I’m gonna say probably not, if he were Valve would be full-on employee owned. I will say he seems a little less uh… warped than most prominent billionaires, but that’s not exactly a high bar to clear. Overall he seems like an okay guy but I don’t know him and have no way of telling whether he’s secretly a dick or something.
If you’re worried about the grind, go install the Untitled Project X mod. It has an option to give exp to all party members regardless of battle participation. It eliminates the “swap everyone in to Guard for a single turn” hassle. Because by default the game forces you to either swap everyone in for a turn, or grind like hell to get everyone properly leveled.
UPX fixes a lot of the issues that the remake has, so ironically that option is buried and was only added as an afterthought. But it’s one of the biggest and most impactful changes that you can make, because it completely eliminates the need to grind. Since every member is getting exp with every battle, you aren’t forced to wait for the relevant enemies to spawn before certain characters level up.
Undertale, for me. I have 0 problems with the game. Art style is great. Controls are great. Story is likely the most compelling I personally have seen. Not to mention the very appropriate humour.
Chrono Trigger: every aspect (graphics, gameplay, story, music, replayability…) has such level of polishness that it’s still outstanding almost 30 years later.
No other JRPG has come even close and, as a Final Fantasy fan, that’s hard to admit
He’s a hardcore capitalist, albeit one who happens to support free software (probably because he believes in it, but also because it means a bigger user base for his platform and $$$)
He’s significantly more likeable than most of the other CEO billionaires but when you look at his peers that isnt too hard.
Shattered is my roguelike of choice on mobile (along with Hoplite if that counts). On desktop I play DCSS and Brogue. Used to play a lot of Nethack too. Never ascended in any of them but that doesn’t make it any less fun.
I’d agree with the others who said to go for games that can be played as co-op, rather than competitive with each other.
Some good ones include: Don’t Starve Together, Valheim, Deep Rock Galactic, Minecraft, Portal 2 (main co-op campaign, and the somewhat hidden co-op free dlc campaign that also exists and is imo even better).
Most survival games that have multiplayer have a co-op/no friendly fire option, and they have adjustable difficulty oftentimes, so you can set it up to be as easy or hard as you want.
Or you could go fully the other way and try the old classic Magica (not Magica 2, the first game is much better) and kill each other in ridiculous ways
My top recommendation for you though is Divinity Original Sin 2, and Divinity Original Sin 1 as well. The second game especially is the king of co-op RPG’s, and both have an incredibly fun combat system, to the point that part of the game would be fun even without the rest of it. And each player in the 2nd game can play a pre-made character with their own story, or they can make a custom character.
Edit: actually I’m not sure of the system requirements for the divinity games, so my top recommendation is now Minecraft and other survival games. They can be really good for hang-out games partly because you can usually wander off and do your own thing while you talk if you want, or you can collaborate, and they leave a lot of room for talking about stuff besides the game.
I’d also suggest trying synchronized movie/tv watching, if ya’ll are the sort to enjoy talking over movies or tv like that. Just pick one, set up voice chat, and press play at the same time. Bonus points for “so bad it’s good” movies like birdemic etc.
this has been my longest-lasting phone game by a significant margin. I love that it’s portrait mode so I can play a game while holding a phone the way God intended
I used to play it a fair amount. I got to the point where I had beaten at least a run with each of the characters. I stopped around when the update that added its own music came in. I should try it out again, it really is a solid game
I’m in the same range, and have moved from Canada to the UK. So basically multiplayer games and the Internet are the only way for me to reconnect with buddies back home.
One game we’ve been rocking pretty hard when we all have time is Deeprock Galactic. It’s good fun, team based mission shooter-looter. Don’t really need super tight controller skills, spray and pray is a viable strat. And rounds are usually like 15-30mins which is great for some of my friends back home with kids.
My answer to this is always Portal, the first one. It was so unexpected and so, so good. Nothing in gaming before or since has been that magical of an experience for me. Maybe early Pokemon, when my little kid eyes were opening to what gaming could be. But there’s just something special about Portal. Such a concise, perfect little game.
Portal’s beauty is in it’s shortness. Perfectly paced, it takes the basic idea, plays with it, twists it, and finishes before it can overstay its welcome. In and out in an afternoon.
This is a bit further back that the era of gaming being presented, but a type of existential crisis occurred the day I discovered that I could download not only a decent Commodore 64 emulator but virtually all the games ever publicly produced. I had a huge collection of disks back in the day, stacks of diskette containers, indexed and sorted, and it was probably a percent of what was truly out there, names I never even heard of.
The crisis hit me when I realized I could stick the entirety of the C-64 revolution (emulator, games, music, demos) on a single USB flash drive.
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