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I just spent my evening trying to track down and identify several old games i could only remember vague details about. I succeeded in doing this and felt pretty awesome about my little bit of internet detective work. This would make for a fun thread, wouldn't it? I mean, everybody has a few games they can only just barely remember, with the title probably not among those details. So provide the information you can, be as specific as you can, and see if somebody else reading this either knows what it is or is able to figure out what it is.

I don't even own Smash Wii U, let alone a Wii U, but here i am with a Kirby Amiibo and a Samus Amiibo. I heard Marth's derpy, badly-sculpted Amiibo was being delivered to stores in very limited numbers, so i checked a few stores to see if i could find him, and most store clerks were saying they only got one or two of him in and that they were literally the first Amiibos they sold in some cases. It was known a little in advance that Marth was going to be relatively rare, so i imagine people just descended on these stores to buy him up. (So hey, if you see Marth, consider picking him up.) Anyways, Samus and Kirby. They look better in person than those early shots of the production figures let on. The figures are fairly nice desk ornaments, i guess. That's pretty much what they're going to be for me, for the time being at least. Also, it looks like there's lots of problems with misaligned parts on the Amiibos, just in general. So if anybody's going to pick some up, take some time to poke around your store's stock to find some that aren't messed up.

This looks neat. A top-down action RPG with kind of a superbrothers-by-way-of-supergiant sort of vibe. The pitch video looks amazing, i think. Also, they're already funded and well through their stretch goals. (They just hit the goal for an OST by Disasterpeace, previously responsible for Fez's OST.)

OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD.

Does anybody else find it particularly interesting that the mini-NES thing has several Konami games on it? At least we can rest assured that Konami isn't going to bury its library and end its licensing. The game is anything but boring and slow, but i think i can understand how you got that impression. I had a hard time getting a feel for it at first, i wasn't sure how i was supposed to approach it because it's such an unfamiliar game. I started watching random matches on youtube to try and get a feel for what i was doing wrong, and it was me watching this set that kind of made me realize a few things about the potential Pokken has as a fighting game: As of right now, i'm pretty positive on the game, i think it's super cool. I'm eager to see people play it at Evo. To be clear, for my part, Star Fox Zero is something i went into wanting to like and gave a sincere chance. I'm a big fan of Platinum and i have played every other Starfox game, Starfox is something i want to be good. Starfox is my Sonic the Hedgehog. I also don't think it's egregiously bad, nor do i think its control scheme is unreasonably difficult to grapple with. I think there's some good mission design in there and despite the low-fi aesthetic at a glance, there's a ton of detail in those levels. It's clear to me that a sincere attempt was made with this game. It is trying so god damn hard, and in the moments where it comes together, it is a technical and engaging action game. I think where it fails is that playing that game well is made harder and not easier by its central gimmick, and moreover that the interesting aspects of the game that are enabled by that gimmick aren't emphasized enough to justify that control gimmick's existence. Starfox Zero is unfocused, it's messy. It's a game that is made worse by its central feature, and i think that qualifies as a failure. Again though, i would say it is the least bad of the bad Starfox games.

For what it's worth, the Steam port is pretty solid. It's one of those ultra basic ports that are common of japanese developers, but it runs perfectly, i haven't had any issues with it at all. ArcSys seems to be doing ongoing work to it as well, and it has all of the original game's DLC just built in. (Most of the negative reviews it has on Steam were from a rough launch window, and there actually aren't many negative reviews at all considering, the game is finally getting the positive reception it deserves.) For other people: You need a gamepad for GG2O, do not try to play this game without a gamepad. Also, here's some ancient grainy footage of what it looks like when people know how to play that game:

