What a soundtrack!

In that case you should go for it as you’ll know pretty quickly whether it’s fun for you.

I think that depends more on your income level. Is $30 a lot to you?

It’s about £22 to me and whilst I’d say the game is a lot of fun (I played through it in 2019, I think, on my Xbox One X) I personally wouldn’t pay that much for it. However I spent a long time poor, so I’m rather price sensitive even though I probably don’t need to be quite so hesitant any more.

I enjoyed Wasteland 3 a great deal too.

I rather enjoyed Gears Tactics a few years ago.

Godus.

I know lots of people hate it but taken in isolation it’s okay. I found its aesthetics charming and its pace generally pretty chill. It wasn’t good but it wasn’t terrible. Low medium perhaps but I have comfortable memories of listening to an audiobook whilst playing it.

An N64 game I’ve never heard of before? Mark it on the calendar because that hasn’t happened in many a sparrow’s moon.

Thank you! I felt like I was the only person on the planet to think that those games only hit the dizzying heights of “okay, fine at a push”. They’re perfectly serviceable and not much more.

Honestly? Not really. My best memories of gaming were in my 20s in my student flat. Lots of Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

I played games in the early '90s and don’t have much nostalgia for most of the games themselves. The late '90s had the PSX and N64 and whilst Mario Kart 64 is probably the best in the series I can’t say I feel most of the games of those platforms were “the best”.

I think I would say that the best games are the PC games that came out between 1998 and 2002. Those I can genuinely enjoy today.

I cannot say the same for much that came out in the 1980s. Most of them entertain me for about thirty seconds, without hyperbole.

Once we get past the early 2000s I’m hard pressed to find any games that I think are truly “the best”. 2007 was pretty damn good as was 2009.

When it comes to gaming with friends any game can be good. The game is practically just a framing device. I’ve not made many friends whilst gaming. I’ve gamed with friends but mostly I’ve found that people either just want to be arseholes or are extremely serious about playing online. In person I’ve found that the skill disparity means that it’s a complete crapshoot. I played a lot of Mario Kart 64 over a ten year period and don’t have any outstanding memories of it being the best thing ever (I think it’s the best MK game but that’s because the others are worse).

Mostly I like games that I can use as escapism. Exploring fun places and getting away from the day to day. I’ve rarely had all that much fun gaming with other people. Exceptions exist though - playing through the recent TMNT game with my teenaged niece was a blast. Playing KeyWe with my wife was also great.

Apple

Good to see HDTP in use.

I can definitely see the appeal of being able to do stuff with the information, and I doubt I could sit down and make a list of every game I’ve ever played. However my memory is pretty good for this sort of thing. It’s very rare for me to lose objects as I have a database-like memory for that stuff.

Amusingly this means that if someone else moves things then I’m comedically awful at searching for whatever it was, and if I move house or re-organise then it takes me a few weeks for my brain to record all the new data. Until then I’m a clueless idiot.

Oh and as I said in another comment - time is my nemesis. I often don’t know what day of the week it is and anything beyond about a week and a half into the future has almost no meaning to me. It’s not a very useful trade-off!

The tradeoff is that I’m terrible at time. Anything beyond about ten days in the future is almost meaningless to me.

Reading the comments - am I the weird one for just remembering?

I played this on Game Pass (Gamepass? I don’t recall how they brand it) years ago and had fun with it. I’d enjoy playing it again, assuming I could forget my previous playthrough.

Is it that time again? Apple considers getting into gaming?

I can’t say I’ve ever found him to speak too slowly, but you do you.

I think it’s Gaming Historian that does my head with that, or at least used to. Comedically slow.

Game development as a service.

Ooh, The Precinct looks rather fun!

Star Citizen still exists? I started when I was in my twenties and now I’m pushing 40!

Game development as a service.

I wouldn’t buy at the current price, raise it as much as you like.

There’s just not enough USPs to justify the cost to me, regardless of how shiny the graphics might be.

I want to want it, but it’s going to have to do a lot more than it currently is as a platform.

Wow, there is someone else out there that feels the same as I do about Dan!

Gunpoint. Charming, atmospheric, doesn’t outstay its welcome.

It’d be interesting to see a developer create a slightly prettier version of Vice City. I appreciate the visuals of the later GTA games but doing more with less seems like it’d make sense. The gap between these games is getting rather nuts.

Then again, “forever” games seem to print money, and that’s more important than creative expression. As I get older I have a greater appreciation for games that don’t try to outstay their welcome. GTA V seemed to struggle with this - on the one hand it was huge, on the other the story seemed to be about half the length it telegraphed itself as. What’s the point in being able to level up the stats of heist crew if there’s not enough for it to matter, etc…

(In my opinion, obviously) GTA IV was too long, San Andreas was a sprawling mess, but Vice City was the sweet spot.

I care about GTA but the online element of it is of zero interest to me, and it seems that’s what it’s become.

The world’s relationship with Facebook has changed a smidge since 2013.

It’s still ripe for parody, but the elements of relevance aren’t the same as they were.

I wonder if the next one will take so long that the world it satirises is long gone. Facebook being parodied in GTA V no longer makes much sense, for example

The Mr. Freeze fight certainly turns the tables. Shame I don’t play the Arkham games to be prey!

I believe it showed the map screen. The functionality worked over a network so it didn’t even have to be dual monitors on the same machine!

Oddly enough, Uplink.

The last full-price AAA game I bought cost £34.99 in 2001. That’s about £64 adjusted for inflation and that’s about $85 (US) at current exchange rates.

Interesting.

smothers it with a towel and stuffs it into an oven

Or sitting in a cupboard off-gassing, oozing, and generally making the home a safer environment.

It does remind me of the Acts of Gord’s use for an N64 - as a doorstop with a note saying “This is all I am good for.”

Oh! Ewaste! So kind of you…

I’ve yet to encounter a single Atari 2600 game that was worth more than 30 seconds of my time.

Considering I have 827 games on Steam, the figure of $1620.26 doesn’t seem too bad. Now I’ve probably bought a load more bundles bumping that up, but there’s no convenient way to figure out how much that adds (let’s round to $2000). I’ve had the account 18 years, 9 months.

So that’s… $8.89 per month.

Yeah, that seems pretty reasonable.

I’ve been playing (and loving) Fallout London. It turns out that the pokey little locations in their games are Bethesda’s fault. The engine does still suck, but it doesn’t have to suck as much as it does in their hands. London is huge!

I guess I don’t get to play either of their exclusive games.

I’ve been meaning to create a suitable control scheme to play on my Steam Deck as it’s the apex of the series for me.

When I was really getting into PC gaming in 2003 a game from 14 years before would have been released in 1989. Yes, I’d say that was old!