Me playing Star Wor in two days after not having played a freespace shooter since… I don’t even remember.
Learn your Thatch Weave and be ready to form up. You’ll be fine. 
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If you are a juggler, you start from scratch all the time. And fail so much.
I was going to make a video essay about how Getting Over It isn’t an interesting experience for jugglers, as it provides no new feelings or levels of frustration.
I also tend to really like fresh games. And it’s so opaque to try to get “back” into a lot of these games with serious formats if they have changed drastically in terms of metagame.
We were talking about this in my guild a bit with Among Us. Some people somehow wanted ranked competitive versions and some people get angry at others for playing it one way or another (too serious, too silly, etc). Exactly the kinds of problems you would expect with a werewolf/mafia game if people have different goals. In a similar context to this, and board games, the experts or constant veterans often want more minutia and more tools and eventually can make the game overwhelming to new players.
I’m not sure where I’m at for the skill based game discussion. I like to play competitive, skill requiring games quite a bit, fighters and fpses, mostly. But I’m absolute trash at them. But I also don’t have the drive and motivation to put in the necessary time and effort to get good at them.
If I have to choose do I want to get decent at one game, or play and experience thousand different games, the choice is very easy for me. Feed me the variety.
game idea: mmo elimination
1000 players
You play as a Marble, 3rd person POV
Race to the bottom of the hill, you fall off the track you lose and spawn into new race.
No input controls. you just watch.
0 skill game
ray trace the marbles, make it pretty
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Same idea, one minor modification. There is one input and exactly one input.
The start of the race track is a plinko/pachinko board. You choose the exact position on the horizontal line from which your marble will be dropped.
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Advance mode, peggle cannon.
So marblelympics X saltybet?
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I was driven away by the plague of hackers at the time the development resources of the game were being fully driven into loot boxes and cosmetics
I’ve recently playing a ton of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2, a combined remake of the first two games of the series from the PS1 era. And it’s pretty good. I spent a lot of my youth playing these games so I am a prime target and for once they managed to capture the old, arcade-y feel without overdoing it like some of the later titles in the series did, all the levels look great and feel good to skate in, though I think they overdid the stuff a bit that some things kind of go missing in the textures, which is particularly noticeable in the Venice Beach level.
I played these games so much in my youth that I basically speedran them without knowing what speedrunning was. What I mean is that you had to complete each objective (collecting SKATE, finding the secret tape, high scores, etc.) with each Skater to unlock their video, and in certain early levels such as Hangar I could do the entire list in a 2 minute session. This however has gone by the wayside here. You only need to collect each objective once to unlock levels, and the levels stay unlocked for any skater. You still have to visit each level to collect the stat points for the skaters, but instead of having to do all the challenges, each skater (and the game overall) has a list of challenges to unlock additional deck graphics or outfits and gain money to to buy other stuff, including objects for the park creator tool. Some of these are tied to the objectives i.e. collecting medals, and hitting the “sick” scores in levels with that skater.
Speaking of medals: I either lost a lot of my skill in the intervening years, or these competition levels are a lot harder than they used to be. I am having an extremely hard time getting gold medals, and lost the gold in the last run more than I care to remember already. Some of the challenges also feel very hard and are kind of very obtuse in their restrictions.
Finally, I am very happy that they basically kept the entire soundtrack intact. THPS1 was a foundational piece in forming my musical taste. As far as I could find, only three songs from the original games are missing, and they added 30+ additional songs from a bunch of bands that I actually rather like, such as Screaming Females, Strung Out, Reel Big Fish, FIDLAR, A Tribe Called Quest, and Billy Talent. The only problem is that some of the songs are pretty heavily censored, particularly noticeable with Police Truck which is a rather offensive song (and intended to be).
Not to go too far offtopic, but yeah, Goldfinger was a band I really got into in the early 2000s. Part of it was that they had a song in THPS. Another part of it was that they had a new album coming out around that time with a cover of 99 Red Balloons which drew a little attention from german press because it contains a verse in german. I distinctly remember seeing some sort of interview with them on a german TV station while waiting for the german version of Big Brother (I was a stupid 14-year old back in 2000). I think a day or so later our newspaper came with an advertising insert from an electronics chain and in it the album was advertised. Had to get it then. So yeah, Stomping Ground was the first punk album I bought. Still a decent album. Kind of unfortunate John Feldman (the lead singer) kind of went off the deep end with his PETA advocacy over the years.
Picked up Chronicon on the black friday sale, it’s been really fun. It’s an indie arpg that hits all the right buttons and excels where it needs to. Graphics are sub-par and enemy variety is below average, but it absolutely nails the feeling of stomping around a map busting hundreds of mooks while loot explodes out of them. Subworld has squared the circle of creating a game with tons of depth that can be quickly picked up to start busting heads. I wish the AAA arpgs focused on speed and gamefeel the way this one does. It’s not perfect, but I’ve played way, way worse arpgs for $12
Playing Hades. Got to what could be the final boss on the last run, but then died. I’m sure I’ll beat it soon-ish. We’ll see how much I keep playing. Pretty sure it’s a play forever sort of thing, as it’s a roguelike and there are many many things I have not unlocked.
Without spoiling it, Hades does have credits at a specific point in the game, at which point it essentially becomes an endless game with self imposed “Challenges” to make the game harder.
I stopped after the credits, but loved every second of it. Fantastic game.
I didn’t stop at the credits, but taking a look at the achievements there’s apparently an ‘epilogue’ which comes after you’ve done enough post credits, we’ll see if I make it to that.
Just got absolutely consumed by Demoncrawl. It’s Minesweeper: the rougelike. The base game is exactly the same, but now you have HP, money, armor, and items. Adding campaign mechanics and random items works surprisingly well for a game that was already procedurally generated. Like classic roguelikes, it is ruthless. There are absurd effects like “the open squares have items that you can take, but deal damage to you” or “clear an entire row of the board, if you kill a monster (mine) refund 50% of this item’s charge” and you need to abuse your items to get a leg up on a system that isn’t quite one hit kill (like normal minesweeper) but damn close.
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