I think the main hangup is going to be: how easy and simple is this thing for the average person?

The Steam Deck is, any way you slice it, a better value than the Switch or Switch 2. The Steam Deck has sold roughly 6 million units in 3 years. The Nintendo Switch 2 has sold close to 11 million units in about 5 months.

I hope you’re right and that Valve really shakes up the whole industry, but I’m not going to start expecting that until I see it.

Increase productivity?

Pumpkin Jack. It’s a 3D platformer. I haven’t played it in a couple years, but I remember it being mostly linear. Not a ton of collectables, but some. 11 months out of the year it’s a pretty “meh” game, but it absolutely NAILS the Halloween aesthetic. Not “horror” or “scary” or “autumn” but very specifically Halloween.

MediEvil is similar, though much older. I have only played the original for PS1, though there is a modern remake on all platforms that looks pretty good. Not quite as explicitly Halloween-y, but still pretty close. Flawed in its own ways, but I would still say a better game overall than Pumpkin Jack. The levels were a bit less linear and it was a bit more like an adventure game than a platformer.

Luigi’s Mansion is a classic too.

A lot of other games have levels or worlds that are good for Halloween even if the whole game isn’t. Like Pumpkin Hill in Sonic Adventure 2, or Subcon Forest from A Hat In Time. Honestly one day I want to compile a list of all of these themes areas across my favorite games and the play all of these levels seasonally.

I hope that once my account turns 18 they will stop asking my for by DOB to look at mature content.

I love how the Connect app has user notes, so I can appreciate the irony that I already marked DragonTypeWyvern as “Sexist” before.

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You have a much more optimistic memory of gaming review platforms than I do.

I remember getting several different magazines in the 90’s and they were always the same thing. Any “professional” journalist knows that their livelihood is based on selling games. Journalists have to strike a balance between their audience and publishers, which makes negative reviews incredibly rare.

It’s not just videogames. Music, movies, TV shows, books, comics, consumer products. Unkess you’re paying out the nose, reviews almost always have some sort of bias towards trying to sell things. I find the best opinions come from other sources: people I know personally, organic community discussions on the internet (though those are not immune to corporate influence), or when products are only mentioned in contexts where the author clearly will not benefit. For example, a journalist making a list of the top-10 games of all time putting Ocarina of Time on it is probably not incentives to do so… Unless Nintendo is trying to promote a re-release.

Honestly she was one of the few characters in the game that I felt had enough depth and interaction with the player that marriage could make sense.

Pretty much everyone else is like “oh you fetched that alchemy ingredient for me? Sure I guess I’ll marry you, I’ve got nothing else going on that day”.

Don’t get me wrong- i still love Skyrim and I’m perfectly happy with marriage being basically just another quest that gives you some buffs. It’s just funny to me that Serana is one of the few characters where we can learn a TON about her, meet her parents, go exploring together, share interests, wash blood off our hands together, eat food together, go on dates. She’s accomplished enough that she is not at all intimidated by the Dragonborn, rather relates to them for being granted these supernatural powers and responsibilities they didn’t ask for. My first time playing Dawnguard ii really thought the devs were hinting that she would be the canonical spouse of the Dragonborn moving forward because it makes so much sense. So I was quite surprised she wasn’t eligible.

I suppose when you look at the world through rose-colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags.

A couple of different controversies. He has posts on Reddit (that have since been deleted, but you can find them archived) talking about how student-teacher sexual relationships can often be consensual.

The more famous controversy is this one. Which is hard to summarize other than him being a general asshole to fans, and while he didn’t really say anything too terrible he uses a lot of red-flag language talking about “cancel culture” and “sjw’s” which, in my experience, is only used unirlnically by shitty people.

The main Factorio dev is pretty publicly a shithead.

Perhaps even worse: Factorio has never gone on sale. They are very strongly against the idea of sales. Which like… Fine, but game value depreciates so you should at least drop the price over time. Not the case- in fact they INCREASED the price from $30 to $35 in 2023. The game came out in 2020. It’s now a 5 year old 2D indie game listed at $35. Can I afford that? Yes. Am I going to buy it? No.

Dimensia Donny seems like a nickname that could fit

The article seems primarily focused on new games. And the article still makes some great points, but when you factor in older games the problem gets bigger.

I am not going to say that old games were better or that “they just don’t make them like they used to”. What I will say is that a lot of older games that are super cheap on Steam or out of print entirely are still great. There are occasionally new great games being released of course (I haven’t played Hades 2 yet but I expect it to be great, for example). But there’s a lot of new games being released where I think… “Why would I spend $70 or $80 on this when I already have this backlog of older games? Why would I spend my time playing 7/10 games when I have dozens of 9/10’s sitting in my library waiting for me?”

