• Some Pokemon ROM hacks where the difficulty spikes were not too harsh

There are definitely some good pokemon fangames on PC that aren’t super difficult from what I remember.

• Pokemon Hidden Place ( Spanish fan game with English translation IIRC )
• Pokemon Bizarre ( another Spanish/maybe Portuguese ( I don’t fully remember ) one with English translation ). Has some memes here and there but it’s manageable.

Most other fan games I could think of are either too long, have a good amount of difficulty, or have some sort of QOL thing preventing me from recommending it.

They’re gonna be in my backlog for a while, but earlier I got Kerbal Space Program 1 ( with DLC ) all for less than $15USD before tax and the Steins;Gate visual novel for something like $3.99 before tax. Would have gotten S;G Zero as well, but I am low on funds as of now.

In my opinion ( haven’t played or really seen the DLCs, so I’m just talking about base game ), Pokemon Scarlet and Violet.

Definitely had ups and downs when I did my only playthrough. Absolutely middle of the road compared to the official games ( completed gen 3, part way through gens 4-7 ) I have played and still even middle of the road compared to some of the fan games I’ve played over the years.

Technically I don’t think there’s a tutorial level per say as much as there is a tutorial set of levels, but Baba Is You.

The game starts off with only the controls on how to move and teaches you about how you can change the rules of the level to beat it if it isn’t possible normally, without explaining anything. Just from you exploring and testing different things. The only other time you’ll ever see any other form of level hint is maybe in the level names or if you end up in a position where you have to undo or restart the level from breaking the " [ object ] is you " rule in some way.

A lot of the game before you escape the testing track, minus maybe the point you are told about momentum jumps, feel like one big tutorial without even realizing you’re in one. It’s done very well.

I personally make a guess depending on certain games as to how long I’ve played them. I’ve definitely lost track of how long I’ve played certain games ( especially on console ) like Borderlands or Sonic Unleashed on xbox360. Especially since I never wrote any of that kinda stuff down in middle/high school because I didn’t care how long I had been playing in total.

Though, I will say that I like and dislike how Steam tracks your progress in playing games. I was roughly 4-6 minutes off of playing for 2 hours in order to buy some game related account themes but now I’m 2.7 hours in accoring to them because I ended up leaving it on in the background. In the future, I’m not gonna remember I did that, so I’ll assume I actually played all that time. There’s no nuance in their monitoring. If the game runs, so does their meter of how long it’s been on, regardless of you playing or not.

Though, I assume a good solution would be using any form of note taking program and jotting down your play times and dates and any other notes you want. Or using a spreadsheet with that same information. As long as you don’t lose that/those file(s), depending on what solution(s) you choose to take, it should be fine as long as you actually remember to do it and aren’t lazy about that, like I would be.

• Sonic the Hedgehog ( Genesis/Mega Drive )

• Chuzzle Deluxe

• Borderlands

• Baba Is You

Those would be some picks I would say are objective masterpieces, but that’s subjective, I guess.

Ever since I first heard it a few months ago, it has never left my mind for even a second.

Free by Crush 40

Sadly this great song was tied to a spin-off series killing game.

The X and Y games set in the Kalos ( France ) region. Also the same generation they released Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire ( remakes of Ruby and Sapphire ( based on some part of Japan ) ).

Yeah, definitely gonna stop those pirates who soft/hardmod their systems and never connect to the Internet/run updates in order to dump their games or play pirated copies or whatever they wanna do! That’ll stop them!

/s

Edit:

This seems to be more about their online account services and their updated privacy policy than anything else, but I still think my point stands, just not for this article.

An EA published game series for the first 2 entries, but Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 1 and 2. Still on entry 1, so I’d like to avoid spoilers, but they definitely feel indie compared to every single triple AAA game that’s come out in the past well over a decade due to the passion you can tell had to be out in for the game to have sold well.

Also learned the 4th game wasn’t even available on PS2 because of its’ 2015 launch, so if I ever get around to finishing the first 3, I gotta get it on PC because there ain’t no way I’m buying a copy for switch.

Edit:

Saw a trailer for the 4th game on Krome Studio’s website and I’m probably gonna skip it because it looked too much like a mobile game for my tastes.

Ever since the switch to 3D, I knew they would never look back. Biggest reason why fan games are so valuable to me. The only thing I like about the upper half gens (not including 5) are the pokemon (case by case and not including regionals) and the terastal mechanic, in terms of the games and their mechanics. Gens 6-9 I really don’t have almost any care for any of the important characters outside of the designs for characters/character art for characters like Geeta, Diantha, Brasius, Kiawe, and Rika. Those are pretty much the only characters who’s names I could even remember.

That’s mostly due to, in my opinion, when I think they started absolutely dumbing and watering down the story and characters so they could start focusing on nostalgia baiting people to keep them coming back while also completely dumbing down exploration as well. I think two of the only characters from gens 6-9 I really care about were Lysander and Kiawe because I thought Lysander’s genocide plot was interesting enough and Kiawe only because of the episodes of the anime I saw (which is kinda cheating since the anime is where they put every ounce of character into 99.99% of all important NPCs).

