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Sure, though you don’t need a state of the art PC to play 90% of the games ever made. These days I play a lot of my games on an old 3DS (hacked to the gills)!
I also have a huge steam library of games, many of which I bought for next to nothing in huge bundles during past sales. Many of them I still haven’t played! They would run fine on a 10 year old PC though.
Gaming is cheaper than ever. Just don’t buy new games. I haven’t bought a new AAA game in decades. There are thousands and thousands of games you can play for free or nearly free.
It’s like music. You can listen to lifetimes worth of music for free or nearly free. The only expensive thing is going to some fancy concert and giving a ton of money to Ticketmaster.
They are for marketing but not in the obvious way. Achievements really exist to tell game developers what parts of their game people are actually playing. Sure, some obscure achievements may be very hard to get and thus not tell them anything useful, but a lot of games have super basic checkpoint “achievements” like “start the game for the first time” or “play through the first level.”
With enough of these, a game developer can tell what parts of their game were entertaining and engaging and what parts were not. Sometimes this information can be used to decide how to improve the game. Other times it may only be useful as a lesson for future games (by that developer) to learn from.
Don’t get me wrong, I love GOG, but I love the Internet archive and projects like ScummVM and DOSBox (as well as all the console and arcade emulators). These are long-term projects carrying the torch of preservation of all these classic games.
After countless Golden Age Hollywood films were lost, I don’t want to see the same thing happen to video games.
Make sure to use ScummVM to play it! DOSBox is a great way to play a lot of classic PC games but ScummVM is better for any games it supports. This is because ScummVM is a modern engine that runs old adventure games which are written as scripts that run on an interpreter. This beats running an old engine on DOS through DOSBox!
For the game itself I recommend the Internet archive! You can find it as part of the ExoDOS collection or standalone!
I think it’s a personality based thing. The clock interacts with a person’s natural tendencies in a way that causes constant pressure and stress. These folks need to be away from clocks in order to relax. They see SDV’s rather rapid daily clock as a fatal flaw in a game that should otherwise be quite relaxing.
I don’t play AAA games anymore (haven’t in years) but I still feel somewhat sympathetic to their plight. What has happened to them is the same thing that happened in the music industry and the film industry and a long time ago in the book publishing industry.
The marketplace is too crowded with quality stuff and so it’s extremely difficult to compete with what’s already out there. The only real answer is to take massive risks and hope you can hit a home run. Unfortunately, AAA studios just like big movie studios aren’t set up to take risks anymore. They’re set up to spend a huge amount of money on a project that’s supposed to be guaranteed to succeed. Indies can survive more easily in this space because they’re small so they can take more risks.
It’s like the dinosaurs after the asteroid impact. The big ones are dying off and the tiny ones are surviving and will eventually become birds. Or something I dunno!
The problem with these games is ranked online multiplayer. Back in the arcade days no one knew the damn frame timings. People just played and had a good time with each other in person. Console ports brought that experience home so you could enjoy it with friends and family, without needing a roll of quarters. No one had any issues with anxiety over these games because you were just hanging out with friends playing a game together. Sometimes you won, sometimes you lost. If your brother’s Ryu was too good, you just challenged him to beat you with a different character.
Online ranked play takes all that away. It makes the competition serious even if you don’t want it to be. Now you’re always being matched up against an equally skilled opponent playing their best character. You never feel like you’re making progress because every match is tough as nails. For people who thrive on competition, that’s great. For everyone else it really sucks!
It’s really critical for me, to have it feel good.
Daggerfall also had this issue with missing but you could get your accuracy up a lot more easily and then you’d hit pretty much every time. The graphics of Daggerfall are of course much less advanced than Morrowind but the “thwack” sounds in DF feel chunkier and heavier, and the simple animations have an abruptness to them that really works for the game. It’s quite strange but combat just feels better to me in Daggerfall than Morrowind.
Of course Morrowind has the far better atmosphere, music, worldbuilding, exploration and all that. DF has the truly gargantuan dungeons though!
I just didn’t like hit chance being a thing in a first person melee game. At all. If my sword connects with the enemy then it should be a hit. When the game decides to roll a miss it makes the game feel broken. It’s like clicking an icon on your computer and it not opening up. Then you click again and it opens. If it’s just randomly not opening it feels broken and unreliable!
Well for him, thousands of people is basically nothing. Skyrim has sold over 60 million copies.
One of the problems with growth in popularity is a growth in expectations. A Morrowind remaster that sold even 1 million copies would be considered a failure.
If they revisit Morrowind, they need to go ALL IN on it. Keep the setting and themes but redo everything else. I love Morrowind as a world to get lost in but the combat gameplay in particular is quite bad, possibly the low point of the entire Elder Scrolls franchise.
I enjoy the combat in Oblivion, Skyrim, AND Daggerfall more than Morrowind, simply due to the feel of weapons connecting with enemies. Daggerfall probably feels the best, due to the crunchiness of it and the way you can do different types of swings in rapid succession.
