Favourite computer games of all time. [2]

Pettytyrant101 wrote:{{ Um, a few liberties being taken I think!}}

Oh wow, interesting.

You know some of these designs are quite interesting. Tolkien's illustrations of some of the armour were quite ornate, and so I enjoyed seeing some of these more bizarre get-ups.
It certainly *feels* better as a Middle-earth game than those bloody Shadow of Mordor games. This one is not so nihilistically edgy.

{{ From the little Ive seen of gameplay it seems quite simple mechanics, reminds me more of the games that came out at same time as the official tie in games to the LotR's films did on ps2, only they weren't the official ones. Bit rough, bit simpler but drawing more from book rights than films in some ways. I think with this we get Gollum getting out the Misty Mountains past goblins, being lured to Mordor and eventually captured (with no doubt some Nazgul evading), his 'escape' and capture by Aragorn, then 'escape' again from the elves of Mirkwood (that seems to be make up a big bit of trailers, so chunk of game is probably set around Mirkwood), and I'm guessing it'll end on Moria and finally meeting up with thee fellowship. }}

A probable outcome!

{{ Was nosing my steam stats and apparently I have spent 4,307 hours in Steam VR, and as some of the VR games I play are on Oculus not Steam you can probably add at least another few hundred to that.
But even on just the Steam stats that means Ive spent just shy of 180 actual days inside virtual worlds.
Heck since the last time I last reinstalled Skyrim Ive spent 21 and a half real days inside that world.
21 days, thats longer than Ive gone to visit any actual real place for! }}

{ Well the Gollum game is out- and, its generally been hailed as the worst game of the year by some distance. I think had they put it out at indie game prices- 20 quid thereabouts its would have got 5/6 out of 10 reviews probably, but as a full price 60 quid triple A game, no, no , no. }}

{{ Well its been a big week for games previews with a couple of different big game events on, the big showstealer, unsurpringly was Starfield from Bethseda, and yes its looking bloody good. But for me the trailer that stole it was the new Fable, Ive not enjoyed a Fable game since the first one, and it was its deliberetly in your face Britishness that gave its charm, and for me this new trailer seemed to have got that tone spot on. }}

{{ This blowing my tiny mind. AI companions in Skyrim, still early days but the results are super impressive already, this has the potential to completely change gaming with no more prewritten, preprogrammed repsonses but the ability to genuinely talk to game characters and get coherent self aware responses. }}

Generative A.I. in games does seem to be a logical step with everything else going on in that arena.

I am just starting Final Fantasy 16... A.I. probably would have written a script about as good as what I have heard so far, which I am not sure is a compliment!

{{ Best accidental screenshot I've ever taken whilst playing a game



Just don't ask what I was planning on using the cat for! }}

Well... because we don't have enough consoles we decided to buy 3 more.

Today a Sega Megadrive and a Super Nintendo arrived. My Sega Master System should be here this week!!!

The other two work on our TV so all good so far.

{{ Not hooking them to a classic CRT for that authentic gaming experience? }}

Don't have the room for one of those. How did we live before flat screens???

Try lifting one.

{{ Well the trailer for GTAVI has dropped and it looks the part, if very much like V visually but more of everything, Ill be more interested to see if it can maintain GTA's satire of the American Dream now Dan Howser and Laslow are both gone. }}

{{ This is for Halfy, just to give an idea of how indepth modern games can get-



this is one of the reasons all these years later I'm still playing Skyrim, for example there's a ruin you can find a massive place, covering the lower slopes of a mountain, in the game it's just presented as a big ruin, old walls, broken buildings, random lumps of carved and cut stone, now the home to some snow trolls. You can pass right through it without thinking too much about it save it's an impressive ruin. Its just nice scenery.

But if you've been reading the many books in the world and have gained some history by talking to the right people, you might realise this ruin is from the Mythic Era, when Skyrim was ruled by the Dragons through their Dragon Priest cult, and this was once the capital of Skyrim and the seat of power of the Dragon Priests. And suddenly you see the place with new eyes, notice little things tying it to its past, and eventually discovering if you're curious enough a dungeon beneath with an artifact tied to those ancient forgotten days and the reanimated Dragon Priest who guards it. And it's full of this sort of stuff everywhere. The game lore isn't just background information, it's after effects, its physical remains are everywhere embedded into the world for you to stumble across on your adventures. }}

