Comment by Bartweiss | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bartweiss | Hacker News Reader

> No Man’s Sky inhabits this frustrating space alongside games like the nu Deus Ex games, the original X-Com, or the Mass Effect series. It offers something you just can’t get anywhere else, but it does so in a deeply flawed and annoying way.

This really resonated with me. I have a whole pile of Steam games which have fascinating, unique traits, but are 'objectively' bad in that they failed to deliver a solid story, or interface, or mechanics, or all of the above.

- Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator comes to mind; it's a great exploration of cooperative multiplayer design and the possibilities opened up by incomplete information. But it's also clunky and acutely underdeveloped in terms of game modes, balance, and AI. If you want a good game, you'd better dive deep into modding.

- Tharsis also counts; deeply strategic play in a constrained setting, undermined by strategy-destroying levels of randomness.

- Even AAA stuff like Civilization does this to me. Why is Civ great? Because nothing else is Civ. Why is Civ terrible? Because the balance is underwhelming and the AI is catastrophically bad.

- Hell, for years Minecraft was like this. The opening comment about "imagine if Minecraft had been clunky and unintuitive at release" made me laugh, because it was. Deep Survival play has been almost dependent on mods for much of the games history, but the underlying insight was too good to pass up.

So... it's an interesting insight, and it also prompts a question. Why don't more of these intriguing flops prompt more polished attempts?

> - Artemis: Spaceship Bridge Simulator comes to mind; it's a great exploration of cooperative multiplayer design and the possibilities opened up by incomplete information. But it's also clunky and acutely underdeveloped in terms of game modes, balance, and AI. If you want a good game, you'd better dive deep into modding.

Could you elaborate on the sorts of things you'd like to see in terms of game modes, and AI? I ask because I've been working for the past 5 years on an open source linux game that has the same basic premise as Artemis called Space Nerds In Space, so I'm always on the lookout for good ideas for this type of game.

It offers something you just can’t get anywhere else, but it does so in a deeply flawed and annoying way.

This just described Elite Dangerous for me. Multiplayer MMO Descent:Freespace scratches a deeply satisfying itch that I've had since I was a kid, but that game's flaws are absolutely maddening.

Is there a word to describe the maddening annoyance at something being so close, yet so far away, for objectively silly reasons?

> Is there a word to describe the maddening annoyance at something being so close, yet so far away, for objectively silly reasons?

They call that the uncanny valley

Heartbreaking, in the same sense as Fantasy Heartbreaker tabletop RPGs?

This may be off-point, but are there more polished attempts at new ideas out there that are worth checking out? I can't keep up with what's worth playing anymore, and don't have time to play every game hoping that it hits the mark. Anytime I check out the top ranking games, it's new Call of Duty's, Battlefields, Assassin's Creeds, or sports (blegh) and a whole host of games that disappear as fast as they show up. I'd kill for a new game that engages as much Civilization or C&C did.

Try Europa Universalis 4 by Paradox Interactive. It's a strategy game.

I think I will be checking this one out

It's not really new, just under the radar - but maybe Paradox Interactive's grand strategy games would be up your alley. Look at Crusader Kings 2, or Europa Universalis 4.

I make this recommendation reluctantly as I despise their DLC practices, but those games are pretty great and fulfill an underserved niche. If you do decide to play them - I'd try out the base game before considering DLC, there's just way too much.

Yes.

Modded Minecraft (try All the Mods 3 on the twitch client, or (formerly my modpack) Resonant Rise)

Challenge Pack Modded Minecraft (Currently Popular: Age of Engineering, Forever Stranded, Sky Factory 3)

Factorio

Dwarf Fortress

Modded Dwarf Fortress Masterwork

Poschengband & Tome4 represent the pinnacle (to me) of classic Roguelike design.

Risk of Rain

Endless Legend

Endless Space 2 (Amplitude releases a consistent and growing world of fantastic games with amazing and long-lived content releases).

(Just give Zachtronics all your money and take all their games, but in a particular order:)

Shenzen I/O

TIS-100

Spacechem

Infinifactory

Cities: Skylines (Paradox Interactive publishes does this and the next few, they're very good)

Europa Universalis 4

Stellaris

Great, thoughtful, engaging games are out there if you want them. Sadly, most people are filthy casuals now.

Zachtronics games in particular stand out as turning real world thinking and skills into fun games.

I've never really understood some of the zachtronics games.

Things like TIS-100 and Shenzen I/O confuse me. Why would I spend time learning some esoteric assembler that exists no where else, when you could take that same time and learn an actual assembler?

I really, REALLY wish they had done something really clever, like targetted AVR opcodes or something for their vCPU. That'd make it so not only do you get to have fun, but you learn a marketable skill in the process!

That's one of my major complaints about most of the "programming" games I've seen, in that most of the time, if I'm going to spend time writing code, I'd rather just hack on one of my projects then play a game with no real end-product. At least with personal projects, you wind up with an actual app at the end.

I did enjoy Spacechem and Infinifactory, though I didn't finish each before becoming bored.

