I love a nice long single player campaign full of story and progression as much as anyone, but I'm also an old school gamer and sometimes I like to turn my brain off and play a simple game for a quick fix of fun. Sometimes I turn to actual games from the arcade era, like Dragon Spirit: The New Legend, Blazing Star, or just straight up Gradius, but recently I've found myself playing a bunch of Crimsonland, a twin stick shooter @jeff has mentioned as a personal obsession of his and one that goes great in short survival mode bursts. I really love the way the survival mode in that game builds to absolutely unmanageable levels and the way you get to build out your perks and weapon combos along the way, in a much quicker and more compressed cycle than something like a Roguelite.
I'm sure that if this conversation gets going people will mention Roguelites, and that's fine of course, you do you, but what I'm actually looking for are the games that operate more on an arcade timescale and mechanical complexity level. Something that you can play for 5-10 minutes and feel like you've gotten a quarter or two's worth of action in, and something where you start fresh from each playthrough without the now typical Roguelite progression system. I know that there are other old school gamers on this board who like actual arcade games or arcade style games still but they don't get talked about a ton here, possibly because they feel kind of disposable and too simple to discuss. Suggestions are always welcome, though, and the great things about these kinds of games is that they are extremely low commitment. You don't have to wait for the first 2 hours of tutorial to be over for them to get good. They're good from the jump!
So...what's good for you right now?
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