borgmaster

There's been some fresh meat the last month.

Dordogne (3 Hour Main Story) - Artistic Narrative Adventure game

Amnesia: The Bunker (4 Hour Main Story) - Spooky-hidey Horror game

The Big Con (4 Hour Main Story) - Narrative Adventure game with punk zine Aesthetic

Slayers X (3 Hour Main Story) - Parody Boomer Shooter

Planet of Lana (4 Hour Main Story) - Sci-fi side scrolling Puzzle Platformer

Supraland: Six Inches Under (8 Hour Main Story) - Metroidvania First Person Puzzle game

Eastern Exorcist (5 Hour Main Story) - 2D Action game

Ravenlok (3 Hour Main Story) - 3D Action game

@bigsocrates: Podcasts never start with an audience. I mean, it took Deep Listens years to become the 9th most popular video game podcast in Venezuela.

I've played some early to mid 90's British games over the last year, and they're all bad. Even well regarded stuff like Lemmings was never actually good. The trend of garbage British games would have begun in the 80's, and likely were due to a strange confluence of early PC adoption, ease of importing small numbers of American games, lack of a strong arcade culture, diverging computing standards with America, small internal market, and late adoption of console gaming. It seems like the early concepts of computer games got across the pond, but the big developments in action gameplay didn't, so a parallel culture of PC game design sprang up that was largely disconnected from the rest of the world.

The connections that were established across the Pacific by console and arcade manufacturers provided enough back and forth for correct game design standards to begin forming. Since the Brits wouldn't get involved in that until the Mega Drive showed up, they developed a lot of bad design habits which took the entirety of the 90's to get beat out of them. Even then, there was an enormous bloodletting in the 15 year period from roughly 1992 to 2007. The large majority of British development teams didn't survive integration with the global market, and the rest consolidated or were sold off. I mean, look at the fate of Psygnosis. These days, you only have Rockstar, Rare, Media Molecule, and some random indies left on that island.

Like, if you look at something like German game development from the previous 10 or 15 years, there's some wacky shit coming out of there. Small time German developers got started in German speaking markets, which is small compared to the international scale of the video game business. By the time a German studio is able to localize their games to English and get it over to the States, the damn things are wacky and busted. There's more nuance to the dynamics within insular game markets that I can't get into, but that's probably the culprit for old British games being hot garbage.

The 3DO, god help me.

Maybe UUGPGC could get more engagement if a podcast was spun out of it. There could be @bigsocrates and a small core group of hosts and one or two guest participants from the community who at the end of each cycle talk about the game.

1. Infinite Guitars

2. Ghost Song

3. Goat Simulator

I've never been a fan of the sneaky-hidey horror subgenre.

The problem with old games is that they're bad. The only reason to play anything more than one generation old would be for intellectual curiosity or nostalgia.

Also, all game experiences are legitimate. There is no wrong way to play bad video games. Games are bad because one or more aspects in the design or execution has failed, if a game has failed you than you cannot fail it. Thus any method of playing old games is valid.

@gtxforza: That's the overriding issue with Light gun games. Actually, that's true in varying degrees about all arcade ports. Something important is lost in the transition, even if the conversion is successful. Removed from the context arcade machines, especially if they have a unique or specific interface, and the coin-op business model, most of the design choices simply don't work. That's why console games evolved away from a lot of arcade conventions through the 80's and 90's. Galaxian³ is just the most extreme example.

@manburger: That's starting to sound like Dungeon Keeper or Evil Genius. The conceptual problem you've identified with the game is directly inherited from the show and that's the main thing blamed for its failure.

@nodima: Sounds like the SNES was the place to go for baseball games right up until its death. Even though I haven't had a good time with any of these Baseball games, I am curious about how developers have tinkered with and evolved usage of the strike zone over the years.

1. Infinite Guitars

2. Ghost Song

3. Merge & Blade

Yo, that's just an ad for the game. Most other game movies try to be movies.