Gaming

It's not you. I don't find most games, even games I used to really splunk a lot of time into happily, much fun anymore.

I've been watching Yahtzee's Extra Punctuation lately, and he his hitting on the same gestalt - most games, especially AAA games, are really boring now because they are really pretty much the same game repainted now. OK, that's a bit of an oversimiplification, but I'd direct you to his several recent commentaries for the deeper insight.

I can remember when I loved the idea of playing online. After a couple of decades of it, I hate online games now (mostly because I despise online game players now). I still love playing a good co-op game with a couple of friends (but those good games in that class are a bit thin on the ground) and I still love finding a good, immersive single player to sit down with. But I don't care for platformers, or side-scrollers, or jumper-puzzles, or Souls games - at least not anymore.

So what am I playing? Well, I am getting a hell of a lot of bang out of my buck playing small games on my iPad from Apple Arcade, believe it or not. I fire up Steam once in a while and look, chin in hand, at my large library of collected games on a fancy-pants Alienware monster gaming machine, sigh, and go back to playing Spell Struck (basically a Scrabble game) on my iPad, because at least it makes me think of good words to use.

Ten years ago, I would be jittery with the impending release of something like Starfield or Diablo IV. Now I'm like "No rush, buy it in 6 months or a year when it goes on sale and the bugs are ironed out."