Let's Talk About Games

I'm not a game developer but if I were to make a game, the only ideas that come to mind seem to be "I'm gonna remake my favorite game but change these things I didn't like about it!" but I heard that's a bad idea usually.

I'm wondering how much change, and to which aspects (gameplay, mechanics, theme, etc), do you think is needed to make a game inspired by something instead of a rip-off?

!askgaming@piefed.social

I have always wanted to make my own neighborhood from scratch as I tend to play Pleasantview but the sort of lots I want to make will make Pleasantview squish. And another factor is majority of pre-made neighborhood are based in America (beside Veronaville as it build as Tudor-style based as the household are based on William Shakespeare' play) which I want to play neighborhood that based around modern Britain as well... I live there.

The only issue I have is:

• How the hell do I make an terrain from SimCity4 where the terrain screams "British suburbia" and not another generic neighborhood. Not wanting to make 1:1 of a real-life town, but just gives off British vibe
• Working out road layout within Sims 2 limitation. Despite you can import .sc4, you can can only use Roads (not Street road, One-way Road etc) and it can't be diagonal, otherwise the game won't render that road. So I had to use the "staircase" method to get rough curve
• For making household, what story would they have as well as their job or if they own a business and which one. For me wanting to open a Salon or anything that sells item beside grocery, it required a Sim to open up a business. It not needed but it makes it more immersive when playing another household and if I feel like they need a haircut, I won't Change Appearance from their mirror and instead take them to salon and pay for haircut.

I might need to try look various places online and use Pinterest which I find alright for planning out the rough aesthetics. I probably should try find other media to get inspiration so feel free to suggest me any which gives me an excuse to take a break from spending HOURS on SimCity4 trying to make both terrain and road layout.

There's something so magical about the old-school Tomb Raider games and I love that feeling of that I have explore all by my own as well as the platforming which felt later games from Tomb Raider Legend streamlined it where I missed that that platforming from A to B was a puzzle to execute.

I tried Tomb Raider 2013 but just felt underwhelm by it and dislike how it where it take/district the controls to make the game "cinematic". Surprised I didn't like as I thought cause I'm a Zoomer, I would like newer games much more compare to the older one.

Any 3D games like Core Design's Tomb Raider that has heavily emphasis on Platforming would be nice to hear as I find it difficult to find game that is identical to Tomb Raider instead of Super Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie. Both great games but completely different to Tomb Raider

!askgaming@piefed.social seems more active

Not so much from me. It’s fun, but I suspect once I’m done I’ll not return to it. But from my four year old daughter. She’s had a passing interest in daddy’s hobby before. With the auto driver on, she can hold interest in few laps of Mario Kart. She liked the execrable Bluey game. Everything else holds no interest.

Until Bananza. Three days straight now, she has asked if she can watch me play the monkey game. Not when I was playing it. At entirely separate times! Tonight, watching five minutes of Bananza was sufficient reward for behaving at bath time. She shrieks with laughter when his eyes turn into bananas. She cheers when I earn a banana. And she offers suggestions for where I might punch to find bananas. She’s totally enraptured and she’s not even the player.

Maybe at some point I’ll show her how to use the second controller function. But for now, it’s just a delight to play the money game with her.

it genuinely is.

I don’t understand why the majority of cozy games have a calendar system and or time limits. I already have a limited time on earth and I don’t want game devs to artificially restrict how I spend time in game.

I have to drop games like Stardew Valley because of the calendar system. I know there is no strict time limits and I can just wait for the following year if I miss an event. But that just makes the game stressful. Also the day/night cycle is extremely quick. Every action I take I have to look at the time and consider the duration.

Similarly in Persona series, why do they have the calendar system and restrict how much you can do with social interactions? When I play an RPG I like to take my time to explore as I want.

I am writing this because I finally found a game that feels cozy, which is Fantasy Life i. No calendar, no time limits, live as many different lives as I want. I prefer games to be games.

For me, I am hoping to see discounts on:

• Steam Deck OLED
• Expedition 33 (probably worth the full price but I am not sure if the timing based combat is for me)
• Fantasy Life i
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle

I love watching game reviews on YouTube, but I find many reviewers sharing these annoyances:

• Loud background music making it difficult to listen to the actual review
• Spending way too much time talking about the story. I only want to know the theme of the story, not the entire plot
• Making it a game tutorial. It is helpful to briefly describe the game mechanics so I can find out whether the game is for me. But it becomes excessive when you explain it in detail.

What I want to hear more:

• Whether the game is good
• How it compares with other games in the genre
• How is the music in the game?

Game channels I like/recommend:
TheKisekiNut, JohnRiggs, MortismalGaming, davidvinc, gameranx, ircha

Can someone recommend other good gaming channels? I especially like retro games.

Could you guys recommend a FPS game similar to CS2 that runs on a modern linux? Decent graphics (essentially GPU support) is of course fundamental, with multiple scenarios and multiplayer? Thanks

The new game releases this week may look a little familiar, but all of them attempt to push their genres or series in new directions. We’ve got a dark game about a plague outbreak where you’re finally a certified doctor instead of someone taking up the job out of necessity; a 33-player action game with large-scale battles that resemble raid fights in an MMO; and a baseball game with — wait for it — a roguelike board game mode.

Oh, and there’s Assassin’s Creed Shadows at the end of the week, with a story set in feudal Japan and a whole base-building system. But that will come after Pathologic 3, which starts the week off with another macabre story of death and decay. Then there’s 33 Immortals, a game where you join up with a whole legion of players trying to survive against hordes of monsters. MLB The Show 25 promises a bunch of new additions to the series, including that roguelike board game mode. And if sports aren’t for you, Reignbreaker is a game that mixes medieval weaponry with a bit of cyberpunk. It argues that your everyday javelins haven’t gone far enough and introduces “motorized” javelins that explode and launch across the screen like a bullet.

