I've had some fun recently with plants vs zombies. And that's about it.
I was looking through my friend's game library trying to pick something to play the other day. Call of Duty 4, Fallout 3, Dragon age 1 and 2, Mass effect 2, Uncharted and Uncharted 2, street fighter 4...there was nothing I was interested in.
I just want to escape. I'd like to be someone that isn't me for a while. But I'm kinda tired of just blowing people away and hacking people apart.
A good survival sim is what I yearn for most. I wanna play a pretty girl on a sandy beach, and use an amazing crafting system to gather materials and turn my humble hut into an island fortress. And I want to adventure off into the wilderness. And find other survivors, or even camps. And I could have a volleyball with a hand print face. Basically I want to play something somewhere between Harvest Moon, Minecraft, and the movie "Castaway".
I also wanna play sim city again. A good one. With lots of land to build on. Or a Zelda game that captures the spirit of the first games adequately. Or a Mario game that doesn't have some bullshit Nintendo brand gimmick.
I think it's my desire to play games like this that keeps me gaming. I'm just sticking around until the shit I want to play comes out. In the meantime I'll play Disgaea 4 or whatever I guess.
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The AnonymousUh, uh, uhhhhhh...Uh, uh.Registered Userregular
edited September 2011
There are a few survival sims out there, actually. Unfortunately, the ones I know of 1) are from Japan, and 2) were Westernised to varying extents, assuming they made it out of Japan in the first place.
The first of these is the Survival Kids series by Konami, which started out on the GBC (the Lost in Blue games are actually part of the series; one is for DS and the other is on Wii). The scenario in each is pretty much the same: for one reason or another, you wind up stranded on a remote island, and your goal is to find a way off. In order to stay alive, you have to monitor your health, fatigue, hunger etc. as well as dealing with native wildlife (which is decidedly not friendly), finding food and water (food can be cooked to make it more edible and longer-lasting; it can go off if you leave it for too long) and other hazards. Time is also an important factor; as you explore the island, time will pass and eventually it'll turn to night, which is a sign that you should stop and find somewhere to rest (you generally can't see in the dark, for instance). The game even keeps track of the number of days you've spent on the island, which can affect what ending you get. For instance, in the first game
there's a radio you have to get working by finding batteries for it. If you then immediately use it until you hear an emergency broadcast, after two days you can make for the beach and be evacuated via helicopter.
It's not the optimal ending though.
In short, it's pretty much what you described, minus the hut construction.
The other one is Zettai Zetsumei Toshi/Disaster Report/SOS: The Final Escape (the latter two are the same thing, just different titles). In this series, things will kick off with a natural disaster of some kind (earthquakes are typically involved). Your goals are then, in order, 1) don't die, 2) find other survivors (possibly female and thus, potential love interest) and make sure they don't die, and 3) find a way out of there, while also uncovering some nasty truths about what's going on. Sadly, these ones got hit really hard with the Americanitis stick: black hair is suddenly blonde, everyone has a dumb-sounding name, and the translation is a God-awful mess. We're talking Revelations: Persona shit here. They're still decent games even after the fact (though a lot more linear than Survival Kids, and not quite as micromanage-y - but it's a lot more story-driven, and you will learn to hit the "duck" button at the slightest indication of a tremor), you'll just have to deal with a terrible localisation if you can't read Japanese (or miss out entirely, if you want to play the third game).
I have all three modern consoles. A DS and a PSP. I have a gaming level computer. And what did I spent 10 hours playing last week? A new flash game which is yet another rehash of tower defense. Why? Cause it was fun.
If you haven't played Uncharted 2, it really is more than a 3rd person shooter. It's Tomb Raider brought to the modern age. One of the best games I've ever played, and I don't say that lightly.
What keeps me gaming is that sometimes, every once in a great while, I see a game and just think. I could lose a hundred hours to that without even noticing. It usually happens with fighting games and standard RPGs, but when I see Culdcept 3D looking like a cross between Magic: The Gathering and Disgaea I just think. Well, there's another three hundred hours down the drain.
If you don't like videogames and want to do something more awesome with your time then do something more awesome with your time? What are videogames but imitations of what we find enjoyable in life?
