Wrestling games.

Love me some Far Cry games

It's the only time I'll ever get an Ubisoft game, and usually I'll pick them up on deep sales

But for whatever reason they just scratch a particular itch

I hated the ending of 5, but it was otherwise alright

6 was whatever, but overall not as bad as the reviews made it out to be imo

I've wasted so many hours looking at tiny circles go up in Game Dev Tycoon

Pokemon pinball for the GBA anyone?

Pocket Pool.

Not to be confused with pocket billiards.

Skyrim. Load up some new mods, play a completely different character. The magic of Bethesda’s old games is that they leave the player free to imagine what they are. The upside of having the PC have no personality is that you get to project whatever personality you like onto them. Don’t initiate the main quest, don’t bother with dragons, play pretty much the entire game as if it is your own sandbox. It’s grand.

Sonic 06.

If you try to play it casually it’s absolutely awful because there’s no guidance on what to do and some of the tasks are awful if you don’t know how to skip them.

But if you watch enough speed runs and LPs of the game you start to figure out why the game breaks, how to do the bad parts, and how to intentionally mess with it. And it’s hilarious to do so. It’s like an unintentional broken sandbox. And the best part is even when you’re not trying to it breaks anyway.

Also the physics in the game are absolutely WILD. It’s one of the few games on earth that’s so bad it’s hilarious.

Kingdom Hearts. The writing is equally sappy and edgy fanfic crossover slop. But there's something so satisfying about the combat, especially after the introduction of the command deck.

Turok 2 for GameBoy Color. It was one of my first games for the GameBoy and I still love it, although, objectively speaking, it might not even be average. The translation was bad and left me confused (non-native English speaker), the levels were not particularly well designed and the platforming and shooting was very bland. But I did not care and it really threw me into the Lost World (was a huge fan of the Lost World movie based on the novel and also the cheesy 90s TV series). The music was great, though, to the point that I would consider it to be in my top 3 all-time gaming OSTs (I think the composer was Alberto Gonzales). Nowadays, I replay it from time to time on my retro handheld. Despite the general forgettable nature of the game, I still have fond memories playing it and the music plays a big role in this as well.

I guess Genshin also counts. The monetisation is horrible, the character designs are facepalm-worthy, the localisation is so bad it makes me wince, Paimon is the worst, but damn, I love the exploration gameplay, landscapes and music 🤷 (Also it helps that I'm f2p, so at least I'm not supporting Hoyo's predatory practices...)

Hentai games are my guilty pleasures in that regard

Sometimes I want to blow things up and get headshots. So I’ll see if there’s a Call of Duty on sale and just play the single player. It’s rare though, and at the moment my blowing things up itch is being scratched by Space Marine.

Skyrim. I mostly just like to install a fuckzillion mods and not play it, though...

Goat simulator and its sequels/DLCs. It's a dumb shitpost game where you run around and create chaos but I enjoy it without any irony for some reason

Starstruck Vagabond, Yahtzee Croshaw’s game.

It’s a well-designed game, and he documented much of the development process on YouTube. It has a dopamine-laden primary gameplay loop that involves either manually piloting your ship around a star system to complete missions, or letting the autopilot fly while you run around your ship making repairs as needed.

I wouldn’t say it’s fun, but it’s not necessarily supposed to be fun, in the way that Papers Please is not meant to be fun. It’s mostly about the living as a star freighter pilot. What plot there is is driven by other characters coming in and interrupting the drudgery.

But I love playing it before bed. It winds me down nicely. And it’s perfect for the Steam Deck.

I used to use Stardew Valley as my wind-down game but I found I was staying up much later because “just one more day-itis” sets in. Starstruck Vagabond I can just save and put down whenever.

Edit: Oh, also it’s tangentially related to his Jacques McKeown book series, Will Save the Galaxy for Food, Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash, and Will Leave the Galaxy for Good.

Final Fantasy VIII impressed me in my childhood and since then I've finished it 4–5 times. The story is a bit of a mess and doesn't make sense sometimes, the fighting mechanics are peculiar, but the game is very dear to my heart. Thinking about giving it another go now, ha!

all those Artifex Mundi hidden object games :D

They're essentially reskins of the same simplistic gameplay and weak stories for like 15 years, but sometimes I still get in the mood for one :D

I love the better ones' environmental art, but I'd be wary to pick up ones made in the last few years bc I'm pretty sure they started to use AI as soon as it became available, due to the conveyor belt nature of the genre.

