Maybe SimEarth.

This simulates a tile-based planet map. Animals grow and evolve, and things like atmospheric concentration and other aspects like surface albedo can be altered. More a toy than a game. Had a lot of fun playing with the levers.

1990 release – it’s still playable, though it’d feel pretty ancient and will not be very beautiful.

I haven’t played SimLife or Spore, and there might be some similarities there.

I’m not aware of anything else that’d be comparable.

EDIT: Liquid War. This is open-source and part of the GNU project. One has a map with some areas closed off and some open space that liquid can flow through. There are two or more “blobs” of liquid of different color; each is attempting to destroy the other. Your blob is attracted to your mouse cursor. “Moving into” a pixel of the other color eventually converts it to your own. If two liquids meet in a bottleneck, they tend to stalemate. One wins by getting liquid on multiple sides of the opponent’s liquid, so that one can move one’s own liquid from multiple directions into it. Maybe a bit closer to a tech demo than a full-on game. I wouldn’t call it mind-blowing, but it is free and as far as I know unique, and I had fun with it.

Terraria

I’d probably put Starbound in the same genre, but yeah, those are the only games in the genre that I’m aware of. It’s pretty unusual.

deleted by creator

Ah, gotcha. It also looks like it was considered to be very difficult (though any game from that era is gonna generally be a lot harder than present-day games).

I also remember a one-bit, not even polygon, but wireframe Star Wars third person rail shooter. It was on the early Mac, but I think it was a port from DOS or something.

kagis

Oh, wow. Apparently, it was actually a color arcade game, Star Wars, from 1983, and I’d just only seen the black-and-white Mac port until today. I wonder if those are true vector-display graphics, like Tempest.

kagis

Apparently yes. For the younger crowd, there was a point in time with CRTs where some video games actually plotted graphics on specialized CRTs by controlling the electron beam and plotting out the graphics with the point of the beam, kind of the way an old analog oscilloscope works. I bet that there have been antialiased remakes or clones of probably most of those vector-display games by now.

EDIT: Oh, I lied. It was first-person, not third person. You did have to dodge obstacles, but you weren’t looking at your ship from behind.

Rise to Ruins is maybe the most-similar game in terms of gameplay that I can think of. You initiate construction of buildings. You have automated characters build them (kind of like Majesty and Settlers). You can upgrade them, and they can provide equipment to characters. It has the same ramping difficulty of attackers. It doesn’t start with a map populated with monster generators the way Majesty does – instead, they show up over time. It has spells. You can build “defensive buildings”. It starts with the map covered with a fog of war. Your colony’s NPCs level up over time. You can put beefy, non-critical structures to act as something like a tank to absorb attacks while your characters make their way over to deal with a threat, kind of like Majesty.

It’s got some major gameplay differences, though:

• It’s one of the “unwinnable” games – absent some ways to kinda cheese the game and win, you’re just expected to survive for as long as possible. There’s a – I forget the term, but “corruption” – that spreads around the map, making terrain more-and-more hostile, and eventually overwhelming you. Majesty is about surviving the most-unpleasant bit, but if you can overcome that, you’ll win a round.

• No gold economy or NPC incentives. Well, IIRC one can create a “golem attractor” that will tend to make a that particular type of NPCs show up in an area, and you can create structures that NPCs will frequent to tend to make them hang out in a given area.

• A strategic map (which some may like).

• Survival aspects, like needing water and food.

• Path efficiency and building roads and such matters.

• The NPCs do get more-durable, but not to the extreme level that they do in Majesty, and they don’t quite work together in the same sorts of ways.

• It’s got more of a maze-building tower-defense aspect.

There are a handful of other third-person, on-rails shooters (Sin and Punishment), but nothing recent that I’m aware of.

The original Rez isn’t recent, (though that’s a game that got a lot of acclaim for the aesthetics, mechanics aside). According to WP there’s apparently a new VR release; I think I remember seeing a video of it.

looks

Rez Infinite.