This. I fucking hate my job, and the fact that I'm stuck there for the forseeable future is incredibly depressing. I'm also in school. Playing games for a few hours a week is a great way for me to have fun without breaking the bank.
I have noticed my tastes changing, though I think it has more to do with the time I have than what I enjoy. I can still play through FF6, Guardian Heroes, or Freespace 2 with no problem, but I can't stand more recent JRPGs, for instance.
See, I wish this was the same for me. I'm also hating my job right now, but my depression over work and home life is spilling into my enjoyment of games. When I'm in a funk, the games aren't as fun as they are when life is good, so I don't play them as much, meaning I'm not doing the hobby that I enjoy the most, which makes me feel worse... It's not a good cycle. Hopefully the combo of work getting better (hopefully soon) and games I'm really looking forward to coming out will get me back into enjoying games again.
It's pretty much all I've done my whole life. If I just stopped one day it would be...weird? I guess. I'm not sure what it would be like.
I still find it pretty fun though
Yeah, I'm partly in the same boat. I've been gaming for over twenty years at this point and it's definitely become an integral part of who I am. Games in general continue to evolve and while there is no argument that there is a very obvious dumbing down of things going on with a lot of mainstream titles, the field has expanded in so many other directions that it's hard to get annoyed by it. The wealth of tech available to smaller devs these days has really opened things up and there are many non-AAA games out there that still provide the experiences that keep me motivated to play. Sure, I still play a few of the big name titles, but who cares if they're kinda retarded when there are still excellent titles like Demon's Souls, The Witcher series, and STALKER out there for when you want a more involved experience?
I also wanna play sim city again. A good one. With lots of land to build on.
to be honest? my friends. it's not always easy to head to a friend's house at midnight and hang out, but at any moment i can hop online and see if anyone i know, IRL or just innnanet fwends, wants to play a few games of pretty much anything.
one of my good friends from high school has moved around a whole bunch. despite me losing contact with people constantly, me and this friend still talk to each other atleast once a week. it helps me feel social when in reality i'm in my apartment in my boxers eating pizza (whoa that sounds more depressing than it is i promise).
i guess if i didn't have the internet i'd still play games, but probably a lot less. i'd definitely buy less though.
This is exactly it for me. Honestly for me the game is largely irrelevant - it's an opportunity to compete with and against my friends, connect with them and enjoy each others' company. Doesn't matter if it's Rock Band, Call of Duty, New SMB or DnD - is about being social. I have Gears 3 early right now and as much as it's amazing I can't fucking wait until Tuesday when I can play co-op and TDM and Horde and everything else with the guys.
@vgreminders - Don't miss out on timed events in gaming! @gamefacts - Totally and utterly true gaming facts on the regular!
to be honest? my friends. it's not always easy to head to a friend's house at midnight and hang out, but at any moment i can hop online and see if anyone i know, IRL or just innnanet fwends, wants to play a few games of pretty much anything.
one of my good friends from high school has moved around a whole bunch. despite me losing contact with people constantly, me and this friend still talk to each other atleast once a week. it helps me feel social when in reality i'm in my apartment in my boxers eating pizza (whoa that sounds more depressing than it is i promise).
i guess if i didn't have the internet i'd still play games, but probably a lot less. i'd definitely buy less though.
This is exactly it for me. Honestly for me the game is largely irrelevant - it's an opportunity to compete with and against my friends, connect with them and enjoy each others' company. Doesn't matter if it's Rock Band, Call of Duty, New SMB or DnD - is about being social. I have Gears 3 early right now and as much as it's amazing I can't fucking wait until Tuesday when I can play co-op and TDM and Horde and everything else with the guys.
As I'm fond of saying whenever the Megachat decides to play something really terrible together: Friends make anything good.
Hell, my favorite gaming moments are always when something really stupid happens when we're playing together. I'll never forget when I was first playing MVC2 against one of them and I accidently canceled out of Colossus's hyper. Colossus went up...and never came back. It was like he just said "Fuck this shit, I'm going to Mars." The match was basically over at that point because we were laughing way too hard. Sure, absolutely stomping the shit out of a pub can be fun, but it's the dumb little moments like that that keep me coming back.
I thought that was a pretty good read, if a little depressing.
