wow, thank you for sharing that, i thoroughly enjoyed it.
i wish. i know a lot about them, but unfortunately ive never had a real playing experience. i have long recognized and lamented the general trend of gaming towards the exclusively single player experience (whether the game is sp or not), though i accept that it is simply inherent to the times… there are great mp games out there like left for dead and minecraft, but long gone are the days of mario party, super smash bros, and imo tabletop gaming. kids these days are being conditioned to sit at their big TV by themselves with a headset and earn achievements and feel special and unique and pat themselves on the back for another job well done. they buy more games this way. the industry makes more money this way. it is an unfortunate byproduct of the expansion of the game industry, casual gaming, appealing to the masses. i feel that one day we will again play games that are “nintendo-hard”… aka a worthy challenge. but i think multiplayer is a dying horse.
i remember chilling with my friends and getting wasted and playing monopoly on 360, now THAT was one of the best mp experiences ive had, and i cherish the memory to this day. one controller, passing back and forth to four players, crowded around one TV, with pizza and beer and weed. we shit talked and got rowdy and if you heard us from across the hall, you would think we were watching football or something. when i tell people about this, theyre like wtf, monopoly? even the guys, i think, were only playing it for lack of a better AAA game being released that quarter, or whatever. but i really GOT it. i dont like monopoly, any more than i like checkers or backgammon, and i wouldnt sit there by myself and play it against computers, but i appreciate it for the game that it is. when you get four dudes together and the competitive juices start flowing, it really doesn’t matter what you’re actually DOING. another game i used to love playing my friend or alone in was Geometry Wars on the 360 arcade, that is one of my all time favorites.
Artemis Starship Bridge Simulator is a game ive been really into lately, i would recommend checking it out, but you cant really play it by yourself (though i did try. you should have seen the look on my moms face when she saw me using four laptops and my smartphone at once.) if only i had friends. its another one of those games that isnt really exciting by itself, but the potential for social interplay makes me shake with desire. since one computer is exclusively dedicated to running the server, you can literally have as many people as you want manning starships and going pvp or pve. incredible potential. god, i wish i had friends.
cata and dwarf fortress are really the only games i play these days, ive been too preoccupied by school (finishing my engineering A.S. finally) and playing guitar. let me know if GTA5 ever comes out on pc, maybe ill pirate that (fuck those sellout crooks) and give it a whirl. ive always thought of going to the hobby shop again some time and checking their games out, i know they host D&D sessions there but i think its mostly kids that attend. i think most of the adults play other, way more complex tabletops and card games, because they cannot settle for social interaction, and instead prefer to crunch numbers and optimizations in their own little world and play by themselves, regardless of the other players present.
well, the industry is still very young, and we are just now starting to take it seriously and consider the potential of video games as a medium for more contemporary artistic concepts and storytelling. we are starting to see games like Alan Wake, Dark Souls, and even indie subs like Braid and others that take the medium seriously and really try to break the mold and be something other than a game in the strictest sense, a vessel for storytelling and conveying deep emotional and philosophical concepts.
im not saying thats what i want… i like fun games, just as a like fun movies, and fun books and fun paintings. i appreciate deeply emotional or philosophical books and movies for what they are, but i dont go to them for entertainment, i go to them for enlightenment. now we are seeing games being created for the point of enlightenment, rather than entertainment, but we also see games created for the sole purpose of exploiting the bored and complacent mass state of mind, and for more nefarious purposes such as cultural and behavioral engineering in the style of gamification. look at paper print, radio, tv, and cinema. the same has happened. in their infancy, they were nothing more than a light hearted hobby, and grew into central cultural media outlets for everything from the news, to the entertaining, to the macabre, to the utterly terrifying.
i really loved that “who killed video games piece” and want to point out that the “evil psychomathematiconomists” are real, they are out there, and they are making disgusting amounts of money these days.
ran my whole battery out typing this up. lol. didnt mean to spend such long time on it. cant help myself, but i gotta go now. or else i would just keep on going prbly.
ill put a break just to save space
thank you for the responses, my favorite part of cataclysm is th community, also the procedurally generated open world game genre which lends itself nicely to replayability. every time i play, it is a completey new experience. thank you guys for a great game
