For me it’s first person puzzle games. I can think of maybe a dozen off the top of my head that came out in the last decade. I especially enjoy when they’re open world. The ability to just quit a puzzle that’s stumped you and go try something else for a little bit is incredibly refreshing.
First-person shooters, the way they were made in the 6th and 7th gens. A campaign, probably co-op, probably with split-screen or LAN, with some versus multiplayer that repurposed some slightly-remixed locations from the campaign that you can play with approximately 4-8 players. That’s all you need. Sometimes we still get some great FPS campaigns, like Half-Life: Alyx, but I haven’t really gotten the kind of co-op or versus multiplayer I’ve been looking for for over a decade. Not everything needs to be a live service. It can be a flash in the pan multiplayer that’s so good that you break it out when you have a few friends over or in a Discord call. Not every multiplayer FPS needs to be an e-sport with an online population of tens of thousands of players to matchmake with in ranked.
I also don’t really get racing games for me anymore. Star Wars: Episode One Racer, Burnout Revenge, and F-Zero GX truly spoke to me, and there were a few others that were close, but for the most part, if your racing game isn’t basically Mario Kart or full of real licensed cars in real places, it doesn’t get made. And the ones that aren’t Mario Kart don’t usually get split-screen multiplayer either, which is a must-have for me. I did get Trail Out in the recent past, which is very good, and there’s that game Aero GPX on the horizon to potentially give me my F-Zero fix, but the actual racing games I’m looking for are so few and far between.
Fortunately, this list used to be much longer, and all the other holdouts, like Advance Wars-esque tactics games, Resident Evil 1-esque survival horror games, Commandos-esque stealth tactics games, and a few others have all gotten their itches scratched.
What’s a 6th and 7th gen? I think I’m too PCMR to understand that
6th is GameCube/Xbox/PS2. 7th is 360/PS3.
But that was when shooters were getting worse the fastest. It’s when we started getting chest-high walls everywhere, regenerating health, auto aim, and a general slow down of the action.
I mean, a lot of my favorites were slower than Quake for sure. Faster isn’t automatically better. Regenerating health was preferable to health packs, but we also had the likes of Doom 2016 to show that it didn’t have to just be one or the other. Games like Halo 2 and 3, Call of Duty 2, 4, and Modern Warfare 2 (the first time), the Timesplitters games, the 007 games of that era (Agent Under Fire with moon gravity and Q Claw is some of the most fun you’ll have with three friends on the same couch), Half-Life 2 and its episodes, Crysis, Left 4 Dead 1 and 2; and getting into third person shooters that were of a similar design philosophy, Metal Arms, Gears of War 1-3, and the much better Star Wars Battlefronts than the ones EA put out with basically the same titles.
As for the antigrav racers you mentioned, have you checked out BallisticNG? It leans more towards Wipeout than F-Zero, but even as a huge GX fan (and looking forward to Aero GPX myself) I’ve really enjoyed it. I believe it does have splitscreen as well, though I haven’t tried it personally.
It couldn’t hurt to try it out, but I always liked F-Zero more than Wipeout. At least it looks to be as fast as F-Zero.
It’s got a variety of speed settings that increase in difficulty, and it absolutely gets fast enough for anyone lol. I like it a lot more than the actual wipeout games I’ve tried even though its mechanics are more styled after that.