Years / Decades:
70s , 80s , 90s , 00s , 10s , 2020
Genres:
2D Platformers, Bullet Hell / 2D Shooters, First Person Shooters, Flash, Horror, Indie, Point and Click , Racing, Real Time Strategy, Roguelikes, RPGs (Turn Based), Sports,Visual Novels
Welcome back. This part of the series will be primarily focusing on genres. So far I have [Action RPG, Board Game, Tabletop RPG, Arcade Game, Third person shooter, MMO, Action, 4X (Civilization-like), 3D Platformer, Dungeon Crawler, Card Game, Text dungeon, Souls-like, Stealth, Rhythm, Metroidvania, Survival, Sandbox, Shoot/beat 'em up, City Builder, Adventure, Puzzle, Fighting, MOBA, Turn Based Strategy, Real Time Tactics, Grand Strategy, Handheld, Walking simulator, Tower Defense, Miscellaneous, and Casual] as available genres. Let me know if I missed something, and I will try to get it added.
This is eventually all going to get compiled into one megathread for people who want gaming recommendations from Chapos specifically. Other consoles and genres will come in sporadic subsequent threads. Please contribute to previous threads if you missed them. This is meant to be an exhaustive list.
Expanding on your choice(s) is definitely a plus. Not everyone knows about or has played non-mainstream titles.
Kerbal Space Program. It is a sandbox game where you assemble parts to construct custom spacecraft designs and fly them. It manages to combine the sandbox construction genre with a flight simulator with orbital dynamics. In addition to rockets, you can build planes, rovers, satellites, landers, stations - and with mods, even boats and submarines.
Unfortunately there were some labor issues a couple years back and most of the original dev team quit. On the other hand, that means you can pirate it and not feel bad.
KSP was like the strongest hardest drug imaginable to me. it felt like I had a part time job in aerospace and mission planning
Does Crusader Kings count? It's a dynastic politics simulator
Frostpunk is a fantastic city sim. Gotta survive a harsh eternal winter like snowpiercer, but all you have is a steampunk coal generator to keep everyone warm. You have to keep track of working hours, choose to allow child labor or not. Waves of refugees show up and burden your supplied leading to factions forming and murders unless you handle it.
It's a super cool concept that's very replayable.
Also all your people have names and families and jobs, so losing them actually has some weight to it.
The expansions are all alright, each one has a focus on a different part of the story. One is after the main story and is about the politics of the different cities and factions, one is another city that failed, one is about building the generators, one is about some scientists that have to preserve a seed bank (really cool because you don't start with any workers, so you need to automate fast. There's also a "you can eat the seeds, but that could doom humanity in exchange for your survival" thing).
It's on gamepass I think if you want to give Microsoft $1 to try it for a month
The Championship Manager/Football Manager series is my favourite. But it is hard to recommend as it is a yearly release kind of deal. I am hopelessly addicted to them since the early 00s. Best sports sim games by some distance.
when they asked me who i saw winning the ballon d'or, and i saw one of the names was "Swan Champion" i knew i had to check this guy out. On loan from Real Madrid at Roma, he scored 10 times and assisted 14 times as a CAM. It had now become my destiny to sign this player. Next season, I thought I didn't have the funds to sign him, but then I saw he was averaging an 8.1 rating in his first 3 games back at Real Madrid. I sold a few players, made a record signing of $132M for him. https://i.redd.it/4mmrmg2chkk51.jpg
He's now 29, I think. He found his role as a regista at my Crewe. What a player.
Getting your legendary regens with silly names and seeing them grow up is very rewarding.
FM is fucking crack. Been a while since I played but I know my life is over the minute I grab a game with the latest squad updates.
Oh wow. Never thought I'd see FM chat on Chapo. I'm the same, addicted since FM2005. If there are enough of us we could get an online game going?
I'll be that guy and say Dwarf Fortress is cool, good, and free. It's been in active development for like 15 years by two dudes, and straddles city builder, management sim, and rogue-like. Fabulously complex and engaging if you can get into it, and it's not nearly as hostile to learn as the zeitgeist suggests. UI is famously janky but alleviated by a host of 3rd party tools, and a paid version is being developed that is re-tooling everything to be much more functional out of the gate.
Would have loved to see the original version they had planned
I also liked the final version, but agreed the early version looked amazing
My personal favourite is definitely Euro Truck Simulator 2. It takes the good parts of driving long distances, giving you time to yourself just to think, and strips away the annoying bits like the lack of comfort and the cost. My dream game would be ETS 2 with AAA budget, but sadly it'll never happen. The main downside to ETS 2 is that it makes me want to buy a third monitor and dumb peripherals.
It's certainly unlike any of the other games that'll get mentioned, but The Sims (and to a lesser extent its sequels) is undeniably one of the best.
I prefer American Truck Simulator, I'll put on some Coast to Coast FM and have Art Bell spout 90's conspiracies at me while driving through New Mexico.
I've been meaning to try ATS, mainly because large segments of ETS 2's map are inexcusably bad without ProMods - most notably the UK, the Netherlands, and Belgium, all of which look horrific. Being from the UK, at least I'll be less likely to notice if the American locations look shit.
I'm also European so driving down European highways just isn't interesting. I want deserts and mesas and tumbleweed.
Hell, I wish there was a mod that let you glimpse UFOs during the night.
Don’t know how similar it is to ETS but my husband spent a lot of hours on Snow Runner this year.
That seems more about navigating difficult terrain than long relaxing drives though.
Seconding The Sims
specifically 2 or 3 (2 has the best overall gameplay, while 3 has an open world that almost makes up for its pudding-like character design)
Victoria 2 is essentially a geopolitical simulator set from 1836-1936. The core mechanics are centered around economics, which is a very in-depth system, and influence. Diplomacy and warfare are somewhat lacking as the game hasn't aged that well. Compared to most other Paradox games, I'd say it fits much more into the "simulator" genre than the strategic sandboxes like HOI4 and EU4.
It's fun even if stupidly complicated. If they could give it the old CK3 treatment and focus on the best parts (economy and politics) and streamline the rest, a hypothetical Victoria 3 could be a great game
Yeah, I think the game just needs a modernisation and slight refocus to be much better. More options to actually influence other countries. Also, I think Victoria 2 could be a very good base model for a Cold War game
Also, I think Victoria 2 could be a very good base model for a Cold War game
Ooh, that would be very good, especially with the influence options and internal politics
An old 2002 game that I think really held up is Sim Golf (from Sid Meier). I still enjoy installing this game and playing it every couple of years. You basically design a small golf course and tourist area. But the best part is that you also create a golfer and can play the courses (including through Tournament events), and it has a pretty impressive golf mechanic (though few are better than the more recent non-Simulation game Golf Story).
My favorite part is that you can customize what the golfers say in text above their heads when they do certain things (hit the ball into the rough) or encounter certain objects. They can end up shouting things like "Oh Shit!!" when a ball almost hits them. I always found that to be enjoyable.
No idea if it's still decent, but I played hella Railroad Tycoon back in the dial up days