The exploration stuff in Morrowind is just amazing though. Some of the dungeons are like Russian dolls of awesomeness! Also just love the music. So relaxing!
Slop falls to the bottom but I bet a lot of hidden gems do too. The greater volume of games coming out, the harder it’ll be for individual developers to get recognized!
Old school indie developer Jeff Vogel has a whole talk about how difficult it is.
You don’t have to have nostalgia for the game to appreciate how wonderfully crafted and expansive it is. It has one of the best soundtracks of any game, period, and its art is highly detailed and numerous. It has a ton of secrets (including one MAJOR secret) and a couple of extra game modes that enhance the replayability.
I would say the game seems to get better every time I play it. Is that nostalgia or something else? There are a lot of games I played before I had ever seen SOTN, yet I don’t feel the same desire to keep replaying them. I think it’s like a piece of classical music or a great movie. The more you replay it, the more details you come to appreciate. The original Deus Ex is like that for me as well.
The deeper thing they have in common is that they’re all products which follow power law distributions based on popularity. Popular items get more exposure by word of mouth than unpopular or unknown items. That exposure leads to even more popularity which results in exponential takeoff.
Thus you can have a music industry where Taylor Swift can make a billion dollars on one tour while millions of other musicians languish in total obscurity.
Yeah. The same thing has happened in the music world, the book world, and even the movie world.
YouTube lowered the barrier to entry to basically nothing if you want to publish your own movie. Getting millions of people to watch it, even completely for free, is very difficult. Almost all of the videos out there with millions of views were published by people who were already well known (even if they grew their fanbase directly on YouTube).
Music is probably fairly similar to movies in that you can publish easy on YouTube and then direct everyone to your Bandcamp site to buy music from you.
The book world is probably hardest to crack. There are so many authors out there and it’s very easy (from a technical standpoint) to publish your own book. Writing a book a lot of people want to read and getting people to read it is a totally different matter!
Here’s the key thing to realize with deck builders: every card you take reduces the number of times you’ll see every other card in your deck by a small amount. It’s so easy to fall into the trap of “this looks useful, I’ll take it” over and over again.
The best decks in Slay the Spire have 5 or fewer cards and they go infinite in on turn 1. Of course in most runs you don’t have the opportunity to create a deck like that. Instead, you want to think about what the core of your deck is right now. Think “if I could remove as many cards as I want right now, what sort of broken thing could I do with the rest?” If your deck can’t do anything broken even after all those removals, then see if adding a card would change that.
If your deck can do something broken after removing all those other cards, and none of the reward cards on offer would change that, why take them?
There are many opportunities to remove cards throughout a run. Take them as much as you can. Try to get rid of as many filler cards as possible. Strikes and defends, for example, have no business being in your deck at the end of the game.
Ironclad, being the first character you can play in StS, is meant to teach you this concept (he also teaches you other concepts, such as health being a resource). He has a number of cards that exhaust other cards and he can frequently build into a deck that’s capable of exhausting down to a winning core. Try playing an exhaust based ironclad and see what you can do with an eye towards creating a broken core.
Of course. But that’s often a sign of bad game design. Difficulty should follow a smooth curve. Enormous difficulty spikes are what you expect from old games in the 80s.
But there’s also an element to mastery that gamers seem to completely neglect: downtime. I finished my math degree a couple of years ago and throughout that entire process I got stuck on math assignments thousands of times. Bashing my head against a wall trying to solve the problem right now rarely worked. I had much better success putting the pencil down and coming back to the problem later, after a period of downtime.
Since graduating I’ve been revisiting a lot of old NES games that I never finished growing up because they were too difficult. Since I’m busy with work I don’t have a ton of time to play every day. This forced downtime actually has the benefit of getting me to think and reflect on my approach, just as I would expect it to!
I think the runback is important to give you time to think. You can repeatedly attempt a difficult section of a game with a ton of checkpoints and get through it without actually learning it properly. You essentially get lucky that your hands do the right thing just enough to get by.
Imagine going to a piano recital where the person keeps messing up and repeating a difficult passage of the music, never actually being able to play the entire thing without making a mistake! That’s just not very impressive!
The goal of playing a difficult game should be to improve your skills and get better, figure out new strategies and use them in battle, not merely reach the end.
Nintendo’s always been litigious and controlling of their brand. What they haven’t been (until recently) is price-gouging peddlers of derivative schlock resting on their laurels. They used to be afraid of low-quality games and rehashes diluting their brand (they witnessed the carnage of 1983). Now they just don’t care.
Well the other thing is that design work doesn’t scale the way art does. You can’t throw 1000 game designers at a project and expect them to create a coherent game design.
So you end up with one or a small team of game designers and they need to get the major parts of the design done early since everyone else follows from that. This leaves you with so little room for experimentation that you end up with a cookie cutter game design.
You won’t get that from AAA studios: that’s largely indie territory today.
