I have been playing Pikmin 2 on Dolphin and have been enjoying it quite a lot.

For the most part, progress has been slow, but today I found the blue Pikmin (I somehow managed to find the yellow ones first and played a bunch of the game without the blue ones), and that just got me so excited that I basically completed Valley of Repose in just one day (the two remaining, farthest caves and every treasure above ground). I’m on day 13 now, have over 90% of the debt paid off, and not a single Pikmin has died on me.

You don’t need to understand the previous paragraph if you don’t know anything about Pikmin. My point is that I’ve been playing through the game rather fast and better than I would on real hardware.

Why?

Save states. ❤️

I love emulation, but I don’t like how “janky” it can be. I don’t like that it doesn’t 100% emulate (pun intended) the “feel” of playing on original hardware.

But boy, oh boy, do I loooooove save states. 🥰

They enhance the gameplay experience so much for me. They enable me to have perfect playthroughs, both in terms of the game’s objectives, as well as my play style (like me not wanting to sacrifice any of my Pikmin, for example).

Do save states make the games too easy at times? Perhaps.

But that’s the point for me.

You see, I don’t want video games to challenge me.

Life already challenges me enough as it is.

I play video games for fun, and I’m not having fun if I’m struggling too much to beat a video game. When I finally beat a difficult challenge in a game, especially if I had to struggle to do so, then I feel frustrated more than I feel that I achieved something.

Is my dislike of challenges, whether in real life or in video games a character defect? A sign of weakness?

Perhaps.

I do face challenges in real life. I have to, or else I won’t survive.

But when I come home and sit down to play a video game, I want it to be a fun and chill experience. I want to feel like a champ who breezes through the game. I also don’t want to waste too much time trying to beat one overly-difficult game, but rather experience as many different games as I can.

Life is too short and I don’t want mine to be wasted by challenging video games.

I have nothing but mad respect for you if you play video games for the challenge, but that just ain’t me.

As one of my favorite YouTubers Mr. Sujano would say: “Don’t temp fate, save your state.”

Examples:

• A live service game that got shut down
• A multiplayer game that no longer has a live community
• A game whose cultural relevance has faded
• An older game that doesn't stand the test of time
• A game you had spoiled for you
• A game that got updated and went in a different direction
• etc.

Let us know what it is, and why you feel that you missed out on it.

I’m going to bring up examples from a variety of mediums, so I couldn’t really fit this just under ~books or ~tv. Sorry about that.

Lately I’ve been thinking about just how much I love fiction with a good plot device, and I’ve been wondering what it is that makes these devices such great vehicles for telling an interesting story.

Death Note is the first example that comes to mind for me. The “plot device” (and I may not be using this term correctly) if the titular item, which is a notebook where, if one writes a name of a person, while imagining their face, along with a time and date, and then a set of realistic circumstances that lead to that person’s death, then it will occur as written. If nothing other than the name, time, and date are written, then the person dies of a heart attack (after 40 seconds, if I remember correctly). The main character was the right kind to have acquired the book, because it enabled the story to be told in the manner that it was. I think the author illustrated this well when, at the very end, another character, not nearly as intelligent as the previous owner of the Death Note, quickly got done away with.

Code Geass is probably one of my favorite animes of all time. It combines a lot of genres into one. The titular “geass”, however, particularly the one that the main character acquired—which allows him to give a one-time order to any person who looks in his eyes, which the person will see through no matter what—is also an excellent plot device.

*The Lake House, a 2006 fantasy romance film, staring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. It’s not a masterpiece or anything, but I can’t forget the whole plot device about the mailbox that allowed the male main character to send letters to the female main character two years into the past.

Dreamless is one of my favorite webcomics of all time. It’s crazy for me to think that this beautiful, entirely-colored webcomic was made available for free all the way back in 2009. I wish more people knew about it. The plot device, which is brilliant, revolves around a man and a woman who were born on the same day at the same time, but he in Japan, and she in the USA—a few years before the outbreak of WWII. From the very day of their birth, they were “connected”. Whenever they fall asleep, they begin to “see through eyes and hear through the ears of the other” until they wake up. If they both happen to be sleeping at the same time, than they see darkness but still hear surroundings. They became aware of this at very young age, learning each other’s languages and falling in love with each other since they were children. The time zone difference makes it relatively easy for them to observe each other’s lives as one sleeps and the other goes about his or her days. They embark on a quest to figure out how to meet each other, in the midst of a brutal war waged between their respective countries.

Severance is a show that everyone is talking about right now, so I don’t need to explain much to you, right? The plot device here is a chip that is implanted into people’s brains, and makes it so that their memories are split in two, based on location. At their work place, the character’s memories from the outside world are “shut off”, and they only remember what they experienced on the inside. I’m almost done with season two and this show is what prompted me to write this thread. I’ve been loving it.

Black Mirror is a show that I need to give a shoutout to, because many of its most famous episodes are centered around a very specific plot device. For me, the most impressive of these, was the one where they had these chips that basically recorded everything that they saw, and it was a normalized thing in society. I think that it was episode three. Episode eight was also interesting. It was about a society in which people’s social status was determined by their online social media rank.

I had an example in the back of my mind of a piece of fiction with a great plot device that I felt was not properly made use of. I’m sure that there are others like that, and it’s a bit sad when that happens, because there is a great idea right there, but it was wasted. I totally forgot about it though. Maybe you can think of some bad examples yourselves?

Edit: I remembered a different one, In Time, a 2011 movie about a society where people don’t age, but rather have their life spans written on a digital countdown clock on their arms. The way that people used their lifespans as currency that they could exchange was a neat idea. I didn’t watch the movie, but I read from other people about it, and it seemed to me like the concept wasn’t properly explored. Maybe I should give it a chance.

