I was playing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe with my kid the other day and it was a blast. Nintendo have really nailed this game, especially in the balance of accessible enough for beginners to have fun but hard enough for people to have a challenge too.

My other favourite game (although I haven't played it for a while) is Sega Rally Championship on Sega Saturn. This game has 4 tracks (one of which needs to be unlocked) and 3 cars (and again, one of these needs to be unlocked). The tiny number of cars and tracks means that you get to do the same corners over and over. This might sound tedious, but when you hit the corner just right you know it. You can get a sense of mastery over it. I've spent many hours playing games in the Gran Turismo series, and I really enjoy them, but fair play some of the tracks and cars are just shovelled into the game and you don't spend much time with them

In the first Gran Turismo the licensing tests were properly hard. They weren't messing around. Getting bronze requires people to read the manual and understand what the point of the test is. Getting all gold is an actual challenge for experienced players. I feel like the tests (at least, the bronze levels) got easier in later games. The UK soundtrack was small but pretty good.

My final mention is the Burnout series. I loved the crash junctions. I'm not sure the open world of Paradise was fun - it meant spending a lot of time driving across a map to get to the start line of various events. I feel the same way about many games - I'd rather just have a menu of levels and what I need to do to complete them (GoldenEye, SNES PilotWings, BlastCorps are all good examples) than have this stuff obscured by the open world. Burnout on the Nintendo DS was a genuinely awful game. I think Burnout Dominator was my favourite in the series.

So, what do driving games get right? What do they miss? What interesting game mechanics do you enjoy?

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!

I saw The Banshees of Inisherin in theaters yesterday and greatly enjoyed myself. I recommend it highly! Starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson (among others), the film takes place in a remote, pastoral part of Ireland with the Irish Civil War as a backdrop. But it's really about the people living on this island; their relationships, their lifestyle, and their internal conflicts. It's character-driven, personal, intimate, funny, surreal, shocking, troubling, and thought-provoking. The dialogue is fantastic and the narrative dramatic. You could do a lot of interesting thematic analysis about the plot and setting, but I don't want to spoil anything.

If you're the kind of person who likes movie trailers, you can watch the official one on YouTube. However, I think contemporary trailers take away from the natural revelations of a story. It's more interesting to go into this one more or less blind.

Timasomo 2022 is now officially complete! Participants will be posting their creations and efforts in this thread as a showcase! Comments and feedback from the wider community are both welcome and encouraged! Let these creators know what an awesome job they've done!

Creators: In posting your showcase:

• Give your project a title, and use the # markdown to make it stand out in the showcase thread!
• Link to your project in whatever way works best for your project.
• Give a "creator statement" that contextualizes what your project is.
• Add anything else you consider relevant! The showcase is yours!
• If you need examples, take a look at last year’s showcase.

Community:

• Treat this thread like a walk through an art gallery or a museum where you get to see different works on display.
• Comments do NOT have to be in-depth -- it is okay to just affirm that you like/love/appreciate something! (In other threads these might be considered noise, but here they are directly validating the sustained creative efforts of another community member!).
• Make sure any feedback you give is constructive.

There were a few years when RTS was a popular genre with games like Total Annihilation, Age of Empires, Command and Conquer, and Starcraft being very popular examples.

But these games have mostly died out, and I was wondering if maybe I'm just not aware of modern RTS variants, or if there are good reasons why these games died off.

Like, are Tower Defence games a form of RTS?

Are there any RTS games where teams play against each other, so 2v2 rather than 1v1?

I’ve been on vacation the past two weeks and now that I’m back and I’ve got internet access I have been reading the news and it has been kind of depressing.

So what’s been good? It can be national, local, personal, or whatever you want to share.