I’m playing No Man’s Sky for the first time. I consider myself fortunate to have missed the launch debacle.

I’m usually playing older games of some sort. There’s retro games, like those from the 32-bit era and before, but I also play…old-ish games, ones that were released within the last decade or two. Just last year I began playing Tokyo Xanadu eX+, which was released in 2017 (albeit as the definitive version of a 2015 game).

I think a number of the indie games I play are generally newer. Though, given my tastes, many of them tend to be games designed to evoke some sort of similarity to those older styles of games. So I guess it’s an interesting question whether they count as “retro” or not.

That said, given that I pretty much only use store-bought laptops (and not of the “gaming” variety), my hardware means that I’m much better off playing older games anyway. “Newer old” games can probably still run, depending on the game, but some may be choppy and I can probably wait on those.

Modern games have become too focused on providing a clean, balanced and no-real-obstacles experience. Sometimes I want to play a game that is a cohesive experience without being laser focused on some big idea about how I should play it. As an example, I’ve recently replayed arx fatalis. It’s really fun how you can do everything in that game that you’d want an npc for in any other. It’s also fun how each playstyle requires its own big chunk of knowledge about how the game works. Modern games try too hard to be minimalistic and fail to see the fun in a truly open experience. Even when you have options, they have all the fun pre-balanced and pre-optimized out of them. They give you too much info. No sense of discovery

I‘m playing pretty old games all the time that have been sitting in my library. I hardly even buy new ones these days cause… why? I‘m sitting on a ton already lol

Big upside: They run smooth as butter on my modern PC up to 4K even.

I just started playing Max Payne 3, which released in 2013. The game aged well, still looks great and a ton of fun.

On a related note, the Steam Deck is the perfect platform for Patient Gamers. It runs these older titles really well, and the portability + ability to suspend / resume games at any time is a game-changer (pun intended).

This is an intruiging subject. I was part of reddit’s /r/patientgamers subreddit (lurking, mostly) because it was a good place to get insight into valuable gems that I missed first time through because I didn’t have time or didn’t want to spend £60 or £70 on a brand new game, and would rather wait for a sale.

Nowadays, I generally wait for Game Pass, Ubi+, PS+ or similar to get the game. Sure, I spend on subscriptions, but the games I play if I count out the costs it’s a lot cheaper.

I do also play retro games - ‘retro’ being an ambivalent term for me, as it somehow is used pejoratively throughout the modern gaming community, which I disagree with: They’re good games, just not on modern hardware or systems - quite often. So - yeah, sometimes I lag, sometimes I’m up-to-date, oftentimes I’m on my Steam Deck so I get to play slightly older games at a high fidelity on a handheld device, which is awesome.

Just finished system shock 1 so like 20+ year old lag, I don’t really have a strong urge to play modern AAA games. I mostly just gawk at what’s popular and just play indie and old games. I also have a problem of not being able to pick up games in the middle of a series. I need to play a series from the start no matter how mad the earlier iterations are.