For video games, Ostranauts. It’s the perfect space survival sim IMO. You wake up on an industrial salvage station and get a ship. Then you fly to derelict ships and scrap them for money and parts. Build up your own ship and travel farther and farther out. It’s jank as fuck to learn but once you get it down it’s the type of game where you put on music then just go for hours and hours. It’s early access and a lot is changing but the core gameplay loop is so addicting already.
For tabletop games, Infinity. It’s the best miniatures skirmish game I’ve ever played. The rules are deep but tight. The number of minis you put on the table is just right to me. List building is the best of any game I ever played. The rules are free. The app is free. The miniatures are the best out of any wargame I’ve ever played. It’s just a shame that people are so locked into Games Workshop that they don’t see other games as an option. Like I had a couple friends get hardcore into it but never more than that. And at the height of it’s popularity at our store we had one of the best players on the East coast play in a tournament. That was a sight to behold. Like I’m not a tourney player at all for any game. Watching the number 1 east coast player do his thing was the most inspired I ever was to become a tournament player.
Ostranauts still needs time to cook but there’s nothing quite like getting your first torch lit, nearly starving during the trip to Venus and then spending days stuck in a crash couch while your earther pilot supervises the burn that nearly kills you. Definitely room to grow.
Meinkraft
I mostly play co-op games and I am tired of the “everything is dark, ugly, and evil, and chaos is rampant” with a souls-copy aesthetic. I crave colorful games and fun co-op mechanics.
Nine Parchments is casual, fun, and beautiful. The point IS that there is friendly fire because the challenge is to get the enemies without getting your friends. Played also by up to 4 people on a single screen.
Coridden is very home-made but has cool mechanics of turning into beasts or riding your friends when they turn into animals. Fun isometric rpg-ish game that can be played on a single screen.
Pizza possum. Steal the food and don’t get caught. It’s casual, chaotic and hilarious. Co-op as well.
Spiritfarer is a great game. Not sure if it’s popular or not bc idk what’s popular. No killing, very therapeutic if you’ve lost someone, is a journey about loving and letting go. Co-op allows you to play the cat.
And go play bombsquad with friends, it is the best and my go-to if I have videogame-comfortable guests at home :)
Love you all. Keep being nice people
An indie 3D platformer game from a couple years ago called Hell Pie. You’re a low-level demon who gets an angel chained to him, and you can use it to do things like spin him to launch yourself and swing on stuff. If you like classic 3D platformers and toilet humor, it’s really very good, and pretty novel.
I just looked at pictures and I fell in love with that artstyle I’ll add that too my list thx
Plasma - a wildly programmable physics game where you can build just about anything in a fairly accessible manner. The devs eventually just made it free because it wasn’t getting much notice.
BPM: Bullets Per Minute - at some point everyone thinks ‘what if you combined an FPS with a rhythm game so you had to shoot on the beat?’ BPM is that, nailed. Others have tried but BPM got it right.
I have just no capacity to judge what’s popular anymore, not sure i ever did.
There isn’t really a natural ‘popular,’ and almost never has been. It’s mostly just what’s marketed.
Not sure if this fits (because it had its moment and its assets are likely popular) but Jump Ultimate Stars for sure.
It is basically the dream of any Otaku materialized and sadly Shounen Jump hasn’t been able to top it yet, the more time it passes the more time I appreciate it 😁
For example I have played with Gon and Killua characters since 2009… But just until now I got to see the 2011 Hunter x Hunter adaptation and oh boy, knowing the characters just improve the experience!
For video games, The Touhou series.
Outside of the games They have alot of fangames/Fan Content ,a massive community and a popular Fan Song (Bad Apple).
Also Undertale/Deltarune has some inspiration from Touhou.For tabletop, I loooooove Sentinels of the Multiverse, always hard to find other folks that play it though.
Video game: Remember Me
I love Sentinels! A friend of mine and I actually found an apparent game-breaking combo a few years ago. We defeated one of the harder bosses in I think 2 or 3 turns? It really felt like we were doing something wrong but we couldn’t find anything.
Ooh, which one? I remember some of the older foes in particular could be flakey like that
I don’t remember much of the specifics, but I remember it was with Dr Medico’s alternate. It was something about being healed by the rest of the team which turned into damage that was redirected (and enhanced) where we wanted. I remember being able to do ~50 damage in a single turn.
Super Puzzle Fighter II: Turbo. Easily the most fun and competent puzzle game I have ever played. It is especially great with 2 players.
So here’s a dumb Puzzle Fighter story. When I was 18, many years ago now, my girlfriend at the time, my best friend and his girlfriend at the time went camping near a little lakeside resort town.
