5 ms·

I’m not sure if it’s just me, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve played a lot less games. Some of it is time, I have less of it and a family who wants it, but some o

by jaabe 7y ago

I’m not sure if it’s just me, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve played a lot less games. Some of it is time, I have less of it and a family who wants it, but some of it is the lack of recommendations. There is a sea of terrible games, and that’s especially true on mobile, and in my experience it’s impossible to find the ones I like. When I was younger, my friend group had time to try a lot of games to find the good ones. Once you found a good one, you’d recommend it to other people, and they would do the same to you. That’s how I found the original Fallout. I played all the demos that came with a PC magazine of the time, and one of those demos was Fallout. I found x-com ufo enemy unknown because my cousin played it at my grandparents house. Dune 2 because it was installed in my youth club. Diablo because it was the hottest game at a Net-cafe. With age I’ve lost that recommendation zone. I don’t have time to try games and neither do my friends, so we don’t. Once in a while something will blow up so large that you can’t avoid hearing about it. But finding the gems? How do you even do that? I mean, I guess you could turn to gaming-“journalism”, but that is mainly just advertising.

rudiv 7y ago
XCOM2 is great. And Eurogamer is a good website. And I don't get paid by either.
- ralphstodomingo 7y ago
  Have been planning to get into XCOM2 for a while now. Really liked XCOM:EW even on a mobile device.
  - chii 7y ago
    You gotta play xcom:ew long war mod. It's amazingly deep and different (and difficult). But the game play is a lot more intense and engaging.
  - rudiv 7y ago
    Be careful with XCOM2 if you like strategy games... I lost many weekends to that game in college. The expansion pack (War of the Chosen) is well worth the money. Honestly just talking about it now is making me want to reinstall it. I like that game so much that I've actually bought it twice.
thrower123 7y ago
Most of my recommendations come from the handful of YouTube streamers I follow these days. The best of them are entertaining, and give you something like a demo and quick analysis in thirty minutes while you do something else. I rather like manyatruenerd.
OJFord 7y ago
I used to read CustomPC, a magazine in the UK that covers hardware (why I started reading) and games (that it got me into). I don't any more, but I believe it's still published. It never really felt like advertising, of course they were sent free copies to review, but there were plenty of negative reviews. If you can apply a mental 'Fortnite filter' (or want to read about Fortnite) then Polygon is good too.
- rudiv 7y ago
  I find Polygon has good content usually, but I've also found many reviews from Polygon that seem to betray a lack of understanding or familiarity with the genre from the reviewer. Also, they have more content that is about gaming (e.g. regurgitating stuff from Reddit, their critical analysis of genres, anything vaguely "gaming culture" related) than they have content that is about games. I'm ashamed that I forgot about it in my other comment, but Rock Paper Shotgun is my other favourite gaming site. I've never gotten any whiffs of shilling from there, but I may not have the nose for it.
ansible 7y ago
Also an older gamer. I don't read much about the latest games, and my rig needs a serious upgrade as well... However, when I do read articles about game development and such, some games get mentioned more than others. For their gameplay, story line, art, etc.. So those games get added to my wishlist, and when they go on sale (such as Spec Ops: The Line, which looks to be a morally ambiguous experience), I pick them up. It helps that years old titles (like the remastered BioShock series) run OK on my rig.
- LandR 7y ago
  Spec ops the line is great!
- the_seraphim 7y ago
  Ive found that the games these days are just about instant dopamine hits - gone are the days where a game could take hours of strategising in favour of a "whose got the best cards" a la command and conquer mobile app. also things like dungeon keeper, black and white, populous... all those semi open ended games. its all just mmorpg, moba or pay to win these days.
mysterydip 7y ago
Those PC magazines of your youth were little more than advertisements themselves :)
- Splognosticus 7y ago
  I remember buying Computer Shopper specifically because it was a giant tome of ads. Whenever it was time to upgrade I poured through it looking for the best deal and ogling all the cool stuff I couldn't justify buying. Now that I think of it, it's sorta weird that despite ads being such an omnipresent nuisance these days there's not a website equivalent of that today.
  - Fjolsvith 7y ago
    And the Lab of Doom and Pepsi Cola. I really miss that magazine, too. It was my newsfeed for the latest computer technologies.
oneeyedpigeon 7y ago
I’ve found the Internet is a pretty good replacement for word-of-mouth-recommendations. Yes, they’re less ‘personal', but the sheer scale more than makes up for that. Reddit, Metacritic, and Twitch are all useful sources.
gaems 7y ago
