this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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Me too, even bought a barebones Shuttle to make it easier to go to LAN games at other people's. Ah nostalgia.
Nowadays the only people who want to play Age of Empires with me seem to live in Turkey and like to talk about how great Erdogan is.
I occasionally get to play a game online with friends, but the old crew are spread around the country and the world now and have young kids so it's hard to organise a good time.
Yeah it's all I can do to even catch up with people irl once every few years, or even online, what with careers and kids and locations.
Must get better at that.
Also I've been thinking I need to get back into Skyrim, I used to really enjoy that and my irl stamina's a bit better these days so the cost benefit ratio would be a bit better.
Do you manage to game at all?
I don't play many games these days. I'll go weeks without playing any, but it's more a priority thing. I get 1, maybe 2 hours in the evening to myself. I often try to use another half hour at lunch as well.
With that time I can read, watch TV, play games, work on lemmy stuff, etc.
In the past year or so I've played through Ryse: Son of Rome to the end, and also played some small amounts of Oxygen Not Included, Morrowind, Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrouds, but I didn't get too far in any of those ones. I tend to play everything on the easiest difficulty these days, so as to make more progress with my time.
I'd say I play less than 1 hour a week. Even 10 years ago that number was a lot higher, a couple of hours most days, but different priorities now 🙂
I loved Morrowind. Re tv when you're pressed for time some of those series of really short episodes are great. Eg Rose Matafeo's Star Struck.
I played one of the Elder Scrolls games (can't remember which, but I think not Morrowind) on a disk that I borrowed from a friend a couple of decades back. I didn't understand what I was supposed to do, so didn't play it much.
It wasn't until Skyrim had the Game of the year edition with all the DLC for $15 that I finally played it. I loved it and spent 100+ hours playing it (I know, amateur numbers).
I only recently tried Morrowind, which was only a few dollars so I thought I'd give it a go. I enjoyed what I played, having had a better casual intro to the series via Skyrim so I knew how things worked, but the problem is I didn't get a chance to play for a few weeks and now I have no idea what I was doing. No quest markers and now I can't be bothered spending the time to work it out, so now it's been months 😆
Having played Morrowind obsessively when it first came out, I downloaded it on Steam and ... geez it makes you work hard now that we're usef to quest journals and maps. Also you're in a potato world. But I still have amazing crystal clear memories of flying around netch farms at night and stuff. I think maybe it offloaded a lot of the image processing onto our brains or something!
I don't mind so much the maps and quest journals if I'm in the moment, but it's a problem when I suddenly need to save and quit, then don't pick it up again for weeks.
Oh in terms of graphics, I can remember how awesome games looks. Quake 2 was so detailed compared to the first. Need for Speed was basically photo realistic. Age of Empires had such detailed units and AoE2 was amazing!
Unfortunately I didn't play Half Life until a decade or so after it came out, but that was apparently revolutionary (and I still really enjoyed it even though it was a decade old).
Carmageddon is the one I remember thinking was amazing. The one with the humans not the zmbies. Also, Quake ha ha ha.
I never got into FPS though.
I don't think I ever played carmageddon, though I know of it.
Before those amazing graphics games came out I used to play shareware games like Commander Keen or Crystal Caves. Only the first episode of course 😆
Omg Crystal Caves, haven't heard that name in a long time! Jump Man was my jam.
Never heard of it! It was definitely the 90s before I knew anyone with a computer, and I'm pretty sure it was the 2000s before I knew anyone with a console 😆. I've personally never owned a console!
Late 80s I knew a couple of kids with Ataris, hence Jump Man. But it was the 90s before I got to really interact with any computers myself.
Late 90s we all used to rent consoles from Video stores though.
My first computer was a 686 built to my specs by a computer shop and to my frustration people kept dissing it for not being "a Pentium" ( the i586) 😅.
Haha wow, you ran with a very different crowd than I did! I didn't know many people who would know one type of computer from another.
I don't remember if our video store didn't have consoles, or my parents just never let us hire them. By the time I was an adult I was into computers and didn't really have an interest in consoles. Still don't! If I want to play a console game, I'll emulate it. Though we do have a suite of Xbox controllers and a PC plugged into the TV so we pretty much have a console without a console.
