RadDevon

I feel like, even if Reddit walks back all these changes, they've already burned the community's trust. I know I'm not going to get caught in their web again because now I've seen a glimpse of the future they want. I would guess others may feel the same.

They have all the power, so I know at least some of this will happen at some point in time. I'd rather rip the bandage off now and flee than wait around for another six months while they figure out how far they can move the community in this direction without everyone completely revolting.

That's awesome to hear! I can identify because I did spend hours going through them all! 😅 It was really fun! Took me back to that time. The stuff is still out there… it's just hard to find because search engines don't care about it.

I heard something about that. I fell off the series hard after MGS1. It didn't pick me back up until 5.

What did you like about 3? I think I owned it at one point, but I'm sure I didn't play more than 20 minutes of it (which is not unusual for me 😅).

In no particular oder:

• Earthbound- Pure wish fulfillment for me at 12. Pure joy for me now when I return to it.
• Final Fantasy III (US)/VI (Japan)- I had three massive game guides for this and read every one multiple times. Explored every nook and cranny of the game. It was an early exposure to games that emphasize story, and it was formative for me.
• Super Mario World- I still think this might be the perfect platformer.
• Metal Gear Solid- One of the early games that was like playing a movie. A revelation. The story was silly, but at 14, I didn't know any better. Not sure I care even at 40, although it would probably hit me a lot differently if I played it for the first time now.
• Samba de Amigo- We played the hell out of this game as teenagers at my friend Blake's house. We got stuck at one point, so we recorded the difficult section on his VCR, played it back in slow motion, and mapped the beats we needed to hit. We were actually able to clear it after doing that.
• Dance Dance Revolution- I lost 35 pounds not even really trying playing this game as a young adult. I've never before or since been so excited about exercise.
• Parappa the Rapper- The songs are catchy, and I love how weird everything is.
• Castlevania: Symphony of the Night- This is a video gamer's game. It's unapologetic, and I love every bit of it. Holds up better than just about any other PS1 game.
• Super Metroid- That escape sequence at the beginning still gives me chills, even though it's hard to fail. The music throughout the game is masterful.
• Stuntman- Something about having to replay the sections of the courses over and over to perfect them tweaked something deep inside my brain.
• Super Meat Boy- Same as the above, except without the excessive load times between retries!
• Hollow Knight- I crave novelty and probably have some brand of ADHD. As a result, I rarely even finish a game once, let alone return to it. I've fully completed this one twice. It's that good.
• Shovel Knight- This is what you think old games were like… until you actually play a few of them. Actually, this is what you wish old games were like. I'm still amazed they were able to stick the landing with the other playable characters. I thought Shovel Knight was lightning in a bottle, but they caught it over and over in this one.
• The Witcher Series (all of 'em)- I love the way Geralt carries a confident swagger — still without being overbearing — through this bleak world. One of my favorite characters in any game.
• Mass Effect 2- Love the ensemble cast. Best one since FF3, IMO.
• Grandia 2- When I was a teenager, I didn't know you were allowed to think the main spoiler in this game, let alone put it in a game.
• Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons- Nothing has ever matched mechanics with emotion like this.
• Life Is Strange- I played through this with my daughter watching over my shoulder. We both loved it. One of my most memorable gaming experiences ever.
• The Walking Dead (Telltale)- Played through this with my ex-wife watching over my shoulder. Similar experience to Life Is Strange, but with a different person I care about.
• The Secret of Monkey Island- The first game I remember playing that was really funny.
• The Realm- This is the first MMO I ever played. I remember in the alpha working for weeks to get the gold pants. These were the most sought-after item in the game: a pair of pants with infinite storage capacity. 🤷‍♂️ I finally got them, and it felt so awesome!
• World of Warcraft- Played this with some friends with work and felt real camaraderie in a game for the first time.
• Diablo (the first one)- This was unlike anything else I'd ever played at the time. The atmosphere was incredible too.
• The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind- This game helped me understand Western RPGs.
• Burnout Paradise- My favorite driving game. So satisfying to play.
• Batman: Arkham Asylum- Played this non-stop while I was home sick with the flu. None of the other games in the series ever surpassed it. Bigger isn't always better.
• Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor- Feeling like a game is aware of you is a really cool feeling.
• Blast Corps- The most fun I had on N64. Destroying things in a game is highly underutilized.
• Doom- Formative and scary. There still aren't many games scarier than Doom. This was also my first exposure to modding. If vanilla Doom is scary, that Alien TC is terrifying!
• Quake- If you ask me, this is the most influential game in history.
• Unreal Tournament- Had so much fun putting together LAN parties to play this. I didn't do many, but the ones I did were amazing. I miss those days.
• Grand Theft Auto 3- The early GTA games were great, but this changed everything. When you think about it abstractly, it's hard to imagine how much a difference moving from 2D to 3D could make… but it did.
• Elden Ring- Best sense of discovery of anything I've ever played. I love just stumbling from one thing to the next at my own pace.

