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hi i'm shane i'm your biggest fan, i have been watching you ever since your zp peggle video which was *casually searches for the video to see how many years ago that was* 13 years ago holy crap! anyway i stopped watching you for a long while after you was not allowed to swear because a yahtzee video without swearing is like sex without an orgasm useless. I know you probably don't read this but i'm just trying to say how happy you make me every time i watch your videos. also i have a new suggestion so i know you have your own names for certain games like "spunk gargle wee wee" for first person shooters or "Jiminy cock throat" for open world games but how about a new one called "poo poo wee stinky fart bollock plop" which could refer to games that eeerm i don't know but it would be funny if you called a game "poo poo wee stinky fart bollock plop" maybe that's what you can call all these time loop games or card battling games or games that try to be all artistic and deep but really are about as complex as an episode of barny the dinosaur.
And then you have the Yakuza/ Like a Dragon series, where you don't so much play as a dad so much as a middle aged man who acts as a largely absent adult figure while faffing about. The uncle game.
Dad games is just becoming common nomenclature for chill games you can walk away from whatever to do other things. Separated from cozy, it seems, by 1:30 and more mature aesthetics. In short good. You should be proud of yourself for growing into more mature games that allow you the space to have a life while getting many hours in.
I'm 20 years old, Don't play SIM games but I'm largely invested in playing narrative city builders, Like Frostpunk, Would've played Animal Crossing if it had a good story. You either have downed something that grew your mental age to oblivion..... Or you're a fan of repetition and the slow process for efficiency.
You're basically describing the Odyssey. Odysseus is a dad who goes through many stages, including the Hero Dad (in the Trojan War), the Sad Dad (during his journey back home), and the Hairy Dad (when he is finally home). Meanwhile, his son Telemachus is trying to get out from under Odysseus' shadow, to become a hero in his own right.
Which of course means that our final dad form is probably the Odysseus from Tennyson's poem Ulysses, where he is at the end of his life, proud of his son but unable to relate to him, and facing years of boredom and decay, sets off on one final great adventure. Come, my friends, 'T is not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
@@fruitshuit This would work in perfect unison with Yahtzee's old idea about "leveling down". Having an RPG character start off as strong, and gradually become weaker, making the game more difficult, as the player becomes more skilled.
Ironically we have never really gotten a game that has brought the Odyssey to life despite it being a public domain free to use story. I really want it to get something on the level of Black Myth.
I think the most important aspect of Dad games is that they tend to let the player sort of hop over the truly difficult part of doing the thing and get to the interesting bit that very few people actually get to do. Just driving the truck for somebody else sucks, there's a lot of futility in the trucking business. But the game, totally unlike the real world, says oh, here's a loan for 1.5 million so that you can buy all the trucks and become the boss of trucking making all the decisions, minus any meaningful stress. SimCity and Cities Skylines allow you to casually decide where the highway goes, like Robert Moses, minus the hard part where you sell your soul to Satan for the power to do all that. They most often take something fun, but unprofitable in the real world, and make it both fun and profitable. I've never seen a game where you have to haggle, or get into a "race to the bottom" price war with a competitor that suddenly makes the business unviable unless maybe you try to do too much work in too few hours, for years on end. Instead, somebody pays you $100 to power wash their grill, which is an absurd price you'd never actually pay to a powerwashing guy for that job. That makes it fun. If these games were truly realistic, people wouldn't play them as much. They're almost always stunningly fantastical to the point of farce in certain crucial areas, like your access to capital, and that is the key to their appeal.
They're games that feel like work, but you're actually rewarded for your effort. The fact that this is a fantasy that so many people in our day and age yearn for, is the most damning indictment of our society that I could possibly imagine.
Hardspace Shipbreaker is like, "here's a horrifying debt in a dystopian capitalist society, it'll take you nearly half a year of 15 minute workdays to pay off!"
There is something darkly humorous about the fact that a large part of the fun in a Dad Game is "but I don't have to worry about the money, I just have to do the job"
8:00 You joke, but there is definitely a story out there about feeling abandoned by one's children and trying to find meaning to the time who remains outside of it.
I once read a YT comment about a centennial (is that how you write that word) grandma that felt like the world had moved on without her. Sounds depressing but would make for a great game probably
Add in a sci-fi twist of extra long lifespans. Your kids have their own grandkids, you and your wife decided to split after 2 100 years together for a few years to shake things a bit and here you are, going to some asteroid mining mission to recall your youth after your checklist of a life ran out of ink, but not of paper. You still have decades to spare, maybe even another century, but you've already planted a small forest, built a small town and had raised enough kids to populate it. So what next? What happens when retirement loses the point?
I like how Yahtzee's "dad games" shorthand for sims focused on very mundane activities spiraled into an entire theory of video game history. Ramblomatic indeed!
I like to believe he's fully aware how thin the veil of this video is to his own arc as a man. Hes a dad now, and a husband. theres feels and corners of his heart never exercised until now...and its weird and scary to him.....(abe simpson voice) AND IT'LL HAPPEN TO YOUUUUUUU
That is true, in his earlier years he was a firebrand that had his pulse on everything that displeased him and also is a creative font in being scathing. Now some of his opinions has reversed. One of them being how he once complained about the endless payment to useless goals to basically including that sort of thing is Starstruck Vagabond even if he does make it so that that Fixbot is basically there after you have settled into the routine of Starstruck Vagabond (which means you are paying money to bypass tedium).
Having unloaded pallets at a grocery store at 2am for four years, moving shipping containers onto and off of my ship in Star Citizen with a robot folklift is actually pretty zen and being able to decide which contracts i take and where they go is a level of control I could never dream of having in real life shipping.
@@fosty. I tried the demo. Thought it was gonna be a blast. But i really just wanted to play space engineers and/or eurotruck simulator2 the entire time. It just felt like a weird in between game. Not as much freedom as in space engineers. And not really driving like in ETS2. But i guess if you can get past the longing for games that you already know. And embrace Star Trucker for what it is. It's probably a lot of fun on it's own.
Star trucker is quite fun, glad you can adjust the difficulty to what parts of the game you enjoy, cause those oxygen filters are such a pain sometimes. It's my space companion to Snowrunner and I'm pretty happy hanging out with my baby and space trucking!
"This is stupid and pointless" was my internal monologue for 12+ hours of Crime Scene Cleaner. Happily looking forward to the DLC so I can complain to myself some more.
Like god damn it, even a monkey could do this job, I have a degree, I should have been playing the forensic investigator but here I am mopping up blood all day.
Shipbreaker did that for me. I rec'd it to all my adult friends with ADHD. Cut shit apart and sort it! IN SPACE! Dozens of hours into that insanely pointless thing.
My guess is "Martyr Dad" where old men fulfill their fantasy of going out in a bright blaze of glory holding off 100 baddies for their family/clan to escape. How you milk a single combat section into 40 hours with DLCs and micro-transaction I leave to the executive ghouls, but I believe they can do it.
I thought that was part of the Hairy Dad. We don't want to see ourselves old, but we want to see our children succeed. We know we are not the heroes our kids might see us as, but hope they will be.
I don't think we will ever get to Martyr Dad, because even old men hate the fact that they are old. Unlike in movies, games don't have to deal with the actors becoming visibly geriatric. My guess is that gaming stops aging legacy characters around the 40s yr mark
My username comes from creating a GameFAQs account to post a FAQ for Railroad Tycoon II...way back on March 24, 2000. I turned 23 that summer. We are all senior citizens who used to be cool.
I think the progression of Geralt from "idealistic" (in the bad ends) fellow who has sex with anything to cynical man to dad with beard is a pretty good example.
You don't need cards in the third one as the options no longer exceed the number of your fingers. Geralt didn't change in that aspect, he still fancies a romp every now and then, even after sealing the deal with either sorceress
@@bottomlefto That's what makes Geralt relatable to older guys. It's not that we don't still enjoy a good tumble, it's that we can't do it as often or as enthusiastically as in the good old days. But when things are just right, "well damn, I still got it." I felt that energy when Geralt and Keira Metz had a good romp in the swamps of Velen (insert your own joke about referring to Keira's lady bits as "the swamps of Velen" here.)
@@parkerdixon-word6295 specially because Geralt in W3 has some huge divorced dad energy. with Triss it's about discovering a new love in a (metaphorically) younger woman, and with Yennefer it has this weird feeling of being forced to be with someone that you hate just because of the kids, but still trying to keep the spark alive. and then in the DLCs the game feels like life after the kids go to college and you enjoy a nice mid-life crisis by seeking new adventure by yourself without responsibilities, kids, or wives.
