Bytes and Mounds: Ten Games I think should be on a list of the best games ever made
I'm bored at work so you all get to read my silly little ramblings
10 Games
Is there a more influential game in the HD era? In the arena of single player games at least. Dark Souls is less of an action RPG and more a series of incredibly thoughtful experiments in how you can fuck a player if you throw out any semblance of conventional game design. And what people forget is that being fucked is pretty cool and pretty great!
Every awkward and jangly shard of handhold-free encounter design feels in tune with the world and storytelling at hand here, even if it, you know, was probably more technical and budgetary limitations at play. It just rewired my entire brain, it's one of the peak Lauracore games out there
Every awkward and jangly shard of handhold-free encounter design feels in tune with the world and storytelling at hand here, even if it, you know, was probably more technical and budgetary limitations at play. It just rewired my entire brain, it's one of the peak Lauracore games out there
Probably doesn't top God Hand for sheer mechanical refinement, but there's more to games than the number of ways you can punch. A chemically refined balance of character abilities against flexible but punishing encounters, art direction for people sick of the "biblically accurate angels" meme, and Bayo herself taught me how to be a woman. Wild stuff
CEO MINDSET
If you had to ask me what truly is the Best Game Ever Made, it's The Void. The most metaphysically and technically ambitious of IPL's works, The Void enmeshes every aspect of its story into its mechanics and opened my eyes into an entirely new way of viewing storytelling in games. You will be pulled into hell but you will survive, you deserve nothing less
A statement on what commitment and fan power can do to salvage a licensed game. At a wireframe view, BfBB is an unremarkable platformer, solid enough but hardly memorable in any capacity. With the lavish detail layered on it by Heavy Iron studios, however, it becomes the perfect love letter to the golden age of the series, delivering on the childhood fantasy of exploring Bikini Bottom in spades. Levels aren't simply spaces floating in a void (sans two of the boss fights), there's real work to indicate the physical space and topography of the show's many landmarks. One moment that blew 5 year-old me's mind was seeing other levels from the inside of Jellyfish fields. Sometimes a masterpiece is just a really well made PB & J
Something about the emptiness of the world in this feels like what Hell must be. It's beautiful and real and worth exploring every inch of but it's also dead dead dead dead and the only things in it that remain are beasts of incalculable wonder. And you kill them. This game makes me feel fear like no other, existential and primal and immediate and philosophical all at once, in service of genocide and forcing you to live with it.
Too many games don't really think about movement. Getting from A to B is an afterthought, something you have to do for the illusion of verisimilitude but hardly worth examining. This is particularly problematic in games that take place in a 3D space, as the complexity required to maintain full control over movement in such a space is unmanageable, and demands abstraction. Spider Man 2 is a game brave enough to design itself entirely around this challenge. Combat, storytelling, even story mode mission design are all sidelined in favor of the most precise 3D grappling hook system in a game, terrifically fun and frightfully challenging as you are thrust into the shoes of Peter Parker without the benefit of the years of experience behind the webs. The joy of mastering this system is unparalleled. There are better spider man stories, combat systems, worlds, and anything else, but this game has the swing. Nothing else even comes close
idk shit made me cry like a lot
Sick as hell tbh no cap fr
VR was made for this
