I played the first one, and found it to be extremely boring but with potential. Unfortunately, playing 3 and Syndicate afterwards showed me clearly that Ubisoft smothered the potential and cranked up the boring. The worlds they’ve created are certainly immersive, but they’re also devoid of energy. 3 has a half-Native American protage who spends five minutes in his home village and then goes off to the colonies with barely a thought spared for his home, so when it’s played for drama it falls flat because we haven’t seen his relationship to his family. And Syndicate’s characters had might as well be carved from soap with how crude and flat they are. There’s a transgendered gangster from New York who joins the Assassins’ gang, and he has absolutely nothing to add for the entire game. Characters with seeming potential come in, have one side quest, and that’s their lot.
During the few months of the year I consider to be my “gaming season”, I mostly stick to 1 game at a time as my primary focus, but I’ll often have a game or few on the back burner that I’ll work into the schedule now and then.
This year I’m focusing on the Doom remake (Doom 2016) as my main game. To be honest, the game is stressful for me, so even though it’s been an absolute blast for me to play, it’s nice to have some alternative games to switch over to after I’m done with Doom.
I agree, it’s very hard to keep up with the stories when juggling multiple games at the same time. Almost as hard for me, if not harder, is keeping up with the controls. Every game is different. Games in the same genre can and will have vastly different control set-ups. Even games in the same franchise / series can have different controls from game to game. Yuck.
So, the control aspect and the story aspect are part of my inspiration for my secondary games. Right now I’m playing Halls of Torment. I guess there’s a story? But it doesn’t seem super relevant or necessary to keep up with. This game is in the same genre as another secondary game I play (and the main one from last year) called Vampire Survivors. Controls for both of these games is super basic. As I mentioned, if there’s even a story line to them, it’s irrelevant to my enjoyment of them.
I also have the Castlevania Dominus Collection which is includes all the metroidvania-style Castlevania games from the Nintendo DS. I played all of them back in the day on original hardware, so there’s a great deal of “recall” in terms of controls and story. And this is probably one of my favorite genres of game.
I barely played the AC games as they came out, but recently decided to give Unity a try. It’s a really stunning presentation much of the time, but I find myself setting the game aside quite regularly as the quests / missions can be rather dull. I should perhaps try to do better at picking what to do in the game, as the immersion can be compelling.
For a long time 3 was my favorite. But I started playing black flag and damn dat shit is good. I think I just didn’t like it back then because it was different from 2 and 3.
I had to stop playing when I saw the review for AC 3 (I think) from Zero punctuation.
He pointed out that the quests were almost entirely “gofer” quests… You know, you go over there and get that, then go fer that other thing and go…
I started the game not long after and I have to say, he was right. And every time I was given a quest to go somewhere only to talk to someone with little to no reason for doing so other than, I have nothing better to do in the game… When that happened, I heard his voice in my head talking about how annoying gofer quests were.
It annoyed me, and I stopped playing as a result. Never got past the first chapter.
Slay the spire, FTL, and Into the Breach probably have the most hours from me because the controls are entirely cursor driven and can be paused indefinitely.
Balatro is quickly taking the space that the built-in Windows solitaire game used to.
Those are the ones that I open when my brain can’t brain.
At least one idle game. I just finished antimatter dimensions after a year or so. Starting on NGU idle next.
And one “100% attention” game like outer wilds or hollow knight.
Typically only 1 story game (first playthrough) like Blasphemous or Outer Wilds. And then only roguelites or sandboxes on top of that like Factorio or Slay the Spire.
A few. I’m playing through the bonus campaigns of Etherfields, while looking longingly at ISS Vanguard which I haven’t picked up in a week, while playing one-shot games of stuff like Twinfold and Harmonies and Balatro and Slay the Spire (both table and phone). Finished Silent Hill 2R recently and that was awesome. Sometimes when I’m up to it I’ll break out some sort of random Final Girl game.
I know this isn’t true for everyone, but narrative solo board gaming is really, really good for me, and lets me do a lot of gaming that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to do, what with my brain being all busted with stroke damage.