{{ Was trying to think of games with decent narratives, world building and deep lore. Have to be purely game based, no book, film, comic or other sort of adaption of material, but solely made for a game, so no Baldur's Gate's, Witcher or Star Wars games etc. I've also limited it to core games in a series, not all the spinoffs or games not made by the original developers, except for the Fallout series, which changed hands but retained the narrative, style and world building elements of what had gone before intact.
Trickier than I initially thought it would be this, here is what I've got so far-

Elder Scrolls (Arena, Daggerfall, Redguard, Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim)
Fallout (1 - 4)
Half-Life (HL1, HL2, HL2Ep1, HL2Ep2, HL:Alyx)
Mass Effect (1 - 3)
Silent Hill (1 - 4)
Elite (Elite, Elite:Frontier, Elite: First Encounters, Elite Dangerous)
Ico and Shadow of Collusus

Games with lots of lore, but it's complete gibberish, contradictory, or changes with every game release-

Resident Evil (1 - 8 )
Metal Gear Solid (1 - 8 )
Alan Wake (1 - 2)

Anyone got any more suggestions, or games you remember as much for their setting or narrative as for the game?}}

Well, my favourite game of all time is Final Fantasy 7.

I am just trying to get time to play the remake of it at the moment so can't comment on that yet but I always loved that for the story.

With all of the spin-offs there probably is a huge amount of lore behind it now too, but the main game is enough for me.

{{ I forgot about the FF games- good call- I played 7 through to 10 on original release, I think. If memory serves each game is a different cast and setting, but the themes of friendship, environmentalism and self-sacrifice are consistent throughout. The fact I can still recall the story to 7, and Shinra and Mako energy, and Cloud and Tifa, and 7 came out in '97 when I played it, is proof enough it made an impression. }}

{{ Will be getting this, even though I've got most of the games in it already, I'd give this money for nothing just so he can keep making games. A very well deserved bit of reverence in a documentary for the legendary coder Jeff Minter. Honestly if you've never played a Llamasoft game before you've never experienced pure arcade gameplay refined. The view that sound, graphics and gameplay should all be the same thing has never been better exemplified or executed. He is the master at it.

edit add- if you've never heard of him but you've ever used one of those programs that play trippy visuals when you play some music (they built one into the ps1), thats Minter. He invented that.}}

Pettytyrant101 wrote:{{ I forgot about the FF games- good call- I played 7 through to 10 on original release, I think. If memory serves each game is a different cast and setting, but the themes of friendship, environmentalism and self-sacrifice are consistent throughout. The fact I can still recall the story to 7, and Shinra and Mako energy, and Cloud and Tifa, and 7 came out in '97 when I played it, is proof enough it made an impression. }}

That's the one. Not sure if you have a PS5 but they have been remaking it. Combat is totally different and I am not sure if I like it but might be worth picking up. The second part of the game is out now (Rebirth) and want to get to that. Probably 3 or 4 years before the rest.

{{ I've been playing through the Half Life series in VR and it occurred to me that the manner in which it delivers its story, similar to games like Silent Hill, make it almost impossible to properly transpose to other mediums, mainly film, as its the one they keep trying. They are games that tell you nothing, but give you everything you need to know in your exploration and interactions with the world. And I don't know how you can do that in film.
SH the film is a good example of this issue, it does what you can do these days, it recreates the look, feel and sound of the games almost perfectly, but the narrative is awful and clunkily delivered, with a huge exposition dump in the final act to explain everything to the viewer that has happened up to that point. They never solved the dilemma of how to convey this sort of story telling in the medium of film.

Take Half Life 2 for example, here's a very brief outline of the set up, if you were to make a synopsis of it-

'Gordon Freeman, missing for 20 years has returned to find the Earth has been been taken over by an intergalactic Empire called the Combine. The remaining citizens of Earth, those not forced and artificially converted to work for the Combine, are herded together in the few remaining cities under the complete control and watchful eyes of the Combine Civil Protection. There are no children any longer as a Suppression Field prevents pregnancy and Earths resources are being drained and taken, leaving eventually a dead planet behind.
But in the capital of this new Empire, City 17, where Earth's Administrator, Gordon's former boss at Black Mesa, Wallace Breen, rules Earth as its puppet for the Combine there are those who resist. Led by former Black Mesa scientists Eli Vance and eccentric genius Dr Kliener they have organised a Resistance against the occupying forces of the Combine, and Gordon's return is about to light a fire under it.'

There simple really, nothing too special in fact.

