feltmonkey

Yeah, none of them are good in any conventional understanding of the word. The question with the EDF games is whether you are the kind of person who can enjoy them anyway.

I would also argue that you don't ever need to play more than one EDF game in your life. I say this as someone who, for reasons I don't begin to understand, owns about a dozen of them, across multiple formats.

I've been interested in UFO 50 for a while. It sounds interesting. Quite a few of the games were made by Derek Yu, if anyone is a Spelunky fan.

The thing that has stopped me so far is that I'm aware that you can get basically the same experience by getting one of those retro handheld emulation machines and just playing some games on a system you never owned. My UFO 50 is a PC Engine emulator.

I've never played any of them. Do I start with 1+2 or jump straight to 3+4?

They're both as good as each other in my opinion. There is no reason to play 1+2 first except if you look at the soundtrack and desperately want to hear those songs while your skate man scrapes his face along the tarmac. If you have Game Pass, just go straight to 3+4 I would say. You effectively already own it.

Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3+4 is an amazing day 1 giveaway. It's so good, even if they have changed the structure of THPS 4 quite a bit.

Felt is a spectacular painter, and I always felt anything requiring huge amounts of dexterity and craft might be safe for a long time, but AI accelerated robotics isn't far from ruining even non-digital creative areas now.

First of all, thank you, that's very kind of you to say. I think it will be a while before mini-painting is automated, but it probably will be possible eventually with some form of robotics. It does effect my work a bit too, already, in that people assume that photos of minis are AI for some reason. There have been accusations of photos being touched-up with Photoshop for years, but recently I've seen someone very confidently proclaim that images of miniatures I've seen in the flesh (plastic?) were AI because the paintjob wasn't possible, as the artist had painted bags under the eyes. Also, earlier this year someone on Instagram was posting AI images of models in amongst their actual models they had painted, without flagging them as AI, presumably to bulk out their Instagram feed and satisfy the relentless hunger for new content that the algorithms create.