While I definitely have less time for things like that, I still find time to play some games usually by giving up a little sleep and playing after the kids are asleep and tons of chores have been done. I can’t imagine that you still don’t need some downtime, you can’t just be “on” all the time without it heavily affecting your mental health. I hope that you have simply found other pursuits that do that for you.
I agree with you fully, sadly. I still buy a portion of my games on gog, especially during their seasonal sales, but more “just in case Steam dies” and to give financial support to gog so that they can stick around and keep doing what they are doing. Hopefully they (or a third party like Lutris or Heroic) will eventually get playing gog games on par with Steam.
There are a few specific missions that are indeed stacked against you, but they are important story missions that are like boss fights. You don’t have to play them a specific way to beat them at all, people just get too caught up in playing these games in cookie cutter ways sometimes and now you get site created by AI slop that just regurgitate it.
Disgaea and like are intentionally non-serious and funny. If the humor doesn’t do it for you in the slightest then it’s not for you sadly. I do have to say that once you get hooked on the series, all the other games feel like their mechanics are overly simplistic though.
And no, Tactics Ogre is all serious and very very good.
I guess this is just a difference in how we look at it. I have for decades now used what I perceive as quality/value to decide whether I should buy a game or whether it may be worth if later if it goes on a steep sale. For example, some AAA game that get polarizing reviews or is known to be very short might be an instance where I’d be not be inclined to pay full price because to me, it wasn’t worth the price. Raising the price of a game to $80 means that I personally will want more value out of it. I just bought a game on Steam yesterday for $20 on sale, which was to me worthwhile. If it had been $80, there is no way I would have bought it.
Their https://eshop.thrustmaster.com/en_us/eswap-x2-pro-controller.html model looks good because you can swap out the dpad as well to give it the Playstation layout, but I wish I knew if their dpad was actually good. That is where nearly all third party controllers fail.
Fine, let’s go with BotW was a bad Zelda game and I strongly disliked it. I tried to like it and played all the way through because I was stubborn, but in the end I think it sucked as did my friends (they all quit long before I did). I wish I hadn’t bought it or spent time in it.
Also, I disagree that it changed the open world landscape. H:ZD released before BoTW did, did the open world stuff better (IMO), and still doesn’t seem like it was radically novel at the time other than the story/setting. The only truly novel thing about BotW was that it was open world in a Zelda game.
I’m shocked that BoTW was considered the top game of the 2010s. I felt BoTW was mediocre over all on top of not feeling like a Zelda game at all. As far as open world games, I felt that Horizon: Zero Dawn was more compelling in both gameplay and story and I’m still not sure I’d rank it as a top game of the decade.
The Dead Cells team definitely has the chop to make a great game, even if I feel it won’t be exactly like an Iga game. That being said, they are likely better off not letting Konami swallow them based on how they have treated their previous star developers. (I’m still pissed about how they treated Kojima).
Also thanks for reminding me about their pachinko obsession. I don’t know why it feel so bizarrely amusing to me, but it does. I just hope they can finally get SOTN ported to PC before they go full pachinko.
I think most Atari 2600 games fell into this trap, not just because they tended to have some of the most awesome covers and lacking tech, but some were just awful ports or phoned in licensed games.
I don’t have many specifically coming to mind, but the Raiders of the Lost Ark game had a really cool cover (still does, but also used to), but the game was an impenetrable mess, both visually and from a game play standpoint. It was quite complex though, so maybe there was something interesting beneath the depths that kid me could never figure out.
Ok, I see where you’re going now, but I’m still not sure I agree with you here overall for the genre.
I think the “add tactics” thing is already done to a degree in these games as early enemies in these games tend to be dead simple since players like likely still acclimating to the game, but I suspect that there is only so much you can do before you end up turning later enemies into some sort of frustrating puzzle. Diablo-likes, for better or worse, aren’t generally mind bending affairs, high skill ceiling affairs.
There is definitely room in the genre for more tactical, skill dependent entries, but I not sure the end result would be as fun for most people as that would be a fundamentally different type game. Hey, maybe I am wrong and this would lead to some sort of souls-like Diablo game where skill and learning are all that matters and items and character building are far less important. Come to think of it, that sounds a lot like Hades in a way.
I’ll be honest here, the theme/vibe put me off enough that I never bothered to download the demo. I’ll give it a shot to see if it is as good as the steam reviews are making it out to be, but the devs need to consider than a couple hundred very positive reviews on a platform with many tens of millions of players doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get financial success. It could be that the unconventional theme/graphics and novel/unfamiliar gameplay can be a tough sell.
I found that I can’t just start and stop reading and get anything out of it in the same way that I can’t just start and stop a game, but that’s good that you can.