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Not to mention the huge loss of a learning opportunity to have players learn programming language basics for specific real world code

This smells of when industry shows up at a college and complains they aren't teaching them "what we use in the real world". After enough practice learning multiple fictional languages, learning the n+1th one should be a walk in the park! The important part is the game is fun and encourages learning. That the developer didn't choose to use an "actual" language to do so shouldn't ultimately matter if the concepts are sound, right?

Let me prove your axiom wrong with a counterexample.

I love these games, and I can program (and have shipped to prod) in over a dozen languages including Erlang, Haskell, C++, C, Common Lisp, Java, Clojure, Scala.

What you're saying is nonsense. Practice in programming is practice in programming. If we wanted to, we could make the TIS-100 system real for embedded computing and I bet it'd be popular with some instruction extensions.

I did an annex course at a local middle school with TIS-100 to teach kids that programming is fun. It went over well.

>Things like TIS-100 and Shenzen I/O confuse me. Why would I spend time learning some esoteric assembler that exists no where else, when you could take that same time and learn an actual assembler?

I think it's really more for people who don't realize they're learning an assembler. Also, it's less daunting than a real assembler because it's so much simpler.

I am a university CS student and my microprocessor course has us learning assembly. The concepts I learned in TIS-100 are definitely making it easier to grasp how things work at the most fundamental level. It might not have taught me x86 assembly, but it taught the basics like moving data between registers and working with only the most basic instructions. Still found it very useful.

TIS and Shenzen superficially look like assembly programming, but in reality they're very sophisticated puzzle games. You basically create these networks of routines, each of which is limited to something like 9 lines of code (and labels cost a line!). All the tasks are structured so that when you try to code them the straightforward way you're always short a line or two, and then you have to sit there racking your brain to figure out the 'trick'. Then you incorporate that new knowledge in your solution for the next level, and so on.

So it's really nothing like real coding. Highly recommended though! Especially Shenzen.

Labels and code can share a line, like this:

  ST: MOV X1 ACC
  TEQ ACC 1
  + JMP ST
  MOV X1 X2
  SLP 1

Now go back and optimize your solutions! :)

My fav part of Zachtronics games is that they show an alternative vision of massively multiplayer PVP where the metric of success is not, "Who is the best murderer?"

> Why would I spend time learning some esoteric assembler that exists no where else, when you could take that same time and learn an actual assembler?

Fully agreed. I own TIS-100 but never saw the appeal. I can write actual programs in real-world programming languages that accomplish something, thank you!

This is why I found Factorio infinitely more engaging: theme matters! The game is still an assembler/automaton, but disguised as a sci-fi RTS game. By the time you realize you're actually programming, it's too late and you're having lots of fun conquering an alien planet.

Haven't played TIS-100, but Shenzen I/O is just a really good puzzle game. Nothing more to it than that.

I'd also add that a large segment of their player base likely has programming experience, yet no experience in assembly.

> Things like TIS-100 and Shenzen I/O confuse me. Why would I spend time learning some esoteric assembler that exists no where else, when you could take that same time and learn an actual assembler?

TIS-100 and Shenzen I/O are theme park training grounds where a solution is guaranteed to exist. For education or for people lacking confidence, that has appeal. Also, I _wish_ I had hardware like the TIS-100.

The games aren't really about the language--which have maybe 12 instructions at most--they're about the challenge of working with an extremely limited instruction set. They're puzzle games disguised as games about assembly languages. A game using a real instruction set might be fun for some people, but it would feel a lot different, and probably have to be a lot more challenging to make up for all of the convenient instructions. At that point you're basically just programming.

Whoa, thank you for the interesting list. I'm excited to check this stuff out.

If you google my name and youtube you'll find an depressingly large cache of content. My recent stuff is not really for random consumption, but my older stuff was when I was considering becoming a fulltime gamer.

I have a still-relevant tutorial on Dwarf Fortress, SpaceChem, and over a hundred hours of very technical modded minecraft play.

Just on Civ, if you like it I'd highly recommend checking out any of Paradox's grand strategy games like Hearts of Iron or Europa Universalis.

The AI is generally pretty good, although you might see some questionable behaviour from time to time. Balance is another matter though, for the most part the games try to at least start with some historic accuracy so you'll find some nations are just straight up hard to play. For example, if you start WW2 as Poland in HoI, you're gonna have a bad time.

Thanks - Hearts of Iron is definitely on my list. Europa Universalis appeals a bit less, though that's mostly because of my perceptions of the interface and cognitive burden. I could be totally wrong about those.

I definitely don't mind bad balance if the game isn't trying for it; Rome: Total War did something very similar with certain nations starting in terrible positions.

HoI4 is a good starting point I'd say, it's prettier and the UI is much more manageable which makes the whole game feel a lot easier to learn even though it's not hugely less complicated than HoI3.

EU is a different beast though, and I know exactly what you mean about the UI. EU4 has made some improvements but once you add in even just a few of the bigger expansions/DLC then it can really get a bit overwhelming.

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