I play games for fun and in the hopes that with each one I play to the end, I'll find a satisfying, possibly even fulfilling experience that I'll walk away from knowing that all of the time I've spent has been put to fine use. I keep playing them because I'm still hopeful that there are plenty of new ideas circulating in the industry and I'll be finding worthwhile investments for years to come.
I have to admit this happened to me- at first it was a niggling notion in the back of my mind that I was essentially playing with virtual toysets- action figures that were more pose-able with special effects. Which is a step down from the feeling I used to have when I could easily step into a gameworld and be transfixed by the aesthetics, and emotionally involve myself without effort. The Nazis in Medal of Honor on PS2 were the people responsible for the events in Elie Wiesel's Night, and I could channel rage which brought an element of pathos to the act of shooting them in the face. But the older I got, and the more I read books and watched good films, the less I could put up with game writing.
Oh, and to address the OP. The Witcher 2. DO IT.
Also, if you're of the strategy and simulation persuasion, that's one branch of gaming that's easily appreciated more and more as you get older. Unlike popcorn arcade crap like COD, strategy/simulation stuff gets infinitely more interesting with age.
EDIT: I bypassed my work filters using Bing's cached page viewer, FUCK YEAH!
Upon reading the article, I couldn't really relate with any of it. It sounds more like the author had matured, but was insisting on playing the same shit the kids were playing instead of the many other great titles that are out there but not necessarily the big blockbusters. He needs to stop getting his game recommendations from the token hot girl that doesn't know anything about gaming behind the counter at Gamestop and expand his gaming horizons.
What keeps me gaming? The fact that I fucking love it. All of it. There is literally no genre that I won't play. And when you love all games, it doesn't get repetitive because you're always playing something different. And I don't limit it to AAA new games, I'll also retro-game and play indies.
I'm at an age now where most of my friends have stopped gaming. What do they do instead? They watch Cops. Fuck that, I'd rather participate in my entertainment experiences.
What keeps me gaming? The fact that I fucking love it. All of it. There is literally no genre that I won't play. And when you love all games, it doesn't get repetitive because you're always playing something different. And I don't limit it to AAA new games, I'll also retro-game and play indies.
I'm a lot like this, I very rarely find games that I don't like. I just enjoy games, and the genres I do tend to gravitate away from I still find games I enjoy in.
A good survival sim is what I yearn for most. I wanna play a pretty girl on a sandy beach, and use an amazing crafting system to gather materials and turn my humble hut into an island fortress. And I want to adventure off into the wilderness. And find other survivors, or even camps. And I could have a volleyball with a hand print face. Basically I want to play something somewhere between Harvest Moon, Minecraft, and the movie "Castaway".
Sounds like The Sims: Castaway. If you can get over the fact that you are playing The Sims, it's a pretty decent Castaway on a Lonely Island Simulator. You can do pretty much all that and more.
The last time I played it, I built my grass hut a little too close to the communal fire and it went up in flames. I was so disappointed, I think I stopped playing after that.
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DunxcoShould get a suitNever skips breakfastRegistered Userregular
I think I'm going to be a sucker and say that while yes, friends and my girlfriend (who showed endless patience when I introduced her to every new game I liked at the time and she didn't quite grasp the mechanics of. Mostly the current-gen Capcom fighters), I think I'm going to say that a lot of it comes down to you guys and the sense of community it brings.
I don't play with all of you. In fact I play with a very, very, very small fraction. But the ones I have played with made it entirely worthwhile. The MK tournament, for example, I met some great dudes while we all went through that. Same can be said of my brief stint into TF2, Halo: Reach, and now League of Legends. The people on here are always introducing me to these new games that I'd never have thought to touch otherwise. I think the biggest reason for this is because PA, as a collective group of gamers, aren't the typical dicks you find mongering around places like Xbox Live. After a tiring day of work or having to sort someone else's shit out I don't want to put up with douchebags during my leisure time. If I play with people here, I know that won't be an issue.
Don't get me wrong, there are games coming out like Sonic Generations that I will be picking up solely for me. And when I get Gears 3 my brain thinks "Sweet, me and my brother will be co-oping this for a while" but tacked onto that is "and I know the PA guys will be up for some Horde." Same with UMvC3 - my friends who are insane over fighting games, and myself, will be rocking the house with that for quite a while, but I know there'll be PA folks up for a brawl at most times and it's definitely something I'll be up for. It's just a sense of community that feels like an escalation of the school banter I used to have with friends over things like Baldurs' Gate 2 or Final Fantasy or Resident Evil. It's a good feeling when there's a community who share your hobby just as passionately even when they're halfway across the globe.
