Briareos H on 30/1/2025 at 07:22
Looking cool! I have struggled connecting with FPS games with a gamepad, movement just doesn't feel right unless it either has a locking system like Metroid Prime or it is a particularly slow and methodical game like Viewfinder, Botany Manor, Talos Principle or most walking sims. Thief might be part of the latter but I'm not looking forward to the more frantic parts, trying to escape a guard and fumbling my mantling. How is it working for you? Have you found a good mapping of the controls?
Re. Cave Story, while it's one of my favourite games I suspect you may also have needed to be there at the right time to get the full effect. At the time, freeware PC games were confidential, short, janky or weird. There was no mainstream indie tradition like there had been in the DOS days, and here came something you knew nothing about that would hit you in the face with the hallmarks of a classic: tight gameplay, readable graphics, an actual story, consistent level design, a bit of open exploration, fantastic chiptune music, a real difficulty curve and some original mechanics. And then you'd hit the end, discuss it with forum friends and figure out there was a proper true ending requiring insane amounts of skill, so you'd play the whole game again. There was nothing like it, and I think it had a profound effect on gamers and developers, spearheading the movement that would lead to Braid and the indie boom.
If I were to play it for the first time today, I'd probably enjoy it but may not see what's so special about it.
demagogue on 30/1/2025 at 07:56
I was gonna say the same thing. It was the first of its kind, an indie game mixing a cute J-style & the power of friendship with serious platforming. Well the first indie game in that generation full stop hitting like it did. Now that's all over the place. I also remember thinking Seiklus was kind of revolutionary for the time. I actually think of that as the ground source for the "soft" indie trend, and Nifflas games shortly following in its wake obviously inspired by it (you could immediately tell & he said it). But if someone played it (Seiklus) today I'm sure they'd be confused about why it ever got any buzz.
Lol, sorry, we're supposed to be talking about games we played in 2025, and I'm talking about games I played in 2005.
At some point I need to make a big post on 1000xResist. It's also an important game already. I need to let it percolate a little more to get a handle on what I just experienced maybe. Well, I just need to find a block of freetime to do my own write up, and then I can crosspost a version here.
That's the biggest game I've played so far this year. It's a little more interactive than a pure walking sim, but it's in that direction. It's getting talked about most because of the story, but I like how they did the storytelling mechanic of advancing forward and backwards in time to make progress. I've seen other games play with that, but they didn't do it well like this did.
Jason Moyer on 30/1/2025 at 08:02
Quote Posted by Briareos H
How is it working for you? Have you found a good mapping of the controls?
Unfortunately it's not really working. The only version of Winlator that I can get Thief running well in has a bug where the stick/pad mapping doesn't work in-game. I can set it up as DInput and play with the original joystick controls but it sucks. Without that bug I don't think it would be bad really, although it's pretty glitchy running it on Android via a Windows emulator. Stuff like selecting the compass making the screen glitch out. It's kind of cool that it can run it all on a relatively cheap handheld though, and if I can get it working in a more recent or future Winlator I'll post my results.
What is cool is that this specific device does a pretty good job running every console emulator I throw at it up to and including most of the PS2/Wii libraries. I haven't come up with a good control mapping for the more precise motion control Wii games but I have it setup so I can play stuff like Bit.Trip Beat or access the menus in Punch Out by using the gyroscope. I picked up a Switch in November and while it's awesome I wanted something smaller/cheaper and 4:3 for playing console and arcade games at that aspect ratio and the Anbernic RG406H and 35XXSP have been amazing for that. I stuff the SP into my pocket basically whenever I go anywhere and whip it out to play some NES or whatever when I have some empty time to fill. It was like $70 or something plus a bit for better SD card and the time to get an emulation-oriented linux distribution installed/configured and I can play anything through PS1 and some lightweight linux ports (Cave Story, VVVVVV, etc) on it.
Starker on 30/1/2025 at 08:24
Quote Posted by demagogue
I also remember thinking Seiklus was kind of revolutionary for the time. I actually think of that as the ground source for the "soft" indie trend, and Nifflas games shortly following in its wake obviously inspired by it (you could immediately tell & he said it). But if someone played it (Seiklus) today I'm sure they'd be confused about why it ever got any buzz.
I remember this game. Its title is the Estonian word for "adventure". I think it was made by a Mormon missionary whose assignment was in Estonia, if memory serves.
I never knew how popular it was among the wider public, but I specifically learned about it on HotU, an abandonware site frequented by kind of a niche group of gaming enthusiasts.
Anarchic Fox on 31/1/2025 at 21:39
Citizen Sleeper 2 came out today, and will be my treat to myself once I'm done with chores this weekend. It looks much like its predecessor, a cyberpunk RPG about carefully managing your resources, chief among them time. (Kinda ironic that I like this, considering how bad I am at it IRL.) Disco Elysium and Roadwarden gave me an appetite for RPGs with minimal combat, and the first Citizen Sleeper filled that appetite for a time, at least until the lategame where the gameplay loops became too transparent. If anyone knows of other such RPGs, I'd love to hear about them.
Starker on 1/2/2025 at 02:31
Unrest, a game I once supported on Kickstarter, has only very minimal combat. Though, I have to warn you, it's not a typical RPG where you get to make grand world-altering or plot-altering decisions. It's rather more about how you react to things and exploring different perspectives. It's the only RPG I know, however, that takes place in India and if you can manage to deal with there not being some kind of a big pay-off to your choices and enjoy the game for its characters and setting, you can have some pretty good time.
