What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?

Been getting back into League of Legends after a multiyear hiatus. I started playing MOBA games before MOBA games before the creation of LoL and DotA: as scenario maps in Starcraft.

LoL has changed a lot and, in my opinion, for the worse. I find it more complicated and less legible.

• Far too many champions. It's very difficult and time-consuming to grasp everyone's mechanics.
• Far too many skins. Riot makes its money selling skins, so they're incentivized to produce many. This reduces the game's legibility. It's hard to quickly tell what champion abilities are in play and what their hit-boxes are because they can look radically different from skins for the same champion.
• Newer champions have overloaded and unbalanced abilities. I presume Riot game designers are pushed to design ever more exciting champions to appeal to players. Newer champions now easily outrange classical "artillery" mages, outmaneuver classical "mobile" champions, outstealth, etc.
• Community is more negative. I'm surprised by how easily people try to surrender games even when they're down by a few points.

I'll probably give it up soon and move on, though I'm hesitant because it's a game I've enjoyed for a long time.

I stopped Hyperbolica for a while to give my brain a rest and have tried out Satisfactory, at my son's request. It's another game notable for being featured on Let's Game It Out, which is my son's favourite YouTube channel. It's a pretty fun game - you make a factory to make things to make a factory better at making things that makes making your factory better. In a lot of ways, it feels similar to Hydroneer - open world, making fidgety gadgets, that sort of thing. It's enjoyable, but as with Hydroneer, I think I derive most of the pleasure from sharing the experience with my kids (one of my daughters also enjoys the game). This one apparently does support multiplayer, but we only have one copy of the game, so haven't tried it together yet.

Elden Ring

Yeah sorry not a very original answer; I've reached around 34 hours of gameplay and it might not seem like much but for me it's A LOT; I honestly can't remember the last time I put so much hours into a game, maybe when I was barely a teenager and played Assassin's Creed II or MGS4 on the PS3.

It's hard to keep me engaged and not bored after a few days of playing the same, but Elden Ring just keeps surprising me and being so entertaining , I think it's because:

• Souls-like combat which makes combat interesting instead of just mashing buttons.
• No cutscenes, tutorials, escort missions or anything like that, I know that if I have 1 hour to play then it's gonna be 1 hour of playing the actual game.
• The world, lore and enemies are SO interesting, not even the story which I can't even follow, just being able to wander wherever and finding cool stuff and wanting to keep playing because I discovered a new area and I want to see what's that cool looking tower on the distance.
• It's not frustrating like Dark Souls because if a boss is too difficult you can just go somewhere else and there's probably more stuff to do in the meantime until you level up and face the boss again. Last time I played Dark Souls I got stuck in the Capra Demon (Even having beaten him in past runs) and ended up dropping the game because I couldn't progress and I know the other areas were even harder.

I started Daggerfall for like the third time after reading Julian Jensen's AMA on /r/Daggerfall a few years ago. It was interesting to see how The Elder Scrolls series came to exist, and how the late series (TESA: Redguard and forward) differ from the first two games. I sprinted the opening dungeon (DfU does allow you to skip, but I missed the option when I started this run) and decided to try to get to work learning the game. I picked up some job quests and died without saving near the end of one, but I plan to not make that mistake again.

I'm still playing OpenMW. I wanted to try to cheese the Boots of Blinding Speed, which can be done easily enough with a few Resist Magicka spells by making different spells with the same effect and stacking them (I also do this for Feather in Oblivion, lol). On my first character, I just decided to see if I could do it, and it only cost me 130 gold to pay for the spell, and as a Redguard melee type he doesn't have any proficiency in magic, which means it's absolutely easy. My battlemage, which is my more "serious" run was able to do the same setup for about the same price, but I had to stack a Resist Magicka potion to remove the minor sunglasses effect when equipping the boots. I also got my Alchemy to level 50 without making myself stinking rich, but ensuring I can fairly consistently make necessary potions, like Restore Magicka and Health.

I'm still chipping away at The Witness, and am not afraid to google the puzzle types (but not the solutions), if I forget, or don't understand how it works after solving a few of them, I'll look up the mechanic to be sure I understand the puzzle type The Witness, and Noclips documentary about it led me to playing Braid, which I've had for years. My first try with Braid collapsed because I thought of it as a platformer with puzzles, not as a platformer that is a puzzle, which is an important difference, and I think a testament to how great Jonathan Blow is at designing games.

Retro SNES:

• Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past -- still one of the best games of all time. Most of the way through it at this point. Super delightful. Possibly the most metroidvania game of all games. Also at times still really challenging. I've gotten to read ancient walkthroughs for a couple sections.

