Yeah I can't see mid-meal smokes doing much to enhance the flavour of the turkey. The only well advised part of the whole thing is smoking with the coffee after the meal. That's the stuff right there.

Well, the best advice would be not to smoke, but you know.

God I feel you. When did you stop craving smokes? It's been like 8 years for me and I still crave them occasionally. Hell, I still get the odd dream about smoking some nights.

Though even with that said, I actually enjoy looking at these ads. But maybe I'm just masochistic.

My first exposure was when DDO went from subscription model to free-to-play but with microtransactions in 09.

At the time I thought it was a great idea as it ended up cheaper to sustain for me than paying monthly (since many dungeons were skippable and you could also earn cash shop currency by grinding) which led me to have a confusingly positive association with the concept of microtransactions for quite a while.

Farmville is an excellent major milestone as well. I completely agree with your take. It releasing in 09 again kind of reinforces my thinking that the 06-09 period is sort of a good endpoint for the era I'm thinking of.

I think you're onto something and what I'm landing on as an endpoint is somewhere vaguely between 2006-09. We have several massively influential events in this period that shaped the following decade both in terms of design and monetisation.

I think both the Horse Armor in 06 and TF2 adding hats in 09 are good markers for the direction monetisation would take over the coming decades.

Design wise I think the release of the first Assassin's Creed in 07 - which set the precedent for the now-ubiquitous checklist-filled "UbiSoft style open world game" - is a fairly important marker. It's a bit of a watershed game, actually.

On a larger scale, the seventh gen consoles coming out in 06 also marked a shift I think. More and more PC games were being developed with multi-platform releases in mind. The identity of PC gaming became slightly more diluted.

These consoles also had internet access, which - together with the by then prevalent broadband internet - contributed to the death of the expansion pack.

I think there is too much bad happening at present day to call it a true golden age, but I might be wrong. Depends on your definition. There are certainly plenty of good games coming out. Maybe it's a golden age of indie games? Overall though, predatory monetisation is rampant, pre-order scams and shovelware mobile games are abundant. Gacha games have conquered the world and continued the EA Sports tradition of selling gambling products to children. Shareholders dominate the business more than ever, we have mass layoffs happening everywhere, mods are getting copyright struck, we have normalised rootkit DRM and always-online singleplayer games... I could go on.

Same! I remember thinking the 3D globe was so cool compared to other RTSes, and I loved going around in a hot air balloon spawning volcanos and other hijinks. Good times.

If you haven't played this classic you should. Perfect platformer, and the musical levels alone are worth the price of admission, especially at 85% off.

I'm happy for the people who enjoy it but I'm also very glad I got off this train. Sounds like it was at the right time, at least for me.

The graphics update looks good though and was sorely needed!

I don't know that it will ever be the game people wanted it to be, but at this point it's a really good and fun game with a great story and characters and a visually stunning beautifully realised world (in terms of aesthetics and art direction at least).

It's most definitely worth experiencing in my opinion, and doubly so for half off.

From looking at the GOG store it doesn't seem to be bundled with any patch, which is actually unusual for GOG. If you're interested I heartily recommend Restoration Project, Updated or RPU for short. It's a combined unofficial patch/cut content restoration that's very vanilla friendly and tidies up a lot of stuff left unfixed in the last official patch.

Yeah those Wanamingos are scary in the early game, definitely a place to come back to later. Armour can be tough to get as it doesn't typically drop as random loot. There are two leather armours for sale in Klamath I think if you've gotten a bit of money now.

I'm glad you're enjoying Fallout 2, it's probably my all time favourite Fallout! Are you playing with the Restoration Project?

I know exactly what you mean by that early game bottleneck. FO2 can be rough in the early stages between lack of equipment and the comically unbalanced random encounters. It usually swings the other way once you can survive big encounters and sell the looted weapons after.

How far have you gotten?

Instead of jumping on the Elden Ring DLC I've continued to be addicted to Esports Godfather to an almost worrying degree.

