I’ve loved Bully every time I’ve replayed it. Not because of the gameplay, certainly - it hasn’t aged well. But the story, characters, and ambience of the town was indeed unique and remains so. I can’t think of another game since that’s similar in tone.
A fighting game where you play an average Greek soldier on his way to becoming a hero.
It starts where you have to kill 5 enemies in a battle and you get promoted. Then you have to kill 10 etc.
You can upgrade your hero and the soldiers fighting under you. So you can choose to become a powerful lone hero or a hero and his men. If you don’t kill enough of the enemy you don’t advance. But if you go on a rampage and the battle is lost you also lose. Your performance influences the battle. So it might be that holding a bridge is more important than total kills for example.
I haven’t played it, so I may be wrong, but isn’t banner lords a bit like this - not Greek, and I assume you start with more status than a foot soldier, but it may be worth a look.
A sort of real time game that starts in third person, as a single character, and expands over time to a whole village. Set in a post apocalyptic world, where you wake up after the apocalypse and have to survive, eventually meeting other survivors and either fight them off or band together to form societies. Each person modelled like an rpg character, with skills sets and capabilities (electrician, plumber, computer geek, radio amateur, farmer and all the other things that make a self-sufficient village). It would need to model the dynamics of politics and how society was governed and the run-ins with other villages and roving bands of survivors.
A sort of mini civilisation but themed around rebuilding capability rather than discovering it.
Black Flag was getting there, it had good vibes, but unfortunately they had to make it an Assassins Creed game and Ubisoft doesn’t know how to do it right anyways. Rockstar does.
I don’t know. It’s Ubisoft after all and the game seems to be very focused on ship battles and multiplayer. I don’t expect a great story or detailed environments like Red Dead Redemption 2 had.
A metal gear type game where the AI is trained on how all players play worldwide and it adapts and evolves over time in how it stations and uses its soldiers against you and for patrols. Every time you go back to play, the layouts and movements and gear and reactions of enemy AI differ.
Action games usually relies on twitch reflexes and using the right combos for the correct enemies. Maybe it isn’t the best name for what I mean but what I want is less “soulslike” games that are just PS2 God of War with a roll button and more like Dark Souls 1 and 2.
So action, but slower action? That’s perfectly reasonable and I love DS1. You might like the Demon Souls remake, and there are a metric ton of indie soulslikes that range the gamut in that respect. You can get an impressively large set of reviews of those from the YouTube channel Iron Pineapple (seemingly named after the Conjurors in DS1, whose helmets look a little like iron pineapples)
A modern version of Stars! (the ! is part of the title). It’s an early / mid-90s (as in it worked on Windows 3.1!) 4x scifi strategy game, one of the early ones. Huge tech tree for its day, something like six-eight different research fields (propulsion, biology, energy, etc.) and 26 (!) levels in each with techs that depend on different levels in each research field. Different species had their own unique traits, techs, ships, playstyles, you could build your own with literally dozens of minor traits, customizable tolerances for planetary traits like radiation, gravity, temperature, custom breeding rate, productivity, … Unlimited completely custom ship and starbase designer where you could put any part in any slot where it fits and the game would just let you. No limits on the number of ships you could have (take that, Masters of Orion!) Came with a manual an inch and a half thick, supported many different kinds of multiplayer (including play by email… again, 1995!) and so many other cool things. Sadly, the company that owned it was passed around a bit and then the parent company went out of business, so it’s abandonware and no one is likely to do anything with it.
Also a modern version of the old Might and Magic games (3-5 in the series, especially 4-5, usually known as World of Xeen) with some elements of the old (1-5) Wizardry games. Did I mention I’m old? I’m old. I know someone who’s working on something like that, but I hear she’s harried by capitalism and has ADHD besides and hasn’t made a lot of progress. I really should bug her to keep at it… (spoiler: she is me)
I played Stars! too! I simply adored that game. Who knows how many thousands of hours I spent as a kid on it. It somehow engaged whatever flavor of ADHD/Tism I have and I could get lost for days on it. It’s funny, but even back then the graphics were absurdly simple, but we didn’t care, the gameplay and complexity was so enthralling. Most of the game was just basic geometric shapes and numbers on a map, which seems hilarious now, but to me it proves that gameplay > graphics. Graphics can help, but the gameplay MUST be there first and foremost.
The Siren series has a mechanic where you see what the enemies are seeing. There’s also a section of Driver: San Francisco where you’re being chased and it’s from the perspective of the person chasing you. That’s the closest I’ve ever seen.
There’s a game on the haunted PS1 collection like that, you play a girl hiding from a monster and there’s portions where you see from the monster’s eyes
Mod Nation Racers on PS4, you could do custom track. It was a really fun game and I liked the fact that you could defend yourself a little bit from items if you had enough boost and a good timing. Really had fun with that game.
Not the same kind of racing game, but Aero GPX is shaping up to be an excellent F-Zero successor that is going to have a fully customisable track creator.
There’s a huge modding scene for Mario Kart Wii, and lots of custom tracks. There’s also several track compilations. One of the most well-known is Wiimms Mario Kart Fun which currently has 449 custom tracks. It runs on a real Wii as well as in emulators. My wife and I used to play it a lot.
The tracks are made by various community members, but the compilation itself is made by Wiimm, the same guy that made the Wiimmfi service that lets you race people online even after Nintendo shut down the official servers.
The physical Mario Kart Switch game with the WiFi controlled carts - except it’s 100 % AR instead, and you can switch between 3rd person overhead AR view from your own position or 1st person view (VR-like) from the kart. You create your own tracks in the room you’re in.
And while we at it, I want a Sonic Maker game, which kinda like Super Mario Maker but for Sonic stages. Would be even cooler if the players can create a 3D Boost Sonic-styled stages too, in addition to the 2D Classic Sonic-styled stages.
Add comment