Thanksgiving with friends? That sounds nice. I wonder what it is like.

I admit, shortly after arriving in Skellige I put the game down for about half a year, but then came back to it and loved it all over again. I walked every corner of Skellige for fun, and then finished the main game and both expansions one after the other.

I could not have played that game through to the end if I had not turned off almost all map icons for places I had not visited.

“Lazily”, perhaps, in terms of conceptual design - but certainly not lazily in terms of the sheer person-hours required to create geography and content on the scale of a modern open world game.

I’ve been playing Rise of the Tomb Raider, and it’s really fun. This is my first Tomb Raider game ever, new or classic, and it is not nearly as puzzle-blighted as I feared. Back in the day, a friend of mine showed me a bit of Tomb Raider 2, I think, which involved some incomprehensible room with some boxes, and then…

I am really torn about whether or not I even want to bother with Andromeda. On the one hand, it’s free on EA Origin Access ... but on the other, is it really worth bothering with at all, when I have other things I could do instead?

I’ve been playing very little this week, and that will likely continue into the weekend. I got stomped again in Stellaris, and haven’t gone back yet. On the bright side, I seem to have successfully taught my father how to play the game - mission accomplished? I just installed Rise of the Tomb Raider, which I had…

When I read your question, I got stuck on “satisfying.” Most of the time, I feel that beating a boss is more of a relief than anything else. “Oh, finally I beat that fucker, thank god it’s over.” For true satisfaction, though, I have to kind of hate the victim, and who they are and what they stand for and everything.…

Last week I burned out on Darkest Dungeon, at around the same point that I burned out on my first go ... which is sort of telling, given that I was playing on the new and shorter radiant mode. It’s not that the game is too long, it’s that the mid-game is just repetitive.

I have thought a lot about my new horrible and awful hobby, Warmachine the miniatures wargame. I have spent probably around $1000 builiding my army this year, which is absolutely absurd.

Um ... just wondering ... but is there any reason this excellent post from 3 years ago showed up on the front page again?

My attempt to learn NBA2K16 began with me loving basketball, and ended with me still loving basketball, but also realizing that I am never going to develop the arcade skills necessary to play that game well. Oh, and that the my player mode is both really cool and totally BS, because you have to buy all of your goddamn…

I imagine that it could be done much more easily in something like Stardew Valley. Imagine that it was possible to buy up people’s houses and kick them out, forcing them to work on your farm as tenant laborers. This allows you to expand in new and amazing ways, changing the fantasy from being a village farmer to being…

Oh, and you have to pay rent on your house and field and animals, which is re-assessed every time you expand, and due whether they got sick and died or not.

The fact that I not only made it into Keyboard Geniuses for the first time in forever (maybe since I tried to explain how dumb double-axes were on v.1), but inspired so much on-point commentary in the threads, while being 100% on brand — it warms my bitter, cold heart.

Actually ... I have taken steps towards doing that myself. My working title was, “It’s a Hard-Knock Life.”

I’ve sunk back into Darkest Dungeon. I played about halfway through soon after release, and then got ground down. I’m playing it on the new Radiant mode now, which is a bit easier and a LOT shorter. I will see how long I feel inclined to keep going. I’d heard lots of annoying things about the DLC, so did not bother…

Life simulators let us feel what it would be like if it were actually possible to accomplish anything in real life. If we were actors in the world, with the power and possibility necessary to achieve things. For are we anything more than plebes and cogs in a system of overlapping oppressive layers, all designed to…

My go-to strategy for this is to mainly play PC games that are for an older crowd.

That ... or you switch to minis wargaming. Minis are for crazy people with a ton of time (to paint everything) and money (to buy everything.) That said, you get a lot of the fun of deck building, but given the physical constraints on changing up one’s deck (buying new figures, painting them, etc.) one will find that…