I don’t see people talk about the Katamari Damacy games very much which is a shame because I think they’re delightful! I also wish more people talked about Cattails (especially the sequel, Cattails: Wildwood Story), these games deserve more love imo haha
I feel it. I feel the cosmos!
This is what me and my partner say to each other when we drink good coffee.
Katamari Damacy
These are apparently the remasters of the first two games for PC:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/848350/Katamari_Damacy_REROLL/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1730700/We_Love_Katamari_REROLL_Royal_Reverie/
From looking at Wikipedia and Steam, I don’t think that there’s a PC version of Me & My Katamari.
Cattails (especially the sequel, Cattails: Wildwood Story)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/634160/Cattails__Become_a_Cat/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1882500/Cattails_Wildwood_Story/
All four games are also on Switch!! That’s where I played them!
The Katamari remasters are very well done as these things go. Just the right amount of graphical and compatibility boosting while not screwing with the gameplay, audiovisuals, or quirky vibes which made the originals so great.
I’m currently playing to a T, by the Katamari creator.
Not remotely similar, and hard to recommend to most people tbh… but it has the same joyful silliness that just makes me smile, somehow.
I saw an article about it!! I really want to play it but alas don’t have anything that can run it, but once I can get a PS5 it’s totally going on my shopping list!
One of the greatest games of all time from a design and gameplay perspective. There’s a reason it’s in the MoMA. The soundtrack is an all-timer as well.
Cattails series mentioned! I’ve replayed those two multiple times they’re so cute and the gameplay loop is so soothing and fun.
Cat Quest series (which is more dungeon-crawler, not cat sim) is also adorable and accessible but doesn’t seem to be mentioned too often.
Man I keep meaning to replay Wildwood Story but I know once I start again that’s all I’m doing for the next few day lol… I love the colony layout editor so much, spent so many hours fine-tuning my colony to make it exactly the way I wanted it
Cat Quest series
Lah, la-la-la-la-la-la-laaah lah la la la-la lah!
Kenshi. Ive only ever seen 1 person mention it in the year I’ve been on Lemmy.
It’s like depressed RuneScape.
… Was I that person?
I evangelize Kenshi like the Holy Nation evangelizes Okran.
Also…!
Kenshi has so much scale and depth it’s hard to explain what you “do” in the game I love it
Die.
A LOT
Kenshi
https://store.steampowered.com/app/233860/Kenshi/
Ive only ever seen 1 person mention it in the year I’ve been on Lemmy.
I’ve brought it up a bunch as an example of a game that I like that’s really a “one-game genre” – it didn’t really get cloned, like most good games do. Kind of a bummer, because if you’ve played all of Kenshi, there’s not much more to do if you want more short of waiting for Kenshi 2 to be finished.
kagis
https://lemmy.world/post/5593904/3755382
https://lemmy.world/post/2703109/2113199
https://lemmy.world/post/7471136/4950578
https://lemmy.world/post/25365592/14990415
https://lemmy.world/post/10421126
There’s also a community here for it, !kenshi@lemmy.world. Not much activity, though.
Kenshi is one of those great war crime simulators
Escape Velocity and its open-source spiritual successor, Endless Sky.
EV Nova is what got me hooked on Star Citizen
Never played Escape Velocity, but Endless Sky was fantastic. Both the main quest lines had fantastic stories, especially the first one.
Escape Velocity also had a sequel or two done by Ambrosia Software themselves. I remember playing and enjoying them.
kagis
Escape Velocity Override and Escape Velocity Nova.
It looks like Ambrosia Software’s website is now down, so I assume that one can’t legally purchase it any more.
It looks like Escape Velocity was never ported to anything outside of classic MacOS, so playing it today probably entails obtaining a classic MacOS emulator and abandonware copies of the binaries.
While Endless Sky is neat and last I looked still getting expanded, it also didn’t have as much story content as the Escape Velocity series either (again, at least last I looked).
The image of each planet in Escape Velocity series (not really worth keeping IMHO, as they were saved at 8-bit depth) were done with KPT Bryce, a now out-of-print terrain generation and rendering software package. Probably one of the better-suited applications for it, as it was pretty good at letting one quickly turn out alien-looking landscapes. While there are newer terrain generation software packages, I have to say that Bryce did a lot of neat stuff and I don’t feel that there’s something that quite fills its “exploration” role in modeling and rendering software today. For example, procedural generation of textures using slope and altitude (so, for example, you could get rocky faces where generated terain was steep, or snow at high altitude on mountains).
Re. EV series ports - check the first link in my previous comment ;)
And I had the same experience with Endless Sky when I first found out about it some years ago. It has gotten a lot of updates since then, but I am holding out for a 1.0 release
Ah, gotcha!
The Thief series. I LOVED the first one especially, Thief the Dark Project. Medieval (low magic fantasy?) stealth shooter. The more valuable you pick up directly translates to what you can buy as a load out for the next level so you’re encouraged to explore, though even the low level enemies can kick you ass so you have to be sneaky. Actually great stealth mechanics even for an old game. The world building is amazing, with it’s own lore, culture and slang. The plot of the games are also great.