Now excuse me I'm going to clean my nose because I got brown on it. :P
These days I find that I'm not as interested in what new games are being released and quite often new games will completely take me by surprise when they're released. ("The new Deus Ex game is out? Didn't they just announce that?") If I've been having a stressful time, games are still great for getting centred again but the patches when I just don't feel like playing videogames are getting longer.
The days (or rather nights) when I could stay up until 3 or 4 in the morning playing a videogame because I just find it so unutterably awesome are long gone, though.
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I was looking through my friend's game library trying to pick something to play the other day. Call of Duty 4, Fallout 3, Dragon age 1 and 2, Mass effect 2, Uncharted and Uncharted 2, street fighter 4...there was nothing I was interested in.
I just want to escape. I'd like to be someone that isn't me for a while. But I'm kinda tired of just blowing people away and hacking people apart.
A good survival sim is what I yearn for most. I wanna play a pretty girl on a sandy beach, and use an amazing crafting system to gather materials and turn my humble hut into an island fortress. And I want to adventure off into the wilderness. And find other survivors, or even camps. And I could have a volleyball with a hand print face. Basically I want to play something somewhere between Harvest Moon, Minecraft, and the movie "Castaway".
I also wanna play sim city again. A good one. With lots of land to build on. Or a Zelda game that captures the spirit of the first games adequately. Or a Mario game that doesn't have some bullshit Nintendo brand gimmick.
I think it's my desire to play games like this that keeps me gaming. I'm just sticking around until the shit I want to play comes out. In the meantime I'll play Disgaea 4 or whatever I guess.
The first of these is the Survival Kids series by Konami, which started out on the GBC (the Lost in Blue games are actually part of the series; one is for DS and the other is on Wii). The scenario in each is pretty much the same: for one reason or another, you wind up stranded on a remote island, and your goal is to find a way off. In order to stay alive, you have to monitor your health, fatigue, hunger etc. as well as dealing with native wildlife (which is decidedly not friendly), finding food and water (food can be cooked to make it more edible and longer-lasting; it can go off if you leave it for too long) and other hazards. Time is also an important factor; as you explore the island, time will pass and eventually it'll turn to night, which is a sign that you should stop and find somewhere to rest (you generally can't see in the dark, for instance). The game even keeps track of the number of days you've spent on the island, which can affect what ending you get. For instance, in the first game
The other one is Zettai Zetsumei Toshi/Disaster Report/SOS: The Final Escape (the latter two are the same thing, just different titles). In this series, things will kick off with a natural disaster of some kind (earthquakes are typically involved). Your goals are then, in order, 1) don't die, 2) find other survivors (possibly female and thus, potential love interest) and make sure they don't die, and 3) find a way out of there, while also uncovering some nasty truths about what's going on. Sadly, these ones got hit really hard with the Americanitis stick: black hair is suddenly blonde, everyone has a dumb-sounding name, and the translation is a God-awful mess. We're talking Revelations: Persona shit here. They're still decent games even after the fact (though a lot more linear than Survival Kids, and not quite as micromanage-y - but it's a lot more story-driven, and you will learn to hit the "duck" button at the slightest indication of a tremor), you'll just have to deal with a terrible localisation if you can't read Japanese (or miss out entirely, if you want to play the third game).
I play for fun. That's about it
What keeps me gaming is that sometimes, every once in a great while, I see a game and just think. I could lose a hundred hours to that without even noticing. It usually happens with fighting games and standard RPGs, but when I see Culdcept 3D looking like a cross between Magic: The Gathering and Disgaea I just think. Well, there's another three hundred hours down the drain.
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They are great when you need to recover though.
See, I wish this was the same for me. I'm also hating my job right now, but my depression over work and home life is spilling into my enjoyment of games. When I'm in a funk, the games aren't as fun as they are when life is good, so I don't play them as much, meaning I'm not doing the hobby that I enjoy the most, which makes me feel worse... It's not a good cycle. Hopefully the combo of work getting better (hopefully soon) and games I'm really looking forward to coming out will get me back into enjoying games again.