The last game I "played" was 2048, which is a pretty dry game when you get down to it. Actually, Universal Paperclips is the most recent "game" I've tried, although in some respects I wouldn't call it a game as much as, perhaps, a technology demonstration. The last true "video game" I played, ever, in the clasic sense of the word, would be GTA: Vice City. That's the last time I had a console, bought a title, and immersed myself in the game play, to beat the game, as intended by the producers of the game. I also revisited it, when they re-released it as a mobile app, and played it on a tablet. After that experience, the deep dive of investing maybe 80 hours of zombie-like effort into beating a richly developed video game, while being mildly entertained by the story arc of the game, I washed my hands of video games. It had eaten up about a month of my life, and had amounted to pretty much nothing in return. I gained a new variant of button mashing skills, while vegetating at home on the couch. Mobile or not, games are time wasters, for when you have time to spare. As I've gotten older, I resist getting sucked into media that tries to engulf me and swallow up weeks of time, to unravel a yarn of riddles attached to a gaming environment. (or whatever) I've seen all the newer games, and they're interesting for sure, but to sit inside and play a video game like it's a job feels like erasing whole sections of your life, when you come up for air. You ask yourself: What the fuck am I doing with my life? I don't really care about all of the new, emerging technology and advancements. It's kind of a sad joke at this point. Graphics cards, consoles, downloadable content, live streaming speed runs, e-sports celebrities and fame? I just... I just don't care anymore.
- seba_dos1 7y ago
  I agree with you, but I don't think it's generally as bad as you paint it. The longest games I've ever played take around a dozen of hours to complete - and there weren't many of them. This of course means that I haven't and probably will never play some popular titles like The Witcher, GTA, RDR etc. that ask for a huge time investment, but there are plenty of really great games that take at most a few hours and which make you feel like after reading a nice book or watching a good movie instead of wasting time.
- frosted-flakes 7y ago
  The best games I've ever played were played with others, and I don't think it was a waste. And not necessarily multi-player games, even playing Zelda with someone, and solving all the puzzles together is a blast. Or Mario Kart. Heck, all of my favourite games are made by Nintendo.
hef19898 7y ago
Back the day I used to binge play games. If I couldn't get myself to do that it was a clear sign I lost interest. Now, older, family and generally less time (or need to sleep ;-)), I stuck half way through Borderlands 2 since more than a year. Last game I really played was Battletech, no idea where I found the time for it. Ehat really stopped was the recurring hardware upgrades ever two or three years. The last one was more than 5 years ago I think...
aasasd 7y ago
Don't forget that until mid-2000s there were like ten very good games a year, so every magazine had to write about them, and then you had a couple dozen okay games and something like ‘Lula the animated simulator of porn studio management.’ So everyone more-or-less knew the good stuff and not the hundreds of copycat daily-grind business simulators. In ~five years between 2006-11 we went to full onslaught of indie games with the markets barely distinguishable from the olde Flash game sites. Everyone can make an ‘indie game’ now―they're not even called that anymore, I think. IPhone and Android happened in the same time. BTW, it sorta helps to have ‘queues’ of stuff you want to read, watch, listen to, or play. I've gathered some titles just from seeing each mentioned twenty times on the web―many are classics by now, of course (especially since my games queue doesn't move much anyway).
ungzd 7y ago
Nowadays I usually just check what's on sale on gog.com, sometimes on Steam, but gog.com has less junk games, cleaner UI and, most importantly, better reviews: I found out that users there criticize more, give lesser ratings and don't hesitate to describe bad aspects; on Steam basically every game, if it's not a complete trash, has "overwhelmingly positive" rating, on gog most popular games have pretty bad ratings. And of course it has lots of old games that I didn't had a chance to play in their era, for example I played original X-Com for the first time few weeks ago. For a while, I also watched Twitch, but seems that everyone except most promoted streamers got tired and there's nothing except streams of Fortnite. I discovered few games from there, at the times when it was interesting. My friends are mostly playing AAA games on Playstation nowadays, so unfortunately I lost this way of discovery too.
- wildpeaks 7y ago
  Might be good to know GOG has a Twitch channel with various streamers that play games available on GOG, quite handy to discover lesser-known games (and quite a pleasant community imho): https://www.twitch.tv/gogcom https://www.twitch.tv/gogcom
dunnevens 7y ago
There's plenty of gaming publications, blogs and streamers which aren't "advertising". Rock Paper Shotgun is some of the best writing on games right now, and has been for the past several years. Eurogamer is also excellent.
HNLurker2 7y ago
>I’m not sure if it’s just me, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve played a lot less games Me too. Reminds me of this quote: "we don't stop playing game because we get old, we get old because we stop playing games".

