Patient Gamers

Have a friend who is obsessed with the borderlands series. Played through the pre-sequel with him. Was not a good time

He wanted to play through 3 with me after, and I noped the hell out

Undertale was zero fun. Interesting story and I liked the graphics and music but the combat got extremely annoying, and I say this as someone who plays 8 bit (heck even 4 bit) combat games. I quit it.

I was the main marketer for "weird, different games" to my friends, back in school. I was the one that first found out about Harvest Moon on PSX and recommended it to another friend, he loved it - mind you, this was back in 2004. In 2006, I got 3 into World of Warcraft, I even printed a "beginners' guide" I made myself just to help them understand the game.

Two games that I experimented from word of mouth were Tibia and Ragnarok Online. The former I gave up the same day - there were like 10 players for each rat in the sewers, the respawn took forever and you were supposed to grind them until you reached level 7, which would take over a week of real playtime at that rate.
RO was an interesting situation, the dude who first started it was bragging about having lots of hours to play, when I disdainfully replied "Why pay when you can just play for free"? He didn't like the reply, but we didn't get along anyway, so I took every chance to jab him, and he did the same to me. Anyhoo, I went online, looked around for a private server and started playing, free of charge. The others didn't join in.

During school and college, none of my friends were interested in RTS or even turn-based strategy games. I already knew about Civilization thanks to my dad. In the internet years, I always lurked around some talks about strategy games and that's where I found Supreme Commander, which is still one of my favorites. Total Annihilation is still on my "to-play" list.

The Witcher 3 felt very sloppy to me, controls wise. I felt like combat had me sliding all over the place. Blocking, parrying, and dodging didn't feel satisfying or responsive.

Just couldn't get into it at all because of it.

I ended up running around and talking to everyone I could, then realize there's a ton of combat stuff to do and nobody else to talk to and I just turned it off

Deus Ex.

... the original.

Kid at middle school just burned it onto a CD-R, gave me a post it note with the install key.

He kept saying this game wasn't like anything else, it was a 'roleplaying shooter'.

I just had to provide him the blank CD-R to burn, and I think a brownie, or cookie, at lunch.

I never even owned a legit copy untill it came out on Steam like a decade later.

So uh yeah, that's how I originally played 'the most important videogame of all time'.

Beyond the gameplay and game mechanics, uh, we are currently now more or less living in a world that more and more resemble's its canon storyline everyday.

Back in 2001, pre 9/11, it was a wild sci-fi/cyberpunk concept for... the entire internet to be routed through a centralized system for surveillance and archiving, for digital privacy to be wholly nonexistent.

Now that building just exists in Utah and is run by the NSA, and... well you have to be exceptionally tech savvy to maintain any kind of what was 25 years ago the norm of digital privacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

It was a wild concept to imagine the US being defined by external and internal terrorism, both real and as a widespread rhetorical accusation against your political opponents, to imagine the US basically being a dystopian economic nightmare defined by homelessness, paramilitarized police, openly and brazenly corrupt governments, corporations nakedly and obviously superseding the government.

Now uh... well, uh, yeah, look outside, look at the news.

It was a wild concept for a prototype AI to tell you:

"The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms."

"God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary."

"The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment."

"You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands."

So uh, yeah, that's... basically currently happening, we sure are at least really trying to build a true, general intelligence AI, and more and more people are falling in love with AI bfs/gfs, tiktok/instagram/facebook/social media are the precursor data-mining algorithms that most people these days are addicted to, to feel observed and be judged, more and more people relinquish their cognitive abilities to some kind of 'AI' to just do all their thinking, their critical evaluating for them, their judgement formation.

Anyway, 9/10 game, pretty good but kinda janky in spots, lol.

KotoR. It doesn't matter how great the story or characters are if I have to grind terrible gameplay to get to them.