Despite having a growing backlog across 3 gaming systems, I keep on getting drawn back into Fallout 4 on the PS4. To keep things fresh, I am also playing Fallout 4 with a different set of mods on the PC. I also get sucked into playing Dragon Age Inquisition first on the PS4 and now on the PC. Same goes for The Witcher 3. Oh, and Skyrim. I think I have a problem.
Being alive.
I think you need a security blanket game, bro
May I recommend
Also: nobody here mentioning Grand Theft Auto V online as their go-to, why can’t I quit you game.
Which is pretty much why I like this community. Except for @Stusser, because, well, you know
Civ V and SotS
I enjoy them both still to this day, but I have a tendency to go back to them instead of trying something new sitting in my inventory.
Well I don’t care for the Online part, but I do love me some GTA V.
There’s a few games from the '90s that I keep coming back to every couple years:
- Darklands
- Machiavelli: The Prince
- Perfect General
- Covert Action – I’ve played this so much I actually managed to beat the game a couple years ago.
- Sword of the Samurai
I guess it helps that I can fire them up instantly on DOSBox without taking any time to install something. But should I stop playing those? All of those are going to stay in my rotation until someone makes a better successor to it, like happened with Pirates!
Burn! Burn the heretic!
The original was before my time. Was it one of those games that’s so far advanced over everything that came before it that you get a deep emotional connection to it?
Well, it may have been: I played it only 3 years later (akin to a century in computer terms, back then), from 1990 on.
All the mechanics (especially the sailing, but also the intertia of the slow paced swordfighting) are just so spot on, and the abstraction is what I always need to enjoy an evocative experience - which is why I don’t enjoy 3D games, especially of the photorealistic kind.
That the manual did a wonderful job to depict the area and allow kid-me to fill the gap is another testament to Microprose’s greatness at its highest hour.
League of Legends. Strange that I always come back to a free to play over all of the traditional pay games I own.
I have a virtual stable of games I continually go back to:
- Kindom Rush - I’m always experimenting with new tower combinations and it’s cathartic
- Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance. What is is about creating huge experimentals and wreaking havoc?
- Borderlands - the original. Fuck the rest of them, but that first one is just golden.
- Stars! - although this has curtailed since win10 as I’m not sure I have the energy to figure out how to get a XP virtual machine up & running yet again.
Huh I found Borderlands 1 almost unplayable but I loved B2.
BL1 was so awesome. You actually can find legendary weapons that will last longer than 2 levels. The fighting was so good - I found them to be challenging and the characters had real different builds to them.
People complain about lack of fast travel in some areas (Knox), but then knox had the king of loot boxes that I would play & play again & again just to get ALL of my 40 weapons to be legendary. So much fun.
Now the story of BL1 was really not there. BL2 was hands-down some of the best story telling ever, but the weapons were so hard to come by & when you did get a legendary, it was worthless in 2 levels. It got to the point where you got far better weapons with those codes they dropped on twitter.
It’s funny how DOS games were such a pain in the ass to get running back in the day but are easy to emulate now. Then there’s about a decade of early Windows games that are inaccessible now. I’d probably play King of Dragon Pass all the time if it wasn’t stuck in 640x480. (Although, speaking of successors, KoDP will get one soon.)
Since the whole point of playing a game is to have fun, the only time I feel I shouldn’t play a game is if I do it despite it not being fun. I got there with WoW sometimes.
I don’t think I’m quite there with Grim Dawn, but it’s getting borderline sometimes. The problem comes when the up-front effort of learning a new game seems too high for a given evening’s session, so you then fall back to a game you’re used to be not really enjoying anymore. The old ‘game of least resistance’ problem, which can be exacerbated when you know you have limited playtime to begin wtih.
Have you tried the DOSBOX version? Runs great.