i love getting my ass beat in a good fighting game. i am very, very, embarrassingly bad at them AND YET they’ve become the only thing I get excited to play. this took many years, but I Get It Now. you can just open fightcade 3S, go “unranked plz” or “noob games?” & run Eight Minutes of casuals with people at any hour. who cares if you lose!!! fuck scoring!!! learning is a victory!!! realizing you are better than yesterday feels insanely good!!! figuring out what a move does, figuring out a way to use it, and actually applying that in-game represents more personal growth than anything 99% of players do in final fantasy 14. doesn’t matter what the scoreboard says. you gotta think of it more like when you started playing Any Other arcade game: “wow cool explosion” gradually turned into “sure i died but holy shit i got in the rhythm of that one dodge / got a little further into that healthbar / actually made it to stage 5 this time,” and then eventually you knew who Yagawa was. If you aren’t find joy in this process I would be curious to know what sort of arcade games you do play, if you do so without credit feeding, if you have hobbies that aren’t Consuming Content etc
please consult the thread title, sales numbers for various fighting and non-fighting games, and global population statistics before drawing conclusions about this post thank you
Also yes I would love a Random Versus Arcade Game Night. Fightcade has hella non-fighting games on it we can play. There’s rollback for Playstation & Dreamcast games now too https://arkadyzja.honmaru.pl/ we could do this for weeks without playing a single fighting game if so desired
The phrase “quality of life feature” has no real meaning. You mean improvement, fix, change, or feature. It’s only been made popular by forever service games where players feel they’re creating a workflow and driving through tasks like they’re at an operating system.
It’s not “quality of life” to add save states, frame skip, 4x battle encounters, sort by rarity, auto-equip, etc. They are features that change the game and how you interact with it. It would be just as much a quality of life change to reduce an enemy’s health or increase the player’s walk speed.
You need to skip the first one and go straight to Tides of Time. Everyone insists on playing the first one, and inevitably fizzle out in the first couple levels. I did too. But Tides is the real deal. Gets rolling immediately, story and settings are bonkers, cool transformations and bosses. Best of all, no starfish!
You’re not being heated enough about this take. I’ll one-up you:
The only worthwhile open world game is Aquanaut’s Holiday.
I’ve already talked at length about this elsewhere, but essentially by rejecting the conventional “purpose” centered form-factor of video games, Aquanaut’s Holiday creates a world that is immediate and personal. There is no worth or meaning to any of it, therefore we only explore for the sake of exploration, because we don’t need dangling keys. We just like mystery.
I thought this was going in a somewhat different direction, so I’ll add something that attacks the games and their influence a little more directly: Adventure games admittedly were a mess before LucasArts, but by their streamlined and accessible (in comparison) approach they dominated the public image as the platonic ideal form of the genre so much that it became a lot more homogenous and harder for different, weirder approaches to get much attention for a very long time. (Luckily, there’s more space for experimental things again in recent years.)
I have another Zelda one: I don’t like A Link to the Past. I think the combat feels awful, its exploration is less engaging than previous entries, and the sprites don’t really do it for me.
I actually feel kind of bad for this one: I don’t like Spyro, either.
The SNES has a ton of worst games in x series that are beloved in ways that baffle me. It has some bangers but it’s the worst of the 16 bit consoles to me by a country mile
I don’t think it’s that embarrassing. The whole reason the term is so fraught today is people who were too embarrassed to admit there was a whole genre of games they’d never heard of.
There are also people that only play Rogue and then try to derive the 30 years to Spelunky from first principles