Aren't all computer games the same?

drhowarddrfine said:
I should have added on to my question. Skills at doing what? Running between rooms and shooting objects? Which is my question. Aren't they all the same? Haven't we seen this movie before?
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Well, now it depends on your definition of shoot-em-up games. If you make it narrow enough you will of course see more similarities.

If you are actually playing the differences are obvious. Just the specific weapons are one.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
I should have added on to my question. Skills at doing what?
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Hand-eye coordination and reaction time for stuff like:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivip0sNnyhM&t=6s

It's also useful for OS and hardware testing:
  • Low-latency checks (Xorg vs Wayland + libinput vs evdev)
  • Audio/video sync (anything "off" is immediately noticeable)
  • Input handling checks (floaty-feel vs 1:1-connected)
  • Graphics API checks with above (OpenGL vs DirectX vs Vulkan)
  • Cross-OS checks (above on Windows vs Linux/FreeBSD Wine; FreeBSD handles it good)
  • Oddity checks (disconnecting the USB drawing tablet after osu! used to crash GNOME on Wayland 😆)
  • Wayland sessions wouldn't allow true fullscreen resolution switching (above would stretch to native 4K res and mess-up full-area tablet conditions along with higher-latency higher-resolution + scaling; osu!'s circle area is 4:3 and I did that vid native 1024x768 on a 4K screen but the tablet area shrinks at widescreen res)
  • I can do that with a mouse too (checks for accel vs flat and high-Hz mice; carries-over to shooters, and general OS UX interactions)
That carries-over to PCVR :cool: (Oculus runtime vs SteamVR, inside-out vs sensor-tracked for the 1:1 feel vs controllers predictively floating to new locations, and USB controller handling: Ryzen with AMD CPU-side USB controller is sketchy with high-bandwidth; don't get me started on direct-display vs GPU encode/decode shenanigans or how/why people tolerate that)

View: https://youtu.be/Fr3h2Oh1q-0?si=2gV4Y2ht8kQgcjBX&t=181

Any OS/hardware that can handle that sort of stuff without stuttering can probably handle anything! And having the low-latency experience from music games allows knowing what to look for for good-conditions with an OS and how to configure it (why I'm not the biggest fan of higher-latency abstraction like Wayland/libinput and running through Flatpak; everything matters including the root filesystem for shader cache/texture loading)

If OS/software conditions are good, it also allows getting right into unique stuff (Ghetto Voltex 🤣 bootleg SDVX)
 
drhowarddrfine said:
A number of people here are into shoot 'em up computer games.
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What you are describing is not a shmup.

drhowarddrfine said:
You get placed into a battle zone of some kind, you run around trying to find bad guys, you shoot bad guys and avoid getting shot. And that's it. The only difference among games is the look of the battle zone.
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These are arena shooters

Are all arena shooters similar, or are all platformers similar? Yes, that's basically the point of the characterization, you look for commonality and group them by their common characteristics.
 
Jose said:
I thought he was describing Battle Royale games. They are quite popular since Fortnite.

Battle royale game - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

There are a lot of those around at the moment that are very, very similar.
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Ugh I dislike battle royal games and particularly Fortnite build-random-stuff stuff :p Population 1 on VR was cool though for being able to climb up buildings.

I'm into deathmatch modes: Fast respawn, and free-for-all means anything that moves is a target for score (simple and to the point :p) Xonotic and OpenArena are cool on FreeBSD!
 
lgrant said:
I am not a big fan of First-Person Shooter games, but there are a couple from Valve, Portal and Portal II, which are pretty cool. You have a gun, but it doesn't shoot people; it shoot portals in walls, floors, and ceilings. It is a puzzle game, where you use portals to get around obstacles, such as pools of toxic waste.

There are also a lot of building/harvesting games, like Stardew Valley, Critter Cove, Coral Island, Teddy's Haven.

There are a couple of hotel simulators, and a of couple grocery store simulators.

There are Real-Time Strategy games, where you send out troops to fight enemies. It is displayed as groups of tiny soldiers moving across the map--no actual first-person combat.

Rez, originally for the Playstation II, but now available on Steam as Rez Infinite, is a rail shooter game. You travel along a fixed path while you try to shoot objects that are firing at you. (The plot is that you are a hacker inside a computer, disabling its security mechanisms. What makes Rez cool is the music, which is synchronized with the action, and gets more and more intense as you go deeper into the game.

My wife and I both hate First-Person Shooters, and we still manage to find a bunch of games to play. (On some platforms, my handle is Reluctant Gamer, because I used to feel the same as you about computer games.)
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The only website where I can debug my operating system and read someone talking of Rez 😍
 
jbo@ said:
I'd say it's similar to my mother looking at a bunch of computers running different operating systems and saying "it seems they are all the same".
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But they are. They just go about it in slightly or mostly different ways but they can all do the same thing the same way if their coded for it.
Zare said:
you could claim the same about sports. "Its just a group of people playing against other group of people".
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Yes but each game is different with different goals, methods and tools.
3301 said:
Two beautiful things in one, great games, where skills (not payments or skins) mattered, and getting the most out of (a computer / the hardware) not just requiring players to buy faster components.
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But that has nothing to do with game play.