It was the last day of our trip, we’d been extremely frugal and so we all still had some spending money left. The girls wanted to go clothes shopping, my buddy and I weren’t as interested in that but we’re trying to be cool so we tagged along. Except, on a covered section of boardwalk we passed a 2-player Super Puzzle Fighter 2 Turbo machine. The girls just left us behind, laughing that the boardwalk was a straight line and we could catch up.
3 hours later, we were both broke and my buddy had to borrow gas money from his girlfriend to get us home. The girls had ducked into a little café and also lost track of time. That was a 50 cent machine and we must have put over 50 bucks a piece into it. We just stood there, getting better and better in perfect lockstep, trading wins and getting more competitive for an entire afternoon, oblivious to the whole world.
That was a great trip. God, nostalgia like that makes me feel old.
I never got to experience it on an arcade cabinet. My first exposure to it was emulated on my original xbox. My friend and I played that game for many hours every weekend for months, and then some! I believe it was available on PSN for a while as well. Such a great game.
Anything named Turbo must be good
FTL with Multiverse Mod
Its essentially FTL 2.0
FTL is already underrated. And most people who do play just stops playing because it can get boring quickly. But Multiverse essentially bring more life to the game. Make the game like 50 times more fun.
For me, FTL is one of those games that gets exponentially more fun the better you are at it. It can be difficult to get over that initial hump.
I don’t think it really helps when everbody calls it FTL instead of Faster Than Light. How would anyone be able to learn about the game when nobody calls it by its name?
The game is literally called “FTL: Faster Than Light”. If you search for “ftl game”, all the search results are about this game. This is a non-issue.
Whoops
Yes, this so much!
The installation guide is not good, and it’s annoying on Fedora since it’s blocked by SELinux, but it’s worth it for the amazing experience. Such a good expansion for an amazing game.
I want a game that has the primary gameplay loop of FTL, but with a choose your path role playing game like Fallout behind it instead of a roguelike.
As Yahtzee Croshaw says, it has the most Star Trek “Target their weapons systems! Damage control to the engine room! Transfer power to the shields!” effect, but I kinda wish you were more able to choose where you want to explore, have a little more agency in quests…
Most quests in FTL follow the format of:
A space thing is happening! Do you:
- Send in a crewmate to help (50/50 chance of succeeding and getting a reward, or failing and taking damage/losing a crewmate)
- With them luck and fly away (guaranteed nothing happens)
- (blue text) use special equipment (guaranteed chance of a nice reward, if you have the equipment/resource/type of crew aboard)
So you don’t have a lot of agency in the kinds of quests you want to explore. A lot of beginner quests happen to you a lot (how many times have we all done the giant alien spiders one) and in a lot of cases you don’t have the blue text options available, so you get to choose “do nothing” or flip a coin. And then you have to face the ship at the end, which a lot of the builds that are kicking ass up to that point just can’t face the end boss.
I want a longer term roleplaying game under these primary mechanics.
RS isnt really popular outside millennials groups, although it’s declining a lot last few years
Ah, yes, Republika Srbska. The most dangerous game.
Wait…
Runescape?
I thought Slice & Dice was going to take Steam by storm but it kinda just came and went. Amazing little roguelike dice battler
The biggest factor for me was that it just felt better on a handheld platform. I put dozens of hours into that game on my android
Quake Champions is pretty great, surprised it’s not at least a little bigger
I’m content with OpenArena, so Quake 3 with open source graphics so you can install and play it anywhere. What does champions do that I’m missing out on?
DotAge. It’s a rogue-like turn-based strategy game where you try to build a village on cursed land, where you have visions of upcoming doom events and the eventual apocalypse. You have to balance stacking resources for growth and basic survival against efforts that will improve your chances of surviving doom events.
The board obviously is different every time. The factors you have to weigh and plan for are just complex enough, and just enough of the future is beyond your sight and control. The gameplay mechanics also change just a bit every time, due to a new mix of buildings and resource gathering methods, as well as new random events that can sometimes have a huge effect on your strategy. You’re not just accounting for randomness in your strategy–you have to adjust how you play the game all the time.
Just when you think the game is getting easy, the next chapter drops, you start doing the math, and realize you have overlooked something that may doom your village, depending on whether the RNG punishes you sufficiently. There’s definitely a big luck factor, as there is in real life. But you can make your own luck if you see far enough into the future and play well.
It’s a very well-made game that can run on a potato, and I’m a little obsessed with it.
Bought this game and forgot about it. Going to try it tonight thanks bro
Never heard of this and now I wanna give it a try!
