To The Moon is actually quite short, about 4 hours should be enough. As somebody who increasingly sorts his backlog by how short the games are, I would definitely recommend starting there.

To be fair, what we have seen so far of at least one of the mockingly linked projects in the article has turned out pretty damn well (talking about the Silent Hills teaser). That man still has it. Even though it's really hard to tell what it might actually turn out to be.

I'm slightly, but only slightly disappointed to see that there is an actual Ticket to Ride: Switzerland boardgame. I actually thought you were referring to a game of a similar spirit that a friend of mine and I have been playing whenever we have to wait around in a train station.

And even that's an understatement. He and his pal Goethe are basically the German-language combo-pendant to Shakespeare.

Thirty Flights of Loving or its free predecessor Gravity Bone could be interesting. They are short enough that they can be seen through in the 2h that the students are supposed to be playing (which in such a scenario can only be an advantage, anyway — you will have to focus your discussion, which is always easier when…

Part of what made Portal puzzles so illuminating was that they
allowed for a degree of improvisation.

I'm always spending Christmas at my parent's home, which means mostly frolicking in the snow or hanging around family and drinking too much. Gaming is not really for daytime, and it's not a social thing to do around here, so I only have the evenings… since I usually don't take a gaming device with me, I'm limited to…

I don't know how much the "indie treshold" is an obstacle for you guys, but one of the more pleasing developments of recent time has actually been the resurgence of local multiplayer games. You know, games like Sportfriends, Broforce, Mount Your Friends, Nidhogg, Towerfall or Samurai Gunn — all of them are basically…

I was thinking the same, but then again I hate the thought of gaming this particular system. (I already felt awful for maxing out both Yukari's and Mitsuru's social link — seems like Japanese teenagers are way more at ease with polygamy than I am. I really hope that Persona 5 will keep 4's option to be close to a girl…

I'm with you. Well, sort of. I just finished Persona 3: FES earlier this week, which took me literally years. (Or more specifically, two attempts with an abandoned save game and a year-long hiatus in between.) And now my heart feels like its Arcana is The Hole. Or something like this.

It's not awful! It's great! To this day, it's the game that defines Zelda for me!

I can only imagine how bad that must have been. I once had some time to kill in Paris after a flight back from Korea, and decided to watch Hot Fuzz in a movie theatre. I was thoroughly disappointed.

Absolutely. Well, the simplest thing would be to say that it's "unlike everything else" in anime, but that would be both a cliché and underselling it. (It is unlike everything else in anime, though, but it's also pretty much unlike everything else in animated movies, and movies and TV in general.)

Also, whatever P'tit Quinquin was, it was glorious.

Ah, sorry then for expecting some kind of meta-joke or something that I didn't get. Rogue-like-likes (or
rogue-lites or whatever) have been such a fixture in my playing habits for the last two years that I erroneously expected everybody to be familiar with them.

It's a rogue-like(-like), which means that while a successful run will, in fact, only be around 40-60 minutes long, the challenging nature of the game (it has permadeath) means that you will probably invest hours before you see the end for the first time. (And there are dozens of different endings.)

I can imagine that this is difficult. From the top of my head, I can only come up with a few:

I can see the point you are making, but your examples strike me as a bit peculiar. Wouldn't you say that being bored by Little Inferno and being bored by Binding of Isaac are two radically different things?

Additional argument: It's not only about exploring different mythologies. In fact, there is an enormous wealth of European folkolore and myths that were never touched by games. (The same is true for Japan and North America, I'm sure.) In fact, I regularly lament the fact that virtually all regions in Europe would be a…

Granted, it is among the more entertaining of its ilk, what with it taking its inherent absurdity and running with it, but do you really miss the Doom book? Ultimately, it was not that great.