monotremata

It’s not exactly the same, but Slay the Spire scratched some of the same itch for me. It’s got the same meta-structure as FTL, but the fights use a deck-builder format. It’s really well done.

One Step From Eden seemed like it should be even better for me, since it borrows the positional strategy stuff from the Mega Man Battle Network games, but I couldn’t get into it. Mostly I remember it being just way too fast. I really wanted to like it, but basically didn’t.

And yeah, as someone else mentioned, Advance Wars is good, too. The thing that Into the Breach did that Advance Wars didn’t, for me, was that Advance Wars basically depended on the AI being a bit crap so that you could overcome an initial disadvantage and work up to victory. Into the Breach gets around that by making the enemy wholly predictable instead, which is arguably more fun. The only other game I know of that worked that way was an Android game called Auro, but I don’t think that’s playable anymore and I believe the dev has abandoned it. It’s a shame, as it was really well made.

Other than that… you could try learning Go (aka igo, baduk, or weiqi). It’s a board game with very simple rules, but very deep strategy that emerges from those rules. The main disadvantage is that it’s multiplayer only, but there are puzzles, problems, and AIs you can use to turn it into a solo time killer.

In addition to “format shifting,” which is a well-recognized use case, and game preservation, which is a huge and under-recognized public interest in emulator development, emulators are also used for the development of homebrew software. E.g., there’s a port of Moonlight for the Switch, which lets you play Steam games streamed from a PC using your Switch, letting it serve many of the purposes of a Steam Deck. That’s huge! It would be way less practical to develop this kind of software if you could only test on real hardware. Testing on real hardware is also essential, of course, but testing on an emulator is vastly faster for rapid iteration.

Yeah, I agree about the textures, but I think you’re overestimating the existing LLMs. I think folks are already starting to recognize the style of the current LLMs and finding it off-putting. I think that’s only going to increase as people try to apply them in even more places.

I kind of disagree about AI, I guess.

I do think it’s a valuable tool, but honestly there’s not a ton that it does that you couldn’t already do with an asset store. And there’s a fair amount of risk associated with using AI in the near term. Folks already have a lot of qualms about the ethics of how those AIs were trained. And the first games that come out that rely heavily on AI are likely to be really janky–there are devs who will have tried to entirely replace a role on the team with AI, and the quality will suffer as a result. So I think in the near term there’s going to be a pretty severe backlash against AI-generated stuff in games. Folks will say it all feels generic and low-effort; it’ll be the new “asset flip.”

Long-term, I think it will have a place in the workflow for sure, the same way that store-bought assets do; you’ll just need to adapt them to fit in with the feeling you’re going for in your game, and hand-revise some things. But near-term, I think there will be a lot of folks who lose interest in a game if they find out there’s AI involved. And that goes triple for AI voice acting. A bad human voice actor can at least be interesting, but AI has that uncanny valley quality that really turns people off once they notice it.

I think it’s going to get even better in the next few years, too. The tools for 3d modeling are poised to improve in a way that makes it dramatically easier to create very high quality graphics. Nanite is one component of this, reducing the need for multiple levels of detail in polygon-based rendering. But 3d reality capture is improving too, both thanks to hardware like depth sensors and software like Gaussian splatting and NeRFs.

Indie games are just going to keep getting better, basically. As will AA games. I think the days of the AAA blockbuster may be numbered.

Just adding a reply here to direct you to my other comment, which summarizes some of the options.

https://kbin.social/m/comicstrips@lemmy.world/t/791813/-/comment/4808661

I mean, if you’re going to say that the name isn’t “go” (which is certainly a common English term for the game) AND that it was invented in Korea, then surely the name should be Baduk, the Korean term for it. Igo is the Japanese name. (and for what it’s worth, weiqi is the Chinese term.) Admittedly English-speakers mostly use Japanese terms for the game, like “atari,” “joseki,” “hane,” etc., but that’s more a historical accident than anything else.

I used to use KGS, but that was mostly on the computer, though I know they also have an Android app. That was several years ago, though. My friend who still plays does so mostly on Pandanet via Android.

Those are both for multiplayer, of course. For single player, a while back I used Gridmaster along with a build of LeelaZero, and there are various apps that offer Go problems, including one my friend likes, but I have forgotten what he told me it was. I think it might be Tsumego Pro, but I’ll have to ask him again next time we talk.

Edit: Dragon Go Server probably deserves a mention as well. That’s a site for, basically, postal games via email, and can be accessed entirely via a web interface. It’s not as popular as the sites with faster time controls, but it’s kinda nice for playing a leisurely game with a busy friend.

