Subnautica

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San Francisco had an emperor.

(He even “decreed” the construction of a bridge or tunnel between San Francisco and Oakland on the other side of the bay, predicting the existence of the Bay Bridge and Transbay Tube!)

Sigma Star Saga for the GBA. Really creative mashup of an RPG and a side-scrolling shooter, with a cool weapon-configuration system thrown in. Definitely suffered a bit from platform limitations, but there’s absolutely more that could have been done with the core concept.

Shockingly good writing, too.

Good lord yes. Overwatch is just a corporatized TF2 ripoff, but Battleborn was a creative, unique game with a soul.

Anyone who hasn’t seen it should watch the game’s intro cinematic, which gives a great sense of just how much character the game had.

It’s also just an incredible deconstruction of the “modern warfare” shooter genre. It screams at the player, “hey, hold up a sec, think about those people you’re shooting”.

I think it’s part of why the only other shooters I like are TF2 and the Borderlands series, both of which frame the violence with a distinctly fantastical, escapist setting, intentionally distancing the game from reality.

I tried Disco Elysium, and I really appreciate everything it did/was trying to do, but I simply could not get over the pacing, long-winded conversations, and lack of guidance.

Don’t get me wrong, I love narrative-based games and open-ended exploration, but what amounts to turn-based game mechanics are too slow, and a complete absence of any obvious paths to take makes the game unapproachable.

Funny story about that one: my first time playing it, I actually found it a bit too… visceral, and had to stop after getting a couple hours in - I only came back to play it all the way through several years later.

In the intervening time, I learned that one of the developers, when asked whether the game had a “good ending”, said something along the lines of “that’s when the player stops playing in disgust”.

Guess I got the good ending.

Roughly in order, I think:

• StarCraft: Brood War
• Subnautica
• FTL: Faster than Light
• Spec Ops: The Line
• Risk of Rain Returns
• Portal
• Dead Cells
• Hades
• Team Fortress 2
• Borderlands 2
• Satisfactory

Honorable mention:

• Unreal Tournament 2004
• The first two Golden Sun games
• SOMA
• Diablo II
• Diablo III
• TLoZ: Link’s Awakening

Looking over this, it seems like I’m drawn to games that have either unusually good writing, very long skill curves, or (e.g., #1) both.

UT2004 sneaks in for being the absolute best LAN-party game ever (fight me). I think Link’s Awakening is mostly just nostalgia though. 😋

Edit: bumped UT2004 down to “honorable mention” because I somehow forgot the billion hours I’ve sunk into Satisfactory. Still very curious to see where that game goes story-wise after the 1.0 launch, though.

Oh shit, I misread the thread title lol

Yeah, still deserves a song.

checks box on “Sabaton thread” bingo card

Got a hater!

The Battle of Myeongnyang.

In 1597, Korean admiral Yi Sun-sin, who had successfully managed the construction of a formidable fleet of warships, was stripped of his rank, tortured, and nearly executed, with naval command transferred to his rival, Won Gyun, due to political machinations.

Won Gyun promptly loses much of the fleet in several disastrous engagements with the Japanese, leaving the Koreans heavily outnumbered.

Yi is hurriedly reinstated, but by this point he commands just 13 ships against a fleet of at least ten times that size. Many of his ships are crewed by survivors of the previous battles, and fear a return to combat.

Yi carefully selects a narrow, shallow strait for his “final stand” limiting the size and number of Japanese ships that can attack simultaneously.

Yi’s flagship initially engages the Japanese attackers alone, due to the other ships’ hesitancy. As it repels one ship after another, like “a castle in the sea”, the other ships eventually join, and the Japanese fleet is repelled.

The Japanese lose at least 30 ships. The Korean fleet loses none.

Or, if you like it more pithy: “The difference between theory and practice is larger in practice than it is in theory.”

Alien might be the scariest movie of all time, IMO, so this makes perfect sense to me.