What game is a guilty pleasure of yours?
6mon 24d ago by lemmy.world/u/Theprogressivist in games
What game do you absolutely love that you know yourself is bad, but love it anyway?
For me, it's Callisto Protocol. Loved that it was just more Dead Space. Not good by any metric but I liked it.
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
Skyrim. I mostly just like to install a fuckzillion mods and not play it, though...
Right there with you.
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.
Deadly Premonition. What a sloppy mess but damn it’s fun.
Just looked it up and looks right up my alley. Especially with the Twin Peaks vibe. Gonna look into this one. Thanks!
shame the sequel was so tedious and dull. Somehow they found a way to make the first one look like a masterpiece in comparison
A sloppy messterpiece! I love Deadly Premonition! Highly recommend if you want some fantastic nonsense!
Probably Vampire Survivors or Vampire Hunters: Sometimes it's just nice to play something where you don't really have to think too hard.
At the risk of pissing some people off, Kenshi has a special kind of jank
Mechwarrior 5 Mercs - stomping around the inner sphere with a 1000 to 1 kill ratio
Man I really want to get into Mechwarrior but I'm just so ridiculously bad at the game and I have no idea how to get better.
I've tried to begin the MW5 campaign three times now and I've been priced out of existing every time, I take way too much damage and my repair bills vastly outstrip my income. Combine with having to spend hundreds of thousands of credits in travel fees to get anywhere and I'm very quickly even more broke than I started.
Just for kicks the other day I set up an Instant Action for testing purposes and I brought two Atlases, a Highlander and an Archer to some random backwater mid-difficulty mission and still barely limped out of there alive, with the Highlander and one of the Atlases downed. That's just shameful.
Play with keyboard and mouse - makes hitting things much easier. Redesign all mechs to have max armour. For most of the campaign bringing as many SRMs to the field as possible is good. Focus fire with your lance mates - makes them much more effective. Remove JJ - useless. LBX10s are great. Remove useless single LRM 5s and 10s from most things - put a lot of lrms on mechs with good quirks - Archer, Longbow. Keep moving, ideally always at least 45 degrees to your target
I only played up to MW3, back then the meta was maxing out on armor and medium range lasers. Go in close , aim for the opponent's leg, shoot. Your mech powers down from the heat for a couple seconds, but the other mech is out of the action. Proceed to one-shot almost every opponent.
You can’t do that anymore alas (except with the clan Nova) - you’re limited by the number of weapon mounts and heat management is now easier…
I tried MW3 (I think?) but never figured out ANYTHING. I was young, joystick drivers didn't work, and I hadn't the slightest idea how to map out all the functions of a mech suit. Now I have nearly 50 inputs mapped to an Xbox controller for Elite Dangerous fully memorized. What a change in times.
I liked Cauldron Born. I had that and Mad Cat as K'nex models. Hated Orion. Since I never figure out how to do anything, all I can judge them on is their appearance in the build menu. I was also like... 10?
I still play that on my PS4 when the mood strikes. Fun game.
Ravenfield is a stupid shooter with bad graphics but it scratches my itch for destruction without a lot of work.
If I have a bad day I throw on some metal and shoot those little stick men.
Man, I wouldn't even consider that a bad game. It's awesome.
I've sunken so many hours in that game, half of which is fiddling with load outs to fit the scenario I'm thinking of lol
Ahh yes, the "army of 10 from future is invading army of 100 who have WW2 weapons"
If only they would add multiplayer to Ravenfield...
One reason I like it is because it’s not multiplayer
It's battlefield but for single player. Even the name is similar.
I guess it depends on why you think it's bad, so for me it's Wuthering Waves. I absolutely love that game, but it's "bad" because it's a gacha game and that monetization scheme is absolutely fucking disgusting.
The game itself is actually really good and the story/side stories had me cry like 4 times already lol
Does the story actually get good? I tried it out around launch but when they introduced a knockoff Paimon I noped out. I was there for a dark post-apocalypse story, not Sunday morning cartoon. Not that there is anything wrong with it but just not for me. I felt a little mislead.
It all depends on what you like. It's a good mix of dark and light and the paimon knock off is pretty chill, they really only pop up at important times in the story they aren't the constant annoyance always speaking for the player like paimon is.
