Alternative downloads exist. You can find torrents, and match checksums against the HF downloads, but there are also mirrors and clones right there in HF which you can download without even having to log in.
Haven't played Obra Dinn yet (it's on my list of games to play together with my wife), but anything by its developer Lucas Pope is a masterpiece. Papers Please, while it infuriated me at times (apparently I suck at following rules and spotting differences) was just amazing. Available on mobile and PC.
I would love to play that! I love the idea of the Playdate but with a Switch that is gathering dust, I don't think I can convince my wife to let me get another handheld :')
Hearthstone (while not web-based) is a deck building game that you play against others and you can only communicate with a small set of inoffensive phrases that cover broad sentiments. Makes multiplayer endurable, and you can turn them off if you like.
Same generation, very insightful. Seeing the old covers makes me remember for a second what it was like to be 10 years old again. Scoring some of those at a school bookmobile was like Christmas. I remember learning about them on a PBS children's book show and being captivated by the idea and implications. I already loved books and the new dimension was fresh, along with D&D. Watching that stuff turn into the video games of today has been quite amazing.
In the FPS space, there used to be only three games worth modding for: Quake, Unreal Tournament, Half Life. You could make a mod back then and get tons of press and players if you could follow through. I was interviewed in popular gaming websites! The games themselves were quite simple graphically so anyone with a drip of talent, time, and motivation could contribute. That specific environment doesn't exist anymore. There are so many games now, it's an ocean, developers have exerted more control over their games, and the talent required to create content for FPS games is too high a bar now.
I loved the mods for the holy trifecta: Quake 3, Unreal Tournament, and Half Life. I consider it the golden age of online gaming. I also spent a lot of time on IRC servers chatting with developers (eventually joining a team myself which lead me to my current career as a developer). My favorite was for Weapons Factory, which was a popular Quake 2 mod at the time. The old dev team moved on with their lives so the community took over...and it was actually released and was even better than the first. High quality, with tons of cool maps, and for an active community of maybe 1000 people? Insane.
Yeah exactly, and the golden age of modding, at least for FPS games. In a few years the engine evolves to something so advanced that only professionals can work on them. I consider HL2 the last moddable engine by the commoners. After that you gotta be a professional or someone with the patience of a saint to mod an FPS engine.
And nowadays they mostly use UE and Unity anyway. Only some of the boomer shooters are moddable.
