I’m so thankful this trend has mostly reversed, at least outside of AAA games suffering from sequel-itis. Many indie games or smaller studio games use pixel graphics, 2D sprites, or barely serviceable 3D graphics from a decade or two ago — and are better off for it. Meanwhile, under-optimized UE5 games like Borderlands 4 overuse the latest & greatest and suffer terrible review scores because of it.
The bigger studios don’t know what to do except chase graphics because they’re too big to innovate anymore. Oh well. All the good gameplay and story come from indies and smaller studios anyway.
Then once in a while the Chinese come out of nowhere and hit it out of the park, like with Wukong. It’s mostly the big established Western conglomerates that produce soulless graphical tech demos…
This is a good list, and if I had infinite time and could only play 2 games for the rest of my life I would pick Baldur’s Gate 3 and Dwarf Fortress (DF), both are endless fun that players are still discovering new things about every day. Caves of Qud/RimWorld close second to DF.
Later tonight, I will be playing the newly released Jurassic World Evolution 3. It has finally brought Planet Zoo/Planet Coaster’s incredibly detailed building mechanics to the Jurassic World Evolution series, and I’ve been waiting for this moment since the announcement of the first game in 2017.
I hear the building hotkeys are very very different from the Planet series which is throwing some people off; but the tools are every but as powerful, and I’m invested enough in dinos and the Jurassic series to power through. And if you’re coming from JWE 1 or 2 rather than the Planet games, I think it’s just a straight upgrade. Even if you hate the piece by piece building and think it’s too complicated, the base game comes with more themes than JWE2 had with all DLC and you can download stuff from the workshop.
I didn’t realize there would be other JWE players! If there are enough of us, we could do some kind of community built park - sharing whole maps is supposed to be very easy with the new workshop.
Perfectly acceptable version of the classic American game show. Everything is there - the million-dollar space, the Mystery wedge, the Express wedge. Pat Sajak and Vanna White have generic replacements.
Character customization options are unfortunately very limited. The host’s dialogue is repetitive. When you guess a wrong letter, the host doesn’t say what letter it is, which is annoying.
Since it’s a video game that’s no longer being updated, naturally there are a finite number of puzzles. I once solved the same puzzle three times in one day. But that was an unusual situation.
If we were building one habitat or amenity building per turn, you’d download a park from the workshop, modify it with your build, then upload a new version of it to the workshop for the next person to download.
That’s hilarious! Now you make me want to change my avatar to a Pachycephalosaurus.
I was actually thinking of changing it to a JWE3 dino, but the Guanlong, not the Pachycephalosaurus.
I didn’t really pay attention to the subscores before but noticed them when looking at Caves of Qud’s entry. If anyone’s interested, here’s the top 3 for each category (and their overall rank in the list) as I didn’t feel like hunting down and organizing all ten games per metric:
This is what I have so far… Mostly just saved space for a parking lot and some facility buildings.
Really, I wanted to build a habitat today rather than something boring like an entrance. But I need to know where the habitat will be, and so I’m just laying out a bunch of stuff.
The good news is that I’m ALMOST done and then I can finally have some fun… like 20 minutes before bedtime