Two things i want to champion: 8-Bit Armies Do you like Command & Conquer? Do you want a true spiritual successor to Command & Conquer? Well here it fucking is, coming literally out of nowhere to surprise the shit out of me, Petroglyph has finally gone and done it. It adheres most closely to the original C&C, it even has a story that even references a despotic villain "Kain" and differs only in a few key areas. There's no landing pad aircraft, they act like normal units, and instead of tiberium/ore fields, you have oil wells. Engineers also don't capture buildings anymore, they act as a universal healer instead, and there's some other smaller differences as well. Other than that, it's pretty much the original C&C with modern visuals and controls. I have just been thrilled with this thing, it's great. It even has a Frank Klepacki soundtrack with him unambiguously doing his C&C thing. Also, it's got a co-op campaign, so that's fun. (Btw, 8-Bit Armies apparently launched with just one faction, a GDI analogue, but the second faction - a Nod analogue - was a free DLC. There's also a paid DLC for that second faction's campaign.) I'll also use this opportunity to again pimp Petroglyph's previous game, Grey Goo, another game i liked quite an awful lot. (I'm a little out of the loop on it, but I understand Grey Goo has a fourth faction now.) Guilty Gear 2 Overture So this just came to Steam and is a port of a 9 year old 360 game that was kind of a proto-Lords Management when Lords Managements were only just finally starting to become visible to the mainstream, it was a game that left its fighting game fanbase confused and actually quite angry. (Tip: Don't try to present your obvious spin-off as a true sequel.) So yeah, it was a game nobody played and nobody liked. I felt like a lone holdout, because the game seemed incredibly interesting and cool to me, kind of blending fighting game mechanics and RTS mechanics, leaning into both with scarcely any restraint. It's a super strange game and having played a lot of it, i think its balance is actually pretty wonky and its campaign is admittedly terrible, but if you can get some friends together for a casual game like i used to, i think it's a ton of fun. It's chaotic and fast and full of odd ideas. If you need the one sentence review: It's like Brutal Legend's multiplayer two years earlier, but better and more sophisticated. I've always had a ton of fun with this one despite how widely hated it was, and i feel somewhat vindicated by the quite positive reception it's had with the Steam crowd.

You can spend the normal currency on rerolls when you're out of shells. (It's expensive.) I imagine they'll just leave it at that. So Splatoon will just end up being more of a grind. Also, the Marie and Callie Amiibos are out.

I am surprised to see TMS#FE get really, really positive reviews after all the pre-release buzz being so negative. Also, i played StarFox Zero. It kinda sucks. To be fair, it probably sucks the least of any post N64 Star Fox game, and i have played them all, but it still kind of sucks. It feels like Platinum trying their god damn best to make a decent game out of an awkward idea, and i think they actually get a pretty good part of the way there, but that game feels like it's pulling in five different directions with its control scheme. For example, it's incredibly difficult to aim with the third-person view, but it's incredibly difficult to dodge shit with the first-person view. Jumping between these perspectives does not work in a difficult, fast-paced action game, and that's just part of it. Why does the arwing mech have both a strafing lock-on mechanic and a torso-twist mechanic? I love me some weird obtuse control mechanics, but even i think this game barely works. Edit: I also played Pokken. That game is weird as shit and kind of awesome, i might say more about it at a later date.

