I should probably go to bed at this point. I typed up a short story of my arduous attempts at defending an outpost in the STALKER modpack GAMMA and how my game crashed when I turned in the quest. Sent off that post and woe-is-me, the entire text didn’t get submitted and I didn’t have it saved in copy-paste. It’s just so ironically fitting.

So ya, what’s something you’d like to ramble a bit about?

  • I feel super stagnated when it comes to games anymore. I still want to play but I only ever seem to play the same 2 games which are positively ancient now. I have tried to chip away at my backlog, but I will play for one night and then go right back to my comfy games even if I enjoyed it. Then if I want to try again I have to start over from scratch because too much time will have passed and I can’t remember the controls or what I was doing, so it’s back to the comfy games again because at least I won’t get frustrated.

    Maybe I need to try some very short games or something? But also maybe I am just being too picky! I look for things that I think would scratch the same itch as my comfy games but haven’t found anything that gets close enough (yet!). I just want to have fun why do I have to make this so difficult?! >_<

    • I’m stuck in that same kind of gaming rut, I think it’s because dealing with “being an adult with responsibilities” is a lot more stress than when I first started gaming as a kid. My brain just does not want to learn a new system of rules, and I end up quitting new games halfway through the tutorial.

      The couple times I’ve fought through that feeling, I’ve found a few new games I really love. So maybe it’s a mindset thing. I miss the ease with which I used to lose myself in new passions.

    • I’ve mentioned this game before recently, but I just finished Gris and am absolutely smitten in a rare way. It’s very short, simple, and relaxed (no fail states), but it’s got probably the most beautiful art direction and score I can remember. That being said, it does also wind up doing some pretty interesting things with its simple mechanics too.

      You can finish it in a few hours, but there’s a draw to return again just to sink back into the world, cause… It’s just pleasant there.

    • I’m the same with basically 2-3 games but I recently made a bold decision to actually start playing something I bought recently (Hitman 3) and I’m having a great time with it! Idk if you experience the same but I get this anxiety at playing something other than my comfort games, but honestly it’s been very nice to play something new for once :) so I really recommend to just give something else a try and really commit to it.

      • Yes, idk if it is anxiety exactly but I definitely find it stressful and discombobulating. But having the backlog sitting there looking at me is also stressful! Probably I need to take pressure off and just try to chill out with a new game, which is sort of the approach I have with drawing, like if I remove the pressure to be instantly good at it and let myself be terrible at it, it actually is a lot more fun for me and I will do it more often.

      • I run my own single-player WoW-WotLK server and that is the main comfy game, the other is the Tropico series (mainly 3 & 4). I have tried a few alternatives over the years for both of these and nothing hooks me in as much, but maybe they only hook me in that much because of familiarity or nostalgia? Timberborn is I think the closest that has given me a similar feeling to Tropico (even though they are fairly different!), and I do have Guild Wars 2 which is a lot nicer overall than WoW but doesn’t really give the same feeling. I should still give it another shot though, I played it for a little while before I set up the WoW server and really liked that the clothes were so customisable :D But I have been out of the loop so other suggestions would be good too!

          • For mine there was very little for me to tinker with, it was a single player Azerothcore repack ready to go, which is good because I am not very technologically skilled! There have been a couple bugs, like a couple of quests are kinda janked, but I can just go into the database and mark them off as done for my character when that happens cos I don’t know how to properly fix them. Most of the tinkering was things like, do I want to adjust reputation/skill gains, how much stuff do I want the auctionhouse bot to list, how many profs do I want to allow per character, things like that. But that was all very easy to do thanks to the way the repack was done, and isn’t actually necessary because you can just stick with the default settings. The only thing I can’t do is PvP because I don’t have playerbots, but I never did PvP on WoW anyway so it doesn’t affect me much. I prefer it a lot to most of the multiplayer pservers I have tried, but I did tend to play WoW as a single player game mostly anyway! :D