So I was watching a few youtubes and remembered how the vast majority (of like the ten) nes games me and my sister had were hard as all hell. I loved to play Little Nemo and Street Fighter 2010 but I am pretty sure I never made it past the third level of either. Let alone infamously hard games like The Lion King.
Which got me thinking. Basically every game for the past 20 years has been designed around instant gratification and being accessible. We outright had to make a new concept “hard but fair” to account for games like Dark Souls that are designed to be difficult but beatable as opposed to putting you in a death spiral if you hesitate too long on a hard jump (hello Ninja Gaiden).
So do the younger folk even have a concept of a “favorite game” where you likely never experienced more than fifteen minutes worth of content?
Depends on how young you mean exactly, but there’s a niche space warfare simulator (simulator in the sense that it only uses currently or very close to existing technology, models the behavior of every major component on a ship, and the developer has stated that it intentionally isn’t made to be balanced as their motive for making it was partially to see what kind of strategies might become dominant in a space war rather than create a balanced game, obviously a true simulator of a space war would be difficult considering one hasn’t happened yet) called “Children of a Dead Earth” that I really like the concept of, and really want to enjoy, but have never been able to properly get into, because I’ve never managed to design ship components that are particularly efficient or effective compared to premade examples, and my experience in games like Kerbal space program havent given me a good enough understanding of the game’s more realistic orbital mechanics to figure out how to maneuver my fleets properly. It feels like a game that one needs to be a bigger space nerd than I am to properly enjoy, but that same effort at realism is why I find it so appealing in the first place.
Have you tried Space Engineers or Empyrion? They’re open world survival crafting games that let you explore entire planets and build your own space stations and ships and such.
Space engineers yes, though not empyrion. I do like the game, but I have found it not quite as fun as a voxel vehicle building game as games that let you also design your own components or subassemblies, such as From the Depths, and not quite as fun as a space game as Kerbal Space Program, as least in my opinion.
If that’s the case, then you may want to check out Starbase. It’s basically on life support at this point (being an MMO), but the ship building is pretty wild. You can build your ships from absolute scratch, choosing the specific size of the plates and able to cut them to fit exactly, choosing where to place your bolts and struts for maximized stability and ship strength. You can even build the engines from different individual parts, and there’s an entire coding system so you can write your own code for autopilot, automatic landing, and all kinds of other things.