Homeschooled316

Wow, so many Catan inductees here.

For me it was the notoriously shitty Civilization (2002). I was around 11 years old. Any designer board game is incredible if it’s the first one you’ve ever played.

Whitehead also dashed away one of the big points of speculation among Sonic fans: that Sonic Mania 2 falling through was the result of bad blood between Sega and members of Evening Star. "Contrary to any rumors, we maintain a friendly relationship with Sega and hope fans are pumped to play both games once they release," he says.

These responses do not leave me with the same impression as the article’s author. Both parties maintain professionalism, but they also both dodged the direct question of why Evening Star isn’t making a sonic game right now. I still think there is bad blood, and history makes me wonder if it was Iizuka wanting to seize more creative control than Whitehead’s team was willing to give.

Yep, I’ve been holding off on it for awhile because of this. It feels like it’s maybe never going to happen at this point.

It’s a novel hybrid of two genres, so the recommendations are all going to be split between them. The best (western) turn based tactics game is likely XCOM 2: War of the Chosen. The best deckbuilder card game is likely Slay the Spire.

If you want a tactics game that retains the social/character aspects, you’re looking for Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but that’s on the switch.

Big Dice hates him

I should put “accessibility” in sarcastic quotation marks. Here, it doesn’t mean adding options or features to assist someone with different handicaps or needs. It means making the game so easy that anyone, even a toddler or game journalist, can finish it without having to learn from mistakes or think about what they’re doing.

Particularly with regard to excessive guidance. Varying degrees of “mobile game that makes you click exactly what it says for 30 minutes to prove you played the tutorial.” Those games may be the worst offenders, but less-dramatic hand holding happens in console and PC games too.

People are going to be pedantic about this one, because it’s not ALL games, but what you’re seeing is real. Game design, especially corporate design, has changed to accomplish two things:

1. Engagement
2. Accessibility

Games are designed to be playable by as many people as possible for as long as possible. Some would say this is just Western AAA games, but lots of anime games have been doing this nonsense for decades - games with 10 hours of baby’s first JRPG tutorial and 80 hours of grinding and filler. Many of them critically acclaimed games that fans would flog me for if I actually named one of them.

There are indie games that help you escape this, but many take that accessibility-first approach that requires everything to be very structured and corral you toward the right direction.

Again, I think people are going to be dismissive, but you’re right. It’s a tough world out there for someone who just wants to play a game and not be suckered into a live service engagement trap, or ladder system that hides your real MMR to keep you grinding up an imaginary points system. It’s not like the old days when you can just pick something popular, you have to discriminate and carefully judge what you buy now.

Horizons has the exact same rules minus blight cards and adversaries. The spirit designs are far, far better for new players than the original “easy” spirits. They corral the player into using them correctly, where the original easy spirits still had a super low skill floor.

I bought horizons just to integrate those new spirits into my regular collection. Their design is so flippin elegant. And their sheets being flat card stock instead of cardboard is a plus, not a minus - the original game frankly should have done the same to save box space. I replaced all my spirits with the foils they sold just to fit everything in a single box.

All the usual problems you expect with lists like these.

• Franchises represented by their first or most ubiquitous game rather than their best (or better yet, all of them that deserve it making the list)
• Recency bias toward games that likely won’t be recognized as this good 5 years from now.
• Missing entries so egregious that almost anyone would agree they belong on the list (see the lack of Symphony of the Night, for example).
• Arguably too much weight put on storytelling.
• (most importantly) The items above being applied randomly and inconsistently.

Arkham City was for a long while considered the best, but age has arguably been kinder to Asylum (thanks to storytelling) and Knight (thanks to streamlining/modernization).

I don’t think there is any question on how to answer the literal post, though. If you could only get one of them, it’s Asylum.

Also, I would not recommend binging these games unless you are REALLY feeling it when you finish Asylum. The chief complaint about them was always that they did not change the formula around enough between games. I have to think playing them back to back exacerbates that.

I have a cool idea to prevent hardcore disconnect deaths: Let people play single player games offline. But it wouldn’t be a blizzard game if they couldn’t pull the plug after a few years.

MetalFX upscaling is a nice gesture, but turned out to be a lousy performance-quality tradeoff comparable to FSR 1.0. Apple Arcade had some nice gems like fantasian, but also ended up a recycling bin for failed f2p games. We can only assume the monkey’s paw will curl some way or other for this, too. Apple’s attempts to get gamers to buy their stuff is always a little half-assed.