I love me some dad games! Its funny you got Euro Truck Sim 2 as a joke - a friend of mine bought me Bus Simulator as a joke present one christmas, and i ended up playing the heck out of it, then trying American Truck Simulator since i was more into American road trips. 719 hours of it later, its now my most played game of all time!
If I had a nickel for everyone I convinced to try ATS or ETS2 during the early days of the pandemic, I probably could've bought one of the map DLCs with them. Lotta folks get hooked (I have over 2,400 hours in ATS and schedule work vacations around the release of new states.)
@@SimuLord When its on sale (for like a fiver - madness!) i often buy copies of it for my friends to coax them into trying it. I feel like games like Star Trucker and Microsoft Flight Simulator have spoiled me a bit though - the freedom to walk around, exit your truck and press actual buttons in Star Trucker mixed with the visual fidelity and 1:1 world scale of MSFS has left ATS feeling tired and old. They keep adding DLC, and i keep buying it, but the core game sorely needs updating visually, and in terms of what you can do in it.
@@andrewhickinbottom1051 I disagree on the grounds that ATS knows what it is and sticks to what it does best-you'll spend at least 95 percent of a gameplay session on the road actually driving (and 1:1 world scale is great if you're moving at the speed of a jet airplane but it's Desert Bus if you do it on the road.) ATS has, post-pandemic, become my after-work wind-down game because I can drive from Seattle to Houston in two-plus hours and make some progress on a podcast or audiobook. It doesn't try to do more than it can do well.
I actually went all out with a steering wheel, shifter, and pedals (WITH a clutch) and discovered ETS2 and ATS are considerably more interesting that way. It goes a long with my flight yoke in my dad-game accessories.
As a former (and sometimes still) trucker, I always wondered why anyone would want to play a game about my shit job. That said I knew other truckers that would play Truck Simulator in their off time, and I would play Elite Dangerous and never fight just be a more fancy trucker in space so I suppose I actually do understand.
Because those games skip all the shitty part of the job and what's left is just driving. It's almost zen, with the exception of that one goddamn company with a narrow gate.
I worked for 15 years on a farm, but got quite a kick out of Farm Simulator. When you fuck up and the *GAME OVER* screen appears, you're not making sure your life insurance is in order (so your family doesn't end up on the street) before tying a noose down the shed. When the tractor shits itself, instead of spending thousands of dollars, waiting days or weeks for the part to arrive, then sitting under the damn thing in grease and oil in 38 degree sun and 95% humidity (serious, fuck Queensland with razor wire), it's a right-click and a cheerful _ka-ching_ noise to fix it. You don't have the tax man, bank manager, or female employee the government forced you to hire, hovering over your head waiting for one fuck-up to fine or jail you. These are the examples I could think of in 10 seconds. I could think of _hundreds_ more given the time.
@@throwaway6478 Also one of the reasons Flight Simulator is so popular. Anyone with a joystick can hop into an A320 flight deck and play airline pilot, while in reality, you'd be a quarter of a million in debt before you get your first chance at the right seat of one of those things.
You know what character type would fit in fine with the aesthetic of granddad games? Wizards, classic style with pointy hats. Gimme a game where I’m Merlin trying desperately to aim the knights of the round table in vaguely the right direction and away from the weird almost anime type crap they’re prone to. Maybe tell them that killing this green knight won’t prevent him from inflicting the same wound on you as he said.
That's like herding cats, nobody ever does what they're told to, and you can't keep them away from the off-limits stuff. I think it would end up like a Dishonored game, where at the end it calculates how badly you mismanaged things and how many of the consequences will be permanent threats to your world.
Now I'm thinking of a colony sim type game where you're the wizard advisor to a young prince/hero Chosen One type who keeps going off on quests, and you have to figure out what to do with all the princesses, widowed dragons, out-of-work minions of evil sorcerors, etc that he keeps bringing back.
@@burgundian-peanuts I mean, it was literally his job to find the single minuscule flaw amidst a sea of perfectly good values. If that's not his journalistic style in a nutshell, I don't know what is.
Constantly seeing a new dataset come in and just KNOWING something is going to be wrong with it before you even open it despite how much effort you've put into showing the people providing it to you on how to get it right does help instill the baseline level of contempt he has for everything around him.
I'm honestly all for Atreus becoming an adult learning to balance being on his own while also holding his old man dear to his life. I also want to have the satisfaction of seeing Atreus be a badass as an adult that's nearly equal that of his father.
I have a hot take, I think Death Stranding is a type of Dad Game, in at least the whole "delivery" aspect part. Like Hardspace, you're given more complex tasks but also improved tools to deal with them over time, and that tickles a part of my brain that enjoys this genre. Also you take care of a baby.
@@meapickleHonestly I say give it a shot. The themes aren't too hard to understand really. Someone did something (you find out later) that made the cycle of life broken, which means ghosts, time accelerating rain, and if a big ghost gets someone an antimatter reaction goes off.
This is the first video I've seen in a long time that acknowledges how the original God of War had emotional depth post God of 4 release. Calling it a "sad dad" game fits incredibly well, especially if you pay attention to the story within it. Respect.
@@addi543 Even then, the times Kratos initiated a fight instead of someone telling him to bring it could be counted on one hand. People just kept getting in his way and wanted to kill him. I would know this having played every game in the series.
4x seems to be an underlooked genre of dad game. It has the slow steady work like city-builders, the mundane repetition of making sure things tick along well, interspersed with sudden and horrible violence as everything tries to eat you for doing well. Glasses-Dad? Heck I still remember after many moons, the anguished cry of my dad yelling "cheating bastard computer" when I was a lad.
In general I'd call Grand Strategy games dad games, as they're indulging in many dude's fantasies of being a king/ruler/general and making something of the state you control.
Eventually in life, your satisfaction with watching a head explode goes down and your satisfaction with restoring order to a system under your responsibility that has fallen to chaos goes up. Pat from Polygon did a pretty good dad game round up.
I'm about to be a 1st time father, due in 5 months. I'm 32. The part about "passing the torch; a sacrifice made over a very long time-scale" has given me great insight and perspective on how I'm going to view raising them. Didn't expect that. Thanks Yahtz.
I mean that’s basically all of human history up until this point, nominally speaking each generation did the things they did in the hopes that their descendants would be better off than them. Kind of ironic given how newer generations will be worse off the. Us.
Good luck. Remember that your kids should always strive to outshine their old man, even when they want to be just like dad. I remember seeing the pride on my grandfather's face when I became a member of the Air Force like he had decades prior. The torch had been passed and the old timer could rest easy. You'll get to enjoy that exchange from the other side.
I suspect in ten to twenty years, we're gonna have a wave of "last hurrah" games, basically the equivalent of "old men do one last bank job" movies. Hopefully one and done lega-sequels where the old dads do one last adventure and definitively die, with their kids being... there in some capacity. Look, I'm not an aging game dev; they'll figure it out when it soothes their nostalgia, K?
@@fawfulmark2 GTA 5 is also a "last hurrah" game imo. Michael is bored in retirement & Trevor is restless at the top of his trash heap. Add in Franklin being on the come-up, and you've got the perfect blend of Sad Dad & Last Hurrah, with all the wacky GTA shenanigans thrown in to sweeten the deal
As a Dad in my 40s, I've actually given a lot of thought to this subject. I went through all the phazes, both in games and in life, which you illustrated here. Now at the end of my 'Hairy Dad' phase, watching my girls preparing to enter adulthood, I find myself less drawn to games where I directly or overtly act, or give orders which are precisely carried out, and more and more drawn to games wherein I give 'suggestions' or broad goals, and let the emergent gameplay of modern simulations-as-games evolve, often in direct contrast to my own goals. Games where I build something up, but then AI has to live in it, such as Oxygen Not Included or any of the various Tycoon flavored games. Knowing that my role as Dad is changing, yet again, and that I'm transitioning from the Directorial phase to the Advisorial phase, has affected my gaming as much as it's affecting my parenting. The Grey (or Gray, if you prefer) Dad Phase. Or Pre-Grandad. With the ever accelerating pace of AI development, I feel like the next few decades will be good to me, as a gamer, as I first suggest how the AI should proceed, then watch as it does it on it's own, with only token deference to me. Eventually, the games will play themselves, as I drool on myself in a corner, as it should be.
