Submitted by [deleted] in Games (edited )

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zoom_zip wrote

hey can i post my own?

  1. d&d
  2. chrono trigger
  3. fallout 2
  4. dark souls
  5. shadow of the colossus
  6. the beginner's guide
  7. cave story
  8. breath of fire 3
  9. everquest
  10. final fantasy vi, vii, viii
  11. dark saviour
  12. tales of maj eyal
  13. return of the obra dinn
  14. terraria
  15. monkey island 2: lechuck's revenge
  16. toejam and earl
  17. lisa
  18. civ ii
  19. shadowrun snes
  20. resident evil 1, 2 and 3
  21. vandal hearts ii
  22. within a deep forest

something like that idk i'm not good at remembering

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zoom_zip wrote

my notes on the games off the top of my head (full spoilers):

d&d

when i say d&d, what i really mean is tabletop rpgs. i love most that i have played. i put d&d at the top because of time-tested longevity, but i'm not talking about any specific edition (bx, 2e, 5e, whatever), and i am being inclusive to whatever the hell other game is out there that is great: shadowrun, vtm, mork borg, whatever. tabletop rpgs are the best because you can really make them your own. if you get a bad gm they can suck hard, but when you get a good group, it's a kind of collaborative storytelling that is unlike anything else.

chrono trigger

there's a part in chrono trigger where you leave your robot behind to terraform a desert into a forest, and then use your time machine to jump forwards 500 years, and for you it's only been five minutes, but your rusted and decayed robot is sitting there waiting for you; and you brush off the leaves and clear the debris, and help him to his feet, and he's just been sat there waiting for you for 500 years, but that desert is now a forest. i found this really heavy. and it's just one tiny throwaway/optional part of the game. the whole game is filled with moments like this. lots of little heavy moments that all add up to one big thing, but you can give or take most of them, and a lot of them you won't even see.

fallout 2

look i know it's kind of old and clunky and doesn't hold up as well as it could in terms of janky gameplay mechanics, but fuck me if it isn't one of the best games i ever played and no i don't think any of the new games (even new vegas) hold a freakin' candle to it. everything that came after 2 took the skin of fallout, but left the heart behind. the game has so much heart, it has so much detail. like how in fallout 2 you can see the progression of settlements between the two games. you can see how certain places have evolved and grown in the wasteland, and you can see how their buildings have improved, and where they have grown grass and trees. the game isn't stuck in a stasis of POST-APOCALYPSE, the characters are genuinely trying to improve themselves. sure, in the den they all live in bombed out buildings, but go south to redding and find a place where they are rebuilding their buildings out of clay bricks. go to broken hills and find a place where they've constructed some new buildings out of adobe and planted trees and tried to move on. the new games just take POST-APOCALYPSE-SANDBOX and toss you into it, but they are like capsules of time where nobody seems to care about rebuilding the world, because the devs just think it's too cool of a setting or something. idk, i could rant about this for years. fuck you. i don't need your validation. fallout 2 is the best game. bethesda sucks.

dark souls

i hesitate to list this one because i know there are people who make dark souls a part of their personality, and those people are chodes. but i do think it's a great game. a really great game. i admire the way it takes a pretty deep lore and story, and then refuses to give it to you as a player, and makes you work to figure it out. all the narrative is hidden behind cryptic npc dialogue, and in item descriptions, and in tiny interpretive architectural placements of statues that you just kind of have to immerse yourself into the details if you want to figure it out. i like that. it's what shadow of the colossus does too. it doesn't hold your hand at any point. you have to figure it out.

shadow of the colossus

oh look, we were just talking about you. everything i just said about dark souls applies here too. it's the same. they do the same thing, but in different ways. i could actually kind of give or take the whole fighting giant monsters puzzle battle thing, but being dumped into a setting where you are free to roam around and explore and untangle this twisted web of inaccessible narrative. that's my jam.

the beginner's guide

this game flopped hard because it wasn't the stanley parable made over again. it wasn't the same thing, and people didn't like that. but it resonated with me hard, because there was a time when i was the protagonist of this game. i was the person who inserted myself into other people's things and tried to make them my own, but never really understood them or was never really good enough. i couldn't keep up with the creativity of others so i only dragged them down. it kind of hurt to play because it was like looking in a mirror. it helped me realise it, and change myself, and not many games can say that.

cave story

i mean, you've played cave story, right? so i don't need to explain why this game is so great. because you've played it. you've definitely played it, haven't you? yeah, you have.

breath of fire 3

i don't know why nobody talks about this game in the canon of rpgs but it's really good. it's cute, it's got a nice story, it's got a whole lot of cool mechanics (you can turn into a dragon). idk. i think it's better than most final fantasy games but everyone seemed to pass it over or forget that it exists.

everquest

my first dance with addiction. including this on my list is probably an exercise in pandering to nostalgia, but i would honestly go back and just live in this world for a while, even if it was empty. i'm not sure if the fact that it was an mmo has anything to do with how good it was; but probably. maybe it wouldn't be the same without other players. of course, you can't play this game anymore, even if you wanted to. it's gone. it has suffered from the disease of developers trying to maintain relevance by writing and over-writing it, so it is a monstrous abomination that has swallowed up any semblance of what it used to be. this is a problem with a lot of games, and the reason i've kept some other games off the list (path of exile i'm looking at you). when the devs decide to throw an udate on it, the version of the game that you love is gone. you can never get it back. if you could go back to 1999 though, i would recommend jumping on the everquest wagon.

final fantasy vi, vii, viii

to me, this is the peak of the series. i go back and forth between which of these three sit at the top, but it's always one of them. it changes depending on my mood, but if you started at six and played through to the end of eight, i think you would have a good time.

dark saviour

okay let me tell you a thing, and you can tell me if it sounds ambitious or overambitious. you are a bounty hunter. you start off on a boat transporting your quarry to a prison island. you're chilling out in your room and the alarm starts to sound. something is happening. a timer starts ticking down. you need to get to the captain's room. based on how long it takes you to get there, the whole game changes. the whole game. this game has like 7 distinct storylines all branching parallel from one diverging event. it's incredible. does the actual game live up to the ambition? not really. but do i love it for having the ambition? yes!

tales of maj eyal

this is the best roguelike.

return of the obra dinn

this is one of those games you can only play once, and you wish you could play again. but you can't, because you've done it. it's solved. it's an experience you can't get back. so if you play it, play it without any spoilers. it's a pretty short puzzle game.

terraria

terraria is an onion where the layers just keep coming off. at first i thought it was 2d minecraft, as people were calling it, but it's way more than that. building stuff in terraria is pretty in depth, but it's also not even necessary to play the game. like, maybe you will build a house, build some shops, get villagers to join you, build some wire machines to automate stuff, build some defenses to defend yourself from zombies, and then maybe all that shit will get destroyed by one boss who tears through the world and ruins everything. it's a game of milestones, and every time you hit one, the whole thing just seems to change. all of your priorities shift. you might abandon your whole base and go and make a new one from scratch elsewhere, all in preparation of fighting one particular boss. it's deep.


ran out of time, will edit the rest in later.

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[deleted] wrote

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zoom_zip wrote

Ok but what if I told you that the giant monsters are a key part of that narrative.

oh yeah absolutely. it is, and it’s great.

but what i mean is, the actual gameplay of climbing on these creatures and killing them is kind of unfun. i think a lot of people are like “oh cool fight big monsters yeah,” and the game isn’t anything more than that for them. i find the climbing/killing sections kind of tedious, but I enjoy the world and the narrative and the meta narrative.

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