It’s just GeForce Now, Nvidia’s game streaming service that lets people without gaming consoles/PCs still play games. In my case, I’m on a Mac =/ Overwatch, R6 Siege, Apex Legends, etc. are on there, but not Marvel Rivals.
I received Senua’s Saga Hellblade II as a gift from my daughter for Christmas… 5 hours in, it’s gorgeous - graphics wise, dark - story-wise, and creepy with the voices in Senua’s head. Awesome moment in spoiler:
I am paraphrasing, but there is a moment, where one of the voices says, “Maybe this is a fear we should listen to.” The voice is not wrong, but damn, that was amazing.
This will take me a while to get through, so I may drop in from time to time with more spoilers, and I hope I can get better at combat so that the voices stop chastising me for being obvious and readable to my opponents… 
Undergoing a bit of a video game renaissance revisiting old co-op hot seat titles decades later now that my boy is old enough to play them and happens to care.
Original Xbox:
Gladius
Circus Maximus
Hunter: The Reckoning
PS4:
Horde
Death Squared
Ibb & Obb
Time Splitters II
Time Splitters: Future Perfect
I really enjoyed Hunter: The Reckoning on the original Xbox.
Gladius was one of my favourite games on the original Xbox. I tried playing it again a couple of years ago (on the Xbox One), but I never finished the campaign. The fights sometimes felt repetitive, the game balance is not great (i.e. there’s supposed to be a rock-paper-scissors relationship with light-medium-heavy gladiators, but heavy gladiators are too strong), and I really wished there was a way to speed up the combat animations.
I have 35-40 hours on Metaphor Refantazio now and my feeling right now is:
This is like Persona + Classic Final Fantasy
I…think I like standard Persona games more, though. Something about the school vibe, answering questions on tests, getting a job. I dunno, it was more of cooler feeling.
This game is straight fantasy and I keep hearing comparisons to other games, but it really reminds me of Final Fantasy 1-10, the best era of that series.
It’s the best Final Fantasy game in many a year, to be honest.
This is the beat em up, right? Game was an absolute blast.
I stopped playing for about a month just because I didn’t really play anything for a month but I’m back into it and really liking it. For the record, I played through the previous games and played Shadow of Chernobyl multiple times so I knew exactly what I was getting into.
It’s a super low-key game. Even the violent parts aren’t really amped up with big explosions and music and stuff. You need to vibe with it and I assume most people don’t. Not because of any superiority in those who do but just because it probably takes a certain type of mind to be content with its slow-paced and sometimes pointless-seeming style.
In some weird way, it almost feels to me like a violent “cozy” game. Go out into the Zone, poke around looking for artifacts or stashes, fight some bandits or military dudes, avoid some dogs, pick my way through an anomaly field with a handful of iron bolts, follow the main story when I feel so inclined… it’s all very chill to me. But one man’s chill is another man’s “this is boring and why am I doing it?”
It’s a pretty unique vibe for a game. So it has a very vocal bunch of people who are into it but they make up a pretty select type of weirdo gamer.
Just started playing Last Epoch again after getting frustrated and burned out on Path of Exile 2. Both are great ARPGs, but LE was a comforting hug after the abusive relationship that is PoE2.
Much more player-friendly mechanics (better loot, amazing crafting, great quality of life, rewarding progression, viable solo self found mode, etc.).
Both are fun in their own ways, but PoE2 was much too punishing and unrewarding for casual players like me. It has good “Dark Souls” like combat but terrible progression. Last Epoch by contrast has relatively generic ARPG combat, but much better other subsystems.
Truly an underrated gem, despite having barely any players left because updates are very slow. Deserves a try though, for anyone who enjoys ARPGs at all (games like Diablo).
I started playing Super Mario Wonder a few days ago. I’m really enjoying it! Being able to change the difficulty level by switching characters or playing easier or harder levels is a nice feature. The game play mechanics are reminiscent of Super Mario Bros, but expanded. One minor annoyance that I had early on is that the default is B to jump and Y to attack or run. I was expecting A to jump and B to attack or run like other Mario games and kept pressing the wrong buttons. Fortunately, you can change the controller options in settings so now that I’ve switched it, I have no problems.
As a fan of survival crafting and base building games I’ve had Icarus in my wishlist for a while. Up until now the best sale I’ve seen for it is 50% off, except right now it’s 75%.
The main problem is that the development focus seems to be pricey DLC. Anyone here played it? Assuming base game with no DLC, yay or nay?
A few more juicy YouTube Playables! 
My Perfect Hotel / Idle Restaurant: Same concept, start with a humble business and gradually build it up with the money you earn until…there’s nothing more to build up. In the former case, you have to continually run around collecting money and doing the manual labor required by the hotel. You can buy new rooms and room upgrades to increase your earnings, and later employees to handle tasks so you’re not overwhelmed by them. It ends when you buy a new hotel (which you don’t get to see), whereupon the game proudly proclaims “GAME COMPLETED”. That’s it. Oh, you can keep playing until you have everything, whereupon your bankroll just keeps going up forever. Yeah. Idle Restaurant is a more traditional idle game, where you hire staff and buy upgrades and wait for the money to roll in to get more stuff. You can click on piles of cash left by customers, but for the most part the key, as is typical for the genre, is lots and lots of patience. (There are offline earnings, but they’re meager. Best thing is to leave the tab open while you work on something else.) Nothing to do once you have everything and have reached the maximum level of 60 (which is 2 more than you need for everything) other than watch your earnings climb to infinity. I consider these more exercises in interactivity than actual games since there’s absolutely zero risk whatsoever, but if you like seeing the pretty graphics, they might be worth your time.
