Survive This!
I can't let Pilot do a post on video games and not try to one up him! He mentioned Balantro, a game I've seen on Steam but never actually looked at. He also mentioned it was made on the sunny shores of Saskatchewan! I've have dived....dove.....doven back into a Canadian made game recently called The Long Dark. It is a survival game in which a (Solar Incident) brings down your plane in northern Canada and you have to survive the long Canadian winter on a remote island with nobody else around. Forage for food, clothes, firewood, etc. hunt deer, run from wolves, bears and the worst of them all, the Moose (That FUCKING moose!).
It's a fun came with some intense survival mechanics. The thing I am most impressed with is how your character slows down when walking up hills, through snow and against the wind. It gives you the EXACT same sense of struggle that you get in real life.
The big thing that keeps drawing me back to the game are the constant updates. I've actually been going back and forth between this and No Man's Sky which are both games that have almost monthly updates. In No Man's Sky it was a terrible game when it was released 10 years ago and is now a very good game, but also almost unrecognizable. Both share the same type of developer though, a smaller company that is in constant contact with the fans and listens to them.
And I guess we all have Minecraft to thank for that. The impact it had on the gaming industry cannot be overstated. If you go on Steam there is now a tag for games that you can play but haven't been released yet and more and more games are supported after the fact as developers realise, they can still get people buying a ten-year-old game if they keep updating it.
Of course, that also comes with the bad. For every great pre-release game out there, you will find ten that are horrible. It makes finding a game to play very difficult, but when you do find them, you end up with a game that you have hundreds of hours in. Between my PS4 and Steam Deck I probably have more than 300 hours in No Man's Sky. I know that seems like a lot, but I've had it for 8 years and a lot of people on the Reddit thread brag about 2000+ hours. Which is wild.
I think the game industry in general is in a good place. Sure, there are still your NHLs and Call of Duties that are just the same game with a new skin overtop each year (especially with sports games), but small game studios or even individuals can make amazing games with more depth and quality than any AAA.
I mean, could a AAA studio ever even dream to top Untitled Goose Game?
Comments
I do want to check out No Man's Sky but I feel like I don't quite have the time to commit to it. One of the security guards at work (a man who is nearly our dad's age) held me hostage for like 40 minutes a few weeks ago talking about his adventures in NMS. Honestly I was a bit annoyed, I had a news inquiry to get to!
One of the best parts of the proliferation of affordable technology is indie anything. From video/tv to music to games, having access to tools to make things that were only available to people with money 20 years ago is amazing. I heard a comedian saying how anything you've ever seen on TV was cleared for you to see by a corporate lawyer - and that has an effect on culture. Indie art and production doesn't have that filter. It does mean that 9/10 of the things you find are crap like you mention on Steam. But that 1/10 is typically novel, original and something you can feel passionate putting your interest behind. No one from Futurama has ever returned an email or interacted with me - but I got an email response from Notch (Minecraft) back in the early Minecraft days and I feel an affinity to LocalThunk (Balatro) because I know he also survived the -40, even if I have no idea who he/she is.