My Daughter has been playing the new Paper Mario, Minecraft and Sims 4.

I've been shooting new games her way, some interest her, some don't.

I've played a little Dwarf Fortress and a lot of Conquest of Elysium 4 which is was a game from the guys who make Dominions.

I was all hot to finish Tower of Time, which was pretty fun, but I lost momentum.

I've played a bit of DIns Legacy, an ARPG type game that has surprising depth.

Animal Crossing, naturally, although a lot less than I was since I've sort of hit a wall as far as things I want to customize/change/whatever.

A lot of Hardspace: Shipbreaker. You are a guy who works as a shipbreaker in a sci-fi setting (i.e. space). Your goal is to cut apart ships and try not to blow yourself up. It is surprisingly engaging, but also pretty relaxing. A good podcast game once you get the hang of it. On a similar note, got back into Elite Dangerous as another podcast game.

I've also been doing weekly co-op sessions of Satisfactory which I've enjoyed a lot. It's basically a first-person, much more fun version of Factorio.

Just this weekend I started playing Satisfactory and I haven’t been hooked into a game like this in years. It’s a much more forgiving Factorio, with No Man’s Sky’s setting and exploration, and allows me to design hyperoptimized and neatly arranged factories to create ever more complex things. Or just build a big ass bridge because I want to.

Finished The Last of Us: Part 2 - am happy to discuss with people, but the internet appears to have covered every single possible angle on it. Have been cycling through Battlefield 5, Destiny 2, CoD: Warzone, Sea of Thieves, Deep Rock Galactic and now Tabletop Simulator with a group of friends on a mutual Discord server. During lockdown I blasted through the Final Fantasy Remake at a frightening pace.

Battlefield and CoD are so godamn different. I have a healthy K/D ratio in CoD, I've always been fast and accurate so if myself and an opponent spot each other at the same time I'll probably win, but in Battlefield other people can be slower and compensate by being clever. I like to run and gun, but Battlefield doesn't reward that, oh no. I have to be smart about where I go or I'll get demoed 7 different ways by people who know exactly where I'll be coming from. Teamwork is actually important here, whereas in CoD I can leave my team behind if they're being shits. Anyway I'm enjoying them both.

Recently I've been working on a base in Satisfactory which is a wonderful way to kill an hour or two while listening to the above group go through their DnD campaign (I've been invited to join but I'd rather do voices than have to act out an entire character).

I've bought Ghost of Tsushima and unfortunately, I'm bored after an hour. It reminds me of a prettier, samurai FarCry. Which is cool, but I'm not invested by any stretch and I've found the combat a little simple.

Sea of Thieves is hands down the most immature fun I've had in years. Sheer fun with friends, sailing around and messing with each other and every player we come across. Cruising past a player galleon with one crew mate playing the banjo on the plank to discuss a truce, while the rest of us are floating underneath with explosive barrels. Following a ship to an island, letting them do the treasure hunting and when they open the cave, blast them from afar and take their shit - then run for our lives because they've respawned and are gunning for us and their shit. Try to fend them off as we hand in their hard earned shit. Launch yourself, out of your own cannon, onto another person's ship and just start blastin' as they wonder what the fuck is happening and why is the ship ablaze. Absolute, delightful chaos.

Seriously cut back on League of Legends - it's actually improved my mental a bit. But, I do miss playing something I know I'm competent at. Outside of 'League,' I've been cycling through other titles published by Riot Games - Teamfight Tactics, Legends of Runeterra, and occasionally VALORANT. The only PC game I'm consistently playing is solo Minecraft as a way to relax. Just queue it up before bed to log a mindless hour towards a creative outlet.

Moved my Gamecube with Super Smash Brothers: Melee on it back home a month ago. My Peach was getting solid. Post-covid life will be fun slamming nerds with the pink princess. Also started up the later two Prince of Persia titles on it beforehand. The Warrior Within is HARD. Even on normal, I barely made it past the tutorial's final boss.

Saving up some money to buy a console to play with the friends I've made where I am before moving out. Really want to steer away from the competitive 'ladder' games Riot releases. Obsessing over rank is not healthy.

I had a dream last night that one of my rare metals refiners had managed to disturb a Native American burial ground and all my workers needed to undergo sensitivity training before they could return to production. I'm pretty deeply engaged in Surviving Mars right now.

I hadn't touched any of the sim-city stuff since the original came out in '89. I'm sure Surviving Mars is all kinds of derivative and I really don't care.

