I haven’t bought a new game for myself for years. Most of what I play is retro emulation, and what PC titles I do play are ones I already own and have a lot of replay value. Indie titles are far cooler than AAA, but even they don’t speak out to me as often. Why spend $60 on a flop like Hyenas, or even $20 on a game inspired by Harvest Moon, when I can actually play the original games for free? Especially on mobile, where most games are idle timewasters looking to lock me into a microtransaction loop. I‘d rather boot up a GBA game and spend my time on that.
>or even $20 on a game inspired by Harvest Moon, when I can actually play the original games for free?
If by that you are referring to Stardew Valley, while it is indeed inspired by Harvest Moon, it is so much richer and deeper and after playing it I guarantee you won't want to go back . It is like saying why play a modern Roguelike when you can just play Rogue.
I’ve played a fair bit of Stardew Valley, and that complexity can be fun, but sometimes I prefer to return to Friends of Mineral Town for the simplicity, and can do so on mobile (iOS lacks a mobile port of SD to my knowledge).
I thought I was the only one. I played so much FOMT on GBA that when I found Stardew Valley I was ecstatic because the dev added a bunch of QOL features I always wanted to add to FOMT.
The longer I played the less I enjoyed it and it’s hard to put my finger on. Music is great, gameplay is great, relationships are alright. Something always feels off though.
I blame the hard coded cooking aspect of the game tbh. And your animals can’t die. And you can’t save in the mines…
My biggest gripes are definitely within the mines and relationships, but there’s also a general feeling of, I guess best described as urgency, I feel in SD but not in FOMT.
The mines are an easy target to pick on, and I understand why it is like this. The game is first and foremost an indie farming sim, and as someone who really enjoys action JRPGs (having grown up on Summon Night: Swordcraft Story) I was thoroughly dissatisfied with the mines. It’s essentially pre-1.12 Minecraft combat (aka spam clicking) against the same 5 enemies, breaking rocks to either get to the nth floor or collect enough of whatever resource to get out and do something more productive. I understand that making it more in-depth would pull the lone dev’s resources from other things and may not even be an interest for them, let alone the mostly casual players, but still a critique I will field.
Probably bigger to me is the relationships. I adore most of the characters, and especially Penny and Sam. It makes romance delightfully difficult when your preferred partner gets with your favorite guy, but that brings me to the problem with the base game. I can’t have a best friend. I want to get full hearts on people without it being strictly romantic, and I am thankful there are so many mods that do touch on this.
Finally, as for urgency, it’s really hard to describe and I’m not sure if it’s the right term. I just feel pressured in SD in ways I don’t in FOMT. Pressured to focus on the game, to plan my time around the game rather than picking it up, playing for the time allotted during a break, and then quicksaving for later. I feel pressured to be profitable, to be efficient, and to be social on top of that. It’s been a good few months since I’ve played FOMT, I admit, while SD was only a few weeks ago, so it may be revealing to play it again and see if I can deduce where these feelings originate.
To you and the previous commenter, is it possible you've just aged out of the market? (not sure what other word to use than "aged") but my point is, most people eventually change their habits in almost everything.
The way I game now has changed drastically over the years for various reasons. The latest for me is probably just being tired of games that seem 3% different than the last fps/shumps/twin-stick-shooter/metroidvania/...
Most likely. My gaming habits have also drastically changed, I would say mostly in part because I find it harder to justify them as a form of entertainment when I could be reading non-fiction books or browsing my RSS feeds. The fact that AAA games have gone to shit and indie games aren’t quite catching me has only further soured my feelings on the matter.
If you're already pirating games with game emulators, what's stopping you from pirating AAA titles as well? I'm not making any value judgement here, it just feels like you compare apples to oranges.
Buying a retro game no longer gives money to the developers. It doesn’t support the development of further games, it mostly just puts money in the pockets of collectors and scalpers.
Except you don't have to hunt down the descendants of the grocery store or who acquired the company that acquired them that sold it for parts, decades later. With old games the rights holders are scattered and even unknown until they assert a claim they believe they have.
It's not, though. I'm not buying a 30 year old tomato, like I would a 30 year old game. I'm going to keep buying a tomato every week to make my BLT, enabling the grocery store to continually give money to the farmer for more tomatoes. I'm not going to be continually rebuy the same old game on a regular basis. Me buying tomatoes encourages the farmer to grow tomatoes next year, the same is not true for retro games.
One of these is a continual economic...pipeline of the tomatoes being exchanged for money, and being consumed. The other is speculation and collection. Please don't get hung up on the terminology, I'm not an economist.
