Daniel Achterman

The Haranir zone music has a traditional choral part that makes my ears peek up every time.

Gorgeous!

Help I've run out of procrastination chores and now I have to work on learning something really hard.*

* Do a fun hobby

Today's work excitement is that after years and years, an important counter exceeded 65535 and broke everything. The efficient use of 16 bit unsigned integers eventually comes for us all.

That book goes so hard. I really enjoyed it.

Happy holidays yourself! This topic is well outside my area of expertise, unfortunately. The team also doesn't generally speak definitively on topics like this outside official channels, because it's important for everyone to be on the same page.

So, I love the list, and I love seeing what resonates with this cohort. I like that Morrowind, with its flexible tools for interacting with the world, ranks above Skyrim. Of course Slay the Spire ranks high.

But I also like to think about what players and gameplay we might be underrepresenting.

Genres that were influential but didn't really survive aren't on the list, like Myst-likes.

There are also entire genres missing, like fighting games (no Street Fighter?!) and action combat (Devil May Cry, God of War).

For instance, I see a preference towards PC over console, as DOOM and Half-Life are included while Halo is not.

Quest for Glory and Kings Quest I being on the list suggests us senior designers are getting old.

The Polaris List of "Top 100 most personally influential games as listed by senior game designers" is interesting.

I love the variety of types of "influential", from story to system to interactivity, but it also tells us about the senior game design community.

polarisgamedesign.com/the-polaris-...

As a result they didn't take this survey, and the list has a high proportion of games based on systems and environmental interaction that ladder up into games that are popular (and monetizable!) today.

At least, that's my read on it.

Myst was very influential, with a variety of Myst-likes released from about 1993 to 2003. The genre fell off for various reasons, and many of the designers who were motivated by high fidelity, cinematic experiences moved into fields like film or mobile games that don't get games media attention.

There's also a factor where the list tells us about the designers who are being polled for it as much as it tells us about which games were influential.

"You know what people find fun? Spellings with a 'z' instead of an 's' and the worst version of Pac Man ever made."

Seattle Airport has a "SkyGamerz" bar where you can get a drink and a bite while playing games at your booth on a... this can't be right... Atari 2600?

Look what opened in Washington State! I haven't had In-N-Out in like a decade.

Is it like a million hours long?

The last Dragon Quest I played was VIII and I was kind of under the impression that it wasn't that long ago but apparently it's been two decades and they've made 3 more so...

I find that undermines it, sadly! Like watching M. Night Shyalamalan's third movie, it's less fun to know a twist is coming.

Like, deceive me. Keep any hint out of the promo materials. Tell me I'm at 100% map completion at the halfway point. Grab this rug under me and really yank!

I love a good game where you're pushing to the final encounter and it's like "surprise, there's a good 30-50% more game left and it's getting REAL."

SotN of course. Final Fantasy VI. A good turn is just so great.

Post you from a different era.

From 20 years ago. I will not be taking questions at this time.

Like, your first sentence completely threw me. "Castlevania" doesn't include saving at all. Castlevania 2 and 3 give you codes instead of saving to storage like Zelda did.

The result is that asking someone their favorite Zelda, Mega Man, or Pokemon game is a decent way to guess how old they are.

One of my favorite things about talking about videogames is how different generations of players consider different games in series as the default or definitive one. Your using Castlevania as an example of how save media works reveals that your default is SotN, while mine are 1, 2, and 3.

She and, like, maybe Leigh Bardugo are kind of horror-ish.

A couple authors you might enjoy:
Stephen Graham Jones
T Kingfisher

Some books I liked:
Someone You Can Build a Nest In
Our Wives Under the Sea
My Murder
Mr. Magic
Just Like Home

I personally find Silksong bosses more satisfying than Elden Ring bosses because the controls and success / failure conditions are so much more crisp.

The last game to land like this for me, and to make me stubbornly push through it to prove I'm still a gamer, damn it, was Nine Sols.

Number of bosses that were like "yikes, this is tough" but not at that "this may be impossible for me" level: very, very many.

The number of Silksong bosses that I've been convinced are impossible that I then managed to progress to a kill over multiple attempts has been, like, 10.