Unless I’m missing something it looks like it doesn’t use Denuvo? (Steam lists a custom EULA but I don’t see Denuvo listed.)

Have you tried Resonance? It’s a mystery adventure game set in modern times where you play as four different characters whose stories interconnect. It’s been a while since I played it (a decade or so?) but I remember that it had an interesting game mechanic that let you use memories like items in various interactions, as well as a number of puzzles that I rather liked the design of.

Pokemon (1st gen and 2nd gen – plus some of the spin-off stuff from that era to a lesser extent) captivated me in a way no other games have before or since. Honestly, I hope nothing ever grabs me that hard again; it’s kind of scary how obsessed I was in retrospect.

A number of N64 games also made a big impact on me. Majora’s Mask was probably my second favorite game (after Pokemon) for many years. (OoT made an impression too, but I played MM first.) I loved the music in Diddy Kong Racing. I got 120 stars in Mario 64, and when I tried it again as an adult, I really appreciated how short and to the point levels could be (not that I played that way as a kid) – also the camera in that game sucked. Castlevania: Legacy of Darkness kind of disturbed me a bit as a kid, but it’s probably the first game I encountered a sort of “New Game Plus” in, which was neat. (People have since told me that’s the “black sheep” of the series and that it’s really weird that that’s the only one I’ve played significantly.)

Duke Nukem 3D was the first game I modded, I think (very simple graphical stuff). Definitely wasn’t age appropriate but I played the heck of it anyway. Didn’t really get much into other shooters other than playing through the main game of Perfect Dark on N64 and playing split-screen Golden Eye with friends.

I also played a lot of Sim<Whatever> games – particularly SimCity 2000, SimEarth, and SimTower. Also had a bunch of others like SimFarm and even some of the more obscure ones like SimSafari. Streets of SimCity and SimCopter being able to load SC2K maps was really neat though. Played a fair amount of other city builders and simulation games like Caesar III and Roller Coaster Tycoon too. My parents probably hoped I’d become some sort of business manager. :p

I had a lot of creative tools back then as well which I treated as not-that-different from video games. Various Kid Pix programs (one of which had a bunch of odd video clips integrated – including a short documentary about jackalopes of all things), Kid’s Studio, Digital Chisel, some version of HyperCard, etc. Game Maker – which I found around the year 2000 back when it was still on www.cs.uu.nl – ultimately led me to being a professional programmer.

I think it’s probably an Indian English-ism. It’s understandable but sounds weird to speakers of American English (and maybe other English dialects).

A more natural sounding title (to an American English speaker) would use “Microsoft is making” or “Microsoft is planning to make” rather than “Microsoft might want to be making”.

This is totally going to turn into another JBIG2 lossy compression clusterfuck isn’t it…

For those who are unfamiliar, JBIG2 is a compression standard that has a dubious reputation for replacing characters incorrectly in scanned documents (so 6 could become an 8, for example) leading to potentially serious issues when scanning things like medical and legal documents, construction blueprints, etc.

Thanks for copying the list out; I’m not visiting YouTube either at the moment. I think I probably saw this video a while ago though – at least, that particular set of games looks very familiar…

I’ve played some of them and have some things to say about them:

• Paradise Killer: I liked the music in this one. I’d never encountered the vaporwave aesthetic before bumping into this game via a Let’s Play (back when I was still going to YouTube) which probably enhanced the weirdness factor of the game for me. It clearly took inspiration from Danganronpa, so if you liked that game you might want to check it out (or vice versa if you somehow ran into Paradise Killer without having heard of Danganronpa, I guess).
• Crosscode: I found this game frustrating. I liked a lot of things the game did – like the interaction with party members (EXCEPT for dungeons) and running around the map searching for secrets – but… the default difficulty seemed to be set to maximize annoyance. I mean, it’s doable. I was very stubborn about not changing the timing setting – probably too much so – and was eventually able to beat the main game, but the way it was tuned definitely reduced my enjoyment. The game claims that adjusting the setting doesn’t matter, but tracks statistics about it (like GTA-style stats) which made me really stubborn about not changing the setting. A lot of the challenges in the game are Zelda-esque timing puzzles – from hell. Like hit the switch then run over and do something before time runs out but with 20 steps instead of the one or two you’d find in a Zelda game. (If you don’t like those sorts of timing puzzles you probably won’t have a good time with this one.) So, of course, the timing is set in such a way that it’s often tricky to actually pull off (particularly with aiming involved) even once you’ve figured out exactly what needs to be done. I did it, but more often than not got pissed off while doing it. The game additionally had the interesting idea of having competitive dungeons. Your party members would challenge you on the overall time to clear dungeons. So, in addition to the time pressure of individual puzzles, there was an overall time pressure to race through the puzzles as fast as possible. I liked the idea of where they were coming from with the party member interactions for dungeons but I’d have preferred to take my time with things frankly. It ultimately doesn’t matter that much whether you win or lose those (I won about half of them), but having the game rub my nose in it for being too slow after getting frustrated at puzzle timing and aiming for an hour or more in each dungeon kind of sucked. The overall plot of the game was interesting enough to go through, and I liked the characters for the most part, but a lot of the gameplay was frustrating. Very mixed feelings on this one.
• Phoenotopia Awakening: This game was another mixed bag. I really wanted to like it. There were a lot of parts I did like… but it is very flawed. First is the gameplay. It presents itself as a mostly cute pixel platformer/adventure game, but the developers seemed to be thinking “Dark Souls” with stamina and such and… it really did not work for me. Thankfully, you can turn most of that crap off – and I did so unabashedly. (I beat DS1 before playing it, and since playing it I’ve beaten DS2 – so it’s not like I can’t handle hard games. It just did not feel good to play with those mechanics enabled.) Second is the story. There’s a decent enough hook to get the main adventure going fairly early on, but the game doesn’t deliver on it. You get to the end and the big dramatic question of the game is… still unanswered! That is really not ok! (Instead you get a bunch of unnecessary backstory for the main character that I took as a big “fuck you”; I won’t say more than that in case someone does want to play it and find out for themselves, but the ending was really unsatisfying to me.) The game had a lot going for it – the music’s good (and I still listen to some of the tracks occasionally), and there was a lot of charm in places. Some of the areas were really pretty and there were a bunch of fun little interactions – but I really don’t know what they were thinking with some of it!

Some games with soundtracks I particularly enjoyed over the last couple years:

• A Hat in Time - a cute, fun collect-a-thon platformer with a kickass soundtrack. This one is particularly fun to play and hits nostalgia vibes for the early 3D Mario games.
• Shantae and the Seven Sirens - 2D platformer with an energetic chiptune-y soundtrack. The game itself is OK, but the soundtrack is what really made this one for me.
• Paradise Killer - vaporwave inspired surreal murder mystery
• Subnautica - underwater survival and crafting game with a soundtrack that set the mood very well
• Demons Roots - 18+ RPGMaker game where you lead a demon uprising to reclaim the surface world, invading country after country freeing slaves as you go. Very dark game that is unusually good for the type of game it is. If you’re not put off by the RPGMaker doujin wabi-sabi and are tolerant of adult content in games this one is worth a look. There are some absolute bangers in the soundtrack.
• Pyre - Lord of the Rings meets 3v3 basketball with a very enjoyable soundtrack by Darren Korb (Bastion).