Found it! It's basically all weirdo in-jokes (like "pinkbunnies" was one of the weirder censor-words they used, and CP was Character Points, a valuable currency used to unlock new, well, characters.) Behold the glory.

I don't have it here at work, alas. When I get home, I'll double-reply to your post with it. It was called "Shawarma from Dormammu" because the Avengers movie had just happened and shawarma was a predictably common-but-useful in-game heal item, and I'd just defeated Fricking Dormammu after much effort and received a…

If you took away the ghost elf and ranger stuff and just made the character an Uruk carving out his career, you'd have exactly the same game. You wouldn't even need to change a lot of the dialogue. I enjoyed that game a great deal but it felt deeply un-LotR to me, almost antithetical to what I enjoy about the…

I like it, but I suspect that a game truer to the spirit of the books would have the same problem WW1 games have often had: the immersiveness is in the atmostphere, the action itself is generally no fun at all and the exciting moments are exceedingly dangerous.

I spent the entire article trying to remember that game's name. I never played it, but when I was seven or so, it promised everything I'd ever want in a game. I'm sure if I'd played it I'd have been disappointed.

No, Marvel Avengers Alliance was one of the earlier browser-based F2P games that happened, and it (and its sequel) got their plug pulled by Disney, both times fairly unexpectedly. The first one was early enough that it had all the Avengers, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Spidey, all of everyones' rogue's galleries,…

Yes! Or the people who would let you know when gold came up on the hourly rankings. Man, I still remember phrases like "GOLD IN SIGMA" fondly…

This sounds terrific, and also horrifying. I have to force myself to read books like that.

It's not even strictly an "X-Men" video game, but I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for the first Marvel Avengers Alliance. All the Marvel characters in a single game, licenses scattered all to hell, mindless moronic grinding without any help, the works. I wrote a poem for it once, even. R.I.P.

I loved your description of Arkham Knight, but @thaene:disqus sold me. Let's do this thing.

Ugh, I'm so sorry. May you have peace and strength in your grief.

Thank you for the thoughtful response! I appreciate the way you framed this and think you make some very valid points. I certainly find that I enjoy F2P games in a different way than I enjoy my "normal" games—less like playing video games and more like an unusually interactive process of cultivating a collection,…

I seriously thought I'd already heard of this when I first saw the trailer.

I have to assume they were deliberate about the whole "his poor heart is just too big" business, because they have so many easier, more straightforward ways to deadify a kid who'd never been here before. Sooo…good for them?

Yeah, it is. I was thunderstruck when I played it on a free weekend on Steam, but after that initial infatuation, I've found that I have to get myself worked up to play it. When I'm mentally investing in it, it's a surreal head-trip of a game; I can't think of many games that gave me more goosebumps than it has. …

My relative lack of enjoyment of DA:I was almost certainly influenced by my not realizing that this was more Game of Thrones than Lord of the Rings until well after I'd quit in confusion. It was seriously like two years later that I realized I'd had the wrong filters on for that game. Still haven't gone back, though.

The Red Alert games seemed to give the Saints Row guys some ideas, because each of the games gets progressively more insane than the one before it. Are you playing each campaign through, or just playing multiplayer maps? If it's the latter, do you have Yuri's Revenge included?

I loved the "take that" simplicity of the romance options, too, especially when you try to romance Keith David. I also loved the Magic Mike parody, where he's chasing the guy and then sees the stripper audition sign and when they say "there's no time for this," he fires back, "There's no time for anything but this!"

Count me in for the "loved the first year then quit" club, too. I don't even know what it was that turned me around. I loved it, the first year happened, then I didn't want to pretend work on my pretend farm any more. It's not even installed right now.

Open question: does everyone hate F2P mobile games? I don't, at all: it's a great sidenote distraction-that-doesn't-really-distract while I'm studying and the best ones are fun to fiddle with, in a ship-in-a-bottle sort of way.