ann-arcana

Queen of Burgers ๐Ÿ”

Writer, game designer, engineer, bisexual tranthing, FFXIV addict

OC: Anna Verde - Primal/Excalibur, Empyreum W12 P14

Mare: E6M76HDMVU
. . .



gamers love a fishing minigame

but they couldn't care less about a fishing game

this has been thrown into stark relief by how very little the 8-/16-bit era of fishing games is documented even slightly accurately. So many of the sites specifically for cataloging games can't even seem to agree on the titles of the games.

i guess nerds just don't give enough of a shit, so nobody bothered.

i find lately, as i explore more oddball genres and corners, this effect starts to rear its head more and more.

it pops up a lot in sports games. I mentioned one of the Ken Griffey games the other day, and it's not even the only one in the series that's just been wildly neglected. the original Ken Griffey Presents for SNES was apparently considered one of the best baseball games ever made ... but here in 2024 I can't play season mode on an emulator because of a crash bug.

there are RPGs that only released in Japan to an audience of 4 people that have thousands of words written about them, full translations, custom code buried inside emulators just to make them run better ... but here's a successful, critically regarded Nintendo published title, and it doesn't even fucking emulate properly in 2024.

Just not the right kind of nerdbait, I guess.


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in reply to @ann-arcana's post:

I'm.. kind of surprised for this. One of my favourite games of all time is dredge, which is just a fishing game with some horror.

It really, really sucks that fishing games are getting left behind like that. No doubt there are others just like them that aren't cared that much about, too, but they deserve to be preserved just as any other game or piece of art does.

I feel like Dredge is kinda further proof of the theory though: they couldn't get attention to their fishing game without throwing out some Lovecraft nerdbait.

They're not even the only one who went that route on the Steam store.

It's just so weird, especially with this "wholesome games" dogwhistly weirdness lately, that no one's been able to do just "stardew valley but it's all fishing", or even seemingly had the thought.