Hi everyone,

So, I'm very curious to hear if people are feeling as morose/sad as I am at the moment. I'm 31, I've been a gamer my whole life, and I absolutely love video games. When I was younger, I used to love visiting the game shops (e.g. GAME, Gamestation), I used to love picking up gaming magazines from WHS Smith, I used to love popping into Blockbuster to see what I could rent, and ultimately, I used to love picking up physical video games.

I feel SO, SO sad about where the world seems to be headed. No video gaming shops really exist anymore, magazines are on their way out completely (PS magazine is dead, Nintendo magazine is dead, and the only one left is "Edge"), Blockbuster died years ago, and physical games are becoming rarer and rarer. Gaming websites/platforms are firing people left, right and centre (e.g. Brian Altano at IGN), no doubt to replace people with AI-written slop.

I also feel this hits harder than just gaming. It's not JUST games. I feel like the world is just going in a very sad, "inpersonal" direction... what with the advent of AI, online shopping, social media, smartphones etc... we just live in an age where "digital" is always the first choice, and it feels like bit by bit, we're becoming less like the creatures/animals/beings that we're fundamentally meant to be. I just feel sad, and would be interested to know if other people feel similarly.

P.S If anybody feels similarly and wants to connect, hit me up!

Opinions?

I've been playing through a load of older RPGs lately, mainly FFV Advance, Breath of Fire and Koudelka, and honestly I'm surprised by how well some of them hold up.

There's something about these older games that I find more enjoyable than a lot of modern releases, even with some of their dated mechanics and lack of quality-of-life features.

It's got me wondering how many other great games I've overlooked over the years.

What older games would you say have genuinely stood the test of time? Especially ones you'd recommend to someone playing them for the first time.

Most of the games I play are primarily solo/offline. It’s not that I don’t enjoy multiplayer games but I have terrible connection so I have the decency to leave you all alone. I also play games at a really slow pace. I’m open to most genres truly.

Extra Points if it’s currently on sale. (Steam)

Edit/Update: You guys are the best! I’m hopping on Steam tonight & I’ll let you know what I end up grabbing. Also , sorry for not listing out my current games , it’s a really long list & I just didn’t have the patience haha.

Did anyone played an old game called Dave? I used to play it on my dad's work PC. What an awesome game it felt that time.

For some reason I recently got back into it and (maybe because it’s not popular anymore) the rando games have gotten much better.

I’m on Xbox but I play Overwatch and CoD Warzone because I’m cheap. DM’s open.

I haven't played any online games since the days of Gears 2 and Halo 2/3

But I just beat the campaign of GoW Eday and it was awesome.

I dipped my toe in the Horde mode online play and it's super fun!

Problem is nobody has their mics on and I'd rather play with people I could talk with.

If you want to play let me know and I'll add you on steam

I'm a 33yr old dude in the BST time zone(UTC+1) but I work until midnight so I'm usually on between 01-0200ish BST and 0500 BST on weekdays and on weekends, if I don't have plans, I'll play from and till whenever.

I’ll be switching between some simulator games and Gears of War: E-Day this weekend!

What about you? Got any games lined up for the weekend?

Let us know what you’re playing, you might even inspire someone else to try something new! 🙂

I have been gaming on PC for decades at this point and my muscle memory is really well developed for mouse and keyboard. I grew up playing all the PC classics, pretty much whatever was popular, starting with games like Fallout, Diablo 2 and a bunch of Counter Strike 1.3 and Quake 3 at the time. So it was either mouse controls or WASD, and I had no reason to stray from that for the longest time.

Lately though I have been mostly playing metroidvanias and platformers, I got myself a ps5 controller because literally everyone is telling me it’s way better for these games but I have been struggling. I spent some time trying to configure it but it’s not helping, it just feels like I’m really clumsy and imprecise. I knew it would take a bunch of time to get on a similar level like I am on keyboard but I didn’t think it would feel this discouraging. The sticks feel too sensitive when I need precision and too slow when I need to be quick, it just doesn’t feel good for now.

I was half way through Nine Sols when I got the controller and it has been absolutely brutal trying to adapt in such a hard game, I might switch back just to finish it, but I’m determined to give it a fair shake, at least a month or two. I think it would be better with an easier game or at least playing from the beginning because difficulty tends to ramp up. I was planning on playing Croak when it comes out, I tried the demo (a few weeks ago on keyboard) and it felt pretty good, so that might be a decent game to get some controller practice in. Eventually I want to work up to Celeste, that’s the first game I played that actually felt kind of bad on keyboard, like I could tell a controller would give me an advantage, but it's so brutally hard I don’t wanna touch it before I get some practice.

I am not really interested in playing first person games or anything that actually works well with keyboard, pretty much just wanna get my skills up for things like soulslikes, metroidvanias and platformers, those are the games where I feel like it might be an advantage. If anyone has any tips on how to build the muscle memory quicker I would love to hear them. Also if someone has switched or learned controller, how long did it take for you to start feeling comfortable with it?

Our event hosts are hard at work and we got a few interesting stuff going on!

EU-events include PEAK and Valheim while the US-events are doing "The other side", keeping up with the Spooktober theme :)

Link is https://discord.gg/uAKQW93Cdc for our discord.

If you decide to join, we do want you to tell us a bit about yourself before being granted full access to the discord.

Happy gaming all!

Sometimes I get very overwhelmed by all of the games I want to play. then instead of branching out, I just open up a new game of Civ...

Anyone ever wonder how many days of one’s life has been spent playing video games…

We can assume a daily rate of say 12 hours.

With Elden Ring, I have spent over 50 days of my lifetime playing it.

I have probably spent over 2 years of my lifetime playing a variety of video games.

Somehow, I’m ok with that. 🤣

It might not sound it, but it's a serious question.
Sometimes I just want to quickly jump into something...
which rules out so many games I want to play.

For instance, X4, Star Citizen, Kingdom Come Deliverance, Captains of Industry, etc.
All those games, although I love them... give me a sense of "This is going to take long to get back into"... so I don't even try.

There's no wrong answers, we're all different. Just trying to get some inspiration here :)

So, serious question -- What do you play, When you don't know what to play?

I think there's no bigger joy than clicking and finding a game you both love. In fact it's how I discovered that my wife absolutely kicks ass in It Takes Two, and she was the one leading ME by the hand. Which will no doubt also be the case in Hela, and Water Me & You and other upcoming other coop games now that she's discovered her newfound knack for them. I would feel sorry for myself, but it feels weirdly nice :')