Subjective Effect on 1/2/2025 at 07:05
Lego City Undercover! What a game! I can't believe it's this old. Brilliant idea and its just so fun.
Sulphur on 1/2/2025 at 07:13
I really should play Unrest as a show of support for folks developing in India, and I'm currently knee-deep in RPGs anyway (currently, it's Live a Live and Shadowrun Returns). One more to the list.
Citizen Sleeper was a very interesting game, I finished the main campaign but am on the DLC now. It does a good job of making its statement (staving off despair in a universe where capitalism's constricting grip has forced you into needing to source a drug to keep living or die once your systems deteriorate), and the initial near-constant background stress of managing your funds, dice, and physical state hit home a bit. It does settle into a comfortable rhythm in the last half-ish, but I enjoyed the writing enough that inhabiting the space the words and the visuals carved out was enjoyable all on its own - a pleasingly confounding, ephemeral sense of intimate distance.
For all its initial bite, I don't think there's any real external threat in the game, though I assume you can reach a Game Over if you're bad at managing your condition. Each of the ways I ended the story were various shades of escaping the system with decent people, which isn't a complaint - that is, after all, the point, but neither your nor the game really confront the system that the game presents as the capital I Issue, and instead work around it or through it. This is a valid approach, but the game needed a little more meat on the bone to sell it, I feel. I could have done with more involved character stories and a higher sense of agency, even if it compromised the sense of fragility the atmosphere evoked. Overall, though, a well-made game. Looking forward to thoughts on the sequel from folks who play it!
EvaUnit02 on 1/2/2025 at 11:40
I've got much love for the remasters of Id games by Night Dive. This evening my friend and I finished our vanilla Doom 1 playthrough (i.e. up to Ep. 3) using couch co-op. It was a flawless experience and hassle free. We also tried a bit of the Quake 2 remaster. Again, flawless and hassle free. (We might play the extra Ultimate Doom 1 episode at a later date.)
I looked into playing a heavier Gzdoom engine total conversion in splitscreen co-op (eg Project Brutality) but it would've required dicking around in an entirely separate source port.
We wanted to play Halo splitscreen but I was overwhelmingly disappointed to see that it wasn't available in the PC version of MCC. My friend has a Xbox Series X but not a copy of MCC. He has access to my PC copy through Steam family share.
Apparently Windows 11 doesn't come pre-installed with DX9? Bizarre. I was trying to play Lego Indiana Jones 1 (another couch co-op game) but it was spitting out a launch error message, to which the answer was needing DX9 binaries. It worked after installing DX9, but I went ahead and installed the DXVK wrapper since there's the possibility the game runs better with it.
froghawk on 1/2/2025 at 17:58
Tribes: Vengeance (2004)
Inline Image:
https://assets-prd.ignimgs.com/2022/04/16/tribesv-1650071542203.jpgTribes: Vengeance was a sidequest in my current catchup of LGS-legacy games. Irrational games co-developed System Shock 2 with LGS as their first game, then immediately pivoted in a different direction, developing the first ever tatical superhero RPG with Freedom Force (which I have not played). For their third game, they pivoted again to developing the third title in the Starseige: Tribes series, which are multiplayer shooters with unique movement mechanics (namely jetpacks & skiing) and 64 player matches. Tribes: Vengeance is not very well regarded by fans of the series, largely because Irrational sought to 'fix' some of the issues with the series (which included things the fans loved, like gigantic matches). It's also the first and only title in the series to include a singleplayer campaign, with a story written by Ken Levine. Levine's writing is highly regarded by the gaming community for his later work on Bioshock and Bioshock: Infinite (and he's apparently also responsible for the original idea behind Thief: The Dark Project), but is it merited? My feeling has always been 'not really', and this confirms it.
Like said Bioshock games, he's attempting to make a political statement here. His story is about the Imperials, who are indeed colonizers as their name implies, and who hold barbaric arena deathmatches with the colonized. The colonized are the tribes - he attempts to turn it all into a class metaphor, with the imperials looking down on the savage tribesman. That's all well and good, but the game is chock full of ludonarrative dissonance, starting with the fact that the supposedly poor and oppressed tribesmen are all equipped with military grade full body armor and jetpacks. The game makes a big deal out of the endless slaughter of the tribesmen by the imperials, but no group seems to hesitate in the slightest at using their own as fodder to be gunned down, and no even flinches at watching their compatriots die. Indeed, a mid-2000s shooter on the Unreal engine simply does not feel like the correct medium for this story. The political analysis is, of course, surface level, and the voice acting is often corny. With that said, the story is surprisingly intricate, jumping between different character perspectives and past and future timelines.
It truly embodies its own name by portraying a complex intergenerational web of vengeance, all centered around a Romeo & Juliet style plot between an Imperial and a Tribal. The chain of vengeance eventually becomes more than 7 people long, but it's delivered in a way that somehow manages to avoid making your eyes cross. Ultimately, while the plot is about breaking the cycle of violence and vengeance, it fails in its characterization of the tribals. There are two main tribes portrayed in the game, and one is portrayed as the good tribe, deserving of better treatment by the empire, while the other is evil, collaborating with the empire. This simplistic dualism feels like it undermines the core message. Ultimately, it's a game of contradictions. It certainly has its fun moments - the gameplay is highly varied in an attempt to keep the nonstop action fun, with mixed results. The game's strength is in its movement, and while the levels are designed to accommodate that, the indoor environments feel far too linear and constrained. Despite the general antipathy towards the game by the fanbase, the community is alive enough that they are still maintaining it for modern systems. The latest build can be downloaded for free at (
https://tribesrevengeance.net/)