So i played this. I really sincerely love this thing, but it comes with some caveats that make it not easy to universally recommend. First though, i think i have to say that it's possibly one of the most striking and attractive games i've ever played. It's something that doesn't really come across in still screenshots or compressed footage. The game plays a real neat trick, where all of its assets were rendered in 3d, converted to 2d sprites, and then combined with the data from the 3d modelling to create true 3d lighting across those sprites. The result they have in this game seems undeniable and unmistakable, it's absolutely beautiful to look at. It's an intensely detailed, populous, dense world that runs at a perfect 60fps, has persistent environmental destruction, and still feels like it has real three dimensional depth. It's something quite special. And, mechanically, there's a fair bit more going on than you would normally expect from what appears to be a twin stick shooter. (For one, it's not a twin-stick shooter, purposefully awkward tank controls abound.) Definitely play the tutorials. There's a lot of concepts like z-axis being considered and having to manipulate the height of your shot by where you aim on the ground around you. (The example the tutorial gives you is having to aim past hover tanks so that your firing arc intersects with them in the air.) Your weapons also all have loudness stats, and if detected, enemies will search for the source of that sound instead of all instantly going aggro on you. Some matches can turn into an intense cat and mouse chase as you attempt to flee from a huge mob headed towards your last known position so you can go resupply elsewhere on the map. Alternately, you can use smaller weapons and faster vehicles to try and pick apart enemy mobs in more manageable numbers. Either way, you often end up weaving between buildings and trees both for cover and to simply break line of sight, keeping in mind that in these maps everything is destructible. (As an aside, the game could probably use some kind of onscreen gauge to track how much noise you're generating, because that can be pretty hard to get a feel for.) That all said, i don't think this game really knows what to do with itself, because it's sandwiched by incredibly plain menus and a no-frills presentation. The campaign, containing missions that are actually quite enjoyable and well-designed, is presented as a list with text blurbs to set up what you should be doing. (Well-written text blurbs, but still.) There's no real sense of a connecting thread through those missions, by the time you have any picture of what is going on in the world the game is depicting, you'll likely be most of the way through. Moreover, the "freelance" mode the game offers, a not-quite-roguelite affair, is very strangely structured with its pre-baked sets of levels to work through. (Which are highly redundant as they often contain the same levels ad nauseum, and level sets aren't even "checked" off as you complete them.) You also set difficulty separately from the level sets in the form of a pilot that has a variety of difficulty modifying stats, so there's really not anything setting apart the different level packs that often contain the same levels. It also tries to present itself as something where you have to make a risky choice to continue on in a level set or exit early to try and preserve some of your earned income for the run, but it kind of ends up being a false choice, and it's because the game has such hard swings. You can go into a level in a perfect situation and die in five seconds, you're as fragile coming out of a mission as you are going in. You don't have have character progression between levels in a set, you can't have a good run that you feel like you're going to cash in on pushing your luck. That all said, unlocking all the vehicles and weapons and playing around with those combinations is super enjoyable and i've already sunk more than a couple dozen hours into it. This is a game where if you know exactly what you're getting into, it's hard to imagine you would be upset about it. If what you want is a spiritual successor to 90's isometric action games like Desert Strike and Mechwarrior 3050, here you go. This is it. It's pretty awesome.

Vulkan support was just released for the PC version, has anybody given it a shot? I've seen claims of massive performance boosts across the full spectrum of hardware. I'm also very nearly finished a nightmare playthrough and my prior positive attitude towards the game holds firm. Doom 4 is really great.

For the standard shotgun, the explosive mod allowing some flanking damage gives it some persisting value over the super shotgun, considering how durable armor plated and shielded enemies are, but if you build down the triple shot path, yeah... what you said. The same is true of the chaingun and the rifle if you build down the micro missiles for the rifle. You then have two strong mid-range DPS dealers that melt through ammo at similar rates. I don't know why i would choose one over the other in any given fight. At least the gauss/plasma are fulfilling clearly different roles off of that shared ammo pool. If you have one ammo type available, you want to spend it in the most optimal way for the situation at hand, that's what the choice is supposed to be. I mean, then you get the chaingun and how its two paths maxed out create virtually identical results. The turret mode has a slightly faster time to kill with a slight move penalty, but they both do their work in about the same ammo cost and at the same range with the same effects. Are those limited differences really enough to justify the chaingun having two alternate forms that both permanently sit in your character inventory? Honestly, shared ammo, as a mechanic, is pretty thorny and problematic. I've never been fond of it. I think Id's games in the past have only barely gotten away with it. The shotgun and super shotgun in Doom 2 and Quake have this trade off of range-versus-power, but the nailgun and super nailgun in Quake are... The super nailgun literally just does twice as much damage for twice the ammo cost, it completely invalidates the existence of the normal nailgun.

