Shenmue's Much-Hated Forklifts Feel Revolutionary Today

You're probably right.

Over time I conflate the concepts found in games like Skool Daze, Make a Chip, My Name is Uncle Groucho, Software Star, Grand National and suchlike that brought together semi-prosaic simulation tasks with a startling self-awareness.

Star Trader from '74 seems to be the inspiration for Trade Wars and Drugwars of '84―they're essentially ‘grind simulators’ with the player looking at sheets of numbers for a lot of the time. However, the apex of popularity of such games was likely in the early-mid 90s when office drones apparently sought to get their minds off the grind with a different grind, and countless knock-offs appeared for DOS.

Still, this ‘spreadsheet’ gameplay is rather different from box stacking. Some Game & Watch titles might be closer.

Right, the 3 you mention are largely mechanically identical to shooters.

Earliest thing I can think of that is even close is Alter Ego which was '86, though I'm sure there are some job-simulator games in basic code in a magazine somewhere.

Somewhat off-topic, but searching for something older than Alter Ego turned up "Little Computer People" which Wikipedia lists as the Ur-example of "life simulation" and looks a lot like "The Sims" but on the C64.

That's more like the many Japanese train-driving games.

Tokyo Bus Guide is my favorite Dreamcast game.

It requires intense focus. A single mistake 15 minutes into a course will result in a game over (small mistakes like going out of the lane or forgetting to signal the next stop will deduct points, but if you even tap another car then that's it). You have to find the perfect level of pressure to apply to the analog trigger to get the bus at the correct speed. I find it meditative in a way that resembles when I work on something that requires very precise and fine movement, like soldering or fine woodworking. A course might take 20 minutes to complete, but time seems to pass in an instant, and when it's done I feel incredibly relaxed.

I highly recommend it, at least to try once!

Speaking of Morrowind, one of the things I liked in the extremely long oral history just published the other day ( https://www.polygon.com/2019/3/27/18281082/elder-scrolls-mor... ) was that the Vivec sermons, among other things, are all conflicting and rival accounts because the dev team itself was internally divided and rooting for particular factions:

"It’s never dogmatic. We would tell the stories basically from a character’s point of view, and we were always very careful that anything that was presented was told from that specific viewpoint. So you had conflicting notions of what went on in the world: “What happened to the Dwemer?” Well, one group says this; another says that. “What happened in Red Mountain?”

What was great about that is you would actually have factions develop on the design team: “Vivec and his buddies were actually the bad guys, and they usurped their power.” And, you know, “Dagoth Ur — our main villain — he was the victim in all this.” You had the room to do that back-and-forth. So, whenever we would present any history, it was never quite like, “Well, the dwarves disappeared because of the following reasons.” Each race has their version. What’s the truth?

And that’s kind of the magic of it all."

It really did establish a strong sense of place. And it was a somewhat unique place, too - a "boring" and unremarkable suburb. Many (most?) of us grew up someplace similar, but few games are set in such places because of the lack of coolness.

Also: I can't look at a retail display of TVs without thinking of that game and hearing the department store jingle!

I have still never gotten Fallout NV to run without crashing catastrophically less than 2 hours in. I've tried different machines (laptop vs. custom desktop) and several mods to fix this, but when I realized I had sunk 4 hours into it already and it was looking like an all day project I walked away and haven't come back since.

It's one of my bigger gaming disappointments, honestly, especially after constantly reading how much everyone loves it years later. I keep hoping for a remaster or something so I can run it without buying new hardware which may or may not work and/or tinkering for hours.

It wasn't released in the US. I believe Microsoft bought the rights to make it an Xbox exclusive here.

That was the problem. The game's lead, Yu Suzuki, was not primarily a game designer. He was known to push ahead games with revolutionary graphics, see Space Harrier and Virtua Fighter. But he was nowhere near as good at game design as Miyamoto or Naka.

I loved Shenmue for the immersive experience which was unchallenged at the time. It was the first of its kind, and for a long time no other open world game paid as much attention to detail. But its traditional gameplay mechanics were weak.

Well the forklift part only happens for a very short window, so it sounds like those people didn't really play through it. The point was Ryo needed to raise money after a thing happens.

Conservatives hate it because of the Gamergate nonsense

"Liberal on social issues" is all it takes for a vocal chunk of gamers to obsessively hate them and everything they write.

Kotaku is very partisan in its Nintendo fanboyism. In their view Nintendo can't do anything wrong, where as the slightest hint of a mistake from Valve or Sega or others, they pounce upon with extreme outrage. Also they kind of patronizingly fetishize Japanese gaming culture, over others. They'll have pages and pages of articles about even the most obscure Pokemon game releases, while they give lesser coverage of a Total War game.

Note to mention the click-bait and hyperbole laden writing style.

Social issues definitely seem like part of it now, but Kotaku was disliked in hardcore communities well before Gamergate or any of that other nonsense. My recollections of late-2000s Kotaku are similar to how I feel today about a lot of tech publications where personal expertise in their subject area makes it painfully obvious that they don't really know what they're talking about.

When you spend hundreds to thousands of hours mastering a game and immersing yourself in the culture surrounding it, an article on "your" game, unless it's written by someone as keyed-in to the meta as you are, is likely to come off as a series of poorly informed hot takes. In other words, generalist journalists frequently have a hard time developing the level of experience in a particular area necessary to write about it in such a way that's not laughable to the "experts". This effect is particularly bad in video games, where the amount of rabbit holes you can pour yourself into is practically uncountable. Everyone's an expert on something, and it only takes one crappy article on your pet game to destroy your confidence in anything that outlet produces, even if you lack the experience to see the lie in each and every piece.

IDK, I've got a suspicion OP has some other axe to grind with Kotaku.

I don't think so personally, because the game is something that should be experienced. Just reading about it, is like reading about food.

I'm not saying don't read it, I'm saying if you want to play the game, consider playing it without preconceptions.

This made me think on a tangent, on whether divulging spoilers for an interactive experience have a heavier "stigma" than for books or movies. Five or 10 years from now, or even a month from now, I can't imagine being offended if someone were to spoil who dies in "Avengers: Infinity War", or the 3rd season of GoT. Whereas a video game is much more inherently about the "journey" -- e.g. you have to do some work to get to the end. I think I'd be annoyed if people were just spoiling "The Last of Us" 10 years after its release (which is likely to be after its sequel is released).

That said, I don't think I'll ever find time to play the original Shenmue. But hearing more details about why it has cultivated such a fond following makes me very interested in playing its Kickstarted sequel.

Unlike other mediums, the number of people who play games has grown exponentially over those 20 years.

I think it's safe to say that the vast majority of people who play games now have never experienced Shenmue even though it was a blockbuster title on the 9 million Dreamcasts that shipped worldwide.

And you're not only spoiling the 20 year old version, you're also spoiling the HD remaster that can be bought right now on PC.