Coincidentally, this afternoon I stopped at a store where my nephew's wife works in the back room just to say "Hi". One of the kids who works there was playing one of these well-known games (I forgot to ask which one) and it was exactly the same routine I see in each and every game I see everyone playing. He was roaming the streets looking for bad guys. Bad guys were shooting at him. He got killed but then respawned (I guess) and went back and did the same thing for a while. He then achieved some level that brought him to another street where he, essentially, just did the same thing as before--it just had some other goal--but all he did was shoot bad guys who were trying to shoot him.

It drives me crazy. I never see anything different.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
He then achieved some level that brought him to another street where he, essentially, just did the same thing as before--it just had some other goal--but all he did was shoot bad guys who were trying to shoot him.
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I wonder if almost every game could come down to a you vs something mechanic?
  • Tetris: You fight against boxes getting towards the top
  • Pokemon: You use a monster to fight other monsters
  • Super Mario: Avoid Goombas or jump on em; fight against a clock and enemies trying to stop your advance
  • MMORPGs: Fight things, win, get levels to fight harder stuff
  • Music games (DDR, Guitar Hero): Fight against the HP bar (by not missing notes)
  • Stardew Valley: I guess fight against crop-growing mechanics by watering stuff? (haven't played it much :p)
  • Age of Empires/Warcraft 2/Starcraft/RTS: Build units better to fight the other guys
  • Capture the Flag in shooters: You run to get a flag, and fight-off bad guys trying to stop you from taking it
  • Point capture in shooters and MMORPGs: Stand in a spot, while defending the position from bad guys trying to stop you from taking it
  • Fishing games: Fight fishing mechanics (fish don't want to be caught, so there's stuff like bobbers that act as defense)
  • Super Hexagon: Dodge walls trying to attack you (on the rhythm of sick beats :cool:)
  • Cooking games: Fight-off bad customer service? (some sandwich-making game in VR where you fill orders on a timer; Delicious series)
  • Zuma: Fight against balls reaching a hole + timer
  • Touhou/bullet-hell: Fight against stuff raining bullets trying to get you
  • Pandemic 2 (flash game): Fight against countries closing borders trying to stop you
  • Tower defense (Bloons; Element TD WC3): Fight stuff with overwhelming-force (of tower-spam) trying to reach a point
Can't quite think of anything with Solitaire though :p (there's a ATHF episode with a funny spin on that though)
 
Espionage724 said:
I wonder if almost every game could come down to a you vs something mechanic?
  • Tetris: You fight against boxes getting towards the top
  • Pokemon: You use a monster to fight other monsters
  • Super Mario: Avoid Goombas or jump on em; fight against a clock and enemies trying to stop your advance
  • MMORPGs: Fight things, win, get levels to fight harder stuff
  • Music games (DDR, Guitar Hero): Fight against the HP bar (by not missing notes)
  • Stardew Valley: I guess fight against crop-growing mechanics by watering stuff? (haven't played it much :p)
  • Age of Empires/Warcraft 2/Starcraft/RTS: Build units better to fight the other guys
  • Capture the Flag in shooters: You run to get a flag, and fight-off bad guys trying to stop you from taking it
  • Point capture in shooters and MMORPGs: Stand in a spot, while defending the position from bad guys trying to stop you from taking it
  • Fishing games: Fight fishing mechanics (fish don't want to be caught, so there's stuff like bobbers that act as defense)
  • Super Hexagon: Dodge walls trying to attack you (on the rhythm of sick beats :cool:)
  • Cooking games: Fight-off bad customer service? (some sandwich-making game in VR where you fill orders on a timer; Delicious series)
  • Zuma: Fight against balls reaching a hole + timer
  • Touhou/bullet-hell: Fight against stuff raining bullets trying to get you
  • Pandemic 2 (flash game): Fight against countries closing borders trying to stop you
  • Tower defense (Bloons; Element TD WC3): Fight stuff with overwhelming-force (of tower-spam) trying to reach a point
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The civilian flightsims are an exception such as Microsoft's Flight Stimulator.

DCS on the other hand has you bomb things or dogfight other players.
 
I am have been playing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on Steam/Linux over the past couple of months and I am having a great time. The art work in that game is just fantastic, Bethesda Softworks did a really great job on that game.

I have a few Steam games running on FreeBSD as well.

I think all video games are what you take from them. The 202x version of a "Star Trek" game is Star Trek Resurgance - and Yes!, it also runs flawlessly on Steam/Linux.
 
cracauer@ said:
The civilian flightsims are an exception such as Microsoft's Flight Stimulator.
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You might fight against hitting the ground :p (or hitting it improperly on landings), and fight against elements that would bring the plane down (fuel, weather; possibly other planes in multiplayer + ATC?)
 
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