Just beat the Dead Space remake. Absolutely amazing job they did, the perfect remake. Much better looking, some neat new added stuff, a better developed story and perhaps my highlight was the ten times better anti-gravity sections. No real reason to ever play the original again, which is HIGH praise for a video game.

Also finished playing Final Fantasy 13, which was terrible, and now messing with FF13-2, which is much better but probably won't hold my attention until the end.

I have finished Kona. 13 hours for me.

I have a World of Xeen file in which 4 party members are petrified, and the other 2 have been dismissed from the party, so the entire party is petrified in that save file.

Doing my second playthrough of Amid Evil in Evil difficulty, quite enjoying the pain so far. Also just finished playing Alpha Prime, and all i can say is... Hubbardium.

Checking out the new System Shock remake beta...

Credit to them, the lighting in this one is much brighter compared to the last demo I played (not sure which one that was...). Cyberspace funnily enough feels relatively close to the original - it's easier to control but it still has that somewhat disorienting feel. Overall, it feels like a remake of System Shock, which is reassuring because I think the threat was that they were going to try to make it more like SS2.

On the downside, the music is boring. I know the original soundtrack is somewhat controversial, but it beats the hell out of this bland ambient noise. I guess we're also stuck with the voice acting. We've gone from the amateur "just grab whoever's in the office that day" performances of the original to some sort of desperate over-acting now. Melee combat lacks a sense of feedback - not the first FPS with this problem but they certainly didn't overcome it. I don't think the opening in the hacker's apartment really adds anything. The intro to Diego is also just wrong. First, the hacking job he hires you for looks like he basically just wants you to push a couple of buttons instead of an intense bit of on-site hacking that only an expert can pull off. Second, he strongarms you into it with armed guards holding you at gunpoint, which I can only guess is because the developers wanted to remove a lot of the hacker's moral ambiguity (Rebecca also doesn't give you the "we know what you did!" dialogue of the original), which is plainly opposed to the intent of the original developers.

MMOs are all I've been playing for the last half a year or so and I'm increasingly afraid that I'm becoming addicted to them, which is unacceptable for me. I didn't play MMOs much before that; I played some WoW but that's it. Half a year ago though I stumbled on Runescape and I was lost, and then I moved to EVE Online and I was lost again. Don't get me wrong, up until very recently I had tons upon tons of fun with these games (I wouldn't have played them otherwise) but they started to interfere with my life so I decided to throw them in the thrash, figuratively speaking, and move back to single player games. Frankly I'm very excited about it.

Currently I'm at the beginning of my third playthrough of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and I'm having a blast.

TLDR and the moral of the story: don't get into MMOs if you are all or nothing person like I am.

Incremental games (see Cookie Clicker for a famous example), but there are others) can be similarly addicting, even though they are single player games.

Funny that you mention it since I'm also an avid Clicker Heroes fan.

I agree that games like this can be very addicting too, but there's also a slight difference: idle games can be played for 30 minutes a day and still reward the player with steady sense of progress (which is what idle games are all about after all).

Most MMOs on the other hand, like the ones that I mentioned, hook you up with quick gains at the beginning and then slowly drag you into more and more activities that take more and more time. At the end of they you end up playing several hours a day just to get this one level or some such. I guess it's a strategy to squeeze some more monies from players by offering a way out, like boosters and such.

Another thing, even worse: some MMOs lock up certain features behind paywall (LOTRO) and then encourage you to spend cash on unlocking them, which is even lower move than the one I mentioned before.

Yeah, the more I think about it, the more I start to dislike MMOs.

The problem that *I* have when playing those games, sometimes, is that I want to play close to optimally, and to do so, I need to be at the computer at the right time to make my next move. Essentially, this means I'm constantly thinking about my progress in the game, and most significantly, I may be pushed to the point of re-arranging my schedule, or at least changing my sleep schedule, just to do better at the game, and it's hard to get out of that mindset.

For some incremental games, those with more active oriented gameplay, it's reasonable to turn off offline progression and actually turn off the game, and I find that that makes me not worry about missing things as much.

The issue is largely psychological, but it is definitely something to be aware of when playing or developing incremental games.

(Worth noting that incremental games are much easier to make than MMOs. With that said, incremental game development is still serious game development; the fact that balance issues can crop up us one example of this.)

Yes there's plenty of micromanagement involved in incremental games if you want optimal progress, or at least not fall behind too much. Use of calculators to better manage your game can take quite a bit of weight off your shoulders, though it does take away from the fun of personally designing your setup which is half the fun of those games after all. In the case of Clicker Heroes there are also whole mathematical essays on Reddit about how to optimally micromanage your game that help a lot, and are also tons of fun to read.

I remember two games that used to keep me up at night like that: Tribal Wars and Travian, though I didn't play those in a long time. By the way it brings me to another form of games that are kind of designed to be as addicting as possible, namely browser games. I used to play lots of those in my youth, fortunately I didn't have much money to spend on them then because I most certainly would have.

I'd say there are even more mathematical problems than strictly game-design ones when developing incremental games. As you said, balancing such a game is most certainly a challenge.

All in all MMOs, incremental games and browser games are all designed to be addicting, unlike single player games, especially story-driven ones, which are often more akin to reading a book or watching a movie than spinning the wheel of fortune. Still, I don't think devs can be blamed for that - money does not stink after all.

I started replaying Dead Space (2008). Man, what a great game.

I'm gonna have to get Dead Space Remake at some point.

Since Wednesday I am playing again Ultima 9: Ascension, about 2 years after I played (and finished) the game for the first time (it was around early-'21). I'm taking it very slow, I observe everything around me and I realize that I'm enjoying and appreciating the game much more than the first time. I think that I had rushed it at the first time, which was wrongdoing towards the game.

I've found that I often want to rush through a game and/or get 100% on a first playthrough, but can relax more on later playthroughs.

(Then again, there are some games that, on repeat playthroughs, I prefer to play in a nonstandard manner; this is especially true if the game is nonlinear, or can be glitched into becoming nonlinear.)

Strange thing that before 2022 I was never playing a game for a second time. Never. But starting from '22 it's becoming a habit! Nostalgia I guess!
Anyway I think that Ultima 9 was judged unfairly by many in its time. And maybe also still today.

Hogwart's Legacy is amazing. Truly one of the best games I've played in years, and a valiant defense of AAA games. It's a shame a controversy around someone barely even involved is ruining its media coverage, because the devs obviously poured their hearts and souls into it.

Also replaying RE3 Remake, which looks amazing with the new ray tracing options (which run well enough to actually use, unlike most games).