I think I'm just slightly older than you. I was in my late teens and flatting in Ak when I was renting consoles with flatmates.
Then I got into computers after using my bf's ones. When I got my own computer the only reason people knew to say "Pentium" was because Intel had been marketing it like crazy, the irony was my Athlon processor was way faster and better than the i586.
A "console without a console" sounds like the way to go! I bet your kids love that! We have an old xbox someone gave us, which is quite good because I only have $ and space for a laptop. If I ever won lotto I'd get a pc.
Oh I remember Athlon processors, and the Athlon vs Pentium thing. I don't think I was an adult then though, I think you're right about being a bit older than me.
TBH we don't do aot of screen time in my house, so you're right my kids do love it when we play some games! Normally this is Stardew Valley, because myself and all three kids can play at once (to varying abilities).
We used to play the original Lego star wars (two player) but one day it stopped working. I got the new one (Skywalker Saga) but it's very different, to the point that you have to navigate in 3d. One of the things I liked about the original is that you're playing from a mostly fixed viewpoint, which made it easier to play at 3 or 4 years old. The older ones can handle it now but we haven't played it as much as Stardew Valley, which is a lot less linear so everyone can do what they like.
I didn't realize more than one person could play Stardew Valley at a time!! It's been on my Steam wishlist for years but I never got it.
Stardew Valley is the game that keeps on giving. The dev releases updates every few years. One is about to be released, v1.6 I think, I haven't been following closely so not sure on what content is being added. And the previous one was 1.5, which was a big update that added a whole island that you can unlock towards the end game (I guess what counts as end game has changed over the years as more content was added).
For a long time you've been able to play multiplayer LAN, and there was some mod thing that let you run multiple instances and join them to get couch co-op, but since v1.5 there is now official couch co-op support up to 4 players. It was not long after that release where we started playing (with the older two).
That sounds really cool! It has a great reputation but I didn't realize the dev was still active.
Yeah, he's working on a new project but he took a break to add some more content to Stardew Valley. There is also a really active mod scene as well.
It;s a cool story where the dev went through a publisher, then the game did so well he bought the rights to publish back from the publisher using his proceeds, then continued to add to the game, self-publishing free updates. It made him so much money (has sold over 30 million copies and continues to sell well) he doesn't have to care about putting food on the table, and just works on his projects as a labour of love.
Ah that's such a great story. That dev was pretty astute to buy the rights back.
I just visited the website. It looks so cute but I can never imagine what gameplay is like. Is it fairly sandbox?
In the beginning, imaging something like the old farming facebook games, except instead of having to wait real-world time you can just go to bed and it's the next day. The initial objective is to grow certain bundles of food to unlock further things in the game.
I wouldn't really call it sandbox, but it is an open world. For the most part you don't have to do anything you don't want to. For example, there's combat if you go in the mines, but if you never want to do combat then you don't have to, there are other ways to get everything. You can run out of time on specific things, but you always get another chance, so it's very chill in that respect.
There are a bunch of NPCs that have their own story arc (including cutscenes), that you unlock by gifting them their favourite foods/items.
It's hard to get a good sense of if you'll like the game without playing it. It seems like it's popular with people who haven't previously been into games, but also with people who have played a lot of games. It has farming, fishing, mining, combat, NPC story arcs, you can customise your house, things are unlocked as you play but there's never any real pressure. You can get married and have kids if you want.
Hard to explain, but it's a pretty sweet game for a one man band. You can also get it on mobile, but as he outsources that it can lag behind the latest release by years (I believe Android got the latest 1.5 update last year, a couple of years after it was released on PC).
I never played the old farming sims on facebook. I remember I had to unfriend my cousin because there was no way to turn off Farnville notifications.
Thanks for the description. It does sound like something I might like. At the moment I'm mostly on mobile and all I can play is online chess!
I played Stardew Valley on mobile first. While it's not exactly the same as desktop (particularly movement and combat), it's a pretty good experience I reckon.
If you do want it on PC, it will run on pretty much anything, so you don't need to worry about specs.
Thanks!