Pretty sure a large amount of fans would absolutely love returning to an older form, at least aesthetically, myself included, but good luck convincing Sintendo of anything without getting their corporate legal open secret stasi (lawyers) getting involved.

One of my all time favorites right now is Brok The Investigator.

It’s a game by French company COWCAT Games that is describes as a point and click beat’em-up game. Has lots to do because there are multiple endings. It has a free visual novel made to essentially showcase a vn engine that can be used to make BTI fan games or your own creations and has an upcoming DLC (apparently only gonna be $9.99) that focuses more on the combat side of the game.

It’s currently available on PS4/5 (vita planned but scrapped), xbox (don’t know if they mean one and series x/s or just series), switch, steam, itch(dot)io, and even epic if you hate yourself.

With the amount of content the main game of Baba Is You comes with, alongside the level editor and custom modded level packs people have made for it, would 100% recommend it.

Finding Paradise is absolutely an amazing game. Would absolutely recommend a blind playthrough of it, or at least a no-commentary walkthrough if nothing else.

Just wait 3 months after switch 2 releases. If you already have a gaming computer, I can almost guarantee that you’ll be able to play launch titles at 10-20fps on an emulator, so long as sintendo do such a piss-poor job of antipiract measures in their consoles (like they’ve always done).

Steam Deck’s touchpad so “too awkward”…

The Steam Deck touchpads are literally the ONLY modern touchpads I like. Every other mother touchpad is absolutely atrocious because they don’t give you anything like a vibration to tell you your mouse is moving and you actually get some level of confirmation you clicked. It feels like every other touchpad out there now, I swear, requires you to attempt to click on the left/right mouse button (completely integrated into the touchpad) about a billion times before it registers that you clicked once.

Also, if the joycons for switch 2 are anywhere near as uncomfortable to hold for extended periods of time like they are for me with regular switch, I guarantee my hand would start hurting after a couple minutes of the, probably gonna be as responsive as a dead man to a cannonball to the face, mouse mode. The premise of turning what could be one of the worst controller designs I’ve ever seen into a mouse makes my hands bleed in pain without having to ever hold one.

I got no clue if this would count as something you’d be into, but I’ve been having fun with Skyblock Zero on Luanti.

Idon’t know how quickly you could finish it considering I play purposefully inefficiently, but it’s a space themed with a quest line to follow where the only limited resource is your time. Spawn on a voxel, keep clicking to gain resources, and build out from there. So far one of my only gripes is storage in the game is only drawers instead of chests, so I constantly have machines and my inventory filled.

Maybe I didn’t spend enough time looking at all the controls or something, but I definitely couldn’t figure out how to play my first turn in that game.

Might have to look into it and see if I really am just that dumb or what.

Don’t know if it was ever announced to be in development and existed in any form outside of being told there was going be 3 games, but would absolutely love to have seen what the 3rd Sonic book game would have been like. I still need to play the Black Knight game, but would absolutely hop on board the 3rd if it existed.

That, and would absolutely LOVE if Sega uncanceled the Riders series. Best racing game series to ever exists in my opinion. Too bad the 3rd game sucked so hard it caused the beautiful rose that is the Riders series to wither away.

Yeah, I don’t think there are any besides Luanti. The rest are pretty much all just closed source mc rip-offs/probably malware/microtransaction filled clones.

Give it 3 months after launch and there will be an emulator that won’t be able to play games, but already have something like a black boot screen.

“Well, you see, if we give away anything for free, it has to be your organs! Our law whor… I mean lawyers cannot afford to be some of the worst people on Earth unless we make things so expensive you have to sell all your organs on the black market!” ~ Them, probably

Be prepared to grab your pitchforks and torches! We storm against Goliath as dawn!

All jokes aside, would absolutely love it if a bunch of Sintendo “fans” all stormed the courtroom in support of them to give them to hopefully lower their brand reputation. Not just this potential case, but literally every single time they go to court anywhere.

Absolutely a fun way to play Hitman. Definitely makes the game so much more fun, especially if you are playing on a crowded map and are trying to take out every single person possible without dying on harder difficulties.

We don’t need stealth where we’re going!

Not AkatsukiLevi, but probably just finish the enemy waves/bases as fast as possible, followed by tearing everything down and rebuilding for maximum efficiency since you can always leave and come back without ever having to worry about enemies after clearing a level*.

*assuming there isn’t a feature where enemies can respawn and retake levels that I haven’t reached far enough to find exists

If I can get it working, I will absolutely use debug mode on pokemon fan games because it saves me time not to have to do things like going back for healing my party, grinding to a certain level defeating bosses I’m not supposed to using cheated in legendaries, etcetera.

Definitely not developer intended, nor am I sure this would count for an intended answer to the question. Otherwise, I cannot think of any other answers to this question.

The way I see the root kit anticheat situation is that because Valve has their own Linux based OS, these companies making anticheat are probably going to end up tailoring it to whatever kernel Valve (or whatever the biggest/most widely used distro made by a large game corporation) uses to ensure people aren’t cheating.

