Control is a really special game. I only got around to playing it last year but it was a wild ride!

I hope Alan Wake 2 goes on sale later this year so I can scoop that up. I got about halfway through AW1 (after getting it for ~£2 on steam) but the gameplay was too repetitive for me in the end.

I don’t think 3 is that hard if you are familiar with Press Turn but the Matador fight is a filter for people who have not learned buffs/debuffs. All of the games tend to get easier as you progress.

Persona is heavier on story, has dating sim elements and operates off a calendar system to progress the story. Hard to explain the calendar system but essentially events are timeboxed and there can be dead time if you finish the main mission quickly. Persona games try to emulate an anime.

SMT is the original series. Easier to explain: it’s like pokemon with mythological creatures and a light philosophy story. I don’t know if I’d recommend starting with SMT 1 or 2, even if they are arguably some of the best in the series.

Edit: I also prefer mainline to Persona. Should reiterate that Devil Survivor is definitely worth checking out. Not patient gamers but the new release of SMTV would also be a good starting point.

SMT1 has a great intro but it is confusing and does not hold your hand. Some mechanics are straight up broken so you can steamroll the game if you know about them (electric bullets). All of the games are like that to some extent. SMT2 is less confusing and might have the best story in the series.

I’d say SMT4 on the 3DS is a good starting point if you wanted to dive in head-first to the mainline series. Otherwise maybe Persona 3 Reloaded for the Persona games.

Edit: A curveball good entry to the series would be Devil Survivor for the Nintendo DS. It’s extremely easy to emulate with modern phones, physical copies are not as expensive as the 3DS games (but still expensive) and there is no region lock on DS so you have some lattitude to shop around if you want to use original hardware. In some ways that game does Persona better than the Persona games do, all while having a classic SMT mainline story of law vs chaos.

My first console was an original GameBoy and I probably got the most hours of use out of it compared to any other console. Despite the horrific backlight (lack thereof) and small screen. I love handheld gaming in general. Still play my 3DS all the time.

PS2 coincided with a lot of good handhelds too. Nintendo DS is a strong contender for best handheld ever, IMO.

3DS might be my favourite console. The DS library is amazing - and not region locked - then the 3DS JRPG selection is probably the strongest out of any console.

I’ve not seen any legitimate refutation of the Cass review so far. The 98% of studies critique was explored and rejected on More or Less: Behind the Stats on Radio4 this week. The programme can probably explain it better than me but essentially the trials of “moderate” quality were not thrown out, and were taken into consideration in the results.

Other criticisms seem more like emotional responses where people complain about the language being overly medicalised. Or similarly, the report reading like something from the past where academia considered homosexuality to be a mental disorder. Personally I don’t think the phrasing - even if it is clumsy - can delegitimise the conclusions.

You can switch seamlessly between systemd and openrc on gentoo. Although it might be worth using one of the debian derivatives in this user’s case - not sure they should be messing with their system too much!

I think as a kid I just bought it because ‘dragons’ lol. I wonder what my reaction would have been to the meta weirdness.

Made it through MGS2 around the same time and that was a formative experience. Totally mindblowing.

Yeah that sounds pretty dope. Will need to check it out!

I owned Drakengard 1 on the PS2 when it came out and I was a kid but pretty much bounced off it after 3-4 hours. I wish I’d kept hold of it seeing the prices that physical copies are commanding nowadays!

Always been curious about trying the series again as an adult. Also loved Nier Automata, and to my understanding there is an easter egg type shared universe with the Nier series.

The game funnels you into playing as a mage with high charisma so you can avoid the clunky combat as much as possible. Be warned though, the last 20 mins of the game can be quite hard if you’ve only specced your character to be good at speech.

This game ruined my interest in Fallout as a series. I’d played everything in the series from the isometric ones onwards but something about this one made me lose interest in the setting. Some kind of Fallout burnout maybe.

I stopped playing when it tried to force me to engage with the crafting mechanics in order to do the Institute level.

I’ve heard the Far Harbour DLC is good I guess so maybe make a beeline for that

Picked up Conker’s Bad Fur Day on N64 for £20 when I was 12 in 2004. I thought it was a bit pricey for an “old” game at the time. However in the years since it’s become a rare game (in addition to being a Rare game) and it’s now worth 5-6 times as much 2nd hand.

Yeah I’m playing San Andreas again on the PS2 for like the 4th or 5th time. The radio is peak and the map is an all time great.

Yeah it’s very good. Written in java so Android is a first class citizen but it runs well on desktop too.

I posted a question to my hometown lemmy community and wondered why I wasn’t getting any responses. Then realised it had ~1 active user per month… who was probably me.

This community seems pretty jumping by comparison!

A few personal recommendations here: Xonotic is the most engrossing quake clone I’ve ever played. The gameplay is fabulous and it would run on a potato. Definitely check it out if you like arena shooters.

Also people who bounced off FreeCiv for its somewhat dated mechanics (I believe it’s most similar to Civ 2 in terms of gameplay), might enjoy Unciv. It’s a FOSS porr of Civilization 5 and the last time I played it a few years back it appeared to be almost feature complete in terms of parity with its inspiration.

Lastly nethack is hard as nails and I’ve never been able to finish it. Good game though!

Interesting to hear about Sawyer moving from a humanities / liberal arts degree into self-taught coding. I followed the same kind of path (although have been far less successful than he has!)

They nailed it with this game. It’s glorious. Every historical detail is spot-on and the “bestiary” style is a feast for the eyes.