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Comment by latexr | Hacker News Reader

Fun video games never went away. Look for games by indie developers instead of AAA titles.

It's actually a golden age for fun video games, because we are swimming in new beautiful, engaging, original titles every year.

Some things really take you by surprise as well.

I never saw Inscryption, Disco Eliseum or Hades coming, and I think nobody did.

And even oldish games still have great value. I still play LoL or Isaac, and they are as good as they were on day 1.

Plus, you get the Switch then the Deck refreshed portable gaming experience. The latter made emulation so nice as well.

With terrific communities, insane speed runners, devs coming up with crazy new concepts and hardware that never stop to get better, it's hard to complain except that with a busy life, you will see only 1% of those masterpieces.

Inscryption is a must play.

I will remember it forever, it's a unique experience.

But it's such a weird combination of aesthetic, story telling and gameplay I have to assume it prevents a huge part of the gaming population from enjoying it.

If anybody read those comments, DO NOT LOOK THE GAME UP if you plan to play it. Go blind.

I binged it during the time I was trapped in my room with COVID. You're right, it is a very weird game(s?) in the best way, it's literally sent me off on a card game design jaunt that's still ongoing haha. And I found myself loving the characters of the, what was it, ocelot and the wizard apprentice who is glad to have any kind of STIM-U-LA-TION?

> I never saw (…) Hades coming, and I think nobody did.

I don’t think Hades came as a surprise to anyone who was already a fan of the devs from Bastion and Transistor.

Come on, Bastion is nice but nowhere as sophisticated as Hades. Neither the gameplay nor the replayability would have let you think the team had the ability at the time.

As for transistor, the story is basically "futuristic world is being destroyed by virus-type-invaders and your sword/companion is the key to beating it", with a predictable end and almost zero character dev.

Being able to make ok games doesn't translate to the skill to make a masterpiece.

It was a quantum leap.

It would be like saying you can deduce Divinity Original sin 2 would be amazing because you played the first one.

I disagree. Sure, there are fun games, but they're so hard to find among all the crap

The noise/signal ratio is worse for everything today: movies, music, tv shows.

But "finding good games requires a tiny bit of effort to me" is a first-world problem.

There are many fun AAA titles, more than one can play

The conversation’s context is fun games without needing the latest hardware.

The majority of my indie titles run on a potato.

Many indie games use Unity and have terrible performance. Source: I have a potato (by which i mean i use the integrated graphics of an i7-56xx)

It can run many games well, so it depends how much developers value performance.

As a player, I do not really value performance unless we're talking sub 25fps.

Same. But some titles have like 3fps (Train Valley World for example)

Performance is not just a simple number. 25 FPS with good frame pacing is much more enjoyable than something that averages 60 FPS but with individual frame times all over the place. That said, for first-person action games especially on a non-tiny monitor, anything below ~40 FPS will be noticeably non-smooth. Other game types have more tolerance, e.g. a top down strategy game could still be playable at ~15 FPS.

A lot of fun old AAA games run on potatoes. And there's so many of them that you won't have issues finding something new to you.

> I look forward to an eventual return to fun video games

They weren't saying they wanted games that run on old hardware. It's just the trope of "back then hardware was bad and games were good. Now hardware is good and games are bad."

Look at anything from publisher New Blood Interactive on Steam for a starting point. Mostly retro style FPS from differing eras, but there are a few other game types. Plus you'll struggle to find any that don't have thousands of user ratings in either very positive or overwhelmingly positive brackets.

Gloomwood (first person stealth) and Fallen Aces are a couple of gems still in early access.

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