What games are you currently playing?

[Rsandee]

The Forgotten City, having a blast rn.

[ItzalDrake]

Everyone is playing Mario Kart World on Switch 2, while I bought the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack and I'm playing the Mario Kart 8 DLC that is included in it

[The Jonster]

Everyone is playing Mario Kart World on Switch 2, while I bought the Nintendo Switch Online Expansion Pack and I'm playing the Mario Kart 8 DLC that is included in it

Well I'm not playing it either! I'm playing Mario Kart Double Dash on my computer!

[ItzalDrake]

Oh, when you're not playing that game?
I'll never forget when I saw your activity on discord and saw that you were playing Double Dash for DAYS

[Greengoop]

I remember when I played on switch I was friends with a guy on Rayman Legends who was literally playing it 24/7. I last checked on him on 2022 and he had TWENTY MILLION DEATHS! God knows how many he has now

[The Jonster]

Oh, when you're not playing that game?
I'll never forget when I saw your activity on discord and saw that you were playing Double Dash for DAYS

Yeah I dunno why Discord repeatedly has me on an app for multiple days at a time even when it's open but I'm not using it.

[HazBlackSlick]

Anyone playing Ring Racers? It's a very challenging Sonic kart racer fan game, It's got me pretty hook

[The Jonster]

Currently playing Super Mario Galaxy on my Switch. One of my fave Mario games

[Adsolution]

Two games I played this year that seriously took me by surprise:

Stray

What a nice surprise! I didn't expect this game to be as jaw-droppingly gorgeous as it is. The attention to detail in the environments is some of my favourite I've seen in the genre... which makes sense considering you play as a tiny boy The atmosphere is superb. The game is generally very easy, with the platforming being magnetised/safe with no way to really fail, the (slight) challenge comes more from just needing to be observant and solve environmental things... with the very sparse, occasional action/combat sequence being suddenly very intense and challenging, which is a strange but welcome curveball. The puzzles can be a little cryptic at times, but I didn't really mind, because the world is just so nice to exist in, meaning you get to suck up their vibes longer. I like how unpadded the game feels. It takes no shortcuts, it's solid, varied and polished from beginning to end, never overstaying or understaying its welcome (if anything it's the latter, but it's understandable given how high quality every inch of it is).

My favourite thing about the game though is easily the overall tone/vibe. It makes you feel things... lonely, warm, cold, afraid, sentimental... dear lord, I get goosebumps just thinking about it. The feeling of becoming acquainted with a scary new place, warming up to it, making friends with everyone, only to have to eventually leave it and likely never return is almost gut-wrenching. When I finally realised near the end that I was very suddenly leaving my friends behind to an unknown fate and going forth alone to open the city, I straight up started crying. You're just overlooking the city in the control centre, all the places you'd been to, and will never go back to. And then you open it and leave, never to see anyone you met along the way again, hopefully to find your herd again. I don't think a game's made me that emotional in a while, and you're just a cat. Genuinely wonderful, wonderful experience.

Poppy Playtime

A mascot horror game that's... really good? How's that even possible.... It doesn't feel cheap or low-brow whatsoever. The environments and lighting are very surreal and ambient, it's almost similar to exploring the depths of Black Mesa (Half-Life was no doubt a huge inspiration), this endless world of facilities, machines, pipes and worker rooms, but stranger and even more unsettling, and it's all very meticulously crafted and high-quality. The grabpack mechanic is a genuinely unique and innovative way of interacting with the world around you, is very fun and satisfying to use all the time, leads to some exceptionally clever and original puzzles and gameplay mechanics, and is just so bizarre and quirky to boot, meshing perfectly with the worldbuilding. The worldbuilding is excellent, from the writing of the characters and the characters themselves, the VHS tapes, the doctors' records, and all the voice acting. The whole premise on the surface seems very been-there-done-that, but it's executed so well that it really isn't. This is, in my opinion, the definitive best series doing the whole creepy toy mascot horror thing, including movies that have done similar. It makes it interesting and compelling as heck.