The 2.0 arc goes through a fantasy like land that leads to a gladiator/rome themed area so not sure how you feel about that but it gets dark all throughout that. The next area we're going to is kinda unknown but it seems like it's going to be much heavier in the "tech" vibe and should give a lot of backstory to the main character since they seem to have some connection to this new place.
For me it's Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. It would be super easy to whale out and spend a bunch of money to get the characters and weapons I want, but I (almost 100%) limit myself to the basically fixed monthly costs.
I was surprised how super in on hoyo stuff I was until I started doing the dailies and the checklists on the regular. I kinda ruined my approach into Honkai because by the time I got into it, I learned from genshin I needed to do those dailies to get a decent shot at getting characters I actually cared about. And then I didn't make any progress, and didn't get in like I did for genshin
Ah, I got into the dailies immediately in both games, just part of playing for me.
On the gacha front, I play Zenless Zone Zero. Parry mechanics are nothing new, but I love both the way they have you parry by swapping in an agent to take the blow, and the very detailed effects and animations they have for each attack.
It’s still a gacha, and I remind myself to stop playing anytime it bores me; but it manages to hold my attention decently.
I play that as well as genshin... I have a problem lol
ZZZ got me to stop spending money though, they're way too fucking greedy. I went full pity and lost every single 50/50 in that game and almost all of them were nekomata... Hoyo can go to hell lol
Yeah…a long time ago I learned lessons about patience, delayed satisfaction, and ended up building a large roster in that game without giving them a dime. I could afford their packs, but it seems like a bad price ratio especially when acknowledging the low chances.
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.
That's a classic! I hear the new one Titans of the Tide is really good.
I still enjoy the game even as is. It's well made for a show/movie themed game
Counter Strike 2. It’s a toxic community, but I find it oddly addictive.
The update from CS:GO to CS2 made the game unplayable on my aging hardware which is the only thing that got me to stop playing.
I'm in a single-player game phase now, and I have to say it's nice having gaming sessions where I don't get called every slur imaginable. That being said, Counter-Strike scratches a very specific gaming itch for me, I'll definitely come crawling back one day.
Oof… sorry. I haven’t played it in so long that I think I was playing CS:GO. It does have a certain appeal.
I also live in a third world country so most games ping is very high. But CS is popular enough that there must be local servers. Because my ping is super low in CS. Another good reason I play it.
Wet. The reviews were pretty harsh due to the length and number of loading screens, but the gameplay was extremely fun. It does end with a cinematic and quick time events which was a bit disappointing, but it's one of the few games I've played through multiple times.
I knew I forgot something! Fantastic style and soundtrack, engaging gameplay and a bit rough in execution - it was great.
I don't play them anymore these days, but for me it used to be the Dynasty/Samurai Warriors series. Dunno what it was with younger me but they just hit for some reason
You may want to check out the new "One Piece" game on the same engine. It has the same game play loop, interrupted by a surprisingly nicely animated story line.
Oh. Good to know. I'll keep an eye out for that one. Thank you!
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.
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 combat system is peculiar, but the game is very dear to my heart nevertheless. Thinking about giving it another go now, ha!
As a kid I picked up VIII before VII (thanks to demo discs) and it has always been my favourite FF game despite its predecessor’s huge shadow. Learning all of the quirks of the games systems felt really rewarding, though I can understand why it didn’t appeal to many.
I also played ff8 before ff7 and largely prefer it. The combat system is a mess but I've grown to like it.
My hypothesis is that the first Final Fantasy you play will forever be your favorite
super deepthroat
True art.
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
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.
As a Stellaris player, nothing is more infuriating than Paradox putting out an update that breaks the save of your 2 month multiplayer game when you havent even reached the endgame lag yet. At least we can downgrade versions.
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.
Stellar Blade has got some personalities as well…
Final Fantasy II - not Cecil's, but Firion's. If I could see people's faces in FF circles when I say that, I bet they'd be looking at me weird. e.e"
Grinding evasion by dual wielding shields and attacking yourself is peak game design.
defeats the dawn of souls final boss, phrekyos and deumion with the art of slapping
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.
My kids play fortnite and I sometimes join them. Was watching some tournament on a stream and the "meta" at a high level of this game is just completely bonkers.