It's the clear standout surprise hit of the year for me so far, coming out of absolutely nowhere and ending up being my favourite game in quite a while. It's a MOBA-themed deckbuilder/autobattler/team management game, and while that sounds like a hot mess it actually plays really well - at least once you get past the initial information overload.

There are lots of fun interactions between cards, items, hero abilities and player abilities which in itself creates great replayability, and constantly changing rulesets keeps things fresh even during a run. The Backpack Battles esque training minigame itself is super fun to optimise when you start getting deep into a run and have more complex blocks to play with.

I heartily recommend it if you like deckbuilders (some passing knowledge of MOBAs might help). It's only €16 on Steam, and there is a free demo that covers the first couple of hours of a run. I recommend playing with AI difficulty on maximum for both card playing and ban/pick for the best experience (the game is a little too easy by default).

That was in my OP though, that most games can be thought of as puzzle games with extra steps.

I just don't get where you're getting "most games" from. If you would have phrased it like "many games can be viewed as puzzle games if you really think about it" you would have maybe had more people agree with you.

I understand your reductive approach - it's just that there are so many games it doesn't apply to that I can never agree with "most games".

If you have 2 minutes to solve a puzzle, is it no longer a puzzle game?

Yes, clearly. It still behaves the way a puzzle - or puzzle game - would: knowledge of the solution trivialises the content. It's just a puzzle game with a timer.

If moving certain colored pieces requires a button combo or sequence, instead of a simple action, is this no longer a puzzle game?

Depends on how the combo works. Is there an element of skill involved? If it's like a rhythm game I would just call it a puzzle/rhythm game. Otherwise it's just a puzzle game with extra steps.

For me, if the main challenge of the game is figuring out the puzzle, then it's mainly a puzzle game. If a measure of skill is required in the actual execution of beating the game it is no longer a pure puzzle game - but it can still contain puzzle elements of course.

EDIT: I would agree that Tetris is not a puzzle game.

Knowing the optimal thing to do can be seen as but a higher order puzzle.

But knowing the right strategy and item build in DotA or LoL means fuck all if you can't mechanically execute your hero properly, which - in my opinion - disqualifies them as "puzzle games".

I've been mainlining Esports Godfather, which is the surprise hit of the year for me so far. The title is nonsensical and on the surface it looks like it can't be good, but it's been so much fun.

It's a MOBA-themed sort of deckbuilder/autobattler/management game - which sounds like a hot mess but plays so much better than you'd think. At least after you get over the initial information overload.

I wish the AI was a little smarter, but even with the game being a touch too easy it's incredible how much fun it is. Loads of cards and heroes to build synergies with and rotating version rulesets keeping things fresh even within a single run.

At just €16 on Steam I'd easily recommend it to anyone with an interest in the genre, and there is even a free demo that covers the first couple hours of a run.

Vanilla Elden Ring felt pretty good in that regard (granted it's been a while since I played it). As I recall between weapons, spells, Ashes of War and Spirit Ashes you had a lot of tool choices and were free to sort of make the game as difficult or easy for yourself as you liked.

Sounds like they lost that aspect in the DLC, which is a shame.

I think your definition of puzzle games is pretty flawed, to be honest. A puzzle does not provide additional difficulty once you've identified how the pieces go together, consequently a game should behave similarly to qualify as a puzzle game. The dichotomy is between conceptualisation versus execution.

Puzzle games can be solved or "won" by identifying the solution. Not-puzzle games require execution.

Guitar Hero and OSU! are not puzzle games. Games like RTSes and MOBAs can be argued to have puzzle elements in terms of strategy and meta, but knowing the optimal thing to do will still not give you victory which imo disqualifies them as outright puzzle games.

An instance managed by a non-profit organisation sounds like a perfect home for Internet Is Beautiful to be honest.

I know the car is getting the traditional Aston Martin mid-season downgrades, but Alonso has not been great lately either. Is he finally getting old, or is he still feeling the post-China hand injury? That was his last great race weekend wasn't it?