Reminds me of the (very fun!) cooperative game SpaceTeam[0], where you have to complete an ever-increasing set of fanciful space-themed actions on a little control panel on your phone. The fun part there is that some of the actions require you to tell someone else to complete an action on their phone, so games always involve frantic shouting to your teammates. Lots of fun
There is a card game version: each player has a stack of problem cards, and a hand of tool cards, and you need a certain combination of tools to fix each problem. You can pass tool cards to other players who need them.
Simple, right?
You can only pass cards to the players immediately to your left or right, so if you need a tool from someone on the other side of the table, you need to get them passed all the way round.
Each tool has a name and a picture. Some of the problem cards refer to the tool by name, some with a picture. So you're asking for "the tool that looks like a red egg whisk", a description which other players may or may not recognise.
There are cards in the problem deck which cause you problems. You might have to throw your hand down and wait for the other players to pick it up. You might not be able to use your thumbs. You might not be able to speak out loud or move until someone touches you.
And of course the game is played in realtime, against a timer, with all players playing simultaneously. There is a lot of shouting.
Plus, i swear that the cards are far more slippery than normal cards, so if you make the slightest error in handling them, they fly off the table.
Shares the concept with "Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes". Its a game about diffusing a bomb. One player has a pdf file containing the instructions, and the other is on the PC diffusing it. The game gets increasingly more complicated, and harder for both players to communicate what they are seeing/what should be done. Really fun, and tests your relationship with the other player, as you'll be shouting and insulting each other the whole time.
The real fun of that one is when you have more than one bomb consultant, and the manual has been ripped up into its separate pages, so the person diffusing basically goes round robin, barking out information about the different parts of the bomb to each consultant in turn, and then they each use the downtime between "turns" to figure out the next action is on their part and get it queued up.
It's pretty neat when it really gets going and you see just how efficient it can be.
It's a great game, with the right people. One of the guys in our games group has extremely poor listening skills... the game is really not fun in that scenario.
I still think the creators of that game described it the best: "A game for people who like technobabble and shouting." It's one of the few games in that category of game where even the most level-headed person will be in a fun-but-frantic panic in no time. There is pretty much no limit in how good you can get at this game.
In my experience the real skills in this game are first of to know when to shut up so someone with a more pressing matter can get their instruction in and secondly learning to talk and listen at the same time.
I would greatly recommend this game, there's basically no rules to explain. I'll be buying the card-game edition pretty soon so I can play it with my less tech-inclined parents.
Sort of ironic that the Windows 95 aesthetic is simultaneously both comforting and familiar (vaporwave), and full of dread and ennui (Dilbert, Office Space).
Dread and ennui is as much a part of vaporwave as anything else. It's kind of the duality of the hopefulness of the era -- Windows and Mac machines being touted as the precursors of the Ono-Sendai cyberdecks we would all be using -- and the soul-crushing boredom and consumerism.
I think how you view it correlates with how old you were when win95 was in use. I certainly don't have any negative associations with it, just nostalgia, but I was just a kid at the time
Highly recommend playing the game, even if not a fan of video games. It's wonderfully written and doesn't require a large time commitment. It's also devoid mechanical checks.
I have a mental list of video games that i could use to justify to my dad that video games are not a mindless waste of time. The Stanley Parable is on that list.
I would be careful about using The Stanley Parable for that specific purpose, because it is one of the easiest targets for "mindless waste of time" classification.
Don't get me wrong, I totally like it, but the whole "game" can be described as "do a bunch of actions, pick some different doors every time, and then restart it all over again, except it might be slightly different, but you are still just choosing which doors to walk through, while listening to some voice".
Note: I didn't "beat" the game (assuming there is some actual ending), but I spent a good couple of hours on it.
I loved the Stanley Parable but it seemed to me entirely written for gamers so I'm curious what a non-gamer would get out of it. Much of the dialog is about the experience of being a gamer.
I found something about this comforting: it shows me dialogs that focus only on the thing that needs my attention, without having to load an entire app with its associated branding. I actually prefer these types of popups to what I deal with now: slack notifications (requires me to open slack first), mail notifications (requires me to open mail), our custom admin app notifications (same). Apps have become first class citizens and the content they operate on have taken a backseat. I'd like to think of these dialogs as the GUI equivalent of Unix pipes.
I kept holding down a key in the email boxes thinking the story was going somewhere...but then I looked at the source and it turns out each sentence is randomly picked from an array of inspirational sentences.
It also encourages you to zone out and type without even reading what's being written, which is scarily accurate given some corporate emails I've seen.
I always loved the window-simulator genre [1] of flash games as a kid, and it's no exaggeration to say that windows spoofs made me the person I am today. I wanted to make my own so badly that in middle school, I saved up to buy a student edition of Flash CS3 and spent a few years building "Window Doors" [2], which I'm proud to say was one of the most fully-featured windows spoofs of its time. Ten years later I have a cs/math degree, all thanks to the kind people on the Newgrounds BBS who were kind enough to put up with middle-school-me.
One identification of the keyword "pepperflashplugin-nonfree" and a browser restart later, I can wholeheartedly concur this implementation was very well made.
Job Simulator is one of my favorite VR games, and is the one I most often show as demo. The humor is just spot-on, and (as one anecdote) watching people try to interact with a virtual computer by touching it, fail, and then realize they have to actually use their controller to move a virtual mouse is... priceless.
Crouch walking is one of those things that is both incredibly awesome but also needs to be optional. I think Alyx did an okay job with it but there were times when I had to literally crouch behind cover not to die. Again, it was pretty awesome but I'm glad they have a toggle crouch option in the settings.
To all the people out there (not this thread necessarily) for whom this resembles their daily work - CHANGE IT NOW! Go create value. And of course, not only in the monetary sense. Solve problems. Be proud of what you have accomplished.
Does it ever end? I was starting to get flashbacks to the real world times I'd be typing mid-sentence and some mystery dialog would appear for a nanosecond, grab my spacebar entry, and then take that as permission to go do... something, so I had to quit. (I'm amazed Microsoft hasn't managed to do something about that issue for going on three decades now...)
This is very cool and very well done. The dialogs are perfect.
However, did anyone else get a bug where the breakout game would no longer destroy the bricks?
My own self-directed minigame within the game was to try to get on top of the brick wall before my "break" ended and the whole thing was less fun after that bug.
I think some of the bricks have a durability number to them, where the same brick has to be hit (e.g.) twice in order to be destroyed?
On the other hand, I do think I noticed a time where the ball went through a brick, which was odd.
This captures the constant sense of being interrupted with senseless/out of context requests I have in my day job, and reminds me why I sorely miss doing engineering.
The only way it could be more realistic is if some of those texts were PowerPoints.
immediately addictive.
can i turn off the tasks and just play pong?
can i reduce the number of emails to send? i don't like smashing on my laptop keyboard in order to keep up.
[0] - https://spaceteam.ca/