But here is how you the player experience things-

At the end of HL1 you, Gordon Freeman, late for work physicist at the secret and highly dodgy underground Black Mesa Research Facility, and who is about to have a very bad day, and saviour of mankind with a crowbar and not a word spoken, are put into stasis by the mysterious Gman.
So far in the plot, you turned up late for work, put a dodgy alien crystal into an analyser, and helped bring about the end of the world in doing so as it caused a Resonance Cascade, opening up a portal to another world whose many creatures began randomly plopping down all over Black Mesa. The army turned up to do a clean up of aliens and scientists, everyone got their arses kicked, mainly by Gordon who'd had enough of this day. He did however successfully closed the portal by going to the alien world and introducing the entity keeping the portal open there to his crowbar, saving the day so it seemed, only then for the strange Gman to put him into stasis of some sort.

Now its HL2-

You are brought back out of stasis by the Gman who only really tells you of import that “the right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world”. You are on a train as it approaches a station, there are two other passengers in the carriage, both wearing identical 1984 like blue work overalls and carrying a suitcase each. The first one only comments that he never noticed you getting on. The second one tells you this is the third relocation coupon he has gotten this year.
And then the train arrives and with weariness and some reluctance the other two get off at the platform, you follow only to be confronted by some sort of flying robot that immediately takes your photo and flies off. Ahead is a huge screen with a massive generally convivial bearded face on it, is welcoming you to City 17, where you apparently find yourself. This is the first time you've heard of the place and have no idea why its named by a number.
There are strange 'police' all over the place and they don't seem too friendly going on their treatment of people. Talking to these people, all in the same blue overalls gives you hints of what's going on, raids, people taken without reason and just disappearing one person warns you off drinking the water as they put something in it to make you forget, others are mustering the courage to go on through the checkpoints that are the only way out the train-station.

The point is, you know nothing about what is going on, and at no time will the game stop for a cut scene, or pause playing to let you read a bunch of background text or listen to audio recordngs, the only way to work out the story you are in is to pay attention, work it out, its a detailed story, but to find out what's going on you will have to put it together yourself, it a tale that's never, in the traditional sense, told to you.
The plot is overheard or observed, that big face on the screen, Dr Breen, your former administrator, you don't know that when you got off the train, you never met him in the first game. It's not till you overhear two npc's talking about him you know that's his name and that this, City17, whatever and wherever it is, is his base of operations, whatever that means. You don't find out he was the former administrator at Black Mesa until another character Alyx mentions it about twenty minutes later. And its only by either noticing and reading some newspaper clippings pinned to a scrapboard, or talking to Eli whilst looking one of the many posters of Breen dotted around the City that you discover he negotiated Earth's surrender after a war that Earth's entire defences only lasted 7 hours in.
None of this is relayed in conventional narrative manner. You have to find it and then piece all the stuff you've discovered together to know what has happened in the last 20 years, what's going on now and what you are doing about it. And often the games narrative doesn't confirm things, its only implies them. For example people get relocated, often several times in a year. Why? Perhaps to prevent more Resistance groups forming, perhaps to disorientate people, perhaps they just need more workers in particular places. Or the fact normal folk complain the food rations are terrible and they might just join the Civil Protection to get a decent meal. This tells you if you join up the rations are better, its presumably an incentive to get people to give up their humanity and be under total Combine control, but the game never tells you that, its just implied from what people say and what you see around you. And there are many aspects of the narrative, some core ones, that are like that, left to you to make the inferences from the given information.

I think its this fundamental difference in how story is delivered that makes turning video games into film and TV so difficult. Where its been most successful so far is in adapting games that themselves mimic the story telling of TV and film, like Last of Us - long cutscenes, dialogue, movie-like sequences, big action set pieces, lots of notes and audio files to find giving you conventional narratives to tell you what you need to know.
But games like Silent Hill, and Half Life don't, and they are the more common and usually the better, more memorable game narratives because you had to participate in the narrative just to find the narrative. There strength in story telling is that they use the medium of games fully to tell their narrative. And there the trick of how do use the medium of film to tell a narrative normally told solely through interactions with the medium arises, and so far I don't think as found a solution that works. Most video game to film adaptations are awful for this reason, or so altered from the original games as to barely resemble them, let alone the experience of playing them.