After hearing Yahtzee's poetry I was reminded of this quote from Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy: “Vogon poetry is of course, the third worst in the universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their poet master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning" four of his audience died of internal haemorrhaging and the president of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos was reported to have been "disappointed" by the poem's reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his 12-book epic entitled "My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles" when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save humanity, leapt straight up through his neck and throttled his brain. The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paul Neil Milne Johnstone of Redbridge, in the destruction of the planet Earth. Vogon poetry is mild by comparison.”
The version I knew was Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings. Weird what things stick with you. Edit: just read up on it and Paul is a real person who didn't want to be known, TIL!
This probably explains the prolific rise of the "survival" games which are mostly about building a nice home to live in, and figuring out which table goes best with the carpet.
I remember becoming a dad game consumer after getting my ass kicked in the original Modern Warfare 3. I could get good at it like I did for the previous yearly CODs, but I couldn't be bothered. My adult responsibilities were piling up, and I didn't want to spend my precious adult minutes learning the meta. Nowadays I mostly play chill, low-investment games
I use the term "Sad Dad Redemption" to describe any game that feels like you're gonna die in the end, regardless of if you do. Because it seems most games that kill off the player star a middle aged man with emotional baggage. The Last of Us, LISA the Painful, and Disco Elysium are my main examples of this.
And then there's the Step-Dad Game, which is the one that's so edgy, violent, and over-the-top that your dad doesn't let you play it, but that cool new dude your mom is seeing brings it over as a gift to keep you distracted for a few hours.
If Kratos wants a Christmas card, does that mean he's finished off killing all the pagan deities and decided he was cool with the Semitic God who died to mortal hands, but got better.
the most logical next stepwould be granddad games games in which you are literally a mentor figure, not only guiding a younger character through the world but effectively doing so only to make their dreams come true the partner figure is the sole focus of attention while you are always just hanging around making sure they make good choices and don't attract the wrong kind of crowd as such, it would almost feel a little but like we're coming full circle as your essentially playing a management game like sim city or rollercoaster tycoon, with the big difference being that you're managing a pupil figure into becoming a self sufficient human being rather than managing a city/park into becoming a self sufficient entity
As someone entering into said 'mom' demographic, I feel that it's cozy games in general that appeal to moms, but the romance-centric farming sims, especially ones with magical/witch-y elements, that seem to be the big winners. I say this while also wanting to get the new Dragon Ball game, so your mileage may vary per person.
Dishonored could also fall into the hairy dad category, and Dishonored 2 literally gives you a choice about whether to play as the hairy dad or the daughter of hairy dad.
And so I learned that me and my friends at 10-14yo were sort of kiddads, as we all played Theme Park, Theme Hospital, Railroad Tycoon, Airline Tycoon, SimCity...
If nothing else, this made me realize that I've been a spiritual dad all my life, what with not having had a console since I got my first PC and playing the heck out of the original Sim City. Even one of my favourite Mega Drive games was Genghis Khan II.
Funnily enough, it was the SNES version of the first SimCity that started the throughline that led to me becoming a PC gamer when the graphics tech of PC finally caught up to consoles and arcade games with the invention of the dedicated GPU in the late '90s and game devs figuring out how to take advantage of them in the early aughts. SimCity, Aerobiz, and the PlayStation port of Civ 2 were my foundation games.
About the bit about seeing your kid as the Hero, I wanna bring up Dragon Quest 5. It starts with the protag as a 5 year old who looks up to his own hero dad, but over several timeskips he grows up, gets married, and has his own kids. On top of that, you'd think the protagonist can wear the legendary hero stuff that only the legendary hero can equip, but you never can. The twist is that the legendary hero is your Son, and your job in the end is to guide him to the big evil so he can slay it. It's the best Dragon Quest, I think.
This was a great video. I found myself re-downloading Elite: Dangerous recently to unwind from my job driving around the USA fixing factory machines...
@@lazygamemaster748 Totally agree. On my last big gaming session on it, I took a Dolphin to the centre of the galaxy and back. It was Hella draining to do so, but I had the time to do it and I did get into some kinda mediative state with it. Just me, my nav computer, and the galaxy.
"There are also several examples of pseudo-hairy dads, characters who exude hairy dad energy without having to escort children or have the full dad experience." Gale of Waterdeep.
I would say Thancred Waters but he basically acts as Minfilia’s father who is very estranged and is not fond of that, and later on is even more of a father to Ryne and literally has to choose between saving Minfilia of the Source and whom he later calls Ryne.
Also, for some reason, there is a metaphorical court battle on who will take custody of Ryne, which climaxes into the Thancred/Ran’jit battle where both fatherlike figures of Ryne are battling to see who will take Ryne, amidst other things. Them serving similar roles also figures in the tenth Eden raid battle of the Fatebreaker.
My first dad game was Football Manager on the ZX Spectrum, and I still play the current Football Manager series 40 years later. I'm also a bit fond of the Truck and Train sim games of which there where also examples on the Speccy, Brighton Belle and Evening Star for the train fans and Juggernaut for driving lorries.
@@guguy00 Meh, whenever FM or CM changed to a new engine in the past, it was time to skip a year or two till they fixed the mess. So same old story really. I still like CM 01-02.
Hearing Yahtzee mention the funny web vide and knowing it’s the Let’s Drown Out of eurotruck simulator with Gabe, and I remember watching it when it came out, and it’s making me realize I was probably watching Yahtzee when I was a little too young.
I distinctly remember in that video Yahtzee almost missed an exit, proceed to cut across 3 three lanes with his huge container truck causing multiple car crashes, much to Gabe's amusement.
The most impressive feat in all of Semi-Ramblomatic will forever be the fact that Yahtzee remembered Inversion. Because I think even the devs forgot they made it. Like a moist, thumping void in their memories.
I saw a Parking Lot Simulator game and my first thought is "That's stupid. What do you even do?". Then I thought about it for a few more seconds and realized how many things you can do in it. From the building, traffic flow, ticket pricing, to plumbing, electricity, fire escape. You can actually do a lot, and it got me excited.
New idea Hairy Granddad game, You play as Santa Claus bringing joy to all the children of the world while saving your granddaughter Holly, and getting over your dislike of your son in law Jack Frost
Yahtz, they gave Shadow a gun because Sonic Team got THOUSANDS of fan mail asking for it. This is real, the backstory behind Shadow the Hedgehog is that SEGA would get constant requests from kids to give Sonic a gun. They thought Sonic with a gun would feel completely wrong, so they gave it to Shadow, which was still pretty silly but is a bit easier to swallow. That wasn’t them desperately trying anything to remain on top, the people BEGGED for it. And honestly, a game that combines the movement of Sonic with the gunplay of a high speed FPS like Quake could’ve actually ruled! A bit silly, yeah, but genuinely compare Quake speedruns to Sonic gameplay and you can see an interesting combination there.
And to Shadow the Hedgehog’s credit, it does have a unique vibe some people would go back for simply because it was an edgy Sonic the Hedgehog game. Most fans can’t claim that for most of the 3d games.
as someone that grew up watching your content and now has a child of my own I can confidently say getting into dad games has been a very strange but fulfilling enjoyment. what gets me is that I've always had an affinity for them but now I really understand the difference between a game and a dad game, something like forever winter that feels ridiculously tedious and slow brings me extreme amounts of joy next to something like transport Tycoon. it's incredible how these games have evolved and I for one hope they stay relevant.
*me, still playing sim city 3000 to this day* *me, being excited and buying Star Trucker while completely ignoring space marine 2* 'you merely adopted the dad-game. I was born in it, molded by it'
The fact that Dishonored did not come up at all is disappointing. That is the epitome of these games, given you go from protecting Emily in one game as the Princess, to being her dad in the second, and, if the player's actually smart, playing as her. Even better, Corvo trained HER well enough that she's in control almost the entire time after the first level, to the point of being so in control she can destroy the lives of her enemies without killing them.
What I remember of Yahtz's review of the first one was him getting awfully snippy about it not being Thief 2: But Again And Better. Dude loved Thief 2; fine. But I think he expected something he couldn't get and never forgave the series for such a betrayal.
