my potato box:

• Sable

• Ion Fury

• Torchlight

• Ziggurat

• Baba Is You

• Edritch

• Fez

• Plunge

• Valley

• Into The Breach

• Journey

(Disclaimer: some are very old, some may not be indie, eh, I did my best.)

I played this two weeks ago and it still rocks.

The first and only console I bought was the original Wii. Games were expensive so I did not have many. I managed to install a few emulators and use it for older console emulation.

After some years they started pulling the plug on the online services. That’s when I decided I would never buy another console again. I will not feed any more walled gardens. I have more games than I can play on my PC, a lot of them are DRM free.

Finally, someone who understands my pain. Thank you for the insights.

I loved Black Mesa up to this point. They turned Gonarch into a RPG sponge in an arena full of hard to avoid clutter which makes it nearly impossible to dodge the attacks.

I think upscaling is a good idea. Most of the time I’m running around while dodging bullets, arrows or fireballs, so I don’t really have time to examine the details of the foliage around me at the pixel level. I also will not buy an overpowered space heater so that the grass in my game looks more realistic. I don’t want a triple fan monster sounding like a turbojet near me.

Thanks, that’s nice to know in case I decide to get a VR headset in the future.

It’s both financial (huge investment for a single game) and not. Playing with a thing strapped to your face does not sound fun. Especially with glasses. Or in the summertime. Plus I’m a Linux gamer, so I’d probably run into a lot of issues before I could run it.

Good luck guys, do let us know how it turned out.

I discovered Brutal Wolfenstein (a Doom II mod that replicates and enhances Wolfenstein 3D) so I’ve been slaughtering nazi scum for a while.

This is the way.

Thank you for the first link, kind stranger.

Looks like PatientGamers’ membership numbers will be on the rise soon.

Journey.

I have over 700 games waiting on Steam, over 300 on Heroic… I’m not buying any other game until I get that backlog down.

Playing some smaller, chill games: The Unfinished Swan and Sludge Life.

Heroic launcher. This is what you need, my friend.