It’s also used for sending huge amounts of data long distances. “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.” That’s usually attributed to Andrew S. Tanenbaum, but wikipedia follows that with “other alleged speakers include…” so take that with a grain of salt. They do note that the first problem in his book on computer networks asks students to calculate the throughput of a Saint Bernard carrying floppy disks.

You know that the other two words also exist though, right? Like, you can effect change in an organization, and there can be something strange in the affect of a psychopath. So there’s a verb “to effect” and a noun “affect” (although here the pronunciation is different–the accent is on the first syllable). It’s true that the most common usages follow the rules you’re laying out, but it genuinely is an oversimplification.

I wouldn’t really call it a favorite, but I definitely ended up liking Nier: Automata pretty well after bouncing off it really hard when trying it at a friend’s house. That’s because we were trying from the start, and it starts with a section that’s about half an hour long, with only two checkpoints, vastly harder than anything else in the game, and in which the first half isn’t even the same genre as the rest of the game. It’s seriously one of the worst intros I can think of in a video game. The rest of the game is, y’know, a pretty good third-person action RPG.

“Scary” may also be the wrong word; “tense” might be closer to the mark. In Fusion there are these sections where you’ll be exploring and then suddenly your doppleganger will show up and start hunting you. It’s surprising and actually pretty unnerving; you have to get away, but the thing can move basically as fast as you can and there’s really not much room to maneuver. I was under the impression that the “EMI” sections in dread were basically a refinement of this, but maybe I was misinformed.

Metroid Fusion has some very scary segments, and my understanding is that Metroid Dread does some of the same things, though I haven’t played through that one yet.

Fakespot used to reveal more about how they detected fakes, but as you say there are obvious issues with that, as it’s a bit of an arms race. They don’t just look at the text of the individual review though. Folks who buy reviews tend to get them from “review farms” that do reviews for a lot of products, and they don’t have an infinite number of Amazon accounts to use for that, so there are network effects that can be powerful indicators, and that aren’t easy for manipulate.

Gluten kicks ass. It’s easily the best fake meat base. I remember in college cooking a meal for my roommates and them saying afterwards “wait, aren’t you vegetarian? did you cook this just for us and not eat any?” and having to explain that no, that wasn’t beef, it was wheat gluten and mushrooms and miso. They were dubious, saying, “well, to me this is just really tender beef.”

So yeah. I’m also disappointed that gluten has gotten such a bad rap. I’m waiting for this knowledge to trickle back into the convenience foods sector so I can buy this stuff and not have to make it by hand every time, and it seems like I’ll be waiting a long time.

I dunno. Is it gluten-free?

Yeah, at the time it didn’t seem so out of line. I guess I just feel like it hasn’t held up as well against modern games as something like Chrono Trigger or FFVI.

II is very good, but it does get VERY grindy right at the end.

I liked it well enough to keep watching it while I had a service that showed it, but MacFarlane never stopped grating on me.

I’ve got a few unusual suggestions. I think most of these flew pretty far under the radar.

Sethian: This one is about decoding an alien language, and is carried out mostly in that language. I don’t think it’s entirely successful, but it’s a very interesting concept.

Heaven’s Vault: also about decoding an alien language, but with a lot more other bits about archaeology, social wrangling, and a weird minigame about sailing between planets? I dunno. I didn’t love this one either but the language thing is so unusual that it’s pretty easy to win me over with it.

Gateways: by Smudged Cat Games, since there are a couple of other games with a similar name. This one is a 2d puzzle platformer; it starts out pretty similar to Portal, but it gets way more involved when you have to manipulate rotation, size, and even time. Really, really challenging by the end.

TIS-100: This one is pretty well-known. This is a “zach-like” puzzle game, along with games like Shenzhen IO and Magnum Opus (also made by Zachtronic Games), but this one is my favorite. It’s about programming an unusual computer. It’s quite hard, but extremely engrossing for the right kind of brain.

Yon Paradox: This one is almost entirely a time travel puzzle game. In it you have to explore a facility, periodically traveling back in time; but with you do, your previous selves still exist, and do what you previously did. So in order to avoid causing a paradox, you have to avoid being seen by your previous selves. I didn’t actually spend much time playing this one–I got it to try in VR, and it gave me motion sickness like that. But I’ve meant to go back and try it in flatscreen. You’ve got to admit it’s an unusual premise.

Oh, and I suppose I should mention Achron as well, since I bought that one for its unusual premise. It’s a realtime strategy game, along the lines of starcraft, but with a timetravel mechanic built in. The mechanic is intended to be balanced even in multiplayer. I never really learned to play it, though–it seemed really complicated and not necessarily all that fun. But it’s pretty unique.