Looks like it’s just a high-resolution VR remake, not a new game.

If Nintendo’s done a new Star Fox release, I imagine that that’d qualify.

kagis

Apparently yes, though the most-recent was Star Fox 2, which was eight years ago…a lot newer than Space Harrier, but no spring chicken.

EDIT: Apparently there’s a Star Fox-alike game, Ex-Zodiac, on Steam. I’ve never heard of it before now, though.

Freedom Force

Oh, yeah, that’s a good one. It had a sequel, though, IIRC.

kagis

I assume that you’re talking about the superhero game that I’m thinking of, not the NES shooter.

Yeah, the sequel was Freedom Force vs the 3rd Reich.

Can’t think of any other game that I’ve seen quite like those, though.

There are some above-view squad-based real-time tactical games, like Starship Troopers: Terran Command, but doesn’t have the focus on configurable and multi-aspect-upgradable powers that made Freedom Force interesting.

There’s also some console game which I absolutely cannot remember the name of – I never played it, just read about people who had talking about it – that used a similar theme of simulating the game starting to break to try to have a fourth-wall-breaking psychological aspect. IIRC it would misdetect controllers being disconnected and stuff.

kagis

Yeah, I dunno, can’t find it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/biel8o/does_anyone_know_some_good_games_that_have_fake/

This lists some games with that thematic element, but I don’t think that the one I heard about is among those.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is the most realistic game ever made. No other game had made me ask “what would I do in real life?” before. Of course, this dies out the more you learn the meta, but your first dozen or so runs are special.

There are some other games that I’d call somewhat-similar. There’s that old Finnish game, whatsit called, is kind of similar in that it’s a wilderness survival roguelike. An innawoods run in Cataclysm can play kind of like that, though Cataclysm as a whole is a lot larger.

kagis

UnReal World

It never quite grabbed my interest the way Cataclysm has, but a lot of people like it. Huh. Apparently it’s not that old, though it goes for a Win95-era appearance.

Cataclysm, for those who haven’t played it, is a very complex open source open-world roguelike. The modeling of a lot of things, as the game has grown over the years, has become remarkably sophisticated, from local weather systems to things like very extensive (realistic, not like Borderlands guns) gun modding, vehicle (land, sea, air) creation and modeling, farming, NPC camps, cybernetics, mutation, sound/smell/sight tracking enemies, martial arts including weapons forms, skills, proficiencies, various types of real-world (and supernatural) diseases and parasites, brewing, modeling of fires, modeling of pain, temperature…it’s a bit of an organically-grown mishmash, but it’s become a game with an enormous amount of mechanics, albeit a very graphically-simple one. I would definitely recommend it to someone with the time and willingness to explore the game’s systems, which is not for everyone. You can just download builds yourself, or there’s a commercial version on Steam, if you want to support the developers.

I’m not familiar with Pony Island, but I’d say that Inscryption – which I quite liked – has got other games like it, as it’s a (good) deckbuilder. If I understand aright from skimming the description, what’s in common is really thematic – simple game with an “upgrade game” aspect tied to a horror theme. The plot gets gradually unfolded as you upgrade and has fourth-wall-breaking aspects, like the game starts to act differently, pretend to malfunction, etc.

Yeah, Katamari Damacy is definitely a “I wouldn’t have played it from the description” game that I found to be a lot of fun. One runs around pushing a growing sticky ball that keeps having objects attach themselves to it. The game has enormous scale change as the ball grows. Simple – almost a tech demo – but surprisingly fun, and I can’t think of anything like it other than games in the series itself.

There’s also a similar discussion on Reddit, some months back, that lists some interesting “unique” games:

https://old.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/14tqdqv/completely_unique_games/

I’ve got a couple games that maybe fit this category.