@@AnotherCraig To be fair, Game 1 does NOT put its best foot forward. The game has massive changes to the world and people...but ONLY after Level 2. And worse yet, the first half of Level 3 is a repeat of Level 2's first half, meaning it's easy to miss the changes as you know where to go and can rush through. Game 2 did this far better by allowing the intro level to hit you with some stuff, so it can change Level 2 and even offered you an alternative, no powers, run right from the start, on top of Corvo and Emily haven't unique styles to their powers and some moves(Corvo is stronger and can break some doors down Emily can't without an upgrade, but Emily can move quicker and parkour easier). It's a game that asks for you to replay it, without making that obvious, which I think hurt it a lot with people who saw it as a 9 hour game, instead of the, at minimum 18 hour game it was. Game 2 did better in all respects there, and even added the 'should be industry standard by now', new game plus mode.
@@SageofStarsDishonored and Thief also have very different premises, though they both fit in "stealth genre." In the original Thief games (1, metal age) you're not a combatant. Yes you can knock people out and hide them, but if you ever actually got caught out your option is to run and hide, because you will get handled. If there's more than one guard? You die if you don't leg it. Dishonored doesn't do that. There is always the option for violence if things go south. With enough practice you can competently murder-machine your way through and not even carry the pretense of subtlety. It's a distinction that's difficult to grasp, how dissimilar the games are played. One doesn't tend to realize how being able to fight your way from a situation changes how you approach things over when that option isn't there. Thief and Thief 2 are practices in patience and study. Dishonored (and Arkhane's Prey,) are predator sims. You can opt for nonviolence, but the *capacity* for it remains.
This video has really made me look forward to replaying the original and enjoying the remake! I've always been fascinated how the town of Silent Hill has some unique similarities to the Catholic Church and other religious groups. You ARE a SH wizard, Mike. 👏
A very well thought out and presented premise. I’m a hairy dad and I never played any of the hairy dad games but I grew my beard about the same time that all of those games came out. What a weird coincidence
As a dad, first born 2005, I wasn't keeping up much on modern games as I was raising my kid. But it occured to me of the few big name games I've played, I have definitely played those Hairy Dad games mentioned lol. Wow. I didn't even realize I had been pulled to those games. I played BioShock and loved it and then went straight to BioShock Infinite. I loved the Telltale Walking Dead games with Clementine. Last of Us one was a great experience, though the ending lost me a bit. For other not entirely inevitable events many dads face, we have It Takes Two. And for the really old dads/lads, To The Moon can be a tear jerker we relate more and more to.
I sat across from a woman on the commuter rail this morning playing Animal Crossing on a Nintendo Switch. And my love of farming/cozy games is a direct "my girlfriend got me into Stardew Valley" consequence. Reminds me of that old deodorant commercial: "Strong enough for a man but made for a woman."
I love how in Mario Odyssey you try to crash Bowser and Peach's wedding and then when you save her, she just ditches both men to go on an adventure on her own.
Appreciate all the new folks signing up for the Patreon over the last week as we prep for our one-year anniversary in November! Thanks for supporting our work and letting us create the things we want to make over the last year. www.patreon.com/SecondWindGroup
hi i'm shane i'm your biggest fan, i have been watching you ever since your zp peggle video which was *casually searches for the video to see how many years ago that was* 13 years ago holy crap!
anyway i stopped watching you for a long while after you was not allowed to swear because a yahtzee video without swearing is like sex without an orgasm useless.
I know you probably don't read this but i'm just trying to say how happy you make me every time i watch your videos.
also i have a new suggestion so i know you have your own names for certain games like "spunk gargle wee wee" for first person shooters or "Jiminy cock throat" for open world games but how about a new one called "poo poo wee stinky fart bollock plop" which could refer to games that eeerm i don't know but it would be funny if you called a game "poo poo wee stinky fart bollock plop" maybe that's what you can call all these time loop games or card battling games or games that try to be all artistic and deep but really are about as complex as an episode of barny the dinosaur.
you're dead wrong about Sonic, it aging with it's audience was a good thing.
@@JokerisWild4 Have you tried any of them? I find them relaxing after a day of work, not sure why though haha
Are you sure you don't need to speak to a professional?
Onlyfans when?
And then you have the Yakuza/ Like a Dragon series, where you don't so much play as a dad so much as a middle aged man who acts as a largely absent adult figure while faffing about.
The uncle game.
Yakuza does give off major uncle energy, as in the single uncle that spends all year doing insane shit and then only comes home for Christmas
They call you Uncle Kaz, it's not subtle.
Kiryu is such an uncle.
@@d00gz_ That has to be the number 1 thing in their "RGG game's main character" checklist
Kiryu IS a dad, he's just not necessarily the best at it
They're starting to look interesting to me, and that's what really scares me.
Some sims do to me, but SimCity no longer does.
At least if you want to get in the genre has become more diverse than ever. Like Yahtzee said, it used to mostly be large vehicles simulators
@@kingsleycy3450 fair, fair.
Dad games is just becoming common nomenclature for chill games you can walk away from whatever to do other things. Separated from cozy, it seems, by 1:30 and more mature aesthetics.
In short good. You should be proud of yourself for growing into more mature games that allow you the space to have a life while getting many hours in.
I'm 20 years old, Don't play SIM games but I'm largely invested in playing narrative city builders, Like Frostpunk, Would've played Animal Crossing if it had a good story.
You either have downed something that grew your mental age to oblivion.....
Or you're a fan of repetition and the slow process for efficiency.
You're basically describing the Odyssey.
Odysseus is a dad who goes through many stages, including the Hero Dad (in the Trojan War), the Sad Dad (during his journey back home), and the Hairy Dad (when he is finally home). Meanwhile, his son Telemachus is trying to get out from under Odysseus' shadow, to become a hero in his own right.
And now I have to go listen to Epic The Musical. Again.
Which of course means that our final dad form is probably the Odysseus from Tennyson's poem Ulysses, where he is at the end of his life, proud of his son but unable to relate to him, and facing years of boredom and decay, sets off on one final great adventure.
Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
@@fruitshuit
This would work in perfect unison with Yahtzee's old idea about "leveling down". Having an RPG character start off as strong, and gradually become weaker, making the game more difficult, as the player becomes more skilled.
@@jonathanmette8348RUTHLESSNESS IS MERCY UPOK OURSELVES
Ironically we have never really gotten a game that has brought the Odyssey to life despite it being a public domain free to use story. I really want it to get something on the level of Black Myth.
I think the most important aspect of Dad games is that they tend to let the player sort of hop over the truly difficult part of doing the thing and get to the interesting bit that very few people actually get to do. Just driving the truck for somebody else sucks, there's a lot of futility in the trucking business. But the game, totally unlike the real world, says oh, here's a loan for 1.5 million so that you can buy all the trucks and become the boss of trucking making all the decisions, minus any meaningful stress.
SimCity and Cities Skylines allow you to casually decide where the highway goes, like Robert Moses, minus the hard part where you sell your soul to Satan for the power to do all that. They most often take something fun, but unprofitable in the real world, and make it both fun and profitable. I've never seen a game where you have to haggle, or get into a "race to the bottom" price war with a competitor that suddenly makes the business unviable unless maybe you try to do too much work in too few hours, for years on end. Instead, somebody pays you $100 to power wash their grill, which is an absurd price you'd never actually pay to a powerwashing guy for that job. That makes it fun.
If these games were truly realistic, people wouldn't play them as much. They're almost always stunningly fantastical to the point of farce in certain crucial areas, like your access to capital, and that is the key to their appeal.
Good observation.
They're games that feel like work, but you're actually rewarded for your effort.
The fact that this is a fantasy that so many people in our day and age yearn for, is the most damning indictment of our society that I could possibly imagine.
Hardspace Shipbreaker is like, "here's a horrifying debt in a dystopian capitalist society, it'll take you nearly half a year of 15 minute workdays to pay off!"
There is something darkly humorous about the fact that a large part of the fun in a Dad Game is "but I don't have to worry about the money, I just have to do the job"
@@silverlight6074"If you paid me properly, I'd do it for free."
😁
8:00 You joke, but there is definitely a story out there about feeling abandoned by one's children and trying to find meaning to the time who remains outside of it.
Damn. That . . . yeah that could have some serious legs.
I once read a YT comment about a centennial (is that how you write that word) grandma that felt like the world had moved on without her. Sounds depressing but would make for a great game probably
You've just described The Stillness of the Wind. A beautiful and heartbreaking game.
Add in a sci-fi twist of extra long lifespans. Your kids have their own grandkids, you and your wife decided to split after 2
100 years together for a few years to shake things a bit and here you are, going to some asteroid mining mission to recall your youth after your checklist of a life ran out of ink, but not of paper. You still have decades to spare, maybe even another century, but you've already planted a small forest, built a small town and had raised enough kids to populate it. So what next? What happens when retirement loses the point?