So i think Doom 4 is pretty remarkable. I also don't think it's much at all like the original games, i might even argue that it's less of a Doom game than Doom 3 was, or at least extracts different lessons from the original games about what defines Doom. (Messages that might be more on point with the ethos of Doom, if not necessarily its mechanics.) I've been a long-suffering advocate of Doom 3, but i have to say that i think the way Doom 4 has broken down the originals and reconstituted them has been an immensely more effective and interesting approach. I think Doom 3 saw its predecessors through a nostalgia lens blind to their inherent sophomoric silliness and attempted to lean into how they were seen at the time as a little bit transgressive. It debatably fell flat on its face with that po-faced self-seriousness and slow-build horror-vibe, despite being strung around around a framework much more faithful to the original games than people generally want to admit. (I always see people cite how "slow" Doom 3 was an example of how it failed in being like the original games - that you can't dodge projectiles - and then i watch footage of these people playing and realize that nobody understands that the game has a sprint key that vaults you into ludicrous Doom 1/2 style sprinting. Never mind that the back half of the game is absolutely manic. Anyways, that's getting off topic.) Doom 4 seems to display a significantly greater degree of awareness about its place in video game history, it's a game that is intensely aware of how people perceive Doom and what they want from Doom. In some sense, the idea of Doom has somewhat drifted away from what Doom actually was. Doom 4 is a game that is as inspired by the modding scene and the history around Doom as it is by the game itself. The result is a game that is more frenetic and immediate than Doom has ever been, with dramatic shifts occurring multiple times over the course of a single battle instead of over the course of multiple rooms, and it's additionally borrowed some interesting mechanics from unusual sources in its modern contemporaries. A few of you have noted that it feels like a character action game with guns, and you're not wrong, there's many elements here that are common in such games but are virtually unseen in shooters, and Doom 4 takes them and makes them work. Special melee actions generating health has become a relatively common fixture in melee-focused action games, for example. Here, despite Doom 4 still ostensibly being a shooter, the glory kill system never feels like a gimmick that overwhelms that action, and it's because it has a clear, distinct role in the framework the game has. It only gives you health if you're below 100hp, you need to use other weapons to first stagger enemies, and it acts as a tether to pull you into the midst of fights, creating that frantic pace Id is aiming for. That all said, no matter what anybody tells you, it essentially means you have regenerating health. The weapons too, people can make big claims about how important and true to the originals not having to reload is, but the big elaborate upgrade trees also create an arsenal of weapons that is less defined by clear roles than in any prior Id game. (I am not particularly a fan of the progression systems in this game.) You play your preferences until you run out of ammo and switch to something else. This is a very different kind of shooter from the original games, one that carries out a significant deception about it being built up on old-school ideas. Again though, i'm not making the argument that this is bad, and i think the way the game has redesigned the chainsaw as a limited-use power weapon is kind of brilliant. Not just a powerful one-hit-kill, but one that drops mountains of ammo to facilitate more shooting and... You know, a lot of this seems really evocative of Bungie's so-called "combat triangle" philosophy for the Halo series. Hell, Doom even has off-hand grenades now. There is one thing that i think Doom 4 replicates impressively from the original games though, and it's that it has these huge open-ended levels that often have non-linear layouts with multiple non-linear objectives, and even when levels are more linear, there is an impressive adherence to avoiding points of no return, providing optional routes back through the level. (At one point, after falling into a large shaft, an elevator opens up at the bottom to take you back up, if you want to, something you would literally never do in normal play.) The game wants you to explore, it wants to recapture the sense of wandering exploration that the original Doom games have, and it's done with all the polish and flash that a multi-million dollar game in 2016 would be expected to have. It's incredible. Doom 3 didn't even do this, Doom 3 kind of followed the Half-Life philosophy of level design. I think it's remarkable to see a major AAA FPS in 2016 try to tackle this kind of level design. I mean, holy shit, it even builds major set piece battles around one-off time-limited power-ups. Deciding when is the best time to grab the quad damage is an important, life-saving choice you make in many later fights, it's fantastic. If there's an issue with what they've done, it's that it could probably throw in a few random enemy spawns, or more incidental groups between major battles, because maps can depopulate very quickly, leading to some pretty uneventful wanderings. They also have a lot of enemies just teleporting in by waves for the big fights, something Doom 3 always got a lot of shit for while nobody's mentioning it with regards to Doom 4. I don't mind it, but I wish they were a little more creative with their enemy composition in those fights, because it often feels like you're just fighting each and every enemy in successive waves. There is, however, an impressive sense of verticality in these fights. Doom 4's levels present a lot of three dimensional space that kind of evokes the first Quake a bit, but where strong z axis movement in quake is generally limited to costly mobility tricks, Doom Guy has learned to pull himself up ledges. (You also eventually gain a double jump.) The result is that you're moving fast through all three dimensions in these fights and it's really pretty thrilling. (Some of the first-person platforming it ends up at outside of the fights i'm less fond of, but it's not as finicky as one might imagine it to be, it works well.) Also, there's a few boss fights. They're actually pretty terrific. Really surprising, that. Man, and Mick Gordon fuckin` nailed that OST. So yeah, i think Doom 4 is mostly kind of spectacular. Way to go New-Id, you've redeemed yourself for Rage. (A game i hated, just to throw it out there.) Also, there's MP, i guess? I haven't touched it, i don't care about it. I heard it was bad, then i looked into it and thought it looked bad, i don't want to taint the great experience i've had with the campaign. I might mess around with Snap Map at some point, that seems neat. Edit: Oh, and i played on Ultraviolence. I wouldn't recommend any lower difficulty if you are a person who plays a lot of shooters, i didn't find it particularly difficult. It felt comparable to playing Halo on Heroic. Edit 2: Doom Guy's not-giving-a-fuck-about-your-problems emoting towards the other characters and all their "serious business" lends a wonderful little bit of character to the game. Less wonderful is that, despite it, the game still wants you to know all about the story it's trying to tell and will make you sit in place and listen on several occasions. Regardless, the story-telling tends towards appropriately terse, i can't really say it overstays its welcome. Also, what is there is tonally - seemingly knowingly - like a shitty 90's comic book, which is super appropriate for Doom. (Amusingly, it opens on a line from an infamous Doom comic.)