• Kerbal Space Program. This had a sequel coming out that apparently wasn’t going very well and was cancelled, so right now, the possibility of a complete additional game isn’t that great. Spaceflight simulator, where one can design and craft spacecraft and amospheric craft, as well as space bases. One can fly to other planets, set up bases, set up satellite networks, etc. There are some “build your own vehicle”-type games, but not as much of a hard sim as this. I believe that X-Plane can handle atmospheric craft modeling, though the scope of that game is much smaller and it focuses more on flying the aircraft. Has a campaign to progress through, where one performs discoveries and conducts research. I’d recommend this to someone who hasn’t played it and likes sim games.

• Kenshi. There’s a sequel coming out, so maybe it won’t be unique at some point. They player controls a squad that moves around the world in real-time – there isn’t an “overworld map”. The squad can be split up into multiple squads. One can build outposts and defenses and such and have something of an automated economy. There’s a tech tree. The world has various factions and dynamic control of regions, something like Mount & Blade: Warband. There are unique biomes to travel through. A fair bit of the world is placed. The world starts out in a mostly-hand-crafted, fixed state, but evolves over time. Character progression isn’t based on point allocation, but on specific experience; have a character get hurt, and over time his ability to take damage will rise, and so forth. I think that this is still worth playing, though it’s by no means a beautiful game and possibly (hopefully) will be surpassed by its sequel.

• Majesty: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim. A real-time colony sim that can mostly run itself. One has indirect control for the most part; one directly controls upgrades, certain spell and structure abilities, and can spend money to create “incentive flags” to create missions for characters to fulfill. I don’t know if it’s right to call it a single-game genre – it’s a colony sim, and other colony sims exist, like Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress, and such. Populus and some god games have direct control over spells. But I don’t know of any other colony sim that plays much like it – most of the focus is on upgrades and on countering waves of invaders, and the gold economy is ununusual. The same developer tried making a sequel, but eliminated the “sandbox” mode, and turned it into more of a puzzle game, and that game didn’t do very well. One builds a colony in real time. There is no direct control over the individual characters, but for certain actions, one can spend money to incentivize them to do certain things. Characters level up and purchase equipment using gold they earn and that you expend on them to purchase items. Some of your control comes from things like building inns to cause them to spend idle time in particular locations. Building construction and maintenance is carried out automatically by peasants. As adventurers spend gold at buildings, it comes back to your control. I think that I’d have a hard time recommending today due to its age (you’re going to have 2d pixel graphics that are going to be tiny on a current computer).

• Pinball Construction Set. This is a video pinball game where the player can use premade elements to easily put together their own pinball board. Very elderly now, dates back to the early 1980s. I remember being absolutely fascinated by this back in the day. Since that time, there have been many video pinball games, as well as some systems that permit some level of authoring capability (e.g. Visual Pinball can run user-created pinball boards), but these require a lot more effort and expertise and “real” authoring tools to put together a pinball board; one can’t just drop in in-game and start throwing elements together. I don’t think that I can recommend this, as it’s absolutely ancient today.

• Noita. It’s based on Liero, but really not at all like it. It’s an action-roguelite (well, that’s a genre, but nothing really similar beneath that level of specificity) that has side-scrolling over an open world. Various materials interact and have their interactions simulated at a per-pixel level, something like the “falling sand” genre. However, there are enemies running around, and the player controls a character that walks and floats through the world. One can find various containers of substances; one can try and mix things together to manipulate the world. One finds wands with spells; one can combine spells and various spell modifiers on wands to create all sorts of custom magic weapons that can range from utility to offensive. The aim, as with many many roguelites, is to try to use some luck and synergies between various items to come up with truly game-breaking combinations. I can definitely recommend this game; I found it to be very good value-for-money.

