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Unidentified genre
Jan. 5th, 2019 03:22 amI'm basically always pining for more of a very specific type of video game, and I don't know how to articulate what it is well enough to find more, if there even are more. The Westward series of four games are basically the ideal for this--and I feel like anything made in that vein these days is a shitty freemium pile of boring, rather than the good old $6 BigFishGames pay once and you have a whole game forever that I relied on as a teen.
The Westward games, if you're not familiar, are like... RPG town building strategy sim? You play a main character who goes through a quest line, and basically every main part of the quest line is 'run around gathering resources and building up this new town to recruit townspeople to gather resources to build up the town with occasional fighting of bandits'. I love them dearly but I've played them like, a lot, and I'd like a little novelty in the formula, you know? They were by Sandlot Games, which made a bunch of random BigFishGames stuff and none of the others are anything like Westward (I find Tradewinds both extremely difficult and violently boring, for instance, and Cake Mania was a decent example of the Diner Dash knockoff genre that I do like, witness my copy of Mystic Inn, but that's got nothing in common with Westward) and they're not making Westward (or uh, anything) anymore. (Also, there was a Westward Kingdoms that kind of nosedived into a more modern mobile game style and sucked in comparison to previous entries like Westward III: Gold Rush.) Virtual Villagers (and its knockoffs, like My Tribe) were also reasonably close to this formula, but it seems like it's gone out of fashion and nobody makes this kind of game before. (I certainly no longer feel like I'm drowning in Virtual Villagers clones. Kids these days are playing Fortnite instead, I guess? Man, remember Virtual Villagers. I only have one of the later sequels and the aforementioned knockoff and I kind of regret not having the original instead.) And I just run around buying things like Cities Skylines and wishing really hard that I didn't find Cities Skylines difficult and kind of tedious even though it seems like it should be a fun combination of Westward and my best beloved Sim Tower. (Sim Tower, at least, has a couple of modern imitators. Project Highrise is a pretty decent Sim Tower clone/update.) Or Stardew Valley, which I also find kind of tedious--manually farming in games is just not my jam, I made a farm in Starbound and immediately got aggressively bored of maintaining it and am now studiously ignoring it and avoiding visiting that planet.
Alas for me imprinting on transient gaming fads from cheap sweatshop studios of the mid to late 00s, I guess.
(If you know any games like Westward or that sound like my description of Westward, or know a handy genre label I've missed, please do tell!)
The Westward games, if you're not familiar, are like... RPG town building strategy sim? You play a main character who goes through a quest line, and basically every main part of the quest line is 'run around gathering resources and building up this new town to recruit townspeople to gather resources to build up the town with occasional fighting of bandits'. I love them dearly but I've played them like, a lot, and I'd like a little novelty in the formula, you know? They were by Sandlot Games, which made a bunch of random BigFishGames stuff and none of the others are anything like Westward (I find Tradewinds both extremely difficult and violently boring, for instance, and Cake Mania was a decent example of the Diner Dash knockoff genre that I do like, witness my copy of Mystic Inn, but that's got nothing in common with Westward) and they're not making Westward (or uh, anything) anymore. (Also, there was a Westward Kingdoms that kind of nosedived into a more modern mobile game style and sucked in comparison to previous entries like Westward III: Gold Rush.) Virtual Villagers (and its knockoffs, like My Tribe) were also reasonably close to this formula, but it seems like it's gone out of fashion and nobody makes this kind of game before. (I certainly no longer feel like I'm drowning in Virtual Villagers clones. Kids these days are playing Fortnite instead, I guess? Man, remember Virtual Villagers. I only have one of the later sequels and the aforementioned knockoff and I kind of regret not having the original instead.) And I just run around buying things like Cities Skylines and wishing really hard that I didn't find Cities Skylines difficult and kind of tedious even though it seems like it should be a fun combination of Westward and my best beloved Sim Tower. (Sim Tower, at least, has a couple of modern imitators. Project Highrise is a pretty decent Sim Tower clone/update.) Or Stardew Valley, which I also find kind of tedious--manually farming in games is just not my jam, I made a farm in Starbound and immediately got aggressively bored of maintaining it and am now studiously ignoring it and avoiding visiting that planet.
Alas for me imprinting on transient gaming fads from cheap sweatshop studios of the mid to late 00s, I guess.
(If you know any games like Westward or that sound like my description of Westward, or know a handy genre label I've missed, please do tell!)