I quit around 2019 because I just didn't stand a chance anymore. I'd place 2 walls and a ramp in the time it took most top-25 players to build a small castle with a wine cellar, jacuzzi, and escalator (or so it felt). I can't keep up with these goddamn Ritalin-riddled kids.
It always cracks me up when my go-to move (in zero build) is to just stand still when it gets to close quarters. They start jumping like a cracked out kangaroo and miss shot after shot. I only do pitch/yaw and some sideways strafe, no jumping. It lets me use my Ps1/Ps2 era PvE experience.
Is it really bad writing, or just anime tropes?
Is it? I actually just played the mission where you find out Mihaly has 20 names and thought "this must be a joke, right?". If it's anime tropes, I'm totally unaware. The subreddit was just full of meta memes so I didn't learn anything useful in my reddit days
Stranglehold. I friggin love this game. It's the John Woo videogame that is technically a sequel to the movie Hard Boiled and has Chow Yun-fat as the lead. I don't know but I just really dig this game. Similar to it Enter the Matrix I also love. I go back and replay both every so often.
It's also a bit of a comfort type of thing as those came out in the early 00's when I was in my early 20s and still living at home and had more money than I knew what to do with hah.
Inspector Tequila was bad ass.
Can't say I feel guilty about liking these but if we're talking about mediocre games I love that would be:
- Drakengard 3 - simple, repetitive gameplay, huge amount of asset reuse and terrible performance if you're crazy enough to play it on PS3. It also has a really engaging and tragic story, full of weirdness unique to the series (well, the first game anyway, haven't played D2 yet).
- Kane & Lynch (both games) - they're rough, gritty and don't pull any punches. Pretty divisive in terms of gameplay though I personally think it's thematically consistent and adds a lot to the atmosphere. My favourite games from IOI despite not being as well designed or polished as the Hitman series.
- Oni - 2001 action game by Bungie. Really cool hand-to-hand combat system, huge empty levels, simple story with wannabe Ghost in the Shell elements.
- Starbound - lots of hype about Terraria in space, lots of wasted potential and cool features that didn't make to the final release. I tend to prefer beta versions (mainly "Glad Giraffe" beta) but the final one also seemed alright based on what little I played of it. Definitely not as good as it had chance to be during development.
- Scarface: The World is Yours - budget GTA clone based on the 1983 movie with Al Pacino (it's actually a sequel). It looks bad even for the time but it plays well enough and has some neat mechanics which made it stand out, if only a little.
- Tresspasser - the infamous Jurassic Park game with full control of your arm and focus on physical interactions with the environment. It's a bit clunky and far from polished but it's an interesting experience nonetheless.
That's all that comes to mind for now, I might update the post if I remember anything else.
Beta Starbound was the shit. Release was just shit, with no "the". They took a great game of endless discovery and procedural generation with a gameplay loop that just worked out of beta and filled it with completely predictable set pieces and juvenile hard-coded nonsense. They literally added a poop emoji monster FFS.
The worst part is there's no "full" version since each beta added new features and removed other ones. I'd give a lot for a build which combines all of the lost mechanics into a single package.
I don't think the final release was "shit" per se, but I was super confused when I played it and expected cool features from the beta. The beta was also very beta and not all of the features were actually good, but I feel like they ran out of time/money/patience and just cut down a ton of stuff to ship it.
Dude, I loved Kane and Lynch! I co-op both of them with a buddy of mine. The jank was real but added charm to it. People complained about the violence but that shit was great. Also might be bias because IO Interactive made Hitman and that's one of my all time favorite series.
It was also an unfortunate victim of the time when IOI struggled with figuring out how to transition from "classic" way of making games to the modern, high budget approach. I'm glad they managed to get back into the rhythm with new Hitman games but it's still a little disappointing K&L had to serve as a stepping stone towards better times.
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.
I remember back when streamers and big YouTubers weren't a thing. I watched a complete play through of kingdom hearts when i was sick. No commentary nothing. I'm still not convinced that game isn't a fever dream. Somehow i never really heard of it, just the name and i don't know anyone who has played it.
Vanquish is so idiot and the story is atrocious but damn the shooting is good.
When it comes to games, I have no guilt anymore. I enjoy some games and despise others. I think the only one that comes to mind for this category is E.V.O. The Search For Eden (SNES). I prefer it with a patch to improve the translation.