EDIT: Ok apparently I was wrong, and they just altogether stopped releasing their games on PC since the pandemic O.o

Probably Vampire Survivors or Vampire Hunters: Sometimes it's just nice to play something where you don't really have to think too hard.

As weird as it sounds: Spongebob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom (The OG one).

On the surface, it's a shit platformer game for kids, but what makes it interesting is the ways you can break the game and the lively speedrunning community. If you just try to play the game by following its rules, you're going to have a bad time.

However, if you use cool speedrunning glitches and exploits, it becomes much more fun to break the game in ways the developers didn't intend. I tend to play from time to time 100%ing it using exploits to reach locked areas earlier, skip entire sections, and play some levels backwards.

Anything from Paradox, but right now it’s Europa Univeralis V. I really like some of their grand strategy staples, even if it’s an abusive relationship where they sometimes release updates that make the games worse and annoy you into buying overpriced DLC to make the last update slightly less bad. The new Crusader Kings 3 DLC is excellent, though. I hope they do more like that.

Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball.

Yes the DoA franchise has a solid fighting game mechanic, but this was made purely for the fan service.

Far Cry games at least until 4. I like mindlessly collecting 300 map markers sometimes. Funny enough, I don‘t like 5 cause there doesn‘t seem to be a collectibles map that lets me just move up and down the map collecting everything lol

Goddess of Victory NIKKE.

I try to be careful where I play it because the character designs are pretty uh... well the characters have huge personalities, usually. That's not why I play the game, but I recognize some people have more of a problem with that than others so I try to be respectful about it. Also, NIKKE is a mobile gacha game, which a lot of people dislike. So I would say it counts as a guilty pleasure, although I don't really feel guilty for playing the game.

For me, I don't really spend money on it. Except for their two collabs with Neon Genesis Evangelion and one collab with NieR, because for me it is literally the law that I pay at least a little for IPs I really like. I am not a Whale (Richard Nixon impression lol), I am not even a Dolphin(?) I think I am called a Minnow. Whatever they call a basically F2P player that spends so rarely they might as well not spend at all. Besides, I have played for 3 years and only spent $60 total, I think that's a pretty good deal so far.

Anyway, I like the gameplay. I realize to some people this might sound like I am saying "I read Playboy for the articles," but hear me out.

When I was younger, I really enjoyed going to arcades. In the tail years of the arcades, newer games started to pop up, among them being lightgun games. I really enjoyed playing Time Crisis and Lethal Enforcers, and later on playing Silent Hill The Arcade, Alien, Terminator, and others. It was fun while it lasted, but now arcades are dead and game developers don't really make those kind of games anymore. Beside my home arcade cabinet where I emulate the older games (and get a worse experience because I have neither the pizza grease and cigarette smell, nor the different shaped controllers), I don't have new options for lightgun games these days. Then NIKKE came out and the gameplay was close enough for me that I felt that same fun of a lightgun game. I enjoy my time with the game mostly because it reminds me of the fun I had in actual arcades with lightgun games.

At the risk of pissing some people off, Kenshi has a special kind of jank

Deadly Premonition. What a sloppy mess but damn it’s fun.

Fortnite. No story to catch up on, no true goals besides winning, no long-term strategizing. I'm sure PUBG is the same/better, but my SO is entertained by the cartoonish nature of FN. It brings us excitement when I'm close to winning. With the introduction of zero build, I fair well. I used to feel more guilt for it being a "bad" game and for not giving time to the betrer story/campaign titles, bur you know what? I'm tired and my time is limited as an actual adult. I'll take my dopamine where I can get it, thank you.

I'm replaying Ace Combat 7 right now. I can't believe how bad the writing is. I played it in 2020 and had a grand time with probably 6 runs for the various achievements. Turns out, I remember basically nothing of the story. It's definitely amusing to revisit the AI story aspects now that "AI" is in full swing. I guess AC5 set my standard for AC stories, but maybe that doesn't hold up well either. Regardless, I'm in it for the fun, respectable flight physics. Just don't ask me where I keep 144 missiles stored.