I work a full time job, but I don't have responsibilities like children, so I have way more free time to play games.
I'm currently playing, Kingdom Hearts 2 and Bug Fables, alongside some friends so we can talk about it together.
With my partner, I'm playing, I was a Teenage Exocolonist, discussing our choices and how our game diverged.
I'm also playing solo: Octopath Traveler 2 and Lies of P.
I'm basically hopping around the various games constantly. I'll play one chapter of Bug Fables, then hop over to Lies of P and clear an area and defeat the boss, then jump over to Octopath Traveler 2 to clear a chapter or two from some characters.
Typically I play Marvel Rivals with my friend group, as it is one of the few multiplayer games these days that supports at least 5 people on a team (we already tried League, Paladins, etc and got tired of that real quick).
On my own, I sometimes feel like playing a retro game, so I have been playing Legend of Dragoon, but recently my save file got corrupted somehow so I haven’t restarted. Instead I switched to playing a less retro game, Need for Speed Carbon. Its been maybe 10 years since I played it last, so it has been interesting dealing with the horrendous rubberbanding and random crashing on PC. I also like to play Goddess of Victory NIKKE as a mobile game whenever I have down time but am away from home.
But I don’t think it is atypical to really focus on playing one game at a time. I’d say that would actually be quite unusual and likely only done by people who have a job playing multiple games per day (a not so good reviewer, streamer, etc).
I started the game in its first year, played for probably five years, got to solid mid Rs9 level, even somewhat enjoyed doing shipments, then one day I suddenly realised that the game was taking up so much time, and unlike before, I wasn’t even looking forward to RS10. So I quit. Kept the game for a while to chat to corp mates and eventually didn’t migrate to DN when it dropped.
My partner got into the game not long after me, he kept playing for a couple more years on and off, got to RS10, managed a few successful runs, then decided RS9 was more fun lol. But after dark nebula he really dropped off. he learned to do the new Red Stars, did a few white stars, and… don’t think he touched it in the last few months.
I did make a few good friend in the game who are still in touch, but I haven’t really thought about HS in so long. This bring up some nostalgia for sure.
As for what we moved to. I play roguelikes/-lites these days when I’m in transit, and I’ve always been a souls fan, so I’ve no lack of games to play at home. My partner went through a few trashy mobile games as I recall, then we started to play board games together. It’s pretty costly but very fun, and more relaxing. I suppose the tactile aspect and the higher amount of interaction appealed to us.
This is probably not helpful if you’re looking for ideas of what game to play next, sorry about that. I do really miss the White Stars and have not known anything that’s quite like it. Espeically when my corp was around RS8. That was for some reason especially fun.
Any names of rogue/-lites? I need them on Android as its the only platform I can reliably play today…
As for board games, we are into those too, or at least we where. But the love for ultra complicated board games by my wife took us to a blind spot where we are always too tired to start a game LOL…
I till love and we still play Ticket To Ride occasionally tough.
Dead Cells is technically on Android, and a great game, but you’d need a controller to really enjoy it.
I absolutely recommend Slay the Spire. It’s a deck-building game ported from pc/console, a very good game, and the port is decent. I have over 300 hours in it, still play it often. It’s a hard game, especially at higher difficulty levels it really requires you to make good decisions everywhere. Choosing your path, building the deck and playing the cards all feel engaging. The vast variety of synergies and anti-synergies also ensures that each play feel different and interesting. There’s also a board game, also very good, although that probably also falls into your blind spot a little, more people playing often add to the complexity.
I’ve recently got Dicey Dungeons, also on android, light game, not a lot of replay value, but the campaign is pretty fun and interesting so far, so I think the price to play time ratio is still pretty decent.
Yes, probably because it’s a port. I mostly find games through pc/console…
Come to think of it, ever played reigns? It’s a roguelike series, the games have similar game mechanics but different settings. They can be played easily with one hand because you make decisions by swiping cards left or right, and at least the one game that i played had pretty interesting story.
It’s been so long that I’d forgotten the name of the game, turns out I got it confused with a game with extremely similar mechanics, only realised today when I found the sequel to the game I played. The game that I’ve played and loved is called Lapse. It’s free on Google Play store.