@@TheArklyte "Your checklist of a life ran out of ink, but not of paper," is an unfairly hard line for the youtube comments section
I like how Yahtzee's "dad games" shorthand for sims focused on very mundane activities spiraled into an entire theory of video game history. Ramblomatic indeed!
He's maturing aswell.
Fully, even.
I like to believe he's fully aware how thin the veil of this video is to his own arc as a man. Hes a dad now, and a husband. theres feels and corners of his heart never exercised until now...and its weird and scary to him.....(abe simpson voice) AND IT'LL HAPPEN TO YOUUUUUUU
That is true, in his earlier years he was a firebrand that had his pulse on everything that displeased him and also is a creative font in being scathing. Now some of his opinions has reversed. One of them being how he once complained about the endless payment to useless goals to basically including that sort of thing is Starstruck Vagabond even if he does make it so that that Fixbot is basically there after you have settled into the routine of Starstruck Vagabond (which means you are paying money to bypass tedium).
Having unloaded pallets at a grocery store at 2am for four years, moving shipping containers onto and off of my ship in Star Citizen with a robot folklift is actually pretty zen and being able to decide which contracts i take and where they go is a level of control I could never dream of having in real life shipping.
It's funny, the comment above you touches on this exact point. You don't have the real world stresses and you have power
Not to mention not having to endure the ordeal of being on the receiving end of the logistics team.
We've added "Dad Game" to our household vocabulary. My kid saw me trying Star Trucker and said, "So is this another Dad game in space?"
@@cbruce78 I'm looking forward to playing that!
@@fosty. I tried the demo. Thought it was gonna be a blast. But i really just wanted to play space engineers and/or eurotruck simulator2 the entire time. It just felt like a weird in between game. Not as much freedom as in space engineers. And not really driving like in ETS2.
But i guess if you can get past the longing for games that you already know. And embrace Star Trucker for what it is. It's probably a lot of fun on it's own.
Star trucker is quite fun, glad you can adjust the difficulty to what parts of the game you enjoy, cause those oxygen filters are such a pain sometimes.
It's my space companion to Snowrunner and I'm pretty happy hanging out with my baby and space trucking!
From Dead Space to Dad Space
"This is stupid and pointless" was my internal monologue for 12+ hours of Crime Scene Cleaner. Happily looking forward to the DLC so I can complain to myself some more.
Spoken like dad lmao.
Like god damn it, even a monkey could do this job, I have a degree, I should have been playing the forensic investigator but here I am mopping up blood all day.
@@xsanguine8 Forensic Investigator is really hard when the previous player 100 percented Crime Scene Cleaner.
Shipbreaker did that for me. I rec'd it to all my adult friends with ADHD. Cut shit apart and sort it! IN SPACE! Dozens of hours into that insanely pointless thing.
@@codyf8511 I tried Shipbreaker for a few minutes once, on PC Gamepass, then realized I'd been playing for 3 hours and amassed a massive debt.
My guess is "Martyr Dad" where old men fulfill their fantasy of going out in a bright blaze of glory holding off 100 baddies for their family/clan to escape. How you milk a single combat section into 40 hours with DLCs and micro-transaction I leave to the executive ghouls, but I believe they can do it.
I thought that was part of the Hairy Dad. We don't want to see ourselves old, but we want to see our children succeed. We know we are not the heroes our kids might see us as, but hope they will be.
I don't think we will ever get to Martyr Dad, because even old men hate the fact that they are old. Unlike in movies, games don't have to deal with the actors becoming visibly geriatric. My guess is that gaming stops aging legacy characters around the 40s yr mark
That's just Red Dead 1 isn't it?
Ah, Halo Reach
This is basically what I attribute John Wick and movie like Nobody to, middle aged men fantasizing about being dangerous before becoming family men.
So, the first example of a "dad game" Yahtzee shows while defining the term is Railroad Tycoon II...one of my dad's favorite games...
My dad was big into Tycoon games and Civilization while I was growing up. Now that I've gotten older, I've had a growing interest in Civilization...
That was one of my favorites when I was a kid
... Have I always been a dad at heart?
My username comes from creating a GameFAQs account to post a FAQ for Railroad Tycoon II...way back on March 24, 2000. I turned 23 that summer.
We are all senior citizens who used to be cool.
I am feeling called out
@@0Gumpy0yes so have I. SimCity 3000 was my jam when I was a kid. Now that I'm a hairy dad, I only appreciate it more.
I think the progression of Geralt from "idealistic" (in the bad ends) fellow who has sex with anything to cynical man to dad with beard is a pretty good example.
From collecting titty baseball cards in the first game to the 3rd mostly being about helping Ciri is a good progression to point out.
You don't need cards in the third one as the options no longer exceed the number of your fingers. Geralt didn't change in that aspect, he still fancies a romp every now and then, even after sealing the deal with either sorceress
@@bottomlefto That's what makes Geralt relatable to older guys. It's not that we don't still enjoy a good tumble, it's that we can't do it as often or as enthusiastically as in the good old days. But when things are just right, "well damn, I still got it." I felt that energy when Geralt and Keira Metz had a good romp in the swamps of Velen (insert your own joke about referring to Keira's lady bits as "the swamps of Velen" here.)
@@parkerdixon-word6295 specially because Geralt in W3 has some huge divorced dad energy. with Triss it's about discovering a new love in a (metaphorically) younger woman, and with Yennefer it has this weird feeling of being forced to be with someone that you hate just because of the kids, but still trying to keep the spark alive. and then in the DLCs the game feels like life after the kids go to college and you enjoy a nice mid-life crisis by seeking new adventure by yourself without responsibilities, kids, or wives.
@@danilooliveira6580 That's a real anti-Yenn take that I don't know if I agree with, but I respect it as an interpretation.
"Simcity is dad game".
Me as 10 year old playing simcity and rollercoaster tycoon: Holy moly these are the best games ever
I love me some dad games!
Its funny you got Euro Truck Sim 2 as a joke - a friend of mine bought me Bus Simulator as a joke present one christmas, and i ended up playing the heck out of it, then trying American Truck Simulator since i was more into American road trips. 719 hours of it later, its now my most played game of all time!
If I had a nickel for everyone I convinced to try ATS or ETS2 during the early days of the pandemic, I probably could've bought one of the map DLCs with them. Lotta folks get hooked (I have over 2,400 hours in ATS and schedule work vacations around the release of new states.)
@@SimuLord When its on sale (for like a fiver - madness!) i often buy copies of it for my friends to coax them into trying it.
I feel like games like Star Trucker and Microsoft Flight Simulator have spoiled me a bit though - the freedom to walk around, exit your truck and press actual buttons in Star Trucker mixed with the visual fidelity and 1:1 world scale of MSFS has left ATS feeling tired and old. They keep adding DLC, and i keep buying it, but the core game sorely needs updating visually, and in terms of what you can do in it.
@@andrewhickinbottom1051 I disagree on the grounds that ATS knows what it is and sticks to what it does best-you'll spend at least 95 percent of a gameplay session on the road actually driving (and 1:1 world scale is great if you're moving at the speed of a jet airplane but it's Desert Bus if you do it on the road.)
ATS has, post-pandemic, become my after-work wind-down game because I can drive from Seattle to Houston in two-plus hours and make some progress on a podcast or audiobook. It doesn't try to do more than it can do well.
I actually went all out with a steering wheel, shifter, and pedals (WITH a clutch) and discovered ETS2 and ATS are considerably more interesting that way. It goes a long with my flight yoke in my dad-game accessories.
Honourable mention : Kerbal Space Program
As a former (and sometimes still) trucker, I always wondered why anyone would want to play a game about my shit job. That said I knew other truckers that would play Truck Simulator in their off time, and I would play Elite Dangerous and never fight just be a more fancy trucker in space so I suppose I actually do understand.
Because those games skip all the shitty part of the job and what's left is just driving. It's almost zen, with the exception of that one goddamn company with a narrow gate.
I know a lot of EMTs who play truck simulator religiously. One of them even went and became a truck driver.