The Kingdom of Loathing is a game I’ve played almost non-stop since about 2003. Web based and free, it’s based off of old text based games. But it’s fun. Really fun. And hilarious. The currency is meat. The classes are goofy. Saucerer? Disco bandit? Seal Clubber? A lot of games deal with things like power creep or inflation, or how the heck to get people to actually help pay for it. This game solves problems like these elegantly. The user base is fun and friendly and corporative, there’s always new stuff coming out to try, they do a holiday special every year, and all the pictures are crudely drawn stick figures.
Half-Life, Thief, and the original Sims games (City, Ant, etc) were my original gaming go-tos!
Sim ant rules, you can be a spider sometimes
There’s a cheat code for that.
Disco bandit checking in! You got any meat paste?
I stack my meat like I stack the bodies of knob goblins in my wake
The Moxie on this one!
The Kingdom of Loathing
I can’t believe that game is still around lol. It was probably 2009 or so when I logged in last. I had ascended 3 times and figured I had pretty much seen all there is to see. So cool to see they are still around and doing well. I guess I’m going to have to playthrough it at least one more time :)
Oh man they have added and changed so much since you dropped off
Board games or video games?
Or The Game?
hey f$#@ you buddy I haven’t lost the game through the internet in awhile, that was a low swipe
👌
You can’t even label these fuckers as “I lost the game because of that idiot”, because then you lose every time you see them
Now you beginning to understand the difficulty I have with most of my real life friendships, my life is a battlefield littered with perfectly nice moments split in two by The Game blasting through, making everybody lose in a terrible animal cry.
The are no heroes in the foxhole, especially when the war is The Game and your fellow soldiers in the foxhole with you are bad at The Game.
hide the sausage?
Why not both?
Slay the Spire - the video game based on board game mechanics
Slay the Spire the Board Game - based on the video game based on board game mechanics but in board game form!
Outlaws. An early Spaghetti Western themed FPS from LucasArts. After Dark Forces (Retconned by Rogue One) and before DF2:Jedi Knight (the one with the amazibad FMV cut scenes and the best expansion pack ever), it leveraged the 2.5d engine for all it was worth and did a hand-animated slightly Don-Bluth-esque aesthetic that worked perfectly.
Level design was good. Multiplayer was fun, even though if you tried to LAN with an unswitched hub (it was 1998!) player 3 would lag like motherfucker and be relegated to throwing dynamite and praying. Story was straight out of a Tropes-R-Us, but well executed and with good voice acting (including John de Lancie IIRC). The coup de grace was the soundtrack, Clint Bajakian seemed to inhabit Ennio Morricone’s soul, but with leitmotifs to make John Williams proud. It absolutely elevated the game.
Outlaws
https://store.steampowered.com/app/559620/Outlaws__A_Handful_of_Missions/
Looks like it’s currently 65% off on GOG:
dark forces got a community sourceport, and even a commercial one. outlaws on the other hand which is better in literally every way gets no love.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
I have been playing this game my entire life on/off, and have the most hours in, but I have never beaten it. I came close 1 fucking time, and I will forever remember the one dumb mistake I made that lost it for me just on the cusp of victory.
One day…
God tier game. I’ve never even been close to beating it.
Mount & Blade. It’s not unpopular per se, but somehow I never saw anyone mentioning it around here in Lemmy.
I was playing it on console so I didn’t get to do any mods to really increase the fun but I still had a lot of fun anyway. I do think the devs need to try a bit harder. I feel like they just provide a framework for mods without making a really nice game themselves.
That being said I played hundreds of hours of both and really like them. I just wish they were a bit better
Blast Corps
Oh fuck yeah
Came here to post this. What a cool weird game just doing its own thing. I’m sure there have been demolition games since then, but the random mechanics of the dump truck (among other vehicles) made it so unique and creative.
Enderal.
I’ll edit this later when I can post from my comp (mobile now) with the full pitchas promised:Basically an indie dev crew broke skyrim down to its most basic assets, then rebuilt a completely new game using them. AND IT’S SO FUCKING GOOD. Completely new lore / game universe (has nothing at all to do with elder scrolls, tamriel, etc), new voice acting, terrain, music, you name it.
Steers away from common story tropes to the point that there isn’t really an antagonist in the traditional sense - but it uses concepts, emotions, philosophies, etc as the driving force for the main story line and some of the larger quest chains.
This game is an absolute passion project by the devs, which is something we don’t see often now-a-days.
Note: link above is to the version that uses Skyrim SE’s assets (the 2016 re-release). If you have the original version of skyrim, use this link instead. If you own a different version of Skyrim, there might be a compatible version of Enderal here: https://sureai.net/games/enderal/
Fair warning: the children NPC voice acting is even worse than the kids in Skyrim. The TAI (toggle AI) command can shut them up without breaking them.
Fair warning 2: they redid combat. The OP shit in Skyrim, like the sneaky archer build, will get your ass beat to a pulp in Enderal. Make a save when you get to the point where you can spend some talent points, experiment with a few styles, and go from there.