Back when I was on Reddit years ago, one of my favorite subs was the Patient Gamers one. There are a couple of similar ones on different Lemmy instances but they’re nowhere near as active.

I remember friends of mine assuring me I absolutely HAVE to get games like Atomic Heart, High on Life, Avowed, the Oblivion remaster, Starfield, Prey, the Outer Worlds, and many more. There are series that I have enjoyed in the last that have way too many entries to keep up with- 3D Sonic, Assassin’s Creed, Monster Hunter, Yakuza (with all it’s spinoff games like Judgement and others). I’m sure a lot of those games are great, but I just don’t have the time to play then all. And with hundreds of games in my backlog already, these games need to be on sale for dirt cheap and without anti-features like DRM and micro transactions and online requirements in order to get me to buy them.

So I think it’s worth asking- are there enough whales willing to buy these games for $70 or even $80 to subsidize people like me picking them up for $10 in five years? If not, perhaps these developers and publishers will need to move to a different business model. Maybe there are simply too many devs and too many games getting made.

These games should have been like maaaaybe $5 each on the 3DS a decade ago. Maybe $30 for a physical cartridge with all of them bundled.

Well I kind of alluded to it, but both of the games lack any clear solutions other than “play the game kill the bad guy”.

Which, to be fair, is probably the reason BioShock 1 at least got so popular. I would say this point is much more important to BioShock 1 than any commentary about Ayn Rand, or any commentary about how worker’s movements can get subverted by selfish actors like Atlas. It takes the usual tropes about videogames and turns them into a commentary on how easily our assumptions and expectations can deceive us. Players do what the game tells them to, they progress the way the game allows them to, without ever questioning whether that is the morally correct thing to do. I would say that’s a pretty reasonable thing to do considering the money these games cost, but BioShock at least shines a light on that and makes the player think about it.

There are plenty of other examples of games that DO engage with political ideologies, and use games as a mechanism to think about then. The most famous one is probably Monopoly, which was stolen from the original creator who called it “the landlords game” to show how capitalism eventually leads to one rich person and a bunch of broke people.

If you want a videogame, Disco Elysium is a fabulous, recent, and well-reviewed example. Personally it’s a bit dense for me to play for too long (sometimes it feels more like reading a textbook than playing a game).

I don’t think BioShock 1 or Infinite are terrible or that they shouldn’t have delved into politics at all. I think that they are overrated in part because they get credit for political commentary that ends up being pretty superficial. I think they could have executed the ideas better.

Fitzroy for example: either give us a better reason to fight her or don’t make us do it. Maybe she gets killed by Comstock and leaves a power vacuum, with the chaos of rebel leaders trying to promote solidarity, fight for their own power, hold off or even negotiate peace with Comstock. Or maybe someone like Lady Comstock or Fink could be a source of division within Comstock’s ranks. Or maybe Fitzroy gets convinced that she needs to kill Elizabeth because she’s some dimensional McGuffin protecting Comstock. Maybe get rid of the rebellion entirely and have another country attack Colombia. They already ceded from the US- surely Uncle Sam isn’t cool with losing this technological marvel, nor having this independent state potentially floating above US territories. It’s been a while since I replayed it but I remember the Boxer Rebellion being a key piece of the story: maybe some fallout from that cones to Colombia.

Ah I hadn’t - it’s still in my backlog. But it sounds like it just re-affirms what I had drawn from the main games.

From playing and replaying both BioShock and Infinite, and reading interviews from Ken Levine, my own conclusion is that both of the BioShock games simply use ideology as a narrative tool to create conflict, and the only thing he is condemning broadly is extremism.

In other words, Levine and the rest of the team didn’t make BioShock because they hated Ayn Rand and wanted to spread that message. They made BioShock because they wanted to make a first-person shooter similar to System Shock 2. They needed villains to create conflict, and the easiest way a sci-fi writer can create a villain is just to take any ideology to extremes and think of ways that could go wrong.

I think this is made pretty clear by the lack of any “good” characters in either game. I can’t think of anyone the player is expected to just like and agree with- they are all charicatures taking their ideologies to extremes. Andrew Ryan is clearly bad, but the only real representative of lower classes is Fontaine who is argaubly an even more evil antagonist.

