I was disappointed to find that Red Dead Redemption 2 is just a linear series of cutscenes without any real player agency - more graphic novel than game. I thought it was going to be Skyrim with guns when I bought it. Its the last game I’ll buy without demoing/pirating first.

Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, got it for the co-op. Admittedly I could’ve done more research but I was (or rather we were) under the impression that there’d be a lot more interaction. So I started rushing through the story part, thinking it’d be a kind of basic tutorial, only to find that it went on for hours and hours. And when we finally were able to meet, it was rather disappointing and limited, I thought.

Idk, I expected something else.

Tried Fallout 76 with a friend cause it was ridiculously cheap and I’d heard the game is much better than it was in the past. Still had to refund it. Game felt so empty and boring, and some weird in between of a fallout game and an MMO which imo did not feel great

The other game that had positive reviews was project zomboid, which is clunky to play, and while it might be progressing in its development, feels slow, like I should check back on it ina year or so.

If you can handle the complexity, I recommend Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. Project Zomboid is like a far simpler and scaled-down game played in real time. I don’t like PZ because of the uncurable infection mechanic coupled with the combat, which is just awful. CDDA has an extremely unforgiving learning curve (like, Dwarf Fortress is IMHO considerably easier to come up to speed on), but is very deep. It’s open-source and free, though they also have a build on Steam if you want to donate.

• Carrier Deck. It’s not a terrible game, but I really badly want deep fleet command games, and it just isn’t that. I knew that going in, but I was still hoping for more.

• WARNO. I like Wargame: Red Dragon, though I play it as single-player, despite the poor AI. I like Steel Division 2 single-player. But WARNO just feels like it’s too fast-paced and like there isn’t enough tactics involved.

• Gradius Origins. I mean, it’s a collection of good horizonal shmups. I have enjoyed Gradius games, years back. It’s just that my tastes have changed over time, and I feel like the genre has evolved. I remember enjoying horizontal shmups, and today, they just feel repetitive, unforgiving, and simple, not to mention requiring one to die, gain knowledge, and play again. The game was as I remember…but I’ve changed.

• Tiger-Heli. Not considered to be a great vertical shmup, but I remember playing it in the arcade, wanted to have a copy. Gave me a brief burst of nostalgia, but not something I’d really play.

• A bunch of almost-all-text Vampire: The Masquerade interactive fiction games. I want an interactive fiction game with a sophisticated, mature vampire story, and so much of the material seems like it’s aimed at a younger crowd. I’ve played good interactive fiction. I found the things kinda disappointing. Writing wasn’t great, plot wasn’t great, gameplay wasn’t great.

• Quern: Undying Thoughts. Aimed at being a spiritual successor to Myst. I had some Myst nostalgia and looked it up. Didn’t like the world, which wasn’t as appealing to me as Myst’s. Didn’t like the puzzles. The world just felt bland. Felt like a slog to get through, didn’t have Myst’s or its successors’ ability to have all these fascinating little machines that suck one in.

• The Close Combat series. Not really a disappointment — I know those games like the back of my hand. I’ve probably bought those things on about four or five different platforms (physical, digital from Matrix Games, GOG, Steam), but just couldn’t summon up the interest to play them on Steam. Bipped in and out. I really liked Close Combat II: A Bridge Too Far when it came out, played the first three games like crazy.

• POOLS. Psychological horror walking simulator. Pretty much exactly what was described, and I felt like it might be interesting, but just didn’t draw me in for long. Was kind of in the mood for a “wander around and look at pretty things” game, and it didn’t really do that for more than a few minutes.

• A long, long list of Pinball FX tables. In particular, I don’t like the Zen original tables — the good side is that they aim for a horizontal orientation, so are more-playable on a computer monitor, but everything else about them is just extremely disappointing. Grindy. Hard to get control of the ball. Generally unimpressive sound samples. I’d have thought that given many years of experience, a bunch of people who are super into pinball could have made better tables. The classic Williams tables are consistently, by a large margin, my favorites, even if they’re technically-dated. I am not an expert pinball player — I can do things like post passes semi-consistently, but I can’t death-save or rolling pass, and maybe building up more skill would change some of my opinions — I’m not a fan of tables that tend to drain down the side readily, for example. I also am disappointed that the lights in Pinball FX tend not to illuminate more area — IMHO, part of what makes a real pinball table exciting is playing it in a dark environment and having flashing lights crazily illuminating the table. Video game engines have, in the past, used what IIRC the OGRE engine calls “static dynamic lighting”. You basically pre-generate lightmaps on a per-light basis, then vary their intensity based on the intensity of the light, combine the lightmaps. So you can use some kind of super-fancy render process to generate your lightmaps, and then at runtime, all you’re doing is slapping some textures on surfaces and twiddling intensity to do the lighting. I think that that might be a good approach here, allow for illuminated lights on the table to have more-sophisticated lighting at low computational cost. I’d be willing to use a fixed-position camera to get that, take the camera position out of the equation so that the specular produced by a given light is always the same.

Cliche internet non answer to your question:

For Wasteland 2, I personally really enjoyed it- however I do think it drags on way too long once you get to the second half.

Wasteland 3 is a much more polished and tighter experience. It focuses more on faction interactions, with a large number of factions you can support or oppose and various combinations lead to various outcomes. The combat is also much better. Assault rifles were sacrificed a bit, now being generally underpowered choice but it mean more variety in all other weapon classes.

This is not recent but a while back I bought a few of the old assassin’s Creed games before I realized how fucking awful the Ubisoft launcher is

I got Avowed for 50% off. Having played through most of it, I feel like I should have waited for a better price. Not outright bad, but fairly unexciting, badly optimized and I’m SO sick of RPGs with frequent character closeups that all have stoic facial expressions. Plus you just know that we’re never going to get another Pillars of Eternity-style game from Obsidian again, it’s like Microsoft took the IP and studio and just took a dump on them. I don’t think I’m going to buy any future Obsidian games.

On the upside, I like the lore, story and voice acting (so far) and the combat was at least better than Skyrim’s.

I havent played a new game in…. A very long time

Been playing satisfactory, elden ring, some path of exile etc in the past year

There has not been any new games i found interesting enough to buy

I got NFS Unbound and NFS Heat this past winter when they were on sale for around $7 each.

Heat has been surprisingly fun. I haven’t played an NFS game since the second Most Wanted and it turned me right the fuck off to the series and back to the OG Most Wanted.

Unbound was utter garbage through and through. Cringey acting and stupid characters, annoying dialogue while driving, terrible design choices, cartoony and realistic at the same time in weird places, customization was lacking, driving and races were not fun, felt like one of those games trying to be edgy while being safe about it in typical corpo fashion… I hated it. I didn’t care that I spent less than a Starbucks coffee for it. I asked for a refund and uninstalled it on my own.

I haven’t done a refund like that in a few years. Other refunds were for performance reasons like this VR surgeon game that had awkward controls.