This is a topic that i've seen pop up repeatedly in various places over the last few months, and i've been thinking about it a lot. So, how do you guys feel about difficulty in games? (And to be clear, i'm talking primarily about action games, but i feel this is also very applicable to strategy and RPG games. Also, I'm probably not talking about games people play for story or atmosphere.) Do you like to feel like you're being pushed, like you're struggling? I think i might still be formulating my own feelings on this, so let me ramble on for just a little bit, but i think i have some coherent opinions about this. I've been known to push people to play games on difficulty levels just a little bit higher than they're comfortable with, because i generally feel that you're missing out on a lot of a game's nuance if you're just coasting through a game at a comfortable level of difficulty. Whenever i get into a conversation about difficulty in games, the example i always go back to is the difference between Halo on normal and heroic. It's not a series that really clicked with me early on, i still think Halo 2 is a really terrible game, but i eventually played through Halo 3 on its Legendary difficulty, and it was there that i kind of realized that the people who were way into that series were playing a completely different game. It's the difference between running around in the open with whatever weapon you feel like using and maybe bashing a dude in the face, to actually struggling and thinking tactically and having to come to grips with the systems in the game. I mean, and that's what i feel constitutes a properly difficult game, the challenge is making you think in different and interesting ways about the game mechanics presented to you. I think it can be a pretty universal means by which a game can push a player to explore its systems. The kind of thing that is "If you want to win, you're going to have to come at this from a different way." In Halo's heroic and legendary difficulties, you'll start using cover, you'll start thinking about weapon resistances and ideal ranges, how many rounds of ammo you have to eat through before a melee hit can effectively finish an opponent, and how to use grenades to flush enemies out of cover. You start being more careful about how you use the vehicles, you're trying to keep your distance from dangerous targets, driving with evasion in mind. You have smart, dynamic, dangerous enemies in large, open-ended combat spaces, and you will not make progress without a competent grasp of those games systems. You will take risks, you will experiment, you will die a lot, and you will come to grips with the game and hopefully feel awesome when that understanding is rewarded. Compare to normal, you can kind of just run around recklessly spraying bullets, and maybe you still die once or twice. Maybe it's hard for you, maybe that's where you're at, but i don't think you would really be seeing the full extent of the game, and i don't know if that would be possible at a more casual level of play like that. (That's a really important question, i don't have an answer for that.) On more and more games, i've started bumping the difficulty up, and have been having more interesting and more rewarding experiences. I've started feeling that easy modes might be bad for games. Dark Souls was a savagely difficult game that was well balanced and well designed, and while it wasn't something everybody got on board with, the people who took on the challenge and completed it generally love it. Now, If it had an easy mode, what would the experience have been for people who weren't coaxed out of their comfort zone? The crux of my opinion, i think, is that games kind of need to push players a little past their limits, so that they start thinking about how to better utilize the tools the game has made available. If the game holds up there, at that level of play, i think then it's a properly interesting and balanced game. I don't think it's always even fun, but for me, at least, it feels more rewarding. There's probably a conversation there about what emotions a game should be eliciting from a player. (Do games have to be fun to be worthwhile?) I mean, but when it comes down to it, I just get bored when i'm coasting through a game that is showing me all these incredible systems and rules with no reason to ever use any of them. I feel that's the biggest failing for BioShock, and the reason i still love System Shock 2 so much more. (Though, admittedly, the all-mighty wrench was still in full effect there too.) I saw a quote a few weeks ago, i can't immediately recall where it was, but it was something to the effect of "If you've created a cover-based shooter where nobody needs to use cover, you've made a bad game." I felt it encapsulated the argument for difficult games fairly succinctly. And for the sake of clarity, i'm not making the argument that difficult games are better by default, that would be silly. It takes deft design and balance for it to work. Personally, I find the higher difficulties on the CoD games kind of intolerable, and while i can't quite pin down exactly why, i think it's maybe like i feel i'm having interesting choices stripped away from me, instead of seeing more choices open up as a result of those gameplay systems being stressed. Or something. Anyways, somebody yell at me and tell me i'm wrong about all of this, i'd enjoy the conversation. Edit: I also feel that games need to be better about tutorializing players so that that those higher levels of play are even accessible. Nowhere in any corner of the Halo series did Bungie ever try to explain any of their complicated, nuanced systems. Things as simple and essential to that design as weapon resistances are never explicitly stated anywhere. You know, but then you have a game like Dark Souls though, where people relish the inscrutable nature of the design. I think the difference is that the former assumes for granted that the player will know what's going on, which i think can be self-destructive, while the latter is... I think the experience of coming to grips with that game is kind of the point of that game. Now i'm totally just rambling, i don't even know what i'm talking about.

