I’m currently playing Astrox Imperium. The dev was out of communication for a while and is now back, though he is going to finish it up as best he can and then later on make it open source since I guess he’s burned out on it or something. It’s a game I really like. It’s a sandbox space trading/combat single player game that is often referred to as “Eve Offline”.

It’s also early access, so it will presumably help with it being a bit shallow. There are a surprising amount of things locked behind various mechanics that I’m starting to stumble across. For example, if you’re a jerk to people enough your karma score will fall and now you have access to rifle through vending machines looking for loose change or robbing an ATM. I have a feeling there are a lot more of these kinds of things to discover.

Just getting out of the Sims price hell is worth it for me. I’ve had some good experiences with early access games in the past so I’m reasonably upbeat about what may come down the line.

Skyrim and Satisfactory.

Linux has come a long way since I last tried it ~15 years ago

100% this. Linux has been my daily driver since ~2005 and it seems like suddenly one day I went from playing tux racer and trying to get Skyrim to work to some degree with wine to buying games on steam with little fear of having to anything more than choose proton experimental and maybe add gamemoderun to the settings. It’s a completely different world now.

Ms. Pacman :)

I’m a mess of un-ticked off mental loose ends :)

I could totally see having something like this take hold of me, but it just hasn’t as far as video games are concerned.

I tend to treat books differently, for what it’s worth. I don’t review them or list them, but a book sitting around that I haven’t read is more of a mental loose end for me than a video game is. Not sure why. I also feel obligated to give a book a really good try before finally bouncing off it forever. Like, this is the 4th time I’ve read this book and have never gotten beyond page 700 before. Calling this one done.

This might sound negative, but I don’t mean it that way. I just think differently about this. I’m glad for those who do enjoy keeping logs and writing about and reviewing games, but it’s not something I really want to do.

I guess I’ve never felt the need to keep a log of what I play. I’m either enjoying myself, or I bounce off of it to something else. I’ve also never really been stressed about a backlog. To me my backlog of games isn’t a list I need to complete, it’s a list of choices I currently have if I’m looking for something to do. I don’t even really have a backlog, just a list of games on steam and/or my hard drive. Along that same vein, I don’t feel pressured to finish games. If I’m really into one and I’ve made a lot of progress, I’ll push it through. If I’m not feeling it, I don’t. Games to me shouldn’t be a chore. I do give them a good try, though, because it sometimes takes a while for a game to hit it’s stride.

To me, because I’m not feeling those urges, keeping a list would be more of a chore for me than anything else.

I honestly believe a HUD minimap is one of the worst game UI elements a game can have. There is rarely a canonical explanation to begin with as to why your character magically knows the layout of rooms they haven’t entered and even worse that they know the position of enemies.

I agree. I like the way old-school rogue-likes would handle it (where you’re an @ symbol). You wouldn’t see anything you haven’t seen, but your map would remember where you have been and what things looked like at the time you last saw it (more or less). I’d personally just rather have a compass than a minimap, that way it could tell me which way I was facing and I’d have to rely on environmental cues for the rest. Maybe footprints if you have walked by there lately (or something has).