Got to hit Street Fighter’s 6 training mode hard to learn some Cammy combos and also to practice some special moves (I’m not used to having a DP) and fundamentals. Getting bodied pretty hard by my friend lately, who mains Juri and plays JP on the side.

Also want to get back to Strive and play some ranked matches and, if I get enough free time, resume my Dragon Age: Origin’s playthrough.

To be fair, I was expecting Diablo IV to be a complete fiasco considering Blizzard recent track record but things to be going really well here! The game is Solid!

Tears of the Kingdom has kept me busy enough.

Bored with the feeling of nothing to play.

I finished TotK, as in finished all of the shrines. I was planning a pokemon fan game on my steam deck for about a week but finished that too. I was playing Melvoe Idle on my phone for the last 6+ months but just 100% it.

I feel like I am growing out of video games a bit. Work and young kids make it hard to put energy in a game unless I’m really into it.

I finally found a way to end my inability to stop playing WoW after 18+ years of it. I didn’t consider myself “addicted” - as I am able to maintain career & family, it was more about it meant I didn’t play any other game. I ended the issue by requesting a “private information removal” - which hard-deletes every aspect of your entire battle.net account. Gone. 13,000 hours and it feels great. I also don’t feel like I “lost” anything. When you see a 2 hour movie, but then you leave the theatre when it’s over - do you regret spending 2 hours? No, you don’t.

AAAAnd the very next act I took was to make a new Battle.net account to play Diablo4. The wheel of time, and all.

In other thoughts, I don’t expect D4 to be forever, and I look forward to smaller/indie games on Steam. Looks like I need to try Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld, and others.

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Gaming wise it’s probably the best period I’ve had. I’ve finished a lot of smaller games, found absolute gems such as Outer Wilds (+ the perfect DLC) and Devil Daggers, P-ranked my way through Ultrakill and I’m slowly going through Elden Ring, which is just so awful on many fronts, that I don’t think I’ll be playing any other soulslikes ever. I’ve got a nice long rant about it brewing inside me.

Celeste got a massive, high quality community map pack recently, so I’m slowly chipping away at the maps, and I finally found a “main game” that I’ll probably be playing forever - Trackmania.

I don’t think I’ll be running out of stuff to play anytime soon.

I’m playing the same multiplayer games over and over but I’m not really progressing on my backlog of games and it’s been this way for 6 months, so i think it could be going better

I have 68 games in my Steam library that I haven’t touched.

On the other hand, I just finished Monument Valley 2 this weekend!

So many games just want too much attention.

The single-player games are bloated with crafting, mission timers, levelling trees, giant worlds that required mounted traversal, etc. They all want to be 50+ hours game time each.

The multiplayer/Live service games are battlepasses, dailies/weeklies, limited-time content. They all want to be 6+ hours a week each.

When I decide to play a game after working, I’m not playing those games anymore. I want to, and I have a bunch of them installed, but they’re just sitting in my library. Games like that require me to choose to spend X hours at a time playing only that, and I’m probably not going to do that.

I love video games, and I enjoy playing those larger SP games when I do play them. But I had to dial back and stop playing a lot of ‘Live service’ games because the content was in passes that demanded too much time I couldn’t give them. I wasn’t playing enough to complete them, but their games were built around them that there wasn’t much point playing them if I couldn’t.

Each evening I feel like playing a game, and I just watch Youtube while playing something I can pickup and play for 30min instead - or fuck around on the internet and not play anything at all.

I decided to play Witcher 3 because it was so highly reviewed, and after playing it for ~5 hours, then going to bed and feeling like I was still in the ‘tutorial starting zone’, having mostly run around over empty ground. Barely any characterisation or story progression had actually occurred. With no meaningful progress or reason to continue, I just… didn’t. A few days later I decided to uninstall.

I’m honestly pretty positive around the number of games I get to play on Game Pass. Several major releases I was excited about are coming there this month, and even if they weren’t, I’d usually be able to find something.

It feels almost petty to mention, but my main problem with gaming these days is choice… there’s just too much. I have a SteamDeck packed with over a decade of Humble Bundles and giveaways. I have a MiSTer FPGA with 10,000 retro games. I have subscriptions throwing me more games in a month than I could play in a year… and amid all that choice, I found I was playing none of it.

So I’ve taken steps. On retro devices, I’ve taken to removing the full ROM sets (or hiding them from view) and just selecting a handful of games that I used to own, or definitely want to play. In Steam, I’ve started a collection list of games I’m interested in and I only ever pick from that.

And, somehow, it works. Seeing only three or four games to choose from somehow short circuits that panic response of seeing three or four thousand. It’s easier to fixate on a game, or to find something to genuinely enjoy about a title that may not be that perfect experience otherwise, rather than discarding it quickly and moving on to the next fleeting thrill.

I feel super stagnated when it comes to games anymore. I still want to play but I only ever seem to play the same 2 games which are positively ancient now. I have tried to chip away at my backlog, but I will play for one night and then go right back to my comfy games even if I enjoyed it. Then if I want to try again I have to start over from scratch because too much time will have passed and I can’t remember the controls or what I was doing, so it’s back to the comfy games again because at least I won’t get frustrated.

Maybe I need to try some very short games or something? But also maybe I am just being too picky! I look for things that I think would scratch the same itch as my comfy games but haven’t found anything that gets close enough (yet!). I just want to have fun why do I have to make this so difficult?! >_<

I watch/listen to a bunch of gaming video essays which help me get a good fix. Been playing ToTK which has been great fun and have been all over Timberborn recently.

There’s so much to play these days, so I have a hard stance against anything with microtransactions.