!olleH
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I love that game. I think it’s the only game that presents dissociation and “functional depression” if that is even a phrase. There is a feeling of an unreliable narrator, but not to the extent of outright lies or hallucinations. Just everything looks out of place, disgusting, ugly and stupid.
Playing the game I feel like I am pretending to be functional in a world I despise, among people I find disgusting or irrelevant.
It’s something.
Atrio: The Dark Wild - has you control a clone with a limited life span. When you die and resume from a new clone, the old clone corpse is lying around and you can harvest it for parts necessary to continue the story.
Sifu - when you “die” your character ages and gets stronger before trying again.
Karateka - plays a lot like a regular game with lives, but it’s not the same life. Every time you have to resume from a new life, it’s a different person attempting to get to the end.
Shadow of Mordor - when you are killed by an orc, you resurrect from a spirit. The orc, however, gets high-fives from all his mates and gets promoted, plus some new skills. Next time you see him he will call you out.
Hades - the entire story is based around you repeatedly failing and dying.
Super Meat Boy - well basically you die and restart, but when you finally beat the level, you get an instant replay with all your failed attempts simultaneously playing on top of it. The effect is more glorious the more you struggled to beat the level.
Procession to Calavry is a point-and-click adventure game tagged as “medieval” and “dark comedy” which is spot on.
The Longing is a pretty experimental game about waiting. You can win the game by waiting 400 hours, or you can go for one of the alternative endings, all of them needing a lot of waiting around.
Return of the Obra Dinn is a game you should take your time in. Explore. Ponder. Explore. Ponder. It has been compared to filling in crosswords.
Ittle Dew is a puzzle game with a Zelda-ish style and cute punk comedy presentation.
One Finger Death Punch 2 makes you feel the way super cool martial arts fights scenes look.
Longtermism is a cardboard halo. A thin excuse to act in complete self-interest while pretending it is good for humanity.
The further into the future we try to think, the more different factors and uncertainty dominate. This leaves you room to put in any argument you feel like, to make any prediction you feel like. So you pick something vaguely romantic or appealing to some relatively popular opinion, and hey you’re golden.
I am approached by a beggar. What do I - the longterminist - do?
I feel like being kind today. My longterminist argument is that every bit of happiness and relief today carries compound interest into the future, and by giving this person some money today, they are content and don’t have to resort to thievery, which again makes another person have a safe day and have mental energy to do a lot of good tomorrow. The goodness becomes bigger every step, over time. I give them $100. It’s pretty obvious, really.
They smell and I don’t want to deal with that right now. My longterminist argument is that helping out beggars actually just perpetuates a problem in society. If people can’t function in society without random help, it’s just a ticking bomb of a humanitarian disaster. Giving them money just postpones the time until the crisis is too big to ignore, and allows it to grow further. No, this is a problem that society needs to handle right now, and by giving money to this person I’m just helping the problem stay hidden. I ignore them and walk on by. It’s pretty obvious, really.
My wife left me and I want other people to hurt like I do. My longterminist argument is that unfortunately, these people are rejects of society and I can’t fix that. But we can prevent them from harassing productive citizens that work hard to create a better future. If fewer beggars make commuters sad and it gives a 1% improvement in productivity, that’s a huge compound improvement in a few hundred years. So I kick him in the leg, yell at him, and call the police on him and say he tried to assault me. It’s a bit cold-hearted, but it’s obviously good long term.
Software Developer pro tip: Never ever get involved in any effort to rebuild the old system in new tech.
Make a new, smaller system to take new market instead of the old system? Good.
Suffer for years through an endlessly growing checklist of things that must be in this new thing because they were in the old thing? Arguing with sales whether you have to again rush out a fix for a customer that is important and absolutely depend on this integration with Microsoft Bob that nobody in the dev team even knew existed in the old system until the customer complained? Have release schedules set years in advance and constantly pushed because this thing will never ever ever be accepted as a replacement of the old system? Bad.
Most chatbots are speed bumps. Like phone menu trees and hold times, they slow you down on your way to get actual help.
Sometimes that means you give up before getting to the real help, which saves money on support.
Whether it’s the intended effect or not, it is so well known at this point that we shouldn’t excuse anyone using this tactic. It’s malicious.
Stronghold, the castle simulator with a lot of charm but a dev team that lost their touch after a few sequel attempts.
Black & White
It has a mechanic where you bless a stone, then throw it across the map, and you get to build and influence an area around the rock. Basically it is the only sane way to expand.
I did not know. I spent painstaking hours slowly growing my village trying to get its area of influence to spread into where I needed to go.
The only plausible use case I could come up with is if a game company earnestly and legitimately wants to allow but outsource a real-money marketplace. As a cost saving measure for their own benefit.
If e.g. Diablo allowed legendaries to be owned based on an NFT, offered zero opinion on its legitimacy, said “whelp nothing we can do” to customers losing their items to scams or accidents, and didn’t add any smart contract taxation or other shenanigans, it could work.
It wouldn’t improve the game for the players, but it would finally be a legitimate use case that improved something for someone without being a pixellated ponzi scheme.
Yeah we should! Most games listed here could have switched the character gender without making changes to the plot as such.
But it does make a difference, so I think they should be included. Even in the extreme example like Satisfactory, where you barely see what your quiet protagonist looks like, it’s make a lot of people happy that the character just is female without it being pointed out or sexed up. It’s also made a few people from the Expected Crowd confused and annoyed, which is healthy.
Big Rigs Over the Road Racing would have blended in inconspicuously on Steam had it released 10-15 years later. At the very least it would no longer be remembered as “the worst game ever”, and it may even have gained some “so bad its good” meme fame from streamers and made some sales.
Apart from my oxygen that is Factorio, I play Heretic’s Fork. The game desperately needs a manual, but I’m enjoying it.