by jaabe 7y ago

rudiv 7y ago

XCOM2 is great. And Eurogamer is a good website. And I don't get paid by either.

ralphstodomingo 7y ago
Have been planning to get into XCOM2 for a while now. Really liked XCOM:EW even on a mobile device.
- chii 7y ago
  You gotta play xcom:ew long war mod. It's amazingly deep and different (and difficult). But the game play is a lot more intense and engaging.
- rudiv 7y ago
  Be careful with XCOM2 if you like strategy games... I lost many weekends to that game in college. The expansion pack (War of the Chosen) is well worth the money. Honestly just talking about it now is making me want to reinstall it. I like that game so much that I've actually bought it twice.

thrower123 7y ago

Most of my recommendations come from the handful of YouTube streamers I follow these days. The best of them are entertaining, and give you something like a demo and quick analysis in thirty minutes while you do something else. I rather like manyatruenerd.

OJFord 7y ago

I used to read CustomPC, a magazine in the UK that covers hardware (why I started reading) and games (that it got me into). I don't any more, but I believe it's still published. It never really felt like advertising, of course they were sent free copies to review, but there were plenty of negative reviews. If you can apply a mental 'Fortnite filter' (or want to read about Fortnite) then Polygon is good too.

rudiv 7y ago
I find Polygon has good content usually, but I've also found many reviews from Polygon that seem to betray a lack of understanding or familiarity with the genre from the reviewer. Also, they have more content that is about gaming (e.g. regurgitating stuff from Reddit, their critical analysis of genres, anything vaguely "gaming culture" related) than they have content that is about games. I'm ashamed that I forgot about it in my other comment, but Rock Paper Shotgun is my other favourite gaming site. I've never gotten any whiffs of shilling from there, but I may not have the nose for it.

ansible 7y ago

Also an older gamer. I don't read much about the latest games, and my rig needs a serious upgrade as well... However, when I do read articles about game development and such, some games get mentioned more than others. For their gameplay, story line, art, etc.. So those games get added to my wishlist, and when they go on sale (such as Spec Ops: The Line, which looks to be a morally ambiguous experience), I pick them up. It helps that years old titles (like the remastered BioShock series) run OK on my rig.

LandR 7y ago
Spec ops the line is great!
the_seraphim 7y ago
Ive found that the games these days are just about instant dopamine hits - gone are the days where a game could take hours of strategising in favour of a "whose got the best cards" a la command and conquer mobile app. also things like dungeon keeper, black and white, populous... all those semi open ended games. its all just mmorpg, moba or pay to win these days.

mysterydip 7y ago

Those PC magazines of your youth were little more than advertisements themselves :)

Splognosticus 7y ago
I remember buying Computer Shopper specifically because it was a giant tome of ads. Whenever it was time to upgrade I poured through it looking for the best deal and ogling all the cool stuff I couldn't justify buying. Now that I think of it, it's sorta weird that despite ads being such an omnipresent nuisance these days there's not a website equivalent of that today.
- Fjolsvith 7y ago
  And the Lab of Doom and Pepsi Cola. I really miss that magazine, too. It was my newsfeed for the latest computer technologies.

oneeyedpigeon 7y ago

I’ve found the Internet is a pretty good replacement for word-of-mouth-recommendations. Yes, they’re less ‘personal', but the sheer scale more than makes up for that. Reddit, Metacritic, and Twitch are all useful sources.