State.io: A very simple real-time Risk-like conquest game where you have to conquer neutral territories to build up the forces to go after your enemies. The AI is nothing special, and the real key is getting strong enough (offline earnings help a lot with that). The maps do repeat, so I don’t know how intense this gets; there may be a point where it gets impossible or at least not worth it. For now, though, it’s a nice occasional romp and I’m not expecting any more.
Zoo - Happy Animals: A youth-oriented omnibus title which borrows heavily from numerous traditional mobile games, inclduing Parking Jam. Some tasks are impossible to lose, while others can get a little annoying with this or that element messing you up. Like Tall Man Run, there doesn’t seem to be any real end to it (yet), but I’m less than a hundre levels in so there’s still a lot to see.
Adorable Home: A game where you…make choices and…do time-based tasks with a heavy luck element. Hmm. Maybe I’ll come back to this one eventually, but right now it seems too much lovey-dovey and not enough decent gameplay to be worth the time.
Emoji Puzzle: Drag a line between the emoji on the left and the similar emoji on the right. Sometimes you have three colums to deal with. It’s more a showcase of the sheer number of emojis rather than anything with any kind of challenge (it’ll tell you when you made a mistake, which says a lot right there), but hopefully there’s at least a definite endpoint.
Word of Wonders Guru: Like the original Word of Wonders except that each word has a different set of letters and you get a clue to what each is. Looks super-easy even compared to the original, but maybe it’ll get into much longer lengths to give some variety. We’ll see.
Homo Evolution: Match two to get a stronger unit; keep matching until you have the ultimate unit, rinse and repeat with the other lines. My main beef with this one is that after a very short time cash becomes useless and essentially all progress has to be made with extremely precious gems. I don’t see it leading to anything special, so I can’t recommend this one.
Fruit Ninja: The original slicer-dicer is back! Mouse control is easier on the hands than a regular touchscreen but might have less precision. In any case, “move-stuff-through-moving-stuff” is a concept anyone can enjoy.
I got Elden Ring under the xmas tree, and am about 20 hours into it. Nearly every quality-of-life compliant I’ve had about prior Dark Souls type games has been answered. That combined with the very open world has already made this one of my top favorites ever. The only thing it is really missing, as all other prior games of its family, is a motivating plot or story. It’s just one weird non-contextual mystic blathering after another.
Has anyone tried Kingdom Come: Deliverance II on Steam yet? I wasn’t familiar with the first one, but this looks like an open-world RPG (in the style of Skyrim / Red Dead Redemption), but based on real history:
(from Wikipedia)
Like its predecessor, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II takes place in the early 15th century[1] in the Kingdom of Bohemia, then part of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown and of the Holy Roman Empire, in what is now the Czech Republic. The game directly follows on from the end of the game’s predecessor, and takes place in the “turmoil of a civil war”, where Henry, the son of a blacksmith, will fight against Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund and his allies.[6] It will conclude Henry’s story.[7]
The game looks great and the voice acting seems superb, and the reviews are very positive… I am really tempted, but it’s expensive ($60) and I never played the first one. Any thoughts?
I’m rather intrigued by the real historical setting, as opposed to the typical swords-and-sorcery stuff. Curious about how combat works without spells (maybe like the Chivalry series?).
Edit: Looks like the first one is on sale for $8, so maybe I’ll try that first: Save 80% on Kingdom Come Deliverance Royal Edition | PC Game | IndieGala
I mean to, but it looks like a continuation of the first game so I want to finish that first. I got KCD1 setup with the recommended unofficial patches and QoL mods, but got pulled in another direction before getting too far in it. I only completed the intro, but that was fantastic.
Yeah, it is. Apparently the start of the second game lets you choose what happened in the story in the first game, so it’s technically optional… but I feel like I’d be missing a lot without having played it first. I did watch some story recaps, but that only made me more interested in the first game, lol.
The first game still looks fantastic, especially with the HD textures pack installed (7 years later, wow, was 2018 really that long ago…). Trying it now, and I love the realistic looking characters and down-to-earth dialogue. It’s a nice change of pace from saving the world from octopus eye aliens.
I discovered a cool 2D space game called Endless Sky. I like space games, I don’t particularly like 2D space games, but this one is nicely done. Flying around looks good with the parallax movement of the stars, and there are lots of other ships and asteroids flying around the solar systems. But you don’t run into anything, the game just assumes you miss all that. It has missions, trading, piracy with boarding and looting/capturing ships, and you can build a fleet of transport/cargo/mining/military ships to fly with you and increase your overall passenger/cargo/mining/fighting capability. It’s free and open source on Github and Steam but feels like it should be a commercial game.
Semi-related anecdote: I snagged Kingdom Come: Deliverance (the first one) when it was offered for free on Epic. I started it four times. I couldn’t figure out how to get through the first mission. I got the shit kicked out of me most of the time and I couldn’t figure out how to lock pick, not to mention that I misunderstood the haggling meter thing and I ended up giving the guy a tip instead of haggling him down.
Anyway … I suck at video games.
Or maybe you’re doing fine and it’s just an incredibly accurate simulation of what it’s like to be the hapless son of a medieval blacksmith without formal combat and thievery training 
I try to keep that attitude. It’s supposed to be simulation. Maybe I’m simulating the village idiot.