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Re: "Re: Games Are How Big Now?!"
@clseibold: I don't mean to judge- everyone is different, and if you enjoy something, great! But if I had time and attention span to learn languages, I'd probably go for Spanish rather than a made-up language to help me bridge elves and ents in a game... I may be a lost cause with games - the only ones I even mildly enjoy seem to be short interactive fiction with minimum mapping/puzzles, and an occasional 80's arcade game. I never had patience for D&D and epic world-building games, even before I was too old.
2023-10-06 · 4 weeks ago
@stack What? Who said anything about D&D or elves? And sandboxes are not epic world-building games. It sounds a bit like you're judging things before you know what they even are. Chants of Sennaar is not necessarily learning languages, it's a bit more like code-breaking. It's not too far off from what linguists do when they learn a language without having any resources to translate between their native langauge and the one they are learning - like when studying ancient langauges that nobody speaks. For some people this is fun and develops their logic skills.
I thought I hated games, and then I actually looked at different types of games and realized I was fool in thinking they are all the same.
Btw, I don't actually play games very often, if at all. I usually play a game for about a week or two if I really like it, and then never play it again, or come back to it like once every 1-2 years or something, lol. I definitely understand the feeling of not liking games.
But for me, what I've learned is that I like games but only in short bursts, and only particular genres (like survival city-builder simulation strategy games). Anyways, don't feel the need to try games if you don't want to, but if you do want to try games that are different and not like most other games, then the ones I suggested are the standouts, imo.
@clseibold - I am clearly talking out of my ass, relying on stale and suspect information from looking over the shoulder of my kids playing, and occasional video about some or other game. I am sure there are good games out there, and if I ever get around to it, I will certainly look at your suggestions...
2023-10-07 · 4 weeks ago
@stack Right. It seems you know more of the fantasy mmorpg and FPS shooter games, like World of Warcraft, Runescape, and Modern Warfare. I absolutely hate all of thsoe games and find them so boring, but they are some of the most popular games, especially among mainstream and younger players, and so I wouldn't be surprised if your kids were playing them.
When I talk about survival, there are really two different types of survival - one type I absolutely hate, and the other is brilliant. The first type is surviving against enemies. Tower defense-style waves of enemies that come in and try to kill you.
This mode is in modern warfare, but it's in other games too, particularly zombie games, and even ones like civilization and other RTS (Real Time Strategy) games. Minecraft Legends is another example of this, where the waves of enemies are zombie pigmen. Modern Warfare is boring as hell, but RTS games make it slightly more interesting. However, I still don't like this type of survival, personally.
The other type is becoming more common in sanbox games, city-builder-style, and RTS games. It's survival against nature or the wilderness. In Frostpunk, for example, you live in a future ice age where you have to plan out a city that keeps people warm so they don't die. You direct your people to mine coal, catch and make food, bulid hospitals, extend this central core heat throughout the "city", etc.
Going Medieval is similar to Frostpunk and Foundation. Foundation has less emphasis on survival and more emphasis on sort of management stuff, like figuring out how production lines work within and across "cities".
Some games combine both elements, like Green Hell, where you try to survive both from the environment and from enemies. You get dropped off in this amazonian forest and you must build, try not to get infected with worms or poison from nature, and try to avoid these enemies out in the forest.
The management type thing that foundation has is emphasized even more in games that are focused on production lines, like Factorio, Satisfactory, and Surviving Mars. Surviving Mars is Science Fiction, not fantasy, and focuses on production on mars to keep people living on mars. So it has elements of environment survival (keeping people alive) as well as production management and city-building.
Minecraft was probably an inspiration for a lot of these. Minecraft has survival, it has enemies (and now waves of enemies) with the nether and the End. It has building. It has production management, sorta, but production management stuff is taken even farther in Minecrafts mods ecosystem, and it has mining and farming and making food. I would not be surprised if a lot of these games really stem from the minecraft line of games, or were inspired by Minecraft in some way.
If we are to go into the more voxel or Minecraft-like route, then there are tons more games that all emphasize a different aspect, either production management (like factorio and satisfactory, and minecraft mods), environment survival (don't starve), enemy survival (minecraft legends), farming (stardew valley), and games that have different combinations, like no man's sky, the forest, Eco, Ark, Fortnite, etc.
I don't particularly like playing most of these games for long periods of time. I'd much prefer something like Frostpunk that has a set storyline, is a environmental survival city-builder-like game that eventually ends at a specific point, but has different storyline modes.
And then there's Minecraft's redstone, which hasn't been replicated exactly in any other game, but the idea behind it is very powerful and unique. When you do redstone, you are essentially doing a slightly more simplified version of electronic engineering. You have a bunch of ways of doing logic gates and you combine those to do some cool stuff. You could make a fully-functioning memory cell with redstone for example, or a CPU, or even a full computer. That's why it's a great *learning* tool for teaching electronics.
@stack and I haven't even gotten into the just plain simulation games, like Game Dev Tycoon, Software Inc., political simulations like Democracy 4, and farming simulations like Green Tea Tycoon. There's also Stacklands and Masterplan Tycoon. And there's hacking simulator games, like TIS-100. Turing Complete is an electronics simulator that teaches that stuff in a puzzle-like way. And of course, we have the classics, like Fish Tycoon, Plant Tycoon, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Prison Tycoon, insaniquarium, and Virtual Villagers!
And there's now starting to be a newer genre popping up with are co-op puzzle games. We Were Here is a co-op puzzle game series.
And then there's Overcooked (which is terrible) and PlateUp (which is great), which are games, but not really tycoons or simulators. Not sure what they would be classified as.
And then if we get further into simulators, there's the 3D simulators, most of which are pretty terrible actually. Games like Surgeon Simulator.
@stack The reason I like Frostpunk so much is that it actually has something to say when you really play through one of its storylines all the way. It's ultimately about tough decisions that are made and how humanity either works together or creates conflict in times of dire need and survival. You make choices in the game based on your preconceptions of what you think the right choices are, but the game is really pointing you in a direction that you don't expect unless you play through the game in a certain way. I don't really want to spoil it, but it's an excellent game. You could get through one of its storylines in about 4 hours or so, but it has ~5 different storylines that all connect.
It really is a great game that gets you thinking about how humans behave and how they can be selfish in times of great stress, and how this selfishness could lead to their death instead of being *selfless* and how this selflessness is really what saves humanity as a whole. Gaah, just writing it out like this makes me love this game even more.
Re: Games Are How Big Now?! — Are these games good enough to be worth it? Most of them aren't, but frostpunk is probably the best game I've ever played in my life. I was obsessed with that game for weeks. The storyline and gameplay was so well done, and I love the city-builder-like survival type simulator strategy games. Games like Foundation, Going Medieval, and Frostpunk. I'm very excited for...