And maybe you can also think of some other good examples, plot devices in books, shows, movies, manga, anime that really blew you away. I’d be curious to hear about them because I’d like to look into them if it’s something that catches my interest.

As for what makes a plot device interesting for me, here are some points:

• It is a concept that is easy to grasp or an object the functions of which are easy to understand.
• It has strict limitations that the plot revolves around and the characters repeatedly run up against. These limitations are explained very early on in the story.
• The plot device and its origins gets gradually explained over the course of the piece.
• The story is largely centered around a small group of individuals.

Sometimes my girlfriend commandeers my desktop to play games like Fallout 4 (which she discovered after the Fallout TV series last year) and sometimes I’ll go on my laptop while she does that. I usually like to program when I’m on my laptop then but I’m looking for suggestions for games to play that don’t need a mouse or much graphical power. Is Dwarf Fortress something I should try?

Hopefully the title says it all, I decided to make this generic because I think all game randomization is cool.

To be specific, this is not about games which have random elements, this is about games which have been modded to introduce some form of randomization.
The Pokemon games are reasonably famous for having fun randomizers.

I posted this because I recently started a Dark Souls 3 randomized run and got given a heap of really nice sorceries and miracles right at the start of the game. Luckily also a catalyst too. It was like it was begging me to be a mage, even though it's apparently hard as hell.

I was reading the recent post about strategy games, and I'm still astonished to see for how many hours (at least hundreds, often 1000+) people are playing these. I'm guessing that in these cases, all your gaming time is exclusively taken by that single game.

So, do you have (or did you have) games, or series, like that? Do you play solo or multi? What compels you to spend so much time on a single game? How do you feel about it?

I've had some ideas for a game simmering for a while now and I've finally committed to learning Godot to see what I can put together. I'm still in need of some inspiration, though, and I know there's a few folks around here who have made games. Complete, polished, sketchy, half-baked - doesn't matter! - I'd love to see what people here have come up with!

This is primarily aimed at the younger folks here, but it can conceivably work for anyone.

Is there a game that came out from before you started gaming that you have since played and loved? An oldie for you, but still a goodie?

I’m curious because gaming has changed so much so quickly that a lot of older games feel like they almost require fond nostalgia to counterbalance their clunkiness. For others, they were sort of a “you had to be there” moment because gaming hadn’t developed fully as a medium so we players weren’t aware of their limitations at the time.

Without nostalgia or direct experience with them, a lot of their magic is gone.

Has anyone found that magic in a game even without the nostalgia? If so, which one(s). What made them resonate for you?

In particular, I’m interested in games that specifically aren’t remakes/remasters since those often modernize elements, but I won’t say they aren’t allowed for the purposes of the question or anything, since they’re also a very accessible way for modern gamers to access older titles.

I just learned that I can use the Steam Link app (iOS link, Android link) to stream Steam games to my phone and tablet (within my home).

I have no desire to play M/KB or controller-based games on these devices (I already have a computer and a Steam Deck which can do those better), but I like the idea of playing some more casual stuff that only uses mouse input (in the form of me tapping the screen).

I'm thinking stuff like:

• Mobile game ports meant for touch input
• Point-and-click adventures
• Clicker games
• Anything else I'm not thinking of that could be easily played by tapping the screen

I'm interested specifically in lower-precision mouse-based games that would be comfortable to play on my relatively small phone screen (the device I'm most likely to use), though that's not a hard requirement. Anything requiring more precision I could play on my much larger tablet screen instead.

What games do you recommend?

I absolutely love the premise of a time-loop. I find them fascinating, and there are so many variations to explore. Inevitably, I find myself fantasizing about waking up in my own younger body and the shenanigans I would get up to with so much future knowledge (before existential dread of meeting the same people and creating the same family kick in).

• Short time-loops where someone relives the same day, or an even shorter period.
• Medium time-loops where someone can live days, weeks, months or even years before resetting - often when they die.
• Longer time-loops where someone effectively relives an entire human lifespan on repeat.
• Shared time-loops where other people are independently looping - a great source of conflict.

And plenty more besides.

I'll share some of my favourite examples in a comment, but please share your favourites and tell us why you love them.

This thread is aimed toward discussing video game mods, whether that be major overhauls, more tame additions to what is otherwise still pretty much the base game, simple QoL stuff, tech demos showing off black magic the game's engine only begrudgingly accepts to let happen, mods you're making yourself, modpacks, or anything else that is related.

Fix an annoyance.
Take out a level.
Revamp a system.
Expand a world.
Etc.

Pick a game, any game, and tell us what ONE thing about it you would change, and why. It doesn’t have to be feasible or reasonable or whatnot. You’ve got a magic wand with one charge left.

Also, your goal CAN be to make the game better, but it doesn’t have to be! Maybe you want to make the game more challenging. More chaotic. More hilarious. More broken.

Entirely up to you!

Also, you only get one change per game, but it’s fine to talk about what you would do for more than one game.

As is the case with a lot of my questions, "intended for multiplayer" is as open as you want it to be.

It could be that it's a game primarily known for its multiplayer that also happens to have a campaign (e.g. one of the Call of Duty games) or it could be you playing Mario Party against yourself by trading off between your own controllers (we've all done something like this, right?).

Entirely up to you how you interpret the question.

Let us know what the game was, why you played it solo, and, most importantly, how that went for you. Did you like it? Did it give you a novel gaming experience? Were you able to work around any of its limitations? Would you recommend other people try it?