Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

TexasErin

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 30, 2013
27
1
My son turns 16 this weekend and I’m looking for some game recommendations. No sex in them——he’s my son after all and that would be creepy to buy him, lol.

He has a PS4 and a Nintendo Switch. I have already bought Shadow of the Tomb Raider and the new Spider-Man game. Some of his favorites are Star Wars Battlefront games, Rise of the Tomb Raider, the Last of Us, all Uncharted games, and Zelda. I bought him Assassin’s Creed Chronicles last year, but there was some area that he couldn’t get past so he gave up on it. He has Destiny 2 and he just really wasn’t that into it. He did like Call of Duty and has several of those games. He has also played a lot of Dragon Quest Builders, which is a game that he has kept going back to.

I have thought about buying him Destiny Forsaken, Infamous Second Son, Child of Light, Resogun, Journey,No Man’s Sky, Okami, Mirrors Edge Catalyst, the Banner Saga Trilogy,Mulaka (which is a digital code), Strange Brigade, and Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age. Does anybody like any of these? Or any other recommendations based on games that he really likes?

I don’t want to get him anything too addictive. We have had issues with Clash of Clans a couple of years ago....
 

cyclingplatypus

macrumors 65816
Mar 15, 2007
1,117
237
Earth
No Man's Sky is kind of meditative gaming which is surprisingly fun. If he likes open world games then I would suggest Assassin's Creed, Origins was good but I think the Odyssey is better (and it is huge, I'm 60+ hours in).

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a great game that pays tribute to classic Tomb Raider.
 

halluxsinister

macrumors regular
Oct 17, 2017
185
196
Without knowing your son, it would be impossible to do anything but tell what games I would have enjoyed or DID enjoy at that age, which got me thinking. (I see your post is a bit old, but for maybe his 17th BD... or just generically,)

Your best bet might be, depending on how big of a nerd/geek/etc. he is, or might be inclined to be, and depending on your budget for both time and money, and your own background, to do something like this:

(I know I would have LOVED if my father could have spared some of his precious F’ing time to do something like this,) is introduce him to whatever you were doing at 16: if like me, around that age, you had a Commodore 64, (it’s what I had then,) find one or two or 10 on ebay, buy them, teach him about them, (there’s LOADS of resources out there for that, and other vintage computers, if maybe you were an Apple ][ guy, for instance) on YouTube like 8-Bit-Guy, including a variety of machines, on how to restore old machines, both in terms of appearance of the hardware, and functionality of the guts.

It would teach him a lot about history of computing, how they worked, etc. as well as be a potential neat bonding experience. OR you could skip all that and just head over to someplace like gog.com, (Good Old Games, which sells old titles DRM-FREE, and which I am, apart from being an occasional customer, in NO way shape or form affiliated,) and find something you enjoyed playing when you were little.

Personally, I loved D&D type stuff, but you could with a fistful of dollars, buy a HEAP of old games, and make a tour-through-time of it. Start out with an Infocom game, which you can find playable via JS online, in a number of places, if you went back that far, and show him that EARLY games, IF, (interactive fiction) titles were games you could play that required you to use your IMAGINATION, which modern games require less and less of as they become progressively more immersive, which *I* think, FWIW, is a loss.

(There’s a reason schools INSIST on reading the classics; gameplay should follow the same regimen. Just as it’s fine for them to read “Harry Potter and the Never-Ending Series of Sequels,” or (when they’re a bit older,) “50 Shades of Orange is the New Blackish... of Thrones” (I know at least a couple of those are based on books,) or whatever... they should also read stuff like Where the Red Fern Grows, The Red Badge of Courage, The Call of the Wild, A Separate Peace, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and as they get older, stuff like Memoirs of an Invisible Man, The Color Purple, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Walden, some stuff by Shakespeare kind of sprinkled throughout, etc., they should ALSO, if they’re going to play computer games, or similar, (console or whatever,) they should also be exposed to the classics, so they have an idea of where it all came from and where it’s all going.

Some absolute classics I enjoyed included Infocom’s Stationfall, and Planetfall, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, as well as Infidel, (all IF titles,) The Bards Tale, (and 2), as well as Diablo 1 & 2, (3’s kinda for the birds, I think,) Sim City, Sid Meier’s Pirates!, Cyan’s “Myst” (1, the original (remastered,) and 3, “Exile” more than the others,) Origin’s (I think,) “Ultima IV,” (the best of them, IMHO,) Warriors of the Eternal Sun, Neverwinter Nights was pretty good, IIRC, though it’s been a LONG time since I played any of these...

Nostalgia has caused a resurgence in the existence of classic arcade games in arcade settings; if you want to take him to play Paperboy, Star Wars, (the ORIGINAL one, where you’re Luke in his X-Wing, blowing up the Death Star over and over, with increasing numbers of tie-fighters trying to stop you,) Pac Man, Frogger, Gorf, Galaga, Centipede, and all those other early Atari, Nintendo, Nameco or whatever titles.

Or you could buy any of 50 different project boards, like the Raspberry Pi or Arduino and all their imitators and competitors, and build some robots and stuff. Make like, an automatically loading and running toaster that starts toasting bread that’s kept in a cold box during the day, (using a Peltier cooler,) and a set of heat-resistant metal tracks to drop the bread into a toaster, and a relay to start the toaster, and a little claw to take the toast OUT and drop it onto a plate, and maybe even spritz them with a bottle of liquid “Holy Moly, This Ain’t Butter?!?” or whatever, then ring a bell.

OR use a Pi or Arduino, etc., and robotics to construct a Rube-Goldberg machine for taking whole roasted coffee beans and making them into coffee. I might do that myself, actually; it sounds fun. (Before anyone says, “They already have machines that do that, or even simpler, just use a Keurig”... NO, I mean REAL, ACTUAL coffee. Made CORRECTLY, not abused.)

Anyway, just my fiftieth of a dollar.
 

gkarris

macrumors G3
Dec 31, 2004
8,301
1,061
"No escape from Reality...”
No Man's Sky is kind of meditative gaming which is surprisingly fun. If he likes open world games then I would suggest Assassin's Creed, Origins was good but I think the Odyssey is better (and it is huge, I'm 60+ hours in).

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is a great game that pays tribute to classic Tomb Raider.

You may want to get NMS at Gamestop used where you can return it if he finds it too slow...

Wow, the price has gone up, it used to be around $10 used but looks like it is $20 now since they announced PSVR compatibility with the next update...
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.