Probably more that are not occurring to me right now… and even so I've probably listed way more than you intended. 😅

I got really interested in WoW Classic Hardcore Mode after watching a recent video about it. In this mode, when your character dies, that character is automatically deleted and you have to start a new one. I'm curious what it would feel like to play WoW again, but this time knowing that death is the end of my adventure. I think I may give it a shot one day.

I know you said it shouldn't require synchronous gaming. WoW of course wants you to be online with other people… but you don't have to be online with any particular people. There's always someone on to group up with. Hardcore mode is having a moment, so you should have no shortage of people to play with. I wouldn't worry about trying to schedule time to play it. I don't want a game that is like a job. Just play when you can, enjoy it as long as you do, and then move on to something else. I guess what I'm saying is that you should play WoW Classic Hardcore casually. 😅

Or you could play the true hardcore mode: play WoW Classic Hardcore until one character dies. Then shelve the game forever and move on to something else. 😆

I didn't run in exactly the same internet circles that you did, but I do still crave the sense of discovery of the early web. A few months ago, I put together a list of "old web" on-ramps to sate the hunger.

Neocities is a big hub for weird web sites that aren't trying to make a buck. For me, that's the key. What's the motivation for this web site? Is someone trying to sell me something, or do they love this thing they're talking about so much, their enthusiasm has spilled out onto the internet?

When search was bad, finding something cool on the internet felt like finding buried treasure.

I'll always remember Illucia: The Town of Final Fantasy. It was a Final Fantasy fansite started by some college student (I assume since it was hosted on some university's web hosting; maybe UC Santa Barbara?) named Tatsushi Nakao in the early 90s. The page greeted you with original art of a pixelated Final Fantasy style town. You could click on various buildings to go to sections of the site. It felt like a place, and it was fun to explore.

I remember the Quake web community in the mid 90s — a bunch of web sites, sometimes linked together and sometimes not — all with Quake-related content. Large portal sites would organize around interests, and they would seek out smaller sites about niche parts of that interest, bringing them into the fold to offer hosting and services. PlanetQuake is the one I remember most around Quake. The PlanetQuake site was a place you'd go to get the latest Quake news, but then they also hosted more niche sites.

The first practical "programming" I ever did was in Quake macros… and that's probably a major part of why I have the career I have today. There was a whole site dedicated to Quake macros (probably hosted on PlanetQuake, but I can no longer say for certain) that helped me get started and even helped me along when I got stuck.

I recall another site which I believe was called the House of Mouse which existed solely to extoll the virtues of the keyboard/mouse control scheme for Quake. When Quake was released, the prevailing way to control a shooter was with the arrow keys on the keyboard. Doom guy wasn't able to look up or down, so the mouse wasn't necessary. (You could control Doom with the mouse, but moving the mouse forward caused Doom guy to walk forward. It was a terrible way to play!) Hence the need to convince people to play with the mouse and keyboard.

I miss the early web. Smaller communities like this, Tildes, and Mastodon give me those same vibes again.