I know what you mean about being too tired to start a game, we had that problem at the beginning of the hobby too! We’ve since learned that even though most filler games can sound a bit boring on paper, they can be quite fun and the good ones end up getting played pretty often.
Our favourites:
Kites: A real-time game about flipping little sand timers while playing cards. It somehow manages to be tense and relaxing at the same time, and it’s always kind of funny when someone accidentally knocks a bunch of them over.
The Mind: The game is so simple the rules can be fully explained in a minute. You try to play numbered cards in ascending order without knowing what’s in other people’s hands. The faces people make to cheat the no communication rule can be hilarious. Especially good to bring on trips, can even be played on trains or planes. Also good to play with someone new due to the simple rules.
MicroMacro Crime City: Hard to explain this one without an example, so look it up if it sounds interesting to you. It’s about solving crimes by looking at a 2D+time dimension map… It gives the intense satisfaction of detective stories while not putting much of a mental load on you. Does require very good lighting, otherwise can be straining on the eyes.
Tranquility / The Ascent: Two games in the same series, mechanics are different but they have similar vibes of, well, tranquility. These games are beautiful, gameplay feels a bit like solitaire but with a bit less thinking/memorization, and they both have well-designed two player modes.
Sky Team: Dice-placing game about landing a plane. The theme was not appealing to me, so it took recommendations from many sources for us to finally try it out. It’s in that sweet spot where the game feels engaging and tense, after a win you feel accomplished. I’m not sure how they managed that with putting dice on a small cardboard panel. Another plus is that it has an expansion where you get to call penguins to ask them to get out of your way.
I should mention these are all co-op games, because I hate losing, and I don’t like others losing. We do own a few competitive games, but they are pretty much all luck-based / super pretty / funny, so that we don’t care who wins.
I also made at least one good friend on that game. We keep in touch years later.
Was amusing the idea to try recreate the original game as open source, with due differences like a true rich tech tree and less grind (no need to monetize an open source game after all), and most of all, self hostable server.
But RL is a bitch and free time is hard to come by these days, so.
Yeah the game was pretty addictive and I took the DN fiasco as a good reason to finally quit. I got to RS10. But seeing how rs10 was so much less fun in red stars was also a turn down as well.
I had friends playing rs10 regularly tough, so those where doable and kinda fun too it seems.
Rs9 where real fun tough… Specially done in private corps with three more able and willing partners.
White stars too, I really enjoyed them, maybe I was in a lucky corporation.
I imagine it would be difficult to capture what makes the the original so special and also make improvements. But yes an open source alternative would be wonderful.
Any idea if someone already started a promising project? I did a quick search on Github and found quite a few HS simulators, most of them archived. Didn’t find anything that’s HS inspired. I doubt I’ll find time for it between my other hobbies, but I do have a couple weeks of holiday leftover from last year, so who knows.
Nobody AFAIK. I would like to start something tough. Doesn’t need to share name or resources, just the feeling, the space theme, the PvP and specially coop pve approach…
I play at most 2-3 games at the same time. 1 story game that requires concentration (currently "Pentiment"), one game I play online with friends (currently "Return to Moria") and one simple game when I don't want to think too much (currently nothing, I just finished "Vampire Survivors")
I'm also a dad with a full time job. As for how I pick my games, if I do the same thing too long I get bored and don't finish the game. And I like finishing games. So I don't do two horror games back-to-back, or two survival games, or two FPS, etc. I like to switch up. Before "Pentiment" my focus games were "SOMA", "Astroneer", "Conarium", "Green Hell", "The Talos Principle" and "Prey". So, quite varied I think.
If you get paralyzed picking which story game to play next, maybe getting really picky about which ones make the list and then literally roll the dice or use an RNG generator to pick one. If they are all good, and your gameplay spread across a long time with work and kids, then any "mood" you are in, in the moment, will be averaged out over time. If you get into a game and find it really just isn't for you, give yourself permission to move on.
In short, make the decision less consequential to avoid paralysis. That was my method anyway, being in similar situation with life time constraints.
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