Ads are indeed getting smarter every day

I was seriously considering buying the game on release but after 8 hours of not having fun paying it I’m glad I had GamePass to try it on first.

Just started Dragon Age Origins, I’m still at the tutorial level but it looks like a game I’d enjoy.

You’re listing outliers that did well despite their smaller marketing budget. There are tons of great games from smaller studios that get buried because nobody knows about them.

Basic builder units. You commit genocide against an entire civilization but leave one of these fuckers alive and 20 minutes later you’re facing en entire army.

I hated this in GTA (mainly 3 and SA). You’re doing an escort mission and suddenly 6 guys start shooting at you with AKs from nowhere because you pissed them off in an unrelated quest.

I prefer a Morrowind-like approach where enemies don’t scale and you have to take care not to venture too deep into some crazy gang’s territory early on.

But it’s much much harder to make this work properly, and scaling enemies have become an expectation by players at this point.

I played Milon’s Secret Castle on the NES as a kid. The game is pretty much unplayable if you don’t have an infinite amount of time and patience, or a guide. There are hidden doors and items in unexpected places that are required to make progress, some rooms are dead ends that soft lock you, there are hidden exits that you have to find by pushing on a random pillar etc.

Once I accidentally didn’t push the cartridge in all the way and the game started out in a random room and full of glitches. This lead me down a rabbithole of searching for hidden stuff, maybe even beat the game, but most of the time it just failed to start.

Another one was San Andreas. I played it when it came out and I read online about myths like bigfoot, the meeting place of the Epsilon Program, ghosts in the desert, aliens etc. I must have spent hundreds of hours searching for these.

Youtube had this feature a decade ago, if you pressed the down key while the video was loading you could play Snake.

But seriously, is this like Stadia where you can stream the games or similar to Flash (or itch.io as a more modern example), where the games will run inside the client browser?