I haven't done a lot of co-op play of any kind. I dabbled a little in Destiny and Destiny 2 simply because it was required in order to advance but let me tell you friend, Hell is Other Gamers. I am vaguely better-than-average at PvP in Destiny (54th percentile!) which is enough to say "I don't enjoy it because I suck, I don't enjoy it because it isn't my thing". So while all the people who spent the past ten years hating on Furries decided they wanted to play a turnip tycoon racoon in Animal Crossing, I've pulled deeply into non-collaborative play. I've got three or four bangin' bases in No Man's Sky but eventually you just have two or three plutonium mines or whatever and you've got a bitchin' circuitboard farm on your freighter and all your ships are exotics and really, there are only five planets with minor variations.

I pretty much gave Horizon Zero Dawn my all. It rewards sniping. I play first person shooters the way most people play golf - lazily hanging at the perimeter and silently killing all the raiders. There's a derogatory term for "taking the easy way out" that Destiny players used all the time but you know what? My ego is not involved here. I'm paying to be entertained and if I want to murder from a distance, I shall. More than that, though, HZD rewards just walking around doing stuff. The interactions are engaging and you get stuff. And the story is actually interesting. But I'm to the point where the only thing I have left is murdering five cybergorillas and they're a pain in the ass and the only thing i hate more than boss battles are shitty combat mechanics.

I cycled through Elite Dangerous (a flight simulator with spreadsheets), Kerbal Space Program (which might be awesome on PC but sucks ass on PS4), Skyrim (HZD if HZD really sucked), two or three Uncharteds (Tomb Raider if you played a misogynistic, destructive jerk), a couple Tomb Raiders (no tap the triangle Harder. HARDER. no HARDER), Far Cry 5 (congratulations on becoming a one-woman killing machine, Koresh is going to kidnap you anyway and force you through a timed-gate murder spree six times anyway), Persona 5 (if you like Persona 5 you're a fucking deviant, I don't care how much your weeaboo friends insist it's normal), and Witcher 3 (the game I think Skyrim wanted to be - I may get back to that once I come to grips with the fact that I need to be about four levels higher before taking out the werewolf) before discovering that what I really want to do is make something, solve problems, and leave the world less destroyed than when I found it.

My wife, who sits next to me on the couch doing actual work while I sit there complaining about food distribution, doesn't particularly care for Surviving Mars because it's a lot less pretty to look at than HZD or Witcher. But you know what? It's a lot more satisfying. Instead of facing a "we made these monsters for you to slay" progression of slaughter, you're given a random map and tasked with making the best of it. And I haven't even started terraforming. Or geese. Apparently there's a goose expansion. All I know is I tried playing as the ESA like six times and I kept running out of stuff and the last time I tried I made the mistake of planting apple trees which used up all my water which caused everyone to get back in the rockets and leave. Now I'm playing as "international space consortium" which gets you a rocket full of shit-tons of food which means you don't need much water and things are going gangbusters other than one of my renegades got murdered by the other renegades and then my population hit a tipping point and all of a sudden I'm scrambling to plant crops and distributing food across thirteen domes and my trucks have sucked down all the surface metals so now I don't have enough iron to build my space elevator and and and

So yeah I'm a giant nerd. I've avoided playing Sim-anything for twenty plus years but somehow pretending to have a martian colony got past my boundaries and now I have a very impressive digital anthill. And you know what? Don't care. One of my friends got murdered last week and the economy is in tatters and I've been forbidden from working because I have COVID symptoms and my $1700 server went tango uniform and so did my Jellyfish but you know what? I'm doing what I can to get shit done leave Britney alone.

Ive been playing Destiny 2 for a while already It's fun and dynamic. The raids are inventive, the missions are exciting, and the gunplay is huuuge Btw there is such a good lfcarry destiny 2 service out there, they help with raids and getting good guns. I really recommend to give it a go

Adding in I've just finished Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice over the weekend. Started Saturday morning, finished Sunday afternoon.

Blew me away how good it was. Got teared up a few times. Pity about the godawful title, but I can forgive it after that experience. Now to wait for the sequel..

I just got the Propel Star Wars drones and they come with an app that allows you to do virtual flights using the controller. I’m gonna start on that today.

After booting it up for the first time in two years last week, I got my wife hooked on Pokemon Go. We go wardriving (this usage of the term is an abomination) to pokestops and gyms together. Keeps us just a little more sane.