Here are our most anticipated game releases for the week of March 17.

Has anyone watched the Secret Level shorts released so far?

Unreal Tournament was a huge nostalgia hit for me and I think the episode was a great interpretation of it. I highly recommend for anyone who played.

The Warhammer 40k episode was also great though I don't have the same kind of investment in the games or media there. The others seemed fairly good for what they are but there's only so much that can fit in a 5-15 minute piece.

Amazon Prime Video link for anyone interested.

I've been playing The Case of the Golden Idol this week and I love how it doesn't pull punches and how I actually have to figure things out without a multiple choice quiz.

A rarely mentioned cute little puzzle game that you might like is called Carto.

What are your favorite mystery/puzzle games that don't spoon-feed you?

Last week, my favoured gaming news site, VGC, asked former US PlayStation boss Shawn Layden whether he thought the pursuit of more powerful consoles was still the way to go for the video games industry. His answer was not what I expected.

“We’ve done these things this way for 30 years, every generation those costs went up and we realigned with it. We’ve reached the precipice now, where the centre can’t hold, we cannot continue to do things that we have done before … It’s time for a real hard reset on the business model, on what it is to be a video game,” he said. “We’re at the stage of hardware development that I call ‘only dogs can hear the difference’. We’re fighting over teraflops and that’s no place to be. We need to compete on content. Jacking up the specs of the box, I think we’ve reached the ceiling.”

This surprised me because it seems very obvious, but it’s still not often said by games industry executives, who rely on the enticing promise of technological advancement to drum up investment and hype. If we’re now freely admitting that we’ve gone as far we sensibly can with console power, that does represent a major step-change in how the games industry does business.

So where should the industry go now?

Asking as the last post here was 21 days ago.

We played through it this weekend. tl;dr: It's funny, about 3-4 hours (or maybe more), and worth the money.

It is incredibly silly, and fantastic for it.
imho, if perfectly captures stupid british humour.

Our favourite moments involved vegan sausage rolls, mysterious sausage holes, and a very friendly mole.

You will also probably be quoting the marrow song for a while.

(And I will just clarify since I'm an admin: I paid for the game, and CoalSupper didn't put me up to this positive mention)

I would gladly pay good money for re-released AC games without any of the modern day Abstergo stuff. Am I the only one? I mean, at the time it was interesting, but the modern day missions now just detract from immersion and are usually crap.

Just me or anyone else?

[Just started replaying Revelations!]

Let's see if this community still is active.

I'm not sure if it's officially agreed upon, but I would say the release of Doom in '93 properly marked the beginning of a golden age of PC gaming. Modern homogenisation and monetisation hadn't set in yet and over the next decade or so the PC gaming landscape would be full of innovation and passion, with a sea of classics being released in that time frame... but when did it end? Was there a specific watershed game that signalled a shift in the landscape?

This topic has been on my mind for a while, because I've pondered on whether there is an open niche for a community dedicated to games of this era. They're not quite at home in Retro Gaming subs, but still old enough now that they might warrant their own corner separate from main gaming spaces.

In all the games I've played (one exception being Half-Life, but that's different) I really don't like using crossbows and avoid doing so at all costs. I don't really know why that is, but to me they don't seem to fit the setting of games like Elder Scrolls or Gothic. I love using regular bows, however. Maybe crossbows feel too modern for me? I don't really know anything about medieval weapons or when they were invented.

What about you? How do you feel about crossbows in these types of games or do you have a similar weird thing you just don't like and refuse to do in video games?

Come one, come all! Got a game that's not AAA (or god forbid AAAA) but you loved anyhow? Welcome to show and tell. Talk about your favorite, why people should play it, and what you love most about it. And yes, I'm aware this may just be end up being 25 comments about stardew valley.

I want to start by recommending Kingdom, a series with relatively simple (but elegant) graphics and side scrolling tower defence style gameplay. It doesn't sound like much but the presentation encourages this beautiful sense of exploration of mechanics. Amos Roddy did the music, which tells you just how much I love the soundtrack I didn't even have to look up his name. There are a few games, but I specifically recommend Kingdom: Two Crowns as it includes co-op and has some nice style options (European, Japanese, and more comprehensive Norse DLC that changes more than looks)

If that's not your speed maybe you'd the better known Stanley Parable. I won't say much on it as it's a fantastically written experience I'd recommend to anyone with a pulse. The less you know going into it the better, and it's very accessible in terms of design because it's largely a (hilarious and witty) walking simulator.

Finally, I'd recommend the Mount and Blade series. Bannerlord is the most recent but it's predecessor, Warband is a very loved game too. Essentially this series drops you into a grounded medieval sandbox world as a character you define, then you just go play. Want to be a merchant and make all the money managing a bunch of stores and contending with the unrest and banditry caused by warring kingdom? You can do that. Want to /be/ that bandit raiding caravans? You can. How about the classic Lancelot experience of being a tournament fighting, seige winning, lady wooing, knightly machine? Absolutely. And better yet, when the king shafts you of that territory you really wanted to be granted you can just rebel and become a king in your own right (long term results and stability of your kingdom may vary by circumstance). It's definitely worth a peek if you haven't looked at any of the games in the series.

And that's what I've got today. Hope you guys have some fun recommendations, stories and anecdotes for trade!