I worked for 15 years on a farm, but got quite a kick out of Farm Simulator. When you fuck up and the *GAME OVER* screen appears, you're not making sure your life insurance is in order (so your family doesn't end up on the street) before tying a noose down the shed. When the tractor shits itself, instead of spending thousands of dollars, waiting days or weeks for the part to arrive, then sitting under the damn thing in grease and oil in 38 degree sun and 95% humidity (serious, fuck Queensland with razor wire), it's a right-click and a cheerful _ka-ching_ noise to fix it. You don't have the tax man, bank manager, or female employee the government forced you to hire, hovering over your head waiting for one fuck-up to fine or jail you.
These are the examples I could think of in 10 seconds. I could think of _hundreds_ more given the time.
@@throwaway6478 Also one of the reasons Flight Simulator is so popular. Anyone with a joystick can hop into an A320 flight deck and play airline pilot, while in reality, you'd be a quarter of a million in debt before you get your first chance at the right seat of one of those things.
I have seen videos of truckers with a sim setup in the truck so they can play when they stop.
You know what character type would fit in fine with the aesthetic of granddad games? Wizards, classic style with pointy hats. Gimme a game where I’m Merlin trying desperately to aim the knights of the round table in vaguely the right direction and away from the weird almost anime type crap they’re prone to. Maybe tell them that killing this green knight won’t prevent him from inflicting the same wound on you as he said.
That sounds a lot like the princess raising games I've seen before, there might be a knight version of that.
That's called the "RTS and 4X" genre.
Do I get to deliver wise-sounding lectures? If so, I'm in.
That's like herding cats, nobody ever does what they're told to, and you can't keep them away from the off-limits stuff. I think it would end up like a Dishonored game, where at the end it calculates how badly you mismanaged things and how many of the consequences will be permanent threats to your world.
Now I'm thinking of a colony sim type game where you're the wizard advisor to a young prince/hero Chosen One type who keeps going off on quests, and you have to figure out what to do with all the princesses, widowed dragons, out-of-work minions of evil sorcerors, etc that he keeps bringing back.
Learning what yatz’s job before journalism explains so much
Like what?
@@burgundian-peanuts I mean, it was literally his job to find the single minuscule flaw amidst a sea of perfectly good values. If that's not his journalistic style in a nutshell, I don't know what is.
Constantly seeing a new dataset come in and just KNOWING something is going to be wrong with it before you even open it despite how much effort you've put into showing the people providing it to you on how to get it right does help instill the baseline level of contempt he has for everything around him.
My dad plays post dad games. I'm currently in college. When I first found zero punctuation he remembered the name like the name of an old friend.
@@blackwing1362 Ow. 😂
I'm honestly all for Atreus becoming an adult learning to balance being on his own while also holding his old man dear to his life. I also want to have the satisfaction of seeing Atreus be a badass as an adult that's nearly equal that of his father.
Kratos literally says in Ragnarok that if Atreus doesn’t surpass him one day, it means he failed as a father
It’s honestly kinda sweet
- So you’re telling me it’s all been about dads?
- Yep, it always was.
Thanks Yahtz.
Amazing to hear Yahtzee flex his limerick brain. Still remember fondly that one ZP full in limerick.
Which one?
@@BrunoMaricFromZagreb Wolfenstein ua-cam.com/video/zHnYFP73MKE/v-deo.html
Do you remember which ZP it was? I would like to watch it :)
@@BrunoMaricFromZagreb Wolfenstein 2009, I'm fairly sure.
I don't think it came out of nowhere. Sounds like he heard Anne Hathaway's Paparazzi song.
I have a hot take, I think Death Stranding is a type of Dad Game, in at least the whole "delivery" aspect part. Like Hardspace, you're given more complex tasks but also improved tools to deal with them over time, and that tickles a part of my brain that enjoys this genre.
Also you take care of a baby.
5/5 Would shake Jar Baby again.
Honestly, despite the fact I haven't played it, and am hesitant to play it. The game play genuinely intrigues me
@@meapickle It’s a game I wanted to like, if only to see Kojima’s weirdness unleashed. But I just couldn’t get into it. It’s really stressful.
@darthelmet1 I'm sure, but the job of being a post-apocalyptic delivery man sounds pretty good
@@meapickleHonestly I say give it a shot. The themes aren't too hard to understand really. Someone did something (you find out later) that made the cycle of life broken, which means ghosts, time accelerating rain, and if a big ghost gets someone an antimatter reaction goes off.
This is the first video I've seen in a long time that acknowledges how the original God of War had emotional depth post God of 4 release. Calling it a "sad dad" game fits incredibly well, especially if you pay attention to the story within it. Respect.
Kratos did everything out of anger and spite. God of War was never a simple hack'n'slash.
@@guy_autordie "By the gods, what have I become?"
It wasn’t until the sequels when Kratos became a “RAGH, RAGE DESTROY ZOOOOSE” caricature
@@addi543 Even then, the times Kratos initiated a fight instead of someone telling him to bring it could be counted on one hand. People just kept getting in his way and wanted to kill him. I would know this having played every game in the series.
4x seems to be an underlooked genre of dad game. It has the slow steady work like city-builders, the mundane repetition of making sure things tick along well, interspersed with sudden and horrible violence as everything tries to eat you for doing well.
Glasses-Dad?
Heck I still remember after many moons, the anguished cry of my dad yelling "cheating bastard computer" when I was a lad.
In general I'd call Grand Strategy games dad games, as they're indulging in many dude's fantasies of being a king/ruler/general and making something of the state you control.
Eventually in life, your satisfaction with watching a head explode goes down and your satisfaction with restoring order to a system under your responsibility that has fallen to chaos goes up. Pat from Polygon did a pretty good dad game round up.
And in the case of SimCity, unleashing a tornado on the order you've imparted (after saving of course)
Polygon still exists? I'm sad now.
I'm about to be a 1st time father, due in 5 months. I'm 32. The part about "passing the torch; a sacrifice made over a very long time-scale" has given me great insight and perspective on how I'm going to view raising them.
Didn't expect that. Thanks Yahtz.
Good luck, be strong, and don't let them go on social media or play Roblox.
You got this.
….Right?
I mean that’s basically all of human history up until this point, nominally speaking each generation did the things they did in the hopes that their descendants would be better off than them. Kind of ironic given how newer generations will be worse off the. Us.
Good luck.
Remember that your kids should always strive to outshine their old man, even when they want to be just like dad.
I remember seeing the pride on my grandfather's face when I became a member of the Air Force like he had decades prior. The torch had been passed and the old timer could rest easy.
You'll get to enjoy that exchange from the other side.
I suspect in ten to twenty years, we're gonna have a wave of "last hurrah" games, basically the equivalent of "old men do one last bank job" movies. Hopefully one and done lega-sequels where the old dads do one last adventure and definitively die, with their kids being... there in some capacity. Look, I'm not an aging game dev; they'll figure it out when it soothes their nostalgia, K?
IIRC Uncharted 4 essentially did that so we might be closer to that Era than you think.
@@fawfulmark2 GTA 5 is also a "last hurrah" game imo. Michael is bored in retirement & Trevor is restless at the top of his trash heap. Add in Franklin being on the come-up, and you've got the perfect blend of Sad Dad & Last Hurrah, with all the wacky GTA shenanigans thrown in to sweeten the deal
thumbnail goes hard as fuck
Daddy wants to drive the bus 🎵
@@I-QU1T-n7c The thumbnail or getting hard?
Yes! It successfully lured me into watching this video. I am very happy to discover this channel though that thumbnail
As a Dad in my 40s, I've actually given a lot of thought to this subject. I went through all the phazes, both in games and in life, which you illustrated here. Now at the end of my 'Hairy Dad' phase, watching my girls preparing to enter adulthood, I find myself less drawn to games where I directly or overtly act, or give orders which are precisely carried out, and more and more drawn to games wherein I give 'suggestions' or broad goals, and let the emergent gameplay of modern simulations-as-games evolve, often in direct contrast to my own goals. Games where I build something up, but then AI has to live in it, such as Oxygen Not Included or any of the various Tycoon flavored games. Knowing that my role as Dad is changing, yet again, and that I'm transitioning from the Directorial phase to the Advisorial phase, has affected my gaming as much as it's affecting my parenting.
The Grey (or Gray, if you prefer) Dad Phase. Or Pre-Grandad. With the ever accelerating pace of AI development, I feel like the next few decades will be good to me, as a gamer, as I first suggest how the AI should proceed, then watch as it does it on it's own, with only token deference to me. Eventually, the games will play themselves, as I drool on myself in a corner, as it should be.
If you want to enter your Screaming Dad phase, you could play Dwarf Fortress. The most "They did what, now?" of games.