With a kernel that can be swapped out for another with varying degrees of difficulty, why wouldn’t they just tailor their work to whatever the biggest corporate game company supporter of Linux is using? If SteamOS (or any other distro made by maybe someone like EA, heaven forbid) ends up becoming what these anticheat devs see as the defacto Linux distro for gaming, I guarantee they’ll probably just focus all their efforts on making sure SteamOS (or whatever it ends up being) works as best they can and hanging out everyone else to dry.

A real “Wanna run the latest CoD (or something similar) on your device? Make sure you use the kernel we say you have to use!” kinda situation is what I foresee happening.

There’s also an OpenBSD song with a few lines of lyrics that I think could sum up what could (and sadly most likely will) happen, in metaphorical Odyssey kind of way:

Corporate monsters, many closing passages\ Tempting harpies\ 13 years of treachery

Though it’s definitely going to be more than 13 years.

…all the IT savvy folks are switching people over…

Totally feels strange because my dad’s laptop doesn’t have the TPM requirement and he was telling me about how he was talking to the IT guy at his work about possibly switching to Linux just so he can keep his laptop. No clue if he’s gonna have me or ask if Mr. IT can do it, though, if he follows through. Absolutely insane because I might not be the only person in my house using it anymore (android not included because I view it as a completely separate entity).

I was telling him that day that I could flash Mint (have the most recent addition on my laptop) to a thumb drive if he was actually wanting to switch over. He’s definitely an average computer user, so nothing too special, but it still feels real weird.

Though this will also suck for a while because the tech savvy people helping them switch over will also be running IT for these people who have never used Linux before and most likely have never even used windows CMD either. Cannot wait for stories of people being fed up because their parent/aunt/uncle/friend/whoever looked up how to fix their device and entered the cursed rf command without thinking once about it.

Plan on, if possible, cloning my account to a new account on a new internal drive (preferably a 2TB+ drive) to save all my stuff that I want and don’t feel like moving over due to laziness. Then on another partition, I plan on having the rest of the space being used for Linux. All I gotta do is make sure the win10 partition doesn’t receive an ounce of Internet connectivity at all and pray I don’t end up with a virus or something similar somehow (because even the safest internet practices aren’t safe enough anymore).

Hopefully I can turn that partition into a cold partition where I can keep the current games I have that aren’t downloaded through Steam installed to ensure I can still play them. Then I can slowly debloat it by uninstalling everything I don’t need on there and get rid of a ton of files/unnecessary programs so that way I can still have roughly 500-600GB for win10 just in case I ever need it for anything, like a program I genuinely cannot figure out how to get working on Linux.

I can’t wait for it to be a thing that only a small handful of actually good 3rd party titles use that feature and the rest are gonna be 1st party titles shoehorning it in to say “Look at our fancy new feature we swear nobody has ever done before! Trust me!”.

I’m a bit boring in terms of my favorite 90s platformer, but absolutely love Sonic 1 & 2.

I’ve heard from at least one smaller channels that it’s a bullet heaven. That’s at least what they call this style of game.

People don’t care and will still buy them anyways. Similar thing has been going down with sports games like madden and nba for years yet people still buy them.

Considering EA is known for making sports games clones of each other that only change the year in the title and people still buy it, I wouldn’t be shocked if nothing comes out of this.

The Star Wars Battlefront games. With how horribly the liver service EA version that came out in 2015 was and how dead it apparently is, the PS2 games are the only ones I’ll ever acknowledge as existing.

Also, one of my personal favorites that I’d consider a must have is Dokopon Kingdom. Yes the remake/remaster exists, but I don’t normally go for remasters in most situations. Gameplay is just roll a spinner, move on board, and adventure around the world while trying to do quests if you are in the story mode.

Both games have a lot of content and replayability in my eyes, which makes a game more of a must have for me.

Edit:

Hot Wheels: Beat That! Looked it up because I couldn’t remember the name, but that’s a racing game with a good amount of replayability and isn’t as short as something like Cartoon Network Racing. Didn’t realize it came out on various other consoles and PC, but can definitely recommend on at least PS2 (how I ended up playing it).

To be fair to at least ps2/x games, there would probably be nothing stopping them from taking something like one of the popular open source emulators, shutting them down, and then hiring anyone they can from the project to work on an official emulator on their end that allows you to play the games on PC in an official manner. Or at least if you purchase individual titles.

But like you said, probably not worth the time or money.

Speaking of somewhat related things, wasn’t there a Steam bug not that long ago that allowed you to essentially be able to “buy” delisted games?

Strangest way I’ve ever heard of saying “Our Business Model Is Ass And Nobody Likes Us Anymore Because Of It!”

In all seriousness, people like them are about as bright as a broken bulb in a deep cave.

Saw this recently with some silly free to download VTuber software that I don’t remember the name of that hasn’t been developed in over a year. Definitely would have picked it up just to mess around with it if it was getting updates.