I'm a filthy casual. Bought a Switch with my tax returns last year. Zelda (Breath of the Wild), Smash bros., Super Mario Odyssey, Doom, and Stardew Valley. Most weeks consist of 0 hours on the Switch, though, and maybe now 3 hours of Po(kemon)Go.

I'm looking forward to this. It's a videogame-ized board game about birds designed by an ornithologist. I'm gonna know alllllllllll the birdthings.

Since you stopped putting quarters into them, the only game I have seriously played is Fallout. 3, New Vegas, 4, and 76.

I play Fallout 76 most evenings now, for about an hour.

Otherwise I play "Poker Night in America" on my iPhone as a pretty Hungarian girl who lives in Scotland (because nobody knows your a dog on the internet), and have earned about $2.8bn.

I've been playing a lot of Noita again recently. It's basically Spelunky if Spelunky took place in a Falling Sands engine, and it's dope. But in typical roguelike fashion it is wholly unforgiving. The engine itself is really impressive with how well it handles all the particle simulation and such, and it makes the game feel so much more dynamic. What really makes it shine is the rather complex wand-editing mechanic.

Another thing that tickles my fancy about that game is the ridiculously large world with tons of barely-accessible secrets. It's kind of a nostalgia trip in a way. It reminds me of games like Battlezone '98 where maps might be 10x larger than the playable area needed to be for no goddamned reason. It's just so mysterious and I love it.

Also been playing M&B Bannerlord, but have been giving it a rest for a little bit. The shit thing about early access games is that the time it takes for a developer to go from EA to complete is typically longer than the time it takes you to get over a game.

I've been replaying games I've had for a long time.

Trying to unlock everything in FTL I never got around to. Playing ridiculously overmodded Kerbal Space Program. Beating the last few bosses it late game Terraria.

I tried dwarf fortress but it didn't quite stick. It's something I might like at a different time, but right now I just don't want to learn it.

FTL really is the go to. It's hard, and random, and you only won if you play smart and get lucky. But it's fun whether I'm playing 5 minutes or a couple hours.

Before I begin, I was prompted to post this game thread cause The Guardian threw out this absolutely garbage article of the "25 Greatest Consoles" that made room for bombs like The 3D0 and Atari Jaguar and completely left out the Game Boy series of consoles. I guess they're only counting systems you can plug into the TV, but seriously, the GBA had probably one of the best libraries of games I've ever seen and the fact that it's backwards compatible with The OG Game Boy and Game Boy Color just made it that much better. Either way, it's not that great of a list, cause it's pretty much every console that ever sold any real quantity. So maybe, I dunno, next time do a Top 10 and give the Game Boy some credit?

I was originally planning on reading The Earth Abides this weekend, but after seeing Quatrarius mention Dark Souls to kleinbl00, I decided to focus on that instead. I ended up getting pretty far in that game initially, but never got around to beating it. Knowing the nature of games these days, I figure it'd just be easier to start a new character than try to pick up where I left off. Knowing my previous experiences with Dark Souls, as well, I'm doing a bit of grinding and just dumping all of my levels into vitality until I have 1,000 hit points. After that, I'll focus on leveling other things, like strength, endurance, etc. Man, that game is bleaker than I remember, but so addictively fun.

I'm mostly enjoying the heck out of my Evercade, picking it up and fiddling around with it a bit between chores. I think most of my time is spent on the Technos cartridge. It's funny, cause I got that game because it's chock full of Beat 'Em Ups, and the ones on that cartridge are awesome, but I'm spending more time playing Volleyball for the challenge and Dodge Ball because it's fun running around on the screen beaning people with a ball as hard as I can. Those guys at Technos know how to make some good games.

I got Divinity: Original Sin II earlier this year, because my friends said it would scratch my D&D itch. It doesn't. Nothing compares to sitting around the table with friends, rolling dice, and goofing off. That said, the game itself is pretty flawed too. The story is uninteresting, the NPC's are uninteresting, and while you're pretty much able to go anywhere or do anything, there's a lack of focus to really drive you to keep playing the game. Mechanics wise, it's a bit interesting in that you can really use map elements to your advantage, such as setting poison gas clouds on fire, electrocuting people standing in puddles of water, turning water to ice, etc., but those mechanics are over used in the entire game, to the point where they're present in pretty much every battle. So instead of having that one memorable battle where you killed a guy by throwing a fire bomb in the middle of a gas cloud, it's basically a common occurrence, making such encounters dull and forgettable. In short, the game is dull, I want my money back.

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Puyo Pop will be forever amazing.