On a technical level, you can tell the original creator was very passionate about game development, it shows in every area. It's made with so much love and expertise. Something like the grabpack is not easy to program. Everything is perfectly polished. The way the characters are animated is beyond technically impressive, it's actually jawdropping, especially Huggy, Missy, and Mommy from the first two episodes. Seeing them move through the environments is a serious joy in itself, and it literally doesn't even look like game animation it's so seamless and integrated into the environments. The hands slapping along the walls, the way they grab onto things and leap around, it's literally flawless. AAA games almost never even come close to looking this damn JUICY in the animation department. My favourite animation in any game I've ever seen bar none.

Chapter 1 and 2 look like (very well-made) indie games (aside from the mindblowing animation), but chapter 3 just straight up looks AAA in every single area, audio and visual. What an actual masterpiece, like what it's a perfect experience from beginning to end, and has a seriously touching story too. The gameplay, the puzzles, the action sequences, the way the mystery unfolds, the tragedy, the pacing, the ending, just wow. I absolutely love the world they've created in this series. This chapter is easily 8 hours long if you take your time, was made on a budget of under $1 million, and is more polished than most AAA games of a similar length that cost 100x as much. That really puts into perspective how disgustingly wasteful western media corporations are, ugh.

Chapter 4... well, if you know, you know. Corporate culture taking over, the original creator leaving as a result, being forced to release it in just one year (as opposed to chapter 3 which took two years to develop). It has some of the most awesome ideas in the series, yet almost every single one of them is anywhere from underutilised to insultingly mistreated. If this was any other mascot horror series then it would still be great all around, but considering what flawless experiences the first three chapters are, this is just tragic. It genuinely sucks that this happened. It has so much potential to be one of the great hybrid-horror series out there, and some young, hair-slicked, arrogant fuckboy CEOs are destroying that.

Underappreciate as heck game (series?) (despite it being very popular still). The genre's reputation of being cheap garbage for kids is to blame

[PluMGMK]

some young, hair-slicked, arrogant fuckboy CEOs are destroying that.

I've never worked in gamedev, and yet I have direct experience of exactly that in a completely different field

[Pirez]

Capitalism sure ruins everything, doesn't it?

[Adsolution]

Capitalism sure ruins everything, doesn't it?

no, shitty people ruin capitalism! They ruin every system though, and shitty people will always exist, so the most happiness-producing system to date is apparently working optimally

I've never worked in gamedev, and yet I have direct experience of exactly that in a completely different field

What field is that?
I almost feel bad saying what you quoted sometimes, because my boss at the company I used to work at was young and hairslicked, a marketer at heart, but he was a great guy who really believed in me

[PluMGMK]

Semiconductor technology development. A field at the intersection of engineering and physics, where rigour and patience are paramount, but management types always seem to think they can Gantt chart their way out of problems. In 2021 the new CEO decided to start slimming down the Failure Analysis labs, closing some and selling off others, leaving just a handful that were constantly booked solid. So when we had a showstopper problem to debug, we'd be way down on someone's list, and the local manager's solution was "we need to hammer them to get results quickly", which obviously had the opposite of the desired effect

Also some FA capability was completely lost, meaning some work that could previously have been done in some of our labs had to be outsourced to external vendors, so it had to go through the procurement process too. Not fun

[Greengoop]

no, shitty people ruin capitalism! They ruin every system though, and shitty people will always exist, so the most happiness-producing system to date is apparently working optimally

I once had an idea for a communist government with a known trusted person as a dictator where their power would be revoked as soon as they did something heavily dodgy. And those revokers would be a court of 50 or so people with no official power other than to revoke other official’s powers by votes. They can also get voted out if they appear to be biased, and they aren’t allowed in votes if they know the subject really well.

[EdgyRabbid]

Green goop this is the topic for talking about video games

[Greengoop]

Damn it, I thought it was the politics one!

[Pirez]

Green goop this is the topic for talking about video games

Maybe he is pitching a videogame for which the primary gameplay loop would be observation and then taking decisions to always appeal to the majority, which would make you more and more corrupt with time.

[PluMGMK]

A bit like SimCity?

[EdgyRabbid]

I need to get simcity, seems fun!

[PluMGMK]

I spent many happy childhood hours crafting and watching the evolution of metropolitan areas in SimCity 3000! And some not-so-happy hours trying to do the same thing in SimCity 4 – they made it a lot more challenging