The issue with creating novel and interesting gameplay is that it’s not a straight-line process. It takes a lot of experimentation and failure. That doesn’t match with the large teams and assembly-line process of AAA game development.
An indie game developer, especially one who just works on the game in their free time but otherwise has a day job, is 100% free to experiment and redo their game design hundreds of times. Often this doesn’t mean throwing the game away but instead making lots of small games for game jams or just to build a portfolio of projects.
Couple that with the fact there aren’t nearly as many AAA studios as there are indie game developers working on hobby projects and you can see why AAAs are at such a disadvantage when it comes to experimenting with novel and innovative game designs. Indie game don’t need to all be successful to make it hard on AAAs: out of thousands of indie games only one needs to be successful.
Yeah I don’t hate Valve fans at all. I have a Steam account myself with a decent library that I play on my laptop.
I had no clue whatsoever about the hacked 3DS ecosystem until my friend basically dragged me into it by buying the consoles (refurbished actually)! Once I started learning about the scene I really got impressed with what the small homebrew community accomplished. In addition to emulators and some homebrew games, there are also a number of utilities in the scene. You can run an FTP server on the hacked N3DS and just bulk copy over files via wifi rather than having to pull the microSD card and sneakernet it to your PC. There’s also a program called universal updater which is a package manager of sorts that makes it easy to download and install emulators and other apps quite easily.
Of course none of this is as smooth and convenient of an experience as installing Steam games would be on a Steam deck, though I’m sure if you’re into emulators you’ll have to use other tools to get those installed anyway.
My friend and I are currently playing through some classic NES RPGs which we’d previously overlooked. The N3DS has pretty good battery life, lasting about 10-12 hours on a full charge; far more battery life than I have time to spend gaming in a day anyway (due to my job). The standby time is good but not great, knocking off maybe about 10% battery per day while sleeping. Lastly, a big plus for me is that replacement batteries are available through iFixit. I bought 2 of them and the install process is very easy (just a couple of screws and you’re in).
My hope is that iFixit will continue to make replacement batteries available long term. That could potentially allow my N3DS to last decades into the future, barring premature capacitor failure or some unfortunate accident.
I think the N3DS really shines as a dedicated older emulator (NES/SNES/SEGA/GBC/GBA) machine and it may be very hard to beat if you’re like me and prefer those older games. For newer games, especially PC games of the last decades or PS2/GameCube/Wii/Switch emulators, the N3DS is just not an option. I am looking forward to playing the Majora’s Mask remaster (written specifically for the 3DS) however!
The one I have is called the “New Nintendo 3DS XL” and it has a much faster CPU (804MHz Arm 11) compared to the original 3DS (268MHz Arm 11). While the CPU difference doesn’t matter for running DS or 3DS games (apart from a handful of games written specially for the New 3DS) it makes a big difference running the more intensive emulators (such as the PS1).
When I got mine it had the very last version of the 3DS operating system installed (Nintendo still maintains the update servers even though the eshop is shut down). Yet the instructions for the hack were easy enough to follow and I had no trouble getting up and running.
The Steam deck is an attractive option too though. The main reason I got into the 3DS is because my friend bought 2 of them and gave one to me so we could both do the hack and play lots of games and discuss them. I think the main reason to really prefer a 3DS comes down to form factor: if you really like the folding case, the stylus, and the dual screen setup (which really shines for many games in the massive DS/3DS library) then you’re not gonna get an optimal experience with the single-screen Steam Deck. I think in particular the stylus really matters for puzzle games which demand higher tap precision than you can comfortably achieve with a fingertip.
It’s hard for me to imagine anyone buying brand new AAA games these days. Between the huge back catalogues of previous gen consoles as well as the PC and the insane prices for new AAA games which don’t innovate very much anymore, I can’t see much reason spend that kind of money.
I have a hacked New Nintendo 3DS and it can basically run every console emulator up to and including PS1 as well as natively run GBA, DS, and 3DS games. The library for the thing is enormous and with a 128GB microSD card you can store a ton of stuff on it.
Oh and it can also run DOSBox and SCUMMVM games though I haven’t tried them so I can’t vouch for the play experience. I should think the stylus would make a decent mouse replacement but I’m not sure how well it works in practice. Arcade-style DOS games that use the keyboard only (Duke Nukem, Crystal Caves, Commander Keen) should work great though!
Sure, we know loot boxes are bad because they exploit the psychology of gambling. But what about Steam sales? They’re exploiting FOMO, hoarding/collecting psychology. We know that Steam users are buying billions of dollars worth of games they never play.
Remastering and remaking an existing game is much easier than making a new game that’s actually good. Why do you think so many AAA companies have become obsessed with remakes and remasters? They’ve lost the creative talent to be able to make brand new hit games. And they’re too risk-averse to even try!
If you want new games that are actually good and innovative, your best bet is indie games. Indie games are more innovative and less risk-averse, operating on a sink-or-swim model (many separate indie game devs all competing).