• Super Mario World -- this one is actually really fun. My partner had an SNES growing up and I didn't, and they are an expert at this game, and this is the only time in our lives when they have been better at a game than me. So it's been super fun to have them, a non-gamer, teach me about a game.

• Super Metroid -- this game was way too hard and too scary for me as a kid. It's really fun to play it now and be good at it and enjoy it. It's so atmospheric.

• Donkey Kong Country -- i remember this game having cutting edge graphics when it came out. It still looks pretty good! And still has exceptional two-player capabilities.

Crusader Kings III
I bought the new-ish DLC that adds more court and culture mechanics. Like all Paradox DLC, it has some good ideas, but is somewhat half-assed.

I enjoyed the court events a lot at first, but they quickly get repetitive. There needs to be many dozens more of these to stay interesting through a several-hundred-years campaign. I quickly got bored with this, and stopped holding court unless prompted by my courtiers.

The artefacts are a cool addition, both the ones on display in the court and worn by characters, giving more personality to both. But they add a bit too much micromanagement, because they eventually break unless you periodically spend money to repair them, and every time you get a new one you have to decide which ones to put into storage. I miss an option to automatically decorate my court with the most powerful artefacts, and there are missed opportunity for set bonuses and culture/religion-specific objects.

My favourite new mechanic turned out to be the new culture mechanics. The cultural head can spend prestige to replace tenets of their culture, modifying it to their liking. And rulers can create hybrid cultures with other cultures present in their realm. (I started as Basque, and am now Basque-Occitan-Butr-Egyptian.) Like creating or converting religion though, it's a bit too easy, and it's a decision you take when you've met the criteria, while it really should have been a more organic process.

I'm not really sure if the DLC is worth the money or not. Paradox has this weird habit of putting half the new features in the free patch, and locking half behind the paywall, and I don't actually know which parts of this one is paid content and not. Buy it on sale, I guess.

Elden Ring. NG+1. I did a dex/str bleed build the first time, now for NG+1 I've respecced for the second half to be an int/dex mage with the moonveil katana. I got to the last boss fight (in the Erdtree) pretty easily.

I curse the final boss fight, it's still hard, even with a very nicely levelled and complete endgame build. This shit hurts.

Lost Ark
My first character, a Gunslinger, was annoying to play and deleted.
My second character, a Berserker, still sits under 600 doing alt-task dailies as I got bored with the T1 grind on my Artillerist and didn't want to have to repeat it, oddly enough the T2 grind was miles easier.
My fourth character, a Shadownhunter, hasn't been touched in at least a week as I'm not finding the time to get her the next 15 levels to 50 while also not willing to spend the gold on a knowledge transfer or use a powerpass as since she's closer to 50 than not. I also blew through a bunch of the engraving books to get her set up and I'm not sure I like her playstyle.
My third character, an Artillerist, has become my main as I enjoy his hard hitting, "What's aiming?", everything-is-an-aoe style. Just hit the last continent after some pretty minor grinding to get to ilvl 1100 to be able to go there. I'm pretty sure I'm just going to finish the story here and call it quits as the endgame isn't really fulfilling. The 30 person chaos gates don't really require anyone to work together, just kill stuff. Same with the 4 person chaos dungeons. The abyssal raids were fine until you got to the last of the T2 stuff and they upped them from 4 person raids to 8 person raids. It was already a chore getting people to know the mechanics when you only had to rely on 3 other people, having to get 7 other people in two separate parties that have their own individual tasks to do so in PUGs is a multi-day ordeal and honestly the mechanics are so convoluted, counter-intuitive, and unexplained (or even hinted at) in the game that expecting people to do the work of the developers to get the raids to work is a major shortcoming on the devs part in my opinion.

Sure there are guides and videos for just about everything, but just as I've seen people that have perfect best-in-slot builds and know the mechanics by heart, I've also seen people in T3 gear that are just running around in what looks like it does a good enough job. The wording on skills and equipment is bad enough that it's misleading on what does and doesn't work together and how it works in the first place. I don't mind watching a mechanics video or checking a site to get a good-enough-in-slot-without-needless-grinding build, but it's obvious some people just want to play the game without doing all that and there's enough of them that it causes issues with being able to play for even people like me that will do a search, but aren't making spreadsheets to track every little thing. I don't fault the players for this, I fault the devs for making a game that requires a legion of other people to make it work.

I have been playing Satisfactory almost rabidly, it's a total addiction I can't stop thinking about. 10/10 do recommend, unless you like having a sleep cycle.

Bought the new ipad mini recently. Wanted to have a fun mobile game to play with. Found this amazing city builder called Theotown. Works great and looks great on the ipad. It really hits the itch for a simcity 3000/4 game that I can take on the go.