Honorable mention:

• Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising. This is not a single-game genre, but there have only been two successful games in the genre, and one, Carrier Command, is from the 1980s (and which I’ve never played). You control a carrier that moves along an island chain; it can create surface, amphibious, land, and aircraft and weapons for these. One has a limited number of AIs that can control some vehicles automatically; one can give general orders to these, control the vehicles directly. One can capture more resources from the islands to expand one’s abilities. There was a remake of Carrier Command, which flopped, and a sequel, Carrier Command 2, a relatively-recent game, but unlike Hostile Waters, is really intended to be played cooperative multiplayer; playing single-player places a very heavy workload on the player…so I have a hard time placing it in the same genre, even if it has many similarities and was inspired by the same game. While I enjoyed Hostile Waters and I think that it could still be enjoyed, it’s getting a bit long-in-the-tooth graphically, and I recall it being a bit unstable even back in the day.

https://www.verizon.com/coverage-map/

This shows that Verizon has good coverage in part of Wanaque, moderate coverage in part, and no coverage in part.

The planning board’s decision was based on health concerns due to the possible negative environmental impact of telecommunication on the residents, especially the children studying at the school who could potentially be exposed to electromagnetic radiation. The town felt the residents would be ‘unsafe’ due to radio frequencies and rejected the company’s notion of building the tower on the land.

I mean, I think that the planning board is idiotic, but I don’t see why T-Mobile cares enough to fight it. If they don’t build it, okay. It looks like the school in question is right in the middle of town. Then Wanaque is going to have crummy cell coverage. Let them have bad cell coverage and build a tower somewhere else. It’s not like this is the world’s only place that could use better cell coverage. The main people who benefit from the coverage are Wanaque residents. Sure, okay, there’s some secondary benefit to travelers, but if we get to the point that all the dead zones that travelers pass through out there are covered, then cell providers can go worry about places that are determined not to have have cell coverage.

If I were cell companies, I’d just get together with the rest of the industry and start publishing a coverage score for cities for cell coverage. Put it online in some accessible database format, so that when places like city-data.com put up data on a city, they also show that the city has poor cell coverage and that would-be residents are aware of the fact.

I don’t really use calendaring all that much, but when I do, I use org-mode agenda in emacs, which seems to do all the stuff that he’s complaining about not having. It does a lot more than I use.

That being said, I get that that’s probably not what he’s after if he’s not an emacs user.

You can buy discs online.

Yes. I wouldn’t be preemptively worried about it, though.

Your scan is going to try to read and maybe write each sector and see if the drive returns an error for that operation. In theory, the adapter could respond with a read or write error even if a read or write worked or even return some kind of bogus data instead of an error.

But I wouldn’t expect this to likely actually arise or be particularly worried about the prospect. It’s sort of a “could my grocery store checkout counter person murder me” thing. Theoretically yes, but I wouldn’t worry about it unless I had some reason to believe that that was the case.

I mean, you can probably create something akin to a god, but I don’t see as to whether it being open source or not would change that.

I don’t really have a problem with this – I think that it’s rarely in a consumer’s interest to choose a locked phone. Buying a locked phone basically means that you’re getting a loan to pay for hardware that you pay back with a higher service price. But I’d point out that:

• You can get unlocked phones and service now. I do. There are some privacy benefits to doing so – my cell provider doesn’t know who I am (though they could maybe infer it from usage patterns of their network and statistical analysis). It’s not a lack of unlocked service that’s at issue. To do this, Congress is basically arguing that the American consumer is just making a bad decision to purchase a plan-combined-with-a-locked-phone and forcing them not to do so.

• Consumers will pay more for cell phones up front. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – it maybe makes the carrier market more competitive to not have a large portion of consumers locked to one provider. But there are also some benefits to having the carrier selecting cell phones that they offer in that the provider is probably in a better position to evaluate what phone manufacturers have on offer in terms of things like failure rates than do consumers.

I mean, if you want to play a game made by volunteers, that’s where Team Fortress came from.

There originally was the Quake-based Team Fortress mod.

There was Weapons Factory for Quake II, which was similar.

The TF team was hired by Valve to do the confusingly-named Team Fortress Classic for Valve’s Half-Life, itself based on Quake II.

And Valve did Team Fortress 2.