Having the game be Windows 10 and Windows store exclusive reeks of the GFW era. I am utterly unconvinced that Microsoft will make Quantum Break a pleasant experience to play on PC.

The deciding games for every major new console release i've purchased with my own money: GBA - F-Zero: Maximum Velocity drove me to pick a GBA up at launch and i had zero regrets about it, Maximum Velocity is a terrific F-Zero game. (It's also the one that owes the most to the original.) Dreamcast - SoulCalibur was the one here and there's obviously no regrets about it, SoulCalibur is one of the best 3d fighters ever made and one of the strongest launch games in the history of console launches. (Though i actually didn't get a DC at launch!) Gamecube - I was holding off on a Gamecube until Metroid Prime came out, i wanted to see if Nintendo could pull of Metroid in 3D before spending the cash on the console. I remember playing at a store demo station for about 15 minutes before walking off and coming back the next day with cash in hand for a GC and a copy of Prime. PS2 - I was a late, late adopter of the PS2. You know what game did it for me? Gradius V. It was totally worth it too, Gradius V is amazing. DS - Bought at launch largely on the promise of Metroid Prime Hunters, a game that got delayed and delayed and delayed and left the DS with a pretty dire first year. (At least i had that First Hunt demo...) When Hunters eventually came out, i ended up enjoying it quite a lot, though it was definitely a flawed game in a number of ways. PSP - This happened at launch and this one is actually pretty hard to pin down, because as much as that console struggled later on, it had an outrageously good launch line-up. I'm going to say it was probably Lumines that was the deciding factor though. Xbox 360 - Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. I remember just being bowled over by the early footage of the game available online, and it ended up being the deciding factor in buying a 360. I had a fantastic time with its multiplayer, it was a pretty great game. Wii - Red Steel. I don't want to talk about it. I was so mad. Wii U - So i told myself i bought my Wii U to play Xenoblade Chronicles X, even though i bought it months in advance of that release, but yeah... Xenoblade Cross is pretty sweet. 3DS - Christ, i have no idea why i bought a 3DS a launch, the thing had such a terrible launch line-up. I want to say the promise of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars was the thing that pushed me over the edge. A new turn-based tactics game from Julian Gollop? Sounds great, except the game is a bug-ridden mess. (Quite interestingly though, it was uncannily evocative of what Firaxis would go on to do with their X-com reboot.)