A classic. I loved how in the last phase you could make the right combination of nonsensical choices and end up with human and do really well. Not as well as my hyper-evolved Rhino-montser, but really well.
Pretty much most of the CoD series... But then again I'm mostly a multiplayer guy, and I only really buy CoD games if I like the beta enough. BO7 is something I kinda do like (MP only with the occasional Zombies) but I have to agree with the fact the campaign is absolute cheeks. It's like Treyarch wanted to make a horror game campaign but they're stuck making Call of Duty so they just shoehorned it in. Which sucks, cause I KNOW they're capable of much more, the BO6 campaign was actually quite great.
For a bit it was Destiny Rising, I quit D2 over a year ago but DR does genuinely do a lot of things much better than the base game and directly addresses a lot of my core complaints that made me quit after 10k hours in the first place. Stupid mobile gacha game with predatory monetization out the ass, and I was shrugging aside the handful of AI NPC voicelines.
Needless to say I came to my senses and dropped it entirely on a whim. Can't support the AI bullshit, I found I'd spent much more than I thought on the game already, and the endgame is entirely just p2w or get a handful of mats you need every 2 weeks. The core of the game and a lot of the systems are legitimately really good, but the gacha core really brings it way down.
That entire franchise is just a warehouse full of monkey paws.
I recently picked up Warframe which I've shrugged off for a long time because TPS almost never clicks for me, but it pulled me in hard, and it's wild going from FOMO-ridden powercrept anti-player D2 and gacha hell DR to a game that actually treats the players with respect.
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...)
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.
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.
Have you played Titanfall 2? That game is often on sale for 5 dollars and it's the best single player campaign i have ever played.
Don't worry BT I'm not going anywhere
Yes it’s an excellent game, I enjoyed it thoroughly and played the co-op defense for a while as well!
This is why I play Ravenfield. Sure, it's bots. But an hour session usually scratches the itch for a few months. Plus I don't have to deal with awful lobbies and trash talk.
Oh I’ll have to try it out! Added to my wishlist.
Recently it's been Chaos Zero Nightmare on my phone. Yeah, it's a gacha. Yeah it has some absolutely ridiculous gooneriffic character designs that makes me roll my eyes. Yeah it's poorly translated and the story is garbage.
But you know what? The actual roguelike deckbuilder game mode is actually a ton of fun. The characters are well balanced enough that I've never felt like I was behind on power even with comparably "bad" pulls from the gacha. The game has been generous enough anyway that I have a lot of pulls saved up too. And the mutability and variety in the roguelike mode is just amazing. Tons of combos, tons of variations of every card and tons of opportunities to make niche builds work just because you happened to get one specific rare upgrade variation on one specific card while also stumbling upon one specific neutral card to add to your deck and stuff like that.
And all for the price of free? I can't complain.
Random my little pony and other young kid games. Hate to admit it but even the paw patrol games are entertaining in this way (had a ps+ subscription, wouldn’t have paid for these). They are short and easy, and kinda junk, nice palate cleanser, and often very cute and encouraging. You don’t know a silly morale boost until you play something that says “you’re doing great!” periodically on the easiest thing you’ve done all day.
Pokemon pinball for the GBA anyone?
My god, that game is a masterpiece.
Indeed, it didnt get the respect it needs.
Escape from Tarkov, but single player (SPTarkov, not the paid upgrade). Lots of controversy surrounding the game, but I quite enjoy it playing at my own pace and difficulty
If you got friends, grab project fika mod and enjoy pve with friends. It's a ton of fun and works great.
Same same. It's a whole other game when you can progress at your own pace and don't have to worry about resets.
I've been playing the android version of Bit Heroes. It's terrible for multiple reasons but I've been playing it because the game can be played semi-passively, meaning that I can multitask while playing it. In fact, I'm actually playing it right now while I'm typing this comment.
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
For me is Dragon Ball Dokkan Battle. Its a Gachal so it has its share of nasty monetization strategies and dark patrerns but since its PvE only, its not as agregious as other titles focused on PvP.
Dragon Ball was the first anime I warched so the Nostalgia factor is very high. I really enjoy the Character attack animations and the team building.
Polarity
You're essentially just trying to make less mistakes then your opponent but the semi-hovering magnets have an awesome table presence
Hentai games are my guilty pleasures in that regard
Are they like good at all or is it just anime girls?