@@SMTRodent That's toddler dad phase!
After hearing Yahtzee's poetry I was reminded of this quote from Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy:
“Vogon poetry is of course, the third worst in the universe.
The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their poet master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning" four of his audience died of internal haemorrhaging and the president of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off.
Grunthos was reported to have been "disappointed" by the poem's reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his 12-book epic entitled "My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles" when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save humanity, leapt straight up through his neck and throttled his brain.
The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paul Neil Milne Johnstone of Redbridge, in the destruction of the planet Earth. Vogon poetry is mild by comparison.”
The version I knew was Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings. Weird what things stick with you. Edit: just read up on it and Paul is a real person who didn't want to be known, TIL!
This probably explains the prolific rise of the "survival" games which are mostly about building a nice home to live in, and figuring out which table goes best with the carpet.
As a current truck driver I absolutely love interior decorating games. The Sims, Unpacking, Animal Crossing etc etc
I remember becoming a dad game consumer after getting my ass kicked in the original Modern Warfare 3. I could get good at it like I did for the previous yearly CODs, but I couldn't be bothered. My adult responsibilities were piling up, and I didn't want to spend my precious adult minutes learning the meta. Nowadays I mostly play chill, low-investment games
Yeah, the moment I realized that there's an army of teenagers with way more energy than me, anything truly competitive lost it's gleam to me.
I use the term "Sad Dad Redemption" to describe any game that feels like you're gonna die in the end, regardless of if you do. Because it seems most games that kill off the player star a middle aged man with emotional baggage. The Last of Us, LISA the Painful, and Disco Elysium are my main examples of this.
raphael doesn't die at the end of disco elysium
And then there's the Step-Dad Game, which is the one that's so edgy, violent, and over-the-top that your dad doesn't let you play it, but that cool new dude your mom is seeing brings it over as a gift to keep you distracted for a few hours.
Oof but accurate
The next phase is the neo dad game. When it comes full circle, both narratively and just how all trends go. Like how 90s pants are back in style
Wow the Let's Drown Out Euro Truck Simulator 2 reference at 2:40. Talk about a deep cut!
If Kratos wants a Christmas card, does that mean he's finished off killing all the pagan deities and decided he was cool with the Semitic God who died to mortal hands, but got better.
if they do it willing it takes all the fun out of it, honestly.
the most logical next stepwould be granddad games
games in which you are literally a mentor figure, not only guiding a younger character through the world but effectively doing so only to make their dreams come true
the partner figure is the sole focus of attention while you are always just hanging around making sure they make good choices and don't attract the wrong kind of crowd
as such, it would almost feel a little but like we're coming full circle as your essentially playing a management game like sim city or rollercoaster tycoon, with the big difference being that you're managing a pupil figure into becoming a self sufficient human being rather than managing a city/park into becoming a self sufficient entity
You forgot 'midlife crisis dad'.
Yup, that's me. I didn't buy a fancy car, but built an expensive sim rig to drive fancy virtual cars. Lol
Oh my god, Yahtz, the limerick in the credits just threw me all the way back to your review of Wolfenstein on the PS3
And that Rhymedown Spectacular episode about what was then known as the "new" consoles.
I want to see this but for mom games. Hint: From personal experience, it's mostly life sims, puzzles and books barely disguised as games.
'Visual Novels.' (Tries to stealthily push stack of otome games out of sight with a foot) ... I've heard they're called 'visual novels.'
@@AnotherCraig Yeah. That's what I wrote at first, but decided to put it that way to include some RPGs that can rival VNs in text quantity.
As someone entering into said 'mom' demographic, I feel that it's cozy games in general that appeal to moms, but the romance-centric farming sims, especially ones with magical/witch-y elements, that seem to be the big winners. I say this while also wanting to get the new Dragon Ball game, so your mileage may vary per person.
Don't forget about the most famous and 100 percented mom game Candy Crush
@@gabrieltavares4867 True!
Dishonored could also fall into the hairy dad category, and Dishonored 2 literally gives you a choice about whether to play as the hairy dad or the daughter of hairy dad.
There was a game called Nier where you could either be young boy or hairy dad depending on which region's version of the game you got.
@@guillermo9171 Justice for Papa Nier
@@guillermo9171honestly I believe it was rather pitiful
And so I learned that me and my friends at 10-14yo were sort of kiddads, as we all played Theme Park, Theme Hospital, Railroad Tycoon, Airline Tycoon, SimCity...
Ah yes, my fellow kids.
The ones who played Dad games from the start, because we popped out as old people.
@@Eeraschyyr 'popped out as old people' I love this!
If nothing else, this made me realize that I've been a spiritual dad all my life, what with not having had a console since I got my first PC and playing the heck out of the original Sim City. Even one of my favourite Mega Drive games was Genghis Khan II.
Funnily enough, it was the SNES version of the first SimCity that started the throughline that led to me becoming a PC gamer when the graphics tech of PC finally caught up to consoles and arcade games with the invention of the dedicated GPU in the late '90s and game devs figuring out how to take advantage of them in the early aughts. SimCity, Aerobiz, and the PlayStation port of Civ 2 were my foundation games.
I have not heard your voice in a LONG time, sir. I'm glad I found this and you again.
Came for the funny, stayed for the surprisingly insightful, professional and well articulated analysis. O.o
About the bit about seeing your kid as the Hero, I wanna bring up Dragon Quest 5. It starts with the protag as a 5 year old who looks up to his own hero dad, but over several timeskips he grows up, gets married, and has his own kids. On top of that, you'd think the protagonist can wear the legendary hero stuff that only the legendary hero can equip, but you never can. The twist is that the legendary hero is your Son, and your job in the end is to guide him to the big evil so he can slay it. It's the best Dragon Quest, I think.
Kratos about to adopt that Kranky Kong energy
I like this video because the cadence of the narration is keeping in line with what dads are able to keep up with.
it's so hard living in this world as someone who hasn't finished red dead redemption 2 yet
As a PC gamer who stubbornly insists on playing games from story-driven franchises in the order they actually came out in, ditto.
I stopped on the island
Ditto.
You're not missing much
I can live with it
Love this video! It's important to contextualize trends in art&media through the thought process of the artists and the consumers
This was a great video. I found myself re-downloading Elite: Dangerous recently to unwind from my job driving around the USA fixing factory machines...
...by, let me guess, flying around the galaxy delivering those machines to be eventually fixed?
@@Vilamus there is something relaxing about driving. Space driving is even better
@@lazygamemaster748 Totally agree. On my last big gaming session on it, I took a Dolphin to the centre of the galaxy and back. It was Hella draining to do so, but I had the time to do it and I did get into some kinda mediative state with it. Just me, my nav computer, and the galaxy.
Yahtzee, once again you give a voice to what I and other dads inexplicably were experiencing but didn't have words to speak about. Thanks again.
"There are also several examples of pseudo-hairy dads, characters who exude hairy dad energy without having to escort children or have the full dad experience."
Gale of Waterdeep.
I would say Thancred Waters but he basically acts as Minfilia’s father who is very estranged and is not fond of that, and later on is even more of a father to Ryne and literally has to choose between saving Minfilia of the Source and whom he later calls Ryne.
Also, for some reason, there is a metaphorical court battle on who will take custody of Ryne, which climaxes into the Thancred/Ran’jit battle where both fatherlike figures of Ryne are battling to see who will take Ryne, amidst other things. Them serving similar roles also figures in the tenth Eden raid battle of the Fatebreaker.
Elites a good mix of Dad Game, trucking, mining, bounty hunting
*Mentions SimCity*
*Calls it a dry, boring affair*
Clint from LGR screamed in horror so hard it was heard all over the world
just dawned on me that i've been watching Yahtzee for around half my life now.
My first dad game was Football Manager on the ZX Spectrum, and I still play the current Football Manager series 40 years later. I'm also a bit fond of the Truck and Train sim games of which there where also examples on the Speccy, Brighton Belle and Evening Star for the train fans and Juggernaut for driving lorries.
Any opinion on the delay?
@@guguy00 Meh, whenever FM or CM changed to a new engine in the past, it was time to skip a year or two till they fixed the mess. So same old story really. I still like CM 01-02.
@@julianbailey2749 Yeah as someone who still plays 11 (my first one) I get that.
Banger thumbnail, contemplative content, banger closing words.
If you have been a fan of Yahtzee long enough you know most of his slang. I like it because I do the same thing creating random slang.