Fair warning 3: It’s built on Skyrim’s assets, which means it has all of Skyrim’s problems. Step on a basket full of cabbage just right; get launched into low orbit. Quest items clipping through the floor. Bounty that refuses to go away. Shit like that. Save frequently, and don’t be afraid to use the command console to do things like magic in a lost item or force a broken quest to progress to the next stage.
Freedom Fighters. Some mechanics were clunky but most were great and I really can’t think of any other games with such a good mix of strategy and quick-thinking/reaction gameplay. I’ve played it through at least 3 times!
Freedom Fighters
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1347780/Freedom_Fighters/
That 94% score doesn’t surprise me at all. Ugh, I wish I had more time to dedicate to gaming.
I randomly came across this game back when it came out on ps2 and I loved it. They set it up for a sequal and im still waiting 2 decades later.
Earthworm Jim
Atomic Robokid (Genesis)
Tempest (Atari 2600 version)
Ghosts and Goblins (NES)
The game where it’s a rich guy that sends a trained assassin out onto a island with nothing and hunts him for 24 hours, and if the assassin kills the rich guy he gets his freedom and like $20K.
Rock n Roll Racing (SNES)
Beyond All Reason/Planetary Annihilation
Ghosts and Goblins
Listen kids, this is how you spot them, this and their rubber skin. Dogs bark at them too.
Earthworm Jim
https://store.steampowered.com/app/901147/Earthworm_Jim/
Ghosts and Goblins (NES)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1556690/Capcom_Arcade_StadiumGhosts_n_Goblins/ (arcade)
Not the same, but apparently close.
The NES & arcade versions are very similar in terms of level layout and enemy spawns. There are certainly differences, but I haven’t played the arcade version enough to tell you what those specific differences are.
Beyond All Reason
https://www.beyondallreason.info/
Planetary Annihilation
https://store.steampowered.com/app/386070/Planetary_Annihilation_TITANS/
I personally enjoyed Total Annihilation, but Planetary Annihilation and some of the later games, like the Spring-based remakes never quite caught me the same way.
TIL there’s an arcade version of Ghosts n Goblins
Thanks for the links!
The arcade was the original version. There’s also a really good modern port on the Commodore 64 with a banging soundtrack called “Ghosts n Goblins Arcade”
Next week, imma be all about this.
Rock n Roll Racing
That was notable for having a pretty good soundtrack for the SNES:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngua3njzHBY&list=PLXtoniNoeLvpgFcFnhfzi2SxEAI4jyIZr
Still to this day I hum Black Sabbath when I drive fast or do any fancy weaving.
Heard Sabbath on this game before anywhere else, I still love them so much.
The original mass effect trilogy. I know they’re very mainstream but no one talks about them anymore and I must have like 5k hours between the 3 games.
Perfect winter break games for just diving in and doing 20 hour long play sessions
mass effect trilogy
Looks like there’s currently a 90% off sale.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1328670/Mass_Effect_Legendary_Edition/
I do recommend the legendary edition, the graphics updates are actually good. You still need to add a few choice mods but it was a good remaster
Same reason people don’t talk about Game of Thrones anymore. The last entry, Andromeda, was so disappointing it retroactively made people like the previous ones less :\
I think they just never were that relevant, probably because the first one was too RPG and not enough action game for the average public to form a cult following around. Still amazing games that are well worth bringing and nerding over
The combat in Andromeda was pretty sweet though even though the story sucked. I have it another shot not that long ago and once I figured out some of the profile swapping stuff the combat was really fun.
Bugsnax. It’s like Pokemon Snap/Legends Arceus, but the Pokemon are food items, like a sub-sandwich centipede or a lollipop dragonfly. You can feed them to people, and when you do, their body parts turn into the food they just ate. It’s great!
- Brave Fencer Musashi
- Limbo
- ReCore
- The Way
- Inside
- Unravel
- Cat Quest
- Death Squared
Limbo
https://store.steampowered.com/app/48000/LIMBO/
ReCore
https://store.steampowered.com/app/537450/ReCore_Definitive_Edition/
The Way
https://store.steampowered.com/app/311010/The_Way/
Inside
https://store.steampowered.com/app/304430/INSIDE/
Unravel
Looks like it’s currently 75% off on Steam.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1225560/Unravel/
Cat Quest
Someone else mentioned this one; I linked to it there.
Death Squared
I have brave fencer on ps1! Still play it sometimes. Sadly missing the ff bonus disc
I wanted to hate it because I had just read Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa and was fascinated by Miyamoto Musashi and the game is only loosely connected to him but it sucked me in.
I ended up playing it for a few weeks straight until I beat it and I’ve never forgotten it.
Is ReCore really worth the play? It was on my list when it came out, but got very mixed reviews.
I enjoyed it but I’ve never finished it because it gets repetitive and starts to feel like a grind.
It fits my play style because I game in fits and starts so I’ve been playing it in chunks.
I liked it enough to go get it for PC after playing it on Xbox GamePass years ago.
The grind aspect is the biggest comment I remember reading. I’ll keep it as an option for one day.