There are a few that are actually fun as games, Tifa Tanx2 being the only example that comes to mind, it's a fun Kung Fu (NES) like beat'em up with easy combos. There are even some work-safe gameplay videos of it on YT
A lot of the games are visual novels, this is where you find a decent variety of styles, though a lot of them use daz3d models, which I don't like. I'd wager that hentai games are like 60% VNs, 30% RPG Maker, 10% everything else
It's also squids.
I've wasted so many hours looking at tiny circles go up in Game Dev Tycoon
I still say Enclave was a great game. The reviewers at the time absolutely misunderstood it.
Most of the complaints from 2003 are things people love about the Souls games now...
HD version:
Skyrim! I always boot it up at least once a year
You think Skyrim is bad?
Tons of bugs. Rereleased on every platform. Zero fixes. Special editions fix nothing of note either.
Well certainly it had a lot of bugs. I remember there was one that bothered me when I first bought it, though that was fixed and I think more were fixed than you seem to imagine. Also being re-released on every platform hardly makes it a bad game, and special editions are only an issue if you're buying multiple copies I'd say. All the bugs aside though I've never heard someone call it a bad game exactly.
Not bad per de but Its defo really dated
I just got back into it since I never finished the main quest line and it’s actually more fun to play now, bug fixes and optimization for the series S/X made load screens instant and I’m blazing through stuff a lot faster.
Heroes of Might and Magic III, although I don't think the game is bad.
What's bad is that there's really nothing new to it and yet from time to time I sink lots of hours into a new campaign.
It's a kind of time machine bringing me back to more innocent times...
For the same reasons I need to beat some computer opponents in Broodwar on Big Game Hunters every once in a while.
have you played HoTA(Horn of The Abyss)? its a community made expansion + rebalance of HOMM3, I found out about it this year and I have lost soooo much time to it, new towns new maps new artifacts...
I haven't and truth be told I wasn't even aware of it.
Thank you for your support in wasting some more time with HOMM 🤗
I played a bunch of HoMM 3 but I don't think I understood how to really play the game. That game is a lot more complex than it initially seems and it's not trivial to me when to add new heroes, explore and split your units.
What puzzles you is the core of each campaign and highly depends on the layout of it.
You gotta try and if you fail, try a different approach.
Saving the game from time to time helps avoiding catastrophic failures without having to start from the beginning.
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
Pocket Pool.
Not to be confused with pocket billiards.
2-5 times a year I get really into Enlisted. It’s a really grindy free to play game, it feels like 90% of my teammates fail to work toward the objective, and every other round there’s an enemy player that paid for overpowered equipment wiping us out.
But man, it is a thrill to charge through whizzing bullets to get into the midst of the other team before firing round after round from a lee enfield bolt action. And if I am playing with friends there is constant strategic and tactical chatter that makes it so engaging.
Hah! That game is such a mess. It is so ridiculously mismanaged I doubt it will ever leave beta. There's no matchmaking, most of the lobbys are 50%+ bots and the bots are laughably bad in all the worst ways, every single update they break something and introduce new bugs so every update has a follow-up "oops" update trying to fix what they broke. Oh man I could go on and on but despite everything the actual gunplay and the buildable spawn point tactical meta game is actually very fun.
Oh and the community! A janky Russian WW2 f2p with low moderation? Yep. It's bad. Really bad.
It is definitely my guilty pleasure game. It's full of bots, noobs and console players so just being half decent is enough to make you feel like Rambo out there. I've introduced 2 friends to it and they laughed at me for playing it. :(
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.
Lego Tower. It’s a silly game with almost nothing to do. And I put more hours into it than anything else
It’s interesting to see what people genuinely consider to be bad, or maybe they just missed that word? 😅
For me, it would have to be Under The Skin; a solid 6/10 game, in a world where 7/10 is considered average!
I think some of the people posting comments don’t know what “guilty pleasure “ means.
Schedule I. I did everything the game has to offer at the present moment but i still go back to spend an ingame day or 2 making silly drug mixes, selling, doing dumb stuff like pickpocketing cops... It's just pleasant.
Wrestling games.
Links Awakening, it’s just been a favorite of mine since I was a kid.
I'd downvote this comment because it's not a guilty pleasure at all, but I'll upvote it instead because Link's Awakening is a beautiful game, and I had it as a kid too :)