I don't mind the extra difficulty so much, as the fact that it completely ruins my immersion. A bunch of cave-dwelling goblins in Daedric armor? Why the hell haven't they upgraded to a hovel at the very least?

Those hard-to-reach, poison-dart shooting, paper-bag-wearing, hard-to-reach gentlemen can also be quite the nuisance. True story though, I managed to travel from one exit of Blighttown (the Depths one) to the other and back to the safety of Firelink Shrine on my first attempt, completely missing out on all of the…

I found the secret with Stellaris was, because the passive AI makes the mid-game plod, the best you can do to keep things interesting is adopt a more aggressive, expansionist approach. Once you manage to get a couple of intergalactic wars started things become fun again.

Wow, usually I try to pepper my habit with a few distractions to stave boredom, but practically all of the games you mentioned (except perhaps Doom) are colossal time-sinks - how are you gonna manage this?

Scrubs - "My Screw Up" destroyed me (though admittedly it did on more than one occasion).

Not only does Dire look cool, but it seems to have a potentially interesting concept as well. I really wish we had more games that did more with driving than simply making you race from A to B under various, barely differentiated conditions. Speaking of which, Jalopy is a game I should try some weekend (though it's…

I didn't really mind the difficulty in DS2, but I thought it was really unimaginative, rehashing enemies and environments from previous iterations and only rarely throwing a genuinely fresh idea in the mix. For some time I wondered if it was my own Souls burnout rather than the game itself, but then Miyazaki-led DS3…

"Pokémon Snap depicts a nightmare scenario: a world in which the artistic merit of your work is judged by a scientist."

First game I thought when I read the title. Excellent game - too bad the sequel seems to be stuck in limbo for the better part of a decade.

Ok, naggin' time: the checkpointing in the Foundry level is horrendous

Just started it an hour ago and I have to say, I expected it to be good, but it's actually amazing. The constant shift between ranged combat, then moving in for a glory kill to recover health is enormously satisfying.

"Doom clones"! That felt like 1995 suddenly jumped out of a corner and slapped me in the face.

Hadn't played Galak-Z before, though it had been on my wishlist for quite some time. Tried it, absolutely loved it, and it's probably what I'm going to be playing this weekend, hopelessly trying to complete it in Rogue mode.

In all fairness though, that Athens - New York flight might have been a tad expensive.

I hinted at some of the issues in the third paragraph, but it's probably not entirely illuminating. The main problem with the original (partly retained here) was that the size of your character and the speed of your enemies made it impossible to react to their attacks: they were too fast so you couldn't hit them, and…

I think your point about agency is spot on. To be fair to the game, SotB still gives you just one attack per press, but it also throws in a varyingly long dash towards your opponent a la Arkham series. The problem is that, unlike those games, here your character's movement is slow and pronounced making the action feel…

That's not even the most surreal bit, they even had a graph showing you their "Predicted Interest Curve" from the moment you started playing it, up until a year after. Science!

True enough, but this was too punishing even for '80s standards, the enemies launching themselves at you with such speed it was impossible to react, forcing you to memorize the exact moment when they'd appear.

It is a bit shocking - the original received 8s and 9s across the board from mostly respected publications; A.C.E. (the chrysalis version of the subsequently revered EDGE magazine) gave it 885 out of 1000.

Technically true, yes, and there was Acorn Archimedes as well, but these platforms were largely ignored both by consumers and developers, so I'm not really sure they warrant an inclusion.