gaems 7y ago

The last game I "played" was 2048, which is a pretty dry game when you get down to it. Actually, Universal Paperclips is the most recent "game" I've tried, although in some respects I wouldn't call it a game as much as, perhaps, a technology demonstration. The last true "video game" I played, ever, in the clasic sense of the word, would be GTA: Vice City. That's the last time I had a console, bought a title, and immersed myself in the game play, to beat the game, as intended by the producers of the game. I also revisited it, when they re-released it as a mobile app, and played it on a tablet. After that experience, the deep dive of investing maybe 80 hours of zombie-like effort into beating a richly developed video game, while being mildly entertained by the story arc of the game, I washed my hands of video games. It had eaten up about a month of my life, and had amounted to pretty much nothing in return. I gained a new variant of button mashing skills, while vegetating at home on the couch. Mobile or not, games are time wasters, for when you have time to spare. As I've gotten older, I resist getting sucked into media that tries to engulf me and swallow up weeks of time, to unravel a yarn of riddles attached to a gaming environment. (or whatever) I've seen all the newer games, and they're interesting for sure, but to sit inside and play a video game like it's a job feels like erasing whole sections of your life, when you come up for air. You ask yourself: What the fuck am I doing with my life? I don't really care about all of the new, emerging technology and advancements. It's kind of a sad joke at this point. Graphics cards, consoles, downloadable content, live streaming speed runs, e-sports celebrities and fame? I just... I just don't care anymore.

seba_dos1 7y ago
I agree with you, but I don't think it's generally as bad as you paint it. The longest games I've ever played take around a dozen of hours to complete - and there weren't many of them. This of course means that I haven't and probably will never play some popular titles like The Witcher, GTA, RDR etc. that ask for a huge time investment, but there are plenty of really great games that take at most a few hours and which make you feel like after reading a nice book or watching a good movie instead of wasting time.
frosted-flakes 7y ago
The best games I've ever played were played with others, and I don't think it was a waste. And not necessarily multi-player games, even playing Zelda with someone, and solving all the puzzles together is a blast. Or Mario Kart. Heck, all of my favourite games are made by Nintendo.

hef19898 7y ago

Back the day I used to binge play games. If I couldn't get myself to do that it was a clear sign I lost interest. Now, older, family and generally less time (or need to sleep ;-)), I stuck half way through Borderlands 2 since more than a year. Last game I really played was Battletech, no idea where I found the time for it. Ehat really stopped was the recurring hardware upgrades ever two or three years. The last one was more than 5 years ago I think...

aasasd 7y ago

Don't forget that until mid-2000s there were like ten very good games a year, so every magazine had to write about them, and then you had a couple dozen okay games and something like ‘Lula the animated simulator of porn studio management.’ So everyone more-or-less knew the good stuff and not the hundreds of copycat daily-grind business simulators. In ~five years between 2006-11 we went to full onslaught of indie games with the markets barely distinguishable from the olde Flash game sites. Everyone can make an ‘indie game’ now―they're not even called that anymore, I think. IPhone and Android happened in the same time. BTW, it sorta helps to have ‘queues’ of stuff you want to read, watch, listen to, or play. I've gathered some titles just from seeing each mentioned twenty times on the web―many are classics by now, of course (especially since my games queue doesn't move much anyway).

ungzd 7y ago

Nowadays I usually just check what's on sale on gog.com, sometimes on Steam, but gog.com has less junk games, cleaner UI and, most importantly, better reviews: I found out that users there criticize more, give lesser ratings and don't hesitate to describe bad aspects; on Steam basically every game, if it's not a complete trash, has "overwhelmingly positive" rating, on gog most popular games have pretty bad ratings. And of course it has lots of old games that I didn't had a chance to play in their era, for example I played original X-Com for the first time few weeks ago. For a while, I also watched Twitch, but seems that everyone except most promoted streamers got tired and there's nothing except streams of Fortnite. I discovered few games from there, at the times when it was interesting. My friends are mostly playing AAA games on Playstation nowadays, so unfortunately I lost this way of discovery too.

wildpeaks 7y ago
Might be good to know GOG has a Twitch channel with various streamers that play games available on GOG, quite handy to discover lesser-known games (and quite a pleasant community imho): https://www.twitch.tv/gogcom https://www.twitch.tv/gogcom

dunnevens 7y ago

There's plenty of gaming publications, blogs and streamers which aren't "advertising". Rock Paper Shotgun is some of the best writing on games right now, and has been for the past several years. Eurogamer is also excellent.

HNLurker2 7y ago

>I’m not sure if it’s just me, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve played a lot less games Me too. Reminds me of this quote: "we don't stop playing game because we get old, we get old because we stop playing games".