I’m a little younger, I grew up playing the NES. I had so much fun and some of my best memories are from playing those games with friends and stuff. But I find it really hard to revisit most of those games based on their own merit.
There is definitely a thing about playing games together with another person that can be magical. And that isn’t gone. You can still do that today with modern games. So in that regard, I don’t think there is anything particularly special about 80s games. Heck, it wasn’t until the N64 that it was common for more than 2 people to be able to play together. A bunch of guys hanging out and all playing a game together was great.
I think losing that is just a factor of growing up. You move on from your friends, maybe you don’t make any new ones, you start mainly playing against faceless strangers online… It’s not a problem with the games, it’s a problem with the players.
It really sucked because Smash Bros is basically the only other big platform fighter on the market. Multiversus was set up to actually be a viable alternative to smash, it was massively popular at first, and they had such an amazing library of characters to pull from. The game had everything going for it. And they just blew it. So badly.
Well, you could play the original Sega Genesis games, since that’s where it all started. You can either download the roms to play on an emulator, or you could probably buy an official release too. The first one is skippable since the sequels basically improve on it in every way. I would at least recommend Sonic 3 and knuckles (it’s a combination of sonic 3 and sonic and knuckles, they were originally going to be one game but got split into 2 games, but through some weird lock on cartridge technology at the time, they could be combined back into one game).
I don’t really feel like going down the rabbit hole of trying a hundred different distros to maybe find one that works. My experiences with those two were that things were completely broken, randomly. Like just trying to boot the USB installer would lock up half the time, the installer itself would fail partway through most of the time, when things got fully installed, trying to update or install new things would just fail randomly. The kde desktop would crash just from me changing settings in the kde menus.
My priorities are being able to run Davinci resolve and Steam games. Nobara ticks those boxes while advertising itself as user friendly. I have heard too many stories of people having trouble getting this stuff running on something like Linux mint, so I didn’t go in that direction. I need to do more with my computer than just view web sites or write code.
A couple weeks ago I attempted to switch over to Linux. Tried installing both Cachyos and Nobara. It was kind of a shit show, nothing worked correctly, stuff was erroring out and crashing left and right, and after a couple days I gave up.
Today I went ahead and installed windows 11. There were some issues… It wouldn’t recognize my CD key, and I accidentally wiped a partition from the wrong drive. But as for the os itself, I spent a few hours getting things set up, and it’s not as horrible as I thought it would be. I was able to simply turn off most of the shit like copilot and recall, and all the advertisements, and I pretty much have it working as I want it to.
I’ve been playing this game ever since beta and have enjoyed it. It’s a shame to see it go, but I guess I got my money’s worth, since I paid nothing. Still, I can’t understand why they can’t just let people keep playing online like every other fighting game out there. I would even be willing to pay a one time fee if I knew the basic gameplay would remain available.
I’ve found that as I got older, my taste in games has narrowed significantly. I used to be able to play pretty much anything, or especially any popular or critically acclaimed games. But these days I just don’t give a shit about most of what’s out there. I do have certain genres and developers that interest me though, so I know there are occasionally going to be some new games that I really like. And every now and then I might get surprised by something too.
Honest question here. I’m not familiar with the game, but you seem to be upset that it offers cosmetic items for sale. One of your proposed solutions is to bundle all of the cosmetic items together and sell it as a DLC. What is the actual difference in those two options? Why does one of them seem acceptable to you while the other does not? They sound like the exact same thing to me.
I don’t really like random battles for the most part, but they are not normally the thing that makes or breaks a game for me, either.
Some of the first jrpgs that I remember handling battles better then the typical final fantasy was Chrono Trigger and Pokemon. In Chrono Trigger, you can typically see the enemies before you have to fight them, though they would often surprise you with enemies that you couldn’t see jumping out. I think that worked much better than just the normal system where if you walk around long enough you get a battle. Then Pokemon has 2 different things that it did. First, for trainer battles, you can see the trainers on screen so you can make sure you are prepared before you go into a fight. Then for the normal battles around the world, it does use random encounters, but they take place ONLY within certain spots, like in tall grass or in a cave. So you still have a lot of freedom to roam around in areas without triggering battles, and when you do go through those spots, you know that a battle could pop up, so you can be ready for it. There are also items you can use to avoid encounters.
For dealing with the annoyance of low level enemies, I think Earthbound had a pretty good system. In Earthbound, it shows you enemies on screen rather than doing random encounters, and once you get to a significantly higher level than the enemies, they will run away from you instead of coming at you, so you are free to just ignore them.
I guess I just don’t see the appeal. If I wanted to interact with an AI, I can do it right now without launching a game to do it. And pointless NPCs are already one of the most annoying parts of games for me. I don’t want to waste my time reading meaningless dialogue from 100 characters trying to find the 1 person who will actually let me advance and continue playing the game. It will be even worse when they are all taking an unlimited stream of shit instead of 1 or 2 canned responses, because it will just be even harder to know who is wasting your time.
For me it’s the NES and N64. While they both have some great games to be sure, I feel that a lot of the games outside of their top 10 simply don’t hold up very well today. These systems were both limited by technical issues and were in eras when developers were still learning what makes a good 2d or 3d game.
For the 25th anniversary of Super Mario Bros, Nintendo released Super Mario All Stars for the Wii. It was just an emulation of the SNES game from years before. It was released for $30 even though you could buy all of the original games on the Wii shop for like $21 total. It just reeked of “We know you’ve already bought these games like 4 times, but please buy them again”. They did do a better job on the 35th anniversary though.
My experience about a year ago. Try to hop into a game and find people complaining about bots and just vote kicking people constantly, then I got vote kicked. Join some more games that vary from people just standing around taunting, to more vote kicking, and everyone wearing stupid looking hats and shit. I used to love the game back in the day, but I gave up on it after a short time, it just felt unplayable.
I think there is a middle ground though. It’s fine to have easy settings to help people get though a game if they want. The online functionality in Mario wonder, and the ability of Yoshis to not take damage are great examples of that. But on the other hand, I also don’t want to just steamroll the game, fully clearing most of the stages in a matter of minutes. How many man hours of work did they put into each of these stages, just for me to blaze through it in 3 minutes and then never look back?
Like I previously mentioned, something as simple as just a time trial mode could give me an actual incentive to go back and enjoy the content a little more.
I’ve had my eye on this for a bit, as the concept of it catches my interest. I got a little confused when I tried the demo though, so I’ve held off on it. I might give it a serious try if it ever comes out of early access.