If we consider a game as a cake, I think of the graphics as its frostings. Sure, it could make the game look very good, but won’t do shit if the base of the cake is crap.
i’d consider realistic graphics as fondant, sure you can create amazing visuals with it… but that thing is barely edible. give me some buttercream (stylised graphics) instead
One of the things I liked about Blizzard was that they never tried to use fondant. It was all buttercream…
Until Activision made them start mixing fiberglass into the frosting to cut costs
As Alton Brown said, “Cake is only the delivery system for frosting.”
I can’t handle getting addicted to Nethack again at this point in time
It’s still great. Like old school Civilization, or even older Zork
I did a lot of stuff in the first Zork (kill the troll, solve the maze, open the gates of hell, etc), but I never quite figured out how I was supposed to win.
They had to start putting graphics in their games before I could beat them.
Hitchhikers Guide was even worse.
Fuck the babble fish puzzle.
Plus getting a third of the way into the game and if you didn’t take the junk mail at the beginning you have to restart.
Also - can’t you pick up tea at some point, when you need to have the item “no tea” to complete the game?
I played the Apple II version. Old games were cruel. I’d get frustrated and rotate between Rivers of Light and The Return of Hercules.
You release the bird from the cage to kill the troll, or maybe I’m thinking Adventure
The troll you can kill with the sword that glows in its presence, if I’m remembering my Zork correctly. I think it regenerates though, so maybe you have to cut the head off, and then it vanishes in a puff of vile smoke, or something like that.
The smirking sneak thief can be dispatched the same way, although I think you can also use the axe you get after killing the troll. I think it wasn’t a sure thing though, like you can give the “stab thief with sword” command a few times and sometimes you win and other times you die.
Although you should give the egg to the thief (he can open it and you can’t) and then kill him and retrieve it from his dead body later, otherwise you can’t win the game. Obviously.
try out Moonring. you might like it and its free
So you thought suggesting another addictive RPG was the correct response here??
Seriously though, seems fun–I tried to go through one dungeon and died very quickly. Looks like it has a lot of depth though, so I’ll probably wait until I have a break to give it a real go. Looks a bit more accessible than Caves of Qud, so I might actually have a chance of getting somewhere.
its very unique for sure. good luck matey
It’s creative bankruptcy. Things don’t need to be realistic, it’s called style.
Stuff like Zeno Clash and Dishonored hold up aesthetically because they aren’t going for realism. And I’d take Morrowind’s arthropod bodies back if I could have the moral complexity and ya know, themes back.
This is also why I prefer the San Andreas era GTA, the graphics are cartoony and the gameplay is fun as hell, the hyper realism style they moved to with GTA 5 is so boring and lifeless
It sounds silly, but San Andreas is really underrated. Like I know it’s considered one of the best games of all time, but the writing, the confrontation with racism and the police and the dynamics of gangs….
I mean, most of the time it’s just fun to get 5 stars and enact your own revenge for the MOVE bombing. But that main storyline is so slept on.
Just don’t understand people looking at screenshots and gameplay videos and commenting on how the shadows on some background detail look slightly better with the FSSMGXTR scaling setting turned to BBXT5 instead of HAMndX3.
And then they complain that their framerate is too low, causing flickering or lag apparently but it causes blurring instead which they do with motion blur effect already. 🤪
All of this is lost on me. Out of ancient habit, I keep my video streams throttled to 360p to ‘save bandwidth’ even though that hasn’t been a necessity for me for a decade or so.
1080p60fps gives me motion sickness. I have no idea what 4k120fps would do to me, not that I have a capable monitor.
Does ASCII art count? Dwarf Fortress, MUDs, etc. are great fun.
Text rendered onto a screen is also graphics.
How many layers can be peeled before it’s not a video game anymore?
I remember people discussing that Dear Esther was not a video game.
Fuck that’s a nice font
That’s 3 hairs on the arm you see. Give me my $90
I’ll just leave this link to Mindustry here, I guess…?
I saw a text based porn game yesterday. Was pretty fun but not much porn.
What’s the fediverse etiquette for “can wet get a link to that?”, but in a way that’s not weirder than this already is…? I’ve made it weird. Maybe it was already weird.
Ok ok, i searched browsing history (you know what i mean…).
Thanks!
I want a fun game that can run on my shitty PC
Anything from 6 or so years before your PC fabrication ought to be easy to run at a fast framerate.
Terraria
Unpopular opinion but graphics do matter a little bit or at least more than the meme depicts. Dwarf Fortress was unplayable before they added actual graphics to it. I wish things moved between tiles fluidly like in Rimworld instead of it being a slideshow, but I can actually stand to play Dwarf Fortress now. If the only video games that existed were text-based, I’d probably never play video games again. Ps2 era graphics on the other hand, hell yeah. 90s era dos graphics are passable too. But PLEASE no text adventure games.
Dwarf Fortress was unplayable before they added actual graphics to it
OBJECTION!!
The ASCII graphics have a charm of its own, even if it skews the horizontal-vertical distances due to characters being 8x12
Dwarf Fortress was unplayable before they added actual graphics to it.
Supremely unbased, I still just see elf, dwarf, plump helmet…
Are dcss tiles banned? I don’t want to play it ascii
You can play adventure books
Fuuuuuck, I forgot all about those. Lone Wolf, Wizards Warriors & You, Fighting Fantasy… They were like a bridge between CYOA and D&D.
Thanks for the unintentional recomendations, sometimes when i can’t play a tabletop rpg and video games won’t fill that gap, but some adventure books manage to help
Noooo
Yeah, I think it’s interesting to play it in ASCII. It makes you actually read the text logs and use your imagination, which feels more like a book. But it also makes it harder to actually know what’s going on, so I really don’t know about it being more fun…
Hyperbole and a half style artwork.
I miss her :(
Hope she’s doing ok
There was an excellent text based RPG called Roadwarden that came out the other year. It’s just text and illustrations so thought I’d use this post to mention it.
If small amounts of animation are allowed then WORLD OF HORROR was decent too.
Roadwarden is excellent.
Vintage Story has the graphics of that other voxel graphics based block game. The gameplay is so good that I bought and play VS, and Terraria, but I haven’t ever played more than 30 minutes of the other block game.
Graphics barely matter. Gameplay is king.
