siftypes

It's probably not a bad idea to go with one of those smaller plug-and-plays, or any older console without internet functionality. It sounds like the kid's parents aren't particularly savvy, so you'd be doing them a favor by going with a system that isn't going to throw updates and connectivity errors at them all the time.

Something like a GameCube or an older DS can probably stand up to the usual punishment a 4-year-old can throw out. If you have access to cheap vintage consoles, I think a kid that young could get a lot of mileage out of a Genesis or an SNES proper, though that can be really expensive or really cheap depending on your immediate local area. Get lucky at a thrift shop and you could set a kid up with years of entertainment for $50.

@someoneproud: If your read of a piece of media about shooting your way through post-apoc America goes no deeper than "Bikes and zombies are cool," then I'm not surprised you consider my post to be "over analyzing." This is shallow stuff - if you really want to over-analyze this thing, I'll a lot more time and a lot more words.

It can be fun and fulfilling to think about media beyond the surface level. The ideas and cultural backgrounds that are behind a story's creation are just as critical to it's final form as any intentional creativity that went into it is.

The game very much gives me the sense that it's trying to enable a very specific type of power fantasy. That fantasy being the hyper-macho "man's man" conservative post-apocalypse dream where you are the superpowered living wall that stands between "good folk" and "everyone else." Am I accusing the game of specifically being designed with that kind of neocon death cult in mind? No, of course not, but it's certainly not avoiding those tropes.

It's the same kind of mindset you see in the preppers that fall into that "economic collapse end of days" niche. Buy up all the assault rifles you can, because when they turn savage, you'll need to stand up and fight to reinstate civilization. There are all kinds of uncomfortable themes that come along with that mindset, and almost all of them devolve into xenophobia or racism of some kind.

I'm not surprised that Days Gone ended up delving into weird conspiracy theories, misogyny, and casual attitudes toward slavery. When you build a story that is designed off the frame work of "Strong-willed white guy with a gun standing in the way of savage end-of-days chaos," everything else just tends to come along with it, whether intended or not.

And despite the potential hypocrisy of it, there is a pretty significant overlap between one pecenter biker types and confederate apologists, in my experience, even if it's only aesthetically.

OK, this is an obscure one.

PC title, between 1993 and 1997, I think. I recall this being an educational game, or perhaps a demo that would have been packed in with something like Encarta or event just packed in with Windows 3.x.

Early 3D adventure/puzzle game where you would have a simple 3D map with color-coded keys, doors, buttons, etc. Find the red key to open the red door, that sort of thing. The main draw of this game that I remember is the ability to make your own maps. There was a top-down 2D map view that would show all the keys, doors, etc on the map, and you would use that to sort of design your path through. I do not remember if the 3D was actual rendered screens or sprite-based.

This was something I played for hours around the same time I was playing MindMaze (packed in Encarta 95) and Lode Runner: The Legend Returns. So that's the kind of period we're looking at.

Frankly, whether I find it or not, I'm just curious if anyone remembers this, or if it was just a weird fever dream.

This was easily one of my favorite games growing up. I think this was my game selection from Blockbuster every week, one summer. I remember spending hours and hours in the first couple of levels, just wandering around, destroying random buildings, and taking in the "amazing" graphics.

Many years later, I revisited it to attempt and beat it once and for all, but as you described, the fun ran out long before the gameplay did. I still talk about this game in the context of being one of the most unique game concepts I've seen on consoles, but it's far from good.

I've been big into gacha gaming, lately, which is basically the same general idea, with some level of nonsense gameplay around the periphery. Gotta get all those jpegs.

Digital card collecting has always kind of interested me, but I just can't make myself stay interested. At a certain point, I need something to do with my jpegs. With a gacha game, you can at least put your jpegs to work defending towers or grinding for currency or something.

I have always loved deck building, even if I don't really enjoy competitive card games. So if there is a digital card collectathon out there that also involves building decks (MtG, Yu-Gi-Oh, whatever), then that could be more interesting, and I'd love to read the pamphlet.

Length doesn't matter, as long as I feel like my time is being valued.

I work 60+ hours a week, I volunteer, I have a family. The time I have set aside for gaming is a handful of hours on the weekend, and maybe an hour or two before I head into the office during the week. The games that have really held my attention this generation are those that I can hop into on a Tuesday morning and know that I'm going to have a full hour of fun before work. I gave up on Witcher 3, AC: Odyssey, God of War, FF7:R, and countless others because I knew that I'd be sitting down and spending 10 minutes running through old areas to get to the new stuff. Then 20 minutes of cutscenes, 10 minutes of tutorial maybe, giving me a solid 10 - 20 minutes of enjoyable gameplay.

Or, I could do a few raids in Pokemon Sword, or run through a dungeon in an MMO, or knock out a quest in Outer Worlds. I could load up The Crew and just listen to a podcast and drive for a while. It doesn't matter if the story is 10 hours long or 100 hours long, what matters is that each of those hours feels like it's worth spending on that game. Weirdly, Fallout 4 is a great example of that. Whether or not the game is good, as a whole, it was always a game that I knew I could boot up and kill and hour or two in before work. No filler, no wandering from place to place, just load in, shoot some ghouls, gather some materials, run through some sidequests. Was it always amazing and fresh and brilliant? No, nowhere close, but it was at least consistently active with minimal fluff.