There's one in every office (as the use of the term "Foxism" in places I've worked can attest.)
Hey, giving things names helps identify them. Especially helpful when there are harmful trends you need to call out (which is basically Yahtzee's job)
Hearing Yahtzee mention the funny web vide and knowing it’s the Let’s Drown Out of eurotruck simulator with Gabe, and I remember watching it when it came out, and it’s making me realize I was probably watching Yahtzee when I was a little too young.
I distinctly remember in that video Yahtzee almost missed an exit, proceed to cut across 3 three lanes with his huge container truck causing multiple car crashes, much to Gabe's amusement.
The most impressive feat in all of Semi-Ramblomatic will forever be the fact that Yahtzee remembered Inversion. Because I think even the devs forgot they made it. Like a moist, thumping void in their memories.
I saw a Parking Lot Simulator game and my first thought is "That's stupid. What do you even do?". Then I thought about it for a few more seconds and realized how many things you can do in it. From the building, traffic flow, ticket pricing, to plumbing, electricity, fire escape. You can actually do a lot, and it got me excited.
Yes an industry that has growing for about 40 years is seeing a raise in DAD games. In about 20-30 years we'll see grandpa games.
I'm realizing that I played Dad Ganes exclusively from the time I was 10. That was when I picked up Flight Simulator 2002.
My tastes have changed, but instead of playing tedious work games, I now spend time programming small games of my own.
This is the path.
Honestly was so hyped some of the LDO lore made it into this video
Why is whoever is playing Mario NOT RUNNING? You gotta run. ALWAYS.
Nailed it. Rather, nailed me. Just finished first run of Satisfactory 1.0, and exclaimed, "This is like work. And I love it!" Hack my brain.
New idea Hairy Granddad game,
You play as Santa Claus bringing joy to all the children of the world while saving your granddaughter Holly, and getting over your dislike of your son in law Jack Frost
2:22 That perfectly dry and deadpan "choo choo" cracked me up.
Thank you for this existential crisis Yahtzee
Power wash DLC drops today dads!
Seeing one of my late father's favorite games when I was growing up listed as an early example of a Dad Game...damn. Nailed it.
I noticed something: Dad and post Dad games are defined by mechanics, whereas sad, hairy, and post-hairy dad games are defined by narrative.
out of this entire ramble, "sebastian caste-whatsit from the evil within games" is what stood out for me. 😆
When I was a young lad, my dad’s game was Leisure Suit Larry.
I never thought my entire video gaming life would flash before my eyes.
Yahtz, they gave Shadow a gun because Sonic Team got THOUSANDS of fan mail asking for it. This is real, the backstory behind Shadow the Hedgehog is that SEGA would get constant requests from kids to give Sonic a gun. They thought Sonic with a gun would feel completely wrong, so they gave it to Shadow, which was still pretty silly but is a bit easier to swallow. That wasn’t them desperately trying anything to remain on top, the people BEGGED for it. And honestly, a game that combines the movement of Sonic with the gunplay of a high speed FPS like Quake could’ve actually ruled! A bit silly, yeah, but genuinely compare Quake speedruns to Sonic gameplay and you can see an interesting combination there.
I mean, we did eventually get Mirror's Edge, Neon White, and Rollerdrome.
And to Shadow the Hedgehog’s credit, it does have a unique vibe some people would go back for simply because it was an edgy Sonic the Hedgehog game. Most fans can’t claim that for most of the 3d games.
as someone that grew up watching your content and now has a child of my own I can confidently say getting into dad games has been a very strange but fulfilling enjoyment.
what gets me is that I've always had an affinity for them but now I really understand the difference between a game and a dad game, something like forever winter that feels ridiculously tedious and slow brings me extreme amounts of joy next to something like transport Tycoon.
it's incredible how these games have evolved and I for one hope they stay relevant.
7:45 Granddad game?
*me, still playing sim city 3000 to this day*
*me, being excited and buying Star Trucker while completely ignoring space marine 2*
'you merely adopted the dad-game. I was born in it, molded by it'
I also played American truck sim as a goof...then put 45 hours into it during lockdown
A lot of these franchises have attracted a large portion of younger fans who want the dad character to stick around and have endless adventures.
The fact that Dishonored did not come up at all is disappointing. That is the epitome of these games, given you go from protecting Emily in one game as the Princess, to being her dad in the second, and, if the player's actually smart, playing as her.
Even better, Corvo trained HER well enough that she's in control almost the entire time after the first level, to the point of being so in control she can destroy the lives of her enemies without killing them.
What I remember of Yahtz's review of the first one was him getting awfully snippy about it not being Thief 2: But Again And Better.
Dude loved Thief 2; fine. But I think he expected something he couldn't get and never forgave the series for such a betrayal.
@@AnotherCraig To be fair, Game 1 does NOT put its best foot forward. The game has massive changes to the world and people...but ONLY after Level 2. And worse yet, the first half of Level 3 is a repeat of Level 2's first half, meaning it's easy to miss the changes as you know where to go and can rush through.
Game 2 did this far better by allowing the intro level to hit you with some stuff, so it can change Level 2 and even offered you an alternative, no powers, run right from the start, on top of Corvo and Emily haven't unique styles to their powers and some moves(Corvo is stronger and can break some doors down Emily can't without an upgrade, but Emily can move quicker and parkour easier).
It's a game that asks for you to replay it, without making that obvious, which I think hurt it a lot with people who saw it as a 9 hour game, instead of the, at minimum 18 hour game it was. Game 2 did better in all respects there, and even added the 'should be industry standard by now', new game plus mode.
@@SageofStarsDishonored and Thief also have very different premises, though they both fit in "stealth genre."
In the original Thief games (1, metal age) you're not a combatant. Yes you can knock people out and hide them, but if you ever actually got caught out your option is to run and hide, because you will get handled. If there's more than one guard? You die if you don't leg it.
Dishonored doesn't do that. There is always the option for violence if things go south. With enough practice you can competently murder-machine your way through and not even carry the pretense of subtlety.
It's a distinction that's difficult to grasp, how dissimilar the games are played. One doesn't tend to realize how being able to fight your way from a situation changes how you approach things over when that option isn't there.
Thief and Thief 2 are practices in patience and study. Dishonored (and Arkhane's Prey,) are predator sims. You can opt for nonviolence, but the *capacity* for it remains.
I turn 40 this year and i didnt realise i was a solid "dad gamer" until you first mentioned it. Now im entirely here for it (loads up Snow runner)
The middle age masculine urge to get a job well done even in video game
This is an amazing observation I never thought about. Great video.
I love how Yahtzee keeps blowing by Let's Drown Out as though a lot of his fans don't still listen to it in the background from time to time.
This video has really made me look forward to replaying the original and enjoying the remake! I've always been fascinated how the town of Silent Hill has some unique similarities to the Catholic Church and other religious groups. You ARE a SH wizard, Mike. 👏
Now we need some games with titles that sound like dad jokes
A very well thought out and presented premise. I’m a hairy dad and I never played any of the hairy dad games but I grew my beard about the same time that all of those games came out. What a weird coincidence
didn't think I would ever hear Yahtzee say "characters that exude hairy dad energy"
The man who coined "Spunkgargleweewee" still has a few tricks up his sleeve.
As a dad, first born 2005, I wasn't keeping up much on modern games as I was raising my kid. But it occured to me of the few big name games I've played, I have definitely played those Hairy Dad games mentioned lol. Wow. I didn't even realize I had been pulled to those games. I played BioShock and loved it and then went straight to BioShock Infinite. I loved the Telltale Walking Dead games with Clementine. Last of Us one was a great experience, though the ending lost me a bit.
For other not entirely inevitable events many dads face, we have It Takes Two. And for the really old dads/lads, To The Moon can be a tear jerker we relate more and more to.
Cover Mom games next.
PLUNGE INTO THE APP STORE!
I sat across from a woman on the commuter rail this morning playing Animal Crossing on a Nintendo Switch.
And my love of farming/cozy games is a direct "my girlfriend got me into Stardew Valley" consequence.
Reminds me of that old deodorant commercial: "Strong enough for a man but made for a woman."
I love how in Mario Odyssey you try to crash Bowser and Peach's wedding and then when you save her, she just ditches both men to go on an adventure on her own.
Hardspace Shipbreaker was such a satisfying gameplay loop with just enough story to keep you going.
I was a dad that found VR and sim racing, i now have a sim rig with wheel,pedals and a shifter. I got hooked..