Some of the stores became Micromania-Zing (owned by gamestop) which amazingly enough still exists.
Yeah, those have been primarily funko pop stores for years too. Their new games are like 20% more expensive than everyone else, and their second hand games priced like everyone else’s new.
Mike Ashley didn’t actually want a game shop, he wanted people spending £70 on each football/COD release, then buying that season’s team strip on the way out of the shop.
Ashley wants two main things out of his purchases, the brand name to slap on a web store with any head start it can give into running a business in that sector, and the retail space. Any decent retail space he wants to flip into residential property while stripping any fixtures and fittings of any value, anything else will be gone or rebooted into the lowest common denominator for that area.
They were good before (and please correct me if I’ve got this wrong) EB bought them and did a “reverse takeover”. Since that point they’ve been going downhill.
Game doesn’t exist anymore where I live, but the last thing I bought from a similar store (down to overpriced games and being mostly about merch) was a 8bitdo controller several years ago. I was there, price was not excessive, and it was slightly more convenient than having one delivered.
Beyond that… I went a couple times just to pick up a free event pokémon on 3DS, and nothing else, and I think the last actual game I got from them must have been Order of Ecclesia on the DS.
I loved the old Blizzard RTSs as a kid. I think it was SC2: Heart of the Swarm when I got a bunch of coworkers to get the game and we played together quite a bit over a month. But it reached a point where I could take them all 4v1 (we only did that once though, I didn’t want to scare them off or be a gloating asshole) and win without really breaking a sweat. I learned my build orders and my keyboard shortcuts.
I could not for the life of me break out of bronze in multiplayer.
A couple years later one of my best friends was talking shit about whooping me in SC1, and I destroyed him. But that game gave me some ideas.
I think people really enjoy the base building aspect, like all of my friends treated building bases on some level as being like Sim City.
And back in the SC1 days, battle.net was rife with “No Rush” games where you build yourself up for whatever agreed upon time limit and then go at it. Games would often be labeled as NR15 or NR20, for example.
I think one possible resolution for increasing the popularity of RTS is to take a hybrid real time approach. You can build and do things in real time, but under the hood battles and the economy operate in discrete chunks of at least several seconds. You can do something similar to Sim City where every minute or two or whatever, you get all your resources to spend, and can then spend the rest of the time focusing elsewhere.
You can make a Base Building RTS where No Rush rules are baked into the game.
There is room for RTS games to be chill and more relaxed, as opposed to the game long manic feeling that you can never do anything fast enough, and that I think is the avenue to giving RTSs some mainstream limelight.
I used to play defensively either by myself or with a friend against the computer. Most people seemed to play a rush strategy. I didn’t find much fun in that. The games were over too quick. Instead I’d simply find a difficulty where I’d last anywhere from 1-2 hours in a game, beating back the cpu while building up more defenses and progressing through the ages and technology, in the early stages of the game. Eventually I could tell I was overpowered and then moved to defeat the enemy. There was a challenge in the beginning half of the game, then just crushing! And none of that rush stuff!
I loved RTS games back in the day, played through all the Command & Conquers, Warcrafts, Starcrafts and all that, but then gradually it felt like the genre starting morphing into DotA and other games and I just sort of moved on. I was mostly single-player, though got into multiplayer later, but remember it being so fucking nerve-wracking and having to click hundreds of times a minute and trying to optimize everything, I’d be so worn out after playing. My best game I ever remembered playing was Starcraft 2, there was one match where multiple players tried ganging up on me in a FFA match, it was obvious they were coordinating, and I somehow fended them off and took the game. It wasn’t an important game or anything, but that was one of the fond memories I have from that time in my gaming life.
I think I eventually just shifted over to turn-based strategy instead and I don’t know if the genre ever really returned from DotA.
Although, if I had to think of beginner tips - knowing the keyboard shortcuts help a ton in getting familar with the game and one can use the “enter” key until you get use to it
I personally learnt by using the starting scenario of the shelter to get familiar with getting the basics of water purification, food sustainability and crafting going and camped out in the shelter and get my crafting up to scratch.
I know that I started to enjoy taking advantage of the weaker zombies in the early game and try and find a small town and try clear it out for a nice cushion to get one up to have a lot of raw material on hand, but that is more when one is more confident in the ability to handle zombies and found a style of play one enjoys
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