I lived for 5 years car-free in Seattle. I'm still car-free, but I'm currently doing a bit of traveling so no longer in Seattle (although I may ultimately end up back there).

It's definitely challenging. I wish there was more train coverage and greater frequency in general of transit service in Seattle. Back when I first moved, car shares were plentiful which made it really easy to hop in a car if I really needed to — maybe 5 to 10 times a year — but that whole thing mostly fell apart. When I left a few months ago, Gig seemed to be doing pretty well.

I lived for 35 years in Knoxville, Tennessee, and it would have been near impossible there. Your world gets very small when you go car-free, and that's a problem in places where everything is spread out assuming everyone will have a car and can quickly traverse the miles between places you might want to be. There's a downtown in Knoxville, but until the last 10 years, almost no one lived there. There's a lot more housing now, but basic amenities like a grocery store and drug store are, so far as I'm aware, still missing. Downtown Knoxville is less a place to live and more a theme park.

I was sad to hear the only full-service grocery store in downtown Seattle closed during the pandemic, but there are still plenty of neighborhoods that are totally livable car-free. Could be better, but it could certainly be worse.

Let's see if I can offer one suggestion for each of these platforms. 😀

• Batman for the NES was the best Batman game until Arkham Asylum came out something around 20 years later. Sunsoft was pretty amazing in that era.
• Earthbound is my favorite JRPG ever. It was pure wish fulfillment for a tween boy, but even though I'm no longer that, it still holds up because it's weird and charming as hell.
• I didn't care much for the N64 — it always looked like a bunch of blobs with blurry textures to me, and the release cadence was abysmal — but I do fondly remember Blast Corps. It was great fun, and I never hear anyone talk about it.
• OK, four in, and I've already failed. 😅 I never owned a Master System.
• I'm not sure if Panic for Sega CD was actually any good, but it was cute and silly and that was enough for me. The correct recommendation here is probably Sonic CD, but that's a boring recommendation.
• Uh oh. I never owned a 32X either. 😞
• I hardly remember anything on the Saturn. Someone has already recommended Nights, so maybe give Christmas Nights a shot. Games with a Christmas theme are relatively rare. 🤷‍♂️
• I can't recommend my favorite Dreamcast game Samba de Amigo because you won't be able to play it properly without the maraca peripherals, but the Dreamcast lineup was absolutely loaded so it's not a problem. I feel like Shenmue embodies the promise of the Dreamcast: unbridled ambition but without the pieces necessary to quite meet that ambition. It might be rough today, but it's one of very few games where you'll be able to spend hours driving a forklift around. That's gotta count for something. 😅
• I'm pretty sure Windjammers is the best Neo-Geo game.
• We're spoiled for choice again on PS1. I have to go with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. It's a classic that holds up better than just about anything else on the console.
• I always thought most of the Game Boy's library was garbage. Qix was neat, albeit simple. Oh, wait. You like JRPGs, right? You should try Pokemon!
• I'll go with the 800 pound Gorilla for my GBC pick: Link's Awakening
• GBA was another one of those killer platforms with tons of great games… but the best one is WarioWare.
• DS just had a near endless library of hits. Rhythm Heaven is one of my favorites. Bonus JRPG pick: Bowser's Inside Story
• The only PSP game I played much of was Lumines, but it is actually really good.
• When I was a kid, arcade games were incredible because the tech was years ahead of what I had at home. Now, I see how predatory they were and have trouble feeling good about many of them. Here are a few I like that fly under the radar sometimes. Tapper is a really good game that's fun for 5-10 minutes. Cadillacs and Dinosaurs is one of those 90s beat-em-ups, but with an interesting theme. If you like those, you might also like the D&D beat-em-ups. They have some really light RPG mechanics. Shadow over Mystara and Tower of Doom. Was there another one? I'm not sure. Then, I know there's near zero chance you haven't played NBA Jam, but it's just my all-time favorite.

Hope that helps!