The Fallout TV series will be interesting in this respect as the games use both forms of story telling- conventional- cut scenes, lengthy dialogue, action set pieces, but all the minutiae of the story, the detail and the background is only found by interacting with the game, its npc's and its environments. Want to know what Vault-tec were up to in different vaults? Well the game will never tell you, unless you want to know and you go look and find out for yourself. It will be interesting to see how they bring that side of the narrative into the conventional side of TV story telling.

Here's the first 5 minutes of Half Life 2 to give you an idea of what I mean by this type of narrative story telling. Remember you just finished game 1 and saved the world by closing the portal to the alien world where all the nasties were coming from, job done. And then weirdo Gman put you in stasis. And then this is immediately next - }}

{{ If you have HL:Alyx there is no excuse not to nip to its workshop and grab some of the best campaign like mods.
This is a cracking one, Cornered, superbly paced, great level design and just a whole ton of fun (modding Alyx is as simple as seeing the mod want you want, clicking the subscribe button and waiting till it's done, no mod managers, no hassles, no conflicts, no manual input required).
Here's my playthrough of it (no commentary)- if you only watch a bit though, watch from 6 mins in, as it's stuff like this both elevate this mod and make you feel stupidly cool at the same time and is why VR rocks.



Also this occurred to me while I was crouched behind that table shooting Combine in the face and ducking back in for cover, that I was doing in my 50's what I hadn't done since I was about 6 - I was kneeling in my living room pointing a pretend gun shooting at made up baddies - it's just I don't have to imagine them any more- but for making me forget I'm old and making me feel 6 again I love VR. }}

{{{ So I spent a month in Skyrim VR.
Well OK not all at once admittedly but looking at my Steam account it seems I have spent over 30 full days inside Skyrim or 732.7 hours of my life.



It occurred to me that this is the first time in human history its been possible to do such a thing, spend a whole month of your life inside an imaginary world.



But what has struck most is dreams. You see I sometimes have 'skyrim' dreams. I have been playing games since the zx spectrum 48k, which I got as a joint birthday present with my brother (it was bit pricey for one each, adjusted for inflation the humble speccy cost about £500 in today's money) when I was 12, some 41 years ago, and to my recollection I have never had a single 'game' based dream. But now I do.
I also cannot believe in only 41 years we went from the first game I ever played on my speccy, Horace Goes Skkiing which was a pack in title-



to this and in VR,



So the question arises why am I having game based dreams now? And I think it comes down to the idea part of the reason we dream is the brain filing and sorting the days events and experiences. But playing a normal game on a screen and it provoking a dream would be like having a dream about watching television. Which I know Ive never done, like my brain doesn't count stuff where I'm just sitting there as worth much filing.



So I think, as far as my brain is concerned, it doesn't really differentiate between reality and VR the same way it does watching a screen and reality. And that I think is down to physicality even more than the immersive 3d environment all around me.




In Skyrim if I want to pick something up I have to reach out and grab it, if I drop something on the floor I have to bend down to pick it up, if want to see the top of that mountain from where I'm standing on the plains below then I'm going to have to crane my neck to see it, if I need to swing a weapon I actually have to swing my arm and if I want to see the moons overhead I need to look up and so on. The combination of a visual world all around you no matter where you look, and having to physically interact with it seems to be enough to fool the brain into thinking its the same as any physical activity taking place in reality. I find it rather fascinating.


}}

{{ From the Titanic Honour and Glory team, their new real time sinking animation of Titanic. It has annotations telling you exactly what was going on as events proceed, but obviously it's quite long as took titanic nearly 3 hours to go down, but you fast forward through it or play it on fast speed. Its beautifully made and as accurate to events as we currently understand them to the detail, more so than James Cameron documentaries where they got a few things wrong (they didnt know they were wrong mind you) and obviously bit different from the film version which gets a lot wrong about where people were and when they abandoned ship and stuff. }}

Just finished Final Fantasy 7 remake and will be moving on to Rebirth (although have a holiday coming up to plan around).

I still prefer the original so far but I will say that this doesn't come across as a money grab move, there is clearly a hell of a lot of effort put in to create what they have. Some minor storylines/characters are much more fleshed out as is the world.

I am getting used to the fighting which is a mix between real time and ATB (which the original used) and can be quite fun. I prefer the first though as I prefer controlling all 3 at once rather than switching between characters.

There is definitely some filler in there, although they have made 2-3 hours of the original game in to a 30 hour game. Some fuller is annoying as there is no choice but to do it to progress. Some are side quests that are a mix of interesting / fun / pointless.

The storyline diverges in what seems like a significant way at the end so looking forward to see what happens in part 2!