Onemanarmyy

I was always into godgames. Populous, Black & White, GODUS.. hah, not that last one.

But yeah, would be cool to see something happen in that space again. I want to throw rocks at cities and terraform terrain!

I'm also down for a new historical citybuilder in the vein of Pharaoh, Zeus or Emperor. Nebuchadnezzar is exactly that, and i should check it out, but i would also like to see someone try to make a truly modern one of those instead of emulating the past.

Brotato:

It looks worse than Binding of Isaac's art, and it might come across as someone's first game-project, but somehow i've spent multiple days playing this thing. Because it's one of those Vampire Survivors likes, but this one is tough from the get go and is generally a bit more close- range focused. You go around the map, surviving, gathering resources to buy extra weapons and upgrades, you combine tier 1 weapons to tier 2 weapons.. etc etc... It's not doing anything special, but it's very addictive stuff to find that balance between keeping yourself alive in the short-term and setting yourself up for a good endgame.

Escape Academy

An Escape room game. The puzzles won't blow your socks off, but it's still a fun little demo to check out. There's something intriguing about the world-building and characters in this. I'm a sucker for mysterious underground organizations.

A pioneer, an innovator, i never saw that personally. Sure, he went head to head with the ESA, but it was not like he had a completely different vision on how new games should be revealed. We've seen so many Geoff Keighley shows throughout the years, even his own productions, that it's clear that there's no monkey up the sleeve. His shows are as cookie-cutter as you could think up.

You get ads, you get trailers, you get some celebs & studio-heads talk for 10 min. All on a flashy big stage. The viewnumbers point towards this old-skool way of doing things is still bringing in the numbers, even if a lot of the vocal ones don't seem to like the presentation. Next year, he'll still have some games to reveal and people will tune in once again. Geoff doesn't have to do strange Devolver acting extravaganza's as long as he gets a handful of game-reveals that people want to see. And if the viewers are with Keighley, game reveals will want to be there too.

Writing this post made me think of the most unusual show i've seen Geoff do, and that was probably that one event where he had Joel McHale as co-host and i think Odd Future was in some carpark and there were sofa's? You could just see Geoff be incredibly embarrassed and angry during that show, while the audience was mixed between 'what a shitshow' and 'omg i can't turn away from this, this is a very entertaining carcrash'. But if you were creating that thing, you'd probably feel like you should never do anything like that ever again and go back to the tried formula of showing some trailers that people might care about, getting funding for it through ads and weird razorblade-robots and keep the innovation aspect restricted to creating a island-background with a floating orb.

It's the internet, so naturally there are always angry people to be found if you look at the right places, but i think the reception to this remake undertaking was way more positive across the board than i expected beforehand. I figured every change would be put under the microscope and cause controversy, but generally it seems like people are okay with this thing being different from the game they already know by heart and is still playable.

Neat combat updates without throwing the menu-based nature completely out the door, depth added to the Avalanche characters, decent graphics and Square actually deciding to change things up based on the original.

CONQUER THE WORLD!

@atheistpreacher: That game has an interesting end structure.

Because the main objectives are all fairly easy, but there's a lot of challenge to be found if you stray from the main quests. That means that if you just want to finish the game without going for a 'true ending', that's a fairly do-able affair for someone that has dabbled with side-content here and there. But for the people that want to squeeze everything out of the game, it has one extremely difficult optional combat challenge and a very difficult optional platform challenge. After doing these, and some of the side bosses, the standard end-boss was quite easy, because the game doesn't seem interested in forcing it's players to seek out all the difficult bosses and challenges if they don't want to do that, but still be able to finish the game.

I'm confused to which article is being referred to. The Ooze page clearly states that it's a game for the Genesis and there's no mention at all about the Nomad in it.

@cikame: Yeah that happened to me as well. I was annoyed by how easy it is to miss out on sidequests if you don't check after each story development and missed something. Then some characters were lame and i ended up doing a lot of meaningless filler 'kill this enemy' quests and fell like i had my fill of this game.

Theme Hospital? That's one of those games that is a joy to boot up when you get the itch to play it, but after finishing 7-ish levels, that itch has been scratched properly and the difficulty gets quite high and suddenly it feels like you're fighting the underlying mechanics of the game itself to make sure that you can actually see the mouse-holes with your camera position or know the exact optimal sizes of each room and understand exactly how the pathing of the visitors will work out for you. At that point, i tend to tap out.

A game like Dungeon Keeper 2 is similar for me. Love playing it, but at some point it becomes too much of a chore to finish.

Black & White? Ditto.

The Killers definitly used to be Indie. They got rejected by major labels and ended up signing for a small-time UK based indie label named Lizard King Records. Now they're obviously a huge rock & roll band that fit more in line with Bruce Springsteen, but they still have the same roots and fanbase as bands like Arctic Monkeys, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bloc Party, Arcade Fire and Franz Ferdinand that all gained popularity in the same timeframe. Most of these bands are no longer on indie labels and honestly i don't see them mentioned all that often as indie-bands anymore, unless an article is written about the start of the career or when you're digging through music genre's in which every rock-adjacent band with artful flourishes gets gobbled up into the term indie together with every solo artist that puts a flute or a violin on their songs.

Sticking to the game-side aspect now, I wonder if checking which publisher releases something makes much sense in a world where AnnaPurna & Devolver Digital are such juggernauts. Do we know whether a small-time studio gets more support from a Deep Silver or a THQ Nordic than a team gets from an massive indie developer like Devolver Digital? Should we focus on the team-size of the developer? Should we just embrace the duality of Indie & AAA and leave it at that?