So has anybody here played Ground Control? The original one, mainly. That game was a big favorite of mine. Can somebody who has played both that and DoK tell me if i'm wrong for seeing a lot of that game in Deserts of Kharak? Haven't picked up DoK yet, but... Yeah... Edit: Also, DoK's original title of "Homeworld: Shipbreakers" was way more evocative and cool, i kind of hate the final title.

I don't think you have anything to apologize for, differing opinions are allowed. I'll concede that i am somewhat predisposed towards appreciating Soma, it's a game that promises the sort of story i love digging into, but it did actually surpass my expectations by quite a margin.

Another general quality of life suggestion for Cross: Don't take under-leveled party members into affinity quests. Anyways, yeah, the digital manual is actually super useful, it explains a lot. It might also be worth glancing through the first few pages of this topic, because we ended up going into detail on some things not covered in the manual. If you still have questions after all of that, go ahead and ask.

I don't know if there's any logic to his release order, i think he just liked Riven and Uru most out of the series, but those two do give you pretty good footing to relate to the other games in the series. (Riven tells the story that many of the other Myst games sort of revolve around, while Uru lays out the background lore in about as clear a manner as the series ever offers.) Those Let's Plays don't get too much into development history or design analysis or anything like that, if that's what you're looking for. They're very story centric, but... i mean... Myst is kind of all about the story, how it strives to contextualize its puzzles as logical facets of worlds full of implied history, and those LP's are terrific at drawing out those details, noticing and pointing out design motifs and subtle environmental stories that reveal things about those worlds that in turn reveal things about the puzzles contained within. That's the kind of stuff people love Myst for, and it's the kind of stuff so few other first-person adventure/puzzle games deal in. Even with the genre kind of exploding back into prominence, i can't honestly think of any recent and clear examples of a game properly doing what the Myst series did. I am quite excited to see what becomes of Obduction.

That is an incredibly broad question for a game like this, can you narrow it down? What specific things do you need answers concerning?

Well, you're describing very subjective experiences and i certainly can't deny you how the game made you feel. I really, really liked Soma. A lot.

The one thing i'll add to what i said above is that the order the player did them in can be slightly irritating at times. If you try to watch in narrative order, you'll find him kind of assuming knowledge of or making reference to things already detailed and explained in videos for later games. The Riven LP might be the best one to start with since It was the first one he did and because it's also still only the second game in the series. It's also pretty universally regarded as the best Myst game.

I think my favorite let's plays ever are this fellow's series of Myst playthroughs. Well researched and structured, explaining the story as he goes, putting it in context relative to other materials in the franchise, while also trying to appear to be working through the logic of each puzzle instead of just going ahead and solving it. Admittedly, i'm a huge fan of Myst to start, but it's a series of let's plays that might also make a compelling case for the series to a person who never really "got" it. , , , , , . That's the proper narrative order for the series, though not the order the Let's Player did them in. (Which was... I think... Riven, Uru, V, IV, Myst, and finally III? Very anarchic.)

For the sake of thoroughness, another action RTS i remember from around the same time as Battlezone and Uprising that hasn't already been posted about here was a Microsoft-published game called Urban Assault. I remember only playing a demo of that one, but it seemed neat and still seems to have a bit of a following. Another thing that has always, always stood out as a little odd to me was an old and actually very cool top down action game from 1998 called Future Cop LAPD. Its multiplayer mode, and stop me if this sounds familiar, has you playing as a hero unit in a symmetrical arena filled with defense towers and factories pumping out automated units, with the objective being to push your way into the enemy's base.