In Infinite, Comstock is clearly the villain as a racist and religious dictator. Daisy Fitzroy is the leader of the rebellion, someone who has personally suffered at Comstock’s hands. She initially starts off as the player’s ally, but then shifts to become “too violent” and “too extreme” in her rebellion, so she and the rest of the rebellion become enemies of Booker. It was really ham-fisted and just kind of waived off as “well anything can happen with the infinite possibilities of dimension hopping!”. But the real reason was more simple: they needed to add additional enemy types to shake up the combat and escalate the difficulty. They wanted to add the chaos of having the player run between two factions fighting each other without the safety of making one of those an ally.

Those two games use ideology as set pieces, but when you combine the two games together the final message is “extremeism bad, centrism good”. I don’t think every game needs to be a doctorate-level poli-sci dissertation, but I do think these two games deserve criticism for being pretty weak there.

The Souls games is another good example I considered bringing up. I’ve only played Bloodborne so far and while I did enjoy it one of my criticisms is that it’s pretty monotone. Even the few NPC’s there are tend to not be very likeable. Everything is dark. Everyone is bad. It’s not even clear whether anything the player experiences is “real” even within the game world, or whether anything the player does accomplishes anything. While I haven’t played the other games I get the impression that they are similar.

I can also think of games that only lean into one side or the others but they do it in a way that I dont mind. “Cozy” games have made an entire genre of this, like Animal Crossing.

Or games where the tone of the game is always dark, but the player and player character both know that there is an “outside” world they can escape to. Resident Evil, Portal, BioShock, etc.

You brought up Metal Gear Solid because it has moments of levity within a gritty military espionage setting, but I think it’s also helped by being set in the real world. If I remember correctly, the end of MGS2 has a boss fight on the roof of a building in Philadelphia and we are shown in cutscenes that the streets below are filled with normal people going about their business, completely unaware of the threat. It’s a reminder of what the player character is fighting for.

Uncharted is another series worth discussing. The first 3 games all kind of blur together in my memory so I could be mistaken, but I remember the first game felt too isolated. I don’t think you really spend much time in a non-hostile environment: it’s all either jungles or ruins or the enemy base. 2 and 3 did a better job of putting Nathan in more mundane and civilian settings: museums, tourists sites, cities, etc. There’s moments where you need to put away your fun and act like a normal person, and that contrast makes the action sequences hit that much harder.

A friend of mine wrote some lyrics for a contest, which includes the lines “if I alone remain, what would it mean to fail? Is there still a world to save…”. This comes into my head a lot whenever I’m playing certain games, especially post-apocalyptic games.

I’d say the Zelda series struggles with this. I put in ~40 hours into Breath of the Wild before I got bored and stopped playing. I never got around to defeating Gannon and I think I only did 3 divine beasts. I kept on looking around and asking myself… Why is Link bothering? It seems like the world is doing pretty well without him. The land of Hyrule is teaming with life. Sure, the people of Hyrule are no longer building megastructures or cities, their populations might be smaller than they used to be, but everyone seems pretty happy and unbothered. The evil forces of Gannon’s corruption mostly keep to themselves, so as long as people avoid the ruined Hyrule Castle or the ruined towers they are fine. Sure, there are monsters that spawn in the wild, but there are also just plain old evil humanoids out there too. There’s regular ass animals. It seems like nature, civilization, and even evil itself have achieved a harmonious equilibrium in Link’s absence. There are some minor problems in the settlements, but in the whole everyone seems pretty happy just living their lives. It’s like they asked the question “what if we give up and let entropy take over” and the answer was the most beautiful and vibrant state that we have ever seen Hyrule in.

By comparison, Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess have a much broader range. TP does this very overtly by having the areas cycle through Twilight vs normal states. They establish Link’s relationships with everyone in Ordon Village first, then have Twilight fall and reduce them to cowering spirits. In other areas you see the Twilight version first and then clear it. Majora’s Mask does similar- everything is bright and sunny and cheerful on Day 1, while Day 3 is an active apocalypse. Which then gets reset over and over again.

I would say Skyrim does a decent job of balancing the two as well, though perhaps not as extreme as other examples. Moments in the main quests like the civil war battles and the journey to sovengard are serious and epic, with the fate of Skyrim (perhaps all of Mundus) resting on your shoulders. There’s deep, personal moments like the Dark Brotherhood quest to kill Narfi or talking the ghost of the child killed by a vampire in Morthal. But there’s fun moments like coming across copies of the Lusty Argonian Maid or getting drunk and carousing with Sanguine. The Sheogorath quest line starts out as “OMG so funny and random XD, cheese!” And then dives into the child abuse and subsequent mental illness suffered by one of Skyrim’s last high kings.