It's pretty much all I've done my whole life. If I just stopped one day it would be...weird? I guess. I'm not sure what it would be like.
I still find it pretty fun though
And reticulating splines.
This is exactly it for me. Honestly for me the game is largely irrelevant - it's an opportunity to compete with and against my friends, connect with them and enjoy each others' company. Doesn't matter if it's Rock Band, Call of Duty, New SMB or DnD - is about being social. I have Gears 3 early right now and as much as it's amazing I can't fucking wait until Tuesday when I can play co-op and TDM and Horde and everything else with the guys.
@gamefacts - Totally and utterly true gaming facts on the regular!
As I'm fond of saying whenever the Megachat decides to play something really terrible together: Friends make anything good.
Hell, my favorite gaming moments are always when something really stupid happens when we're playing together. I'll never forget when I was first playing MVC2 against one of them and I accidently canceled out of Colossus's hyper. Colossus went up...and never came back. It was like he just said "Fuck this shit, I'm going to Mars." The match was basically over at that point because we were laughing way too hard. Sure, absolutely stomping the shit out of a pub can be fun, but it's the dumb little moments like that that keep me coming back.
I play games for fun and in the hopes that with each one I play to the end, I'll find a satisfying, possibly even fulfilling experience that I'll walk away from knowing that all of the time I've spent has been put to fine use. I keep playing them because I'm still hopeful that there are plenty of new ideas circulating in the industry and I'll be finding worthwhile investments for years to come.
Oh, and to address the OP. The Witcher 2. DO IT.
Also, if you're of the strategy and simulation persuasion, that's one branch of gaming that's easily appreciated more and more as you get older. Unlike popcorn arcade crap like COD, strategy/simulation stuff gets infinitely more interesting with age.
EDIT: I bypassed my work filters using Bing's cached page viewer, FUCK YEAH!
Upon reading the article, I couldn't really relate with any of it. It sounds more like the author had matured, but was insisting on playing the same shit the kids were playing instead of the many other great titles that are out there but not necessarily the big blockbusters. He needs to stop getting his game recommendations from the token hot girl that doesn't know anything about gaming behind the counter at Gamestop and expand his gaming horizons.
I'm at an age now where most of my friends have stopped gaming. What do they do instead? They watch Cops. Fuck that, I'd rather participate in my entertainment experiences.
I'm a lot like this, I very rarely find games that I don't like. I just enjoy games, and the genres I do tend to gravitate away from I still find games I enjoy in.
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The last time I played it, I built my grass hut a little too close to the communal fire and it went up in flames. I was so disappointed, I think I stopped playing after that.
I don't play with all of you. In fact I play with a very, very, very small fraction. But the ones I have played with made it entirely worthwhile. The MK tournament, for example, I met some great dudes while we all went through that. Same can be said of my brief stint into TF2, Halo: Reach, and now League of Legends. The people on here are always introducing me to these new games that I'd never have thought to touch otherwise. I think the biggest reason for this is because PA, as a collective group of gamers, aren't the typical dicks you find mongering around places like Xbox Live. After a tiring day of work or having to sort someone else's shit out I don't want to put up with douchebags during my leisure time. If I play with people here, I know that won't be an issue.
Don't get me wrong, there are games coming out like Sonic Generations that I will be picking up solely for me. And when I get Gears 3 my brain thinks "Sweet, me and my brother will be co-oping this for a while" but tacked onto that is "and I know the PA guys will be up for some Horde." Same with UMvC3 - my friends who are insane over fighting games, and myself, will be rocking the house with that for quite a while, but I know there'll be PA folks up for a brawl at most times and it's definitely something I'll be up for. It's just a sense of community that feels like an escalation of the school banter I used to have with friends over things like Baldurs' Gate 2 or Final Fantasy or Resident Evil. It's a good feeling when there's a community who share your hobby just as passionately even when they're halfway across the globe.
Now excuse me I'm going to clean my nose because I got brown on it. :P
The days (or rather nights) when I could stay up until 3 or 4 in the morning playing a videogame because I just find it so unutterably awesome are long gone, though.
Games. The fuckers just keep making them.