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The last game I "played" was 2048, which is a pretty dry game when you get down to it.

Actually, Universal Paperclips is the most recent "game" I've tried, although in some respects I wouldn't call it a game as much as, perhaps, a technology demonstration.

The last true "video game" I played, ever, in the clasic sense of the word, would be GTA: Vice City. That's the last time I had a console, bought a title, and immersed myself in the game play, to beat the game, as intended by the producers of the game. I also revisited it, when they re-released it as a mobile app, and played it on a tablet.

After that experience, the deep dive of investing maybe 80 hours of zombie-like effort into beating a richly developed video game, while being mildly entertained by the story arc of the game, I washed my hands of video games. It had eaten up about a month of my life, and had amounted to pretty much nothing in return. I gained a new variant of button mashing skills, while vegetating at home on the couch.

Mobile or not, games are time wasters, for when you have time to spare. As I've gotten older, I resist getting sucked into media that tries to engulf me and swallow up weeks of time, to unravel a yarn of riddles attached to a gaming environment. (or whatever)

I've seen all the newer games, and they're interesting for sure, but to sit inside and play a video game like it's a job feels like erasing whole sections of your life, when you come up for air. You ask yourself: What the fuck am I doing with my life?

I don't really care about all of the new, emerging technology and advancements. It's kind of a sad joke at this point. Graphics cards, consoles, downloadable content, live streaming speed runs, e-sports celebrities and fame? I just... I just don't care anymore.

I enjoy gaming though. Some people play sports, some people watch shows, some people build stuff and others read books, because it makes them happy.

If something makes you happy, you should do it. It is not a waste of time if you enjoy it. Also, I find listening to people a waste of time. Work is a waste of time. To be honest everything in a sense is a waste of time.

> Mobile or not, games are time wasters, for when you have time to spare.

Oh, they good 'ol waste of time argument in a sauce of nostalgia and regret. Been there, done that.

Games do not have to be time wasters! There are good games which you can play casually. An example is Wordfeud (a Scrabble clone) which only takes about 5 minutes every 3 days if you want it to be. Its great to play whilst traveling or on the toilet.

Puzzle elements and competitive elements can be a useful aid. Even hand eye coordination has uses. Doing so in a playful manner can be constructive. I've seen games which even learn a toddler programming basics. Even the social element of a game such as a pen & pencil RPG or an MMORPG (why travel IRL for RPG) is worth something.

> You ask yourself: What the fuck am I doing with my life?

This is a good question to ask for people who get sucked into time sinks of gaming. What I've observed is that people who do those grindy games need to get their mind of their RL issues. You can call it avoiding reality, or trying to cope with reality.

I agree with you, but I don't think it's generally as bad as you paint it. The longest games I've ever played take around a dozen of hours to complete - and there weren't many of them. This of course means that I haven't and probably will never play some popular titles like The Witcher, GTA, RDR etc. that ask for a huge time investment, but there are plenty of really great games that take at most a few hours and which make you feel like after reading a nice book or watching a good movie instead of wasting time.

The best games I've ever played were played with others, and I don't think it was a waste. And not necessarily multi-player games, even playing Zelda with someone, and solving all the puzzles together is a blast. Or Mario Kart. Heck, all of my favourite games are made by Nintendo.

Don't forget that until mid-2000s there were like ten very good games a year, so every magazine had to write about them, and then you had a couple dozen okay games and something like ‘Lula the animated simulator of porn studio management.’ So everyone more-or-less knew the good stuff and not the hundreds of copycat daily-grind business simulators.

In ~five years between 2006-11 we went to full onslaught of indie games with the markets barely distinguishable from the olde Flash game sites. Everyone can make an ‘indie game’ now―they're not even called that anymore, I think. IPhone and Android happened in the same time.

BTW, it sorta helps to have ‘queues’ of stuff you want to read, watch, listen to, or play. I've gathered some titles just from seeing each mentioned twenty times on the web―many are classics by now, of course (especially since my games queue doesn't move much anyway).

Nowadays I usually just check what's on sale on gog.com, sometimes on Steam, but gog.com has less junk games, cleaner UI and, most importantly, better reviews: I found out that users there criticize more, give lesser ratings and don't hesitate to describe bad aspects; on Steam basically every game, if it's not a complete trash, has "overwhelmingly positive" rating, on gog most popular games have pretty bad ratings. And of course it has lots of old games that I didn't had a chance to play in their era, for example I played original X-Com for the first time few weeks ago.

For a while, I also watched Twitch, but seems that everyone except most promoted streamers got tired and there's nothing except streams of Fortnite. I discovered few games from there, at the times when it was interesting.

My friends are mostly playing AAA games on Playstation nowadays, so unfortunately I lost this way of discovery too.

Might be good to know GOG has a Twitch channel with various streamers that play games available on GOG, quite handy to discover lesser-known games (and quite a pleasant community imho): https://www.twitch.tv/gogcom

Also an older gamer.

I don't read much about the latest games, and my rig needs a serious upgrade as well...

However, when I do read articles about game development and such, some games get mentioned more than others. For their gameplay, story line, art, etc..

So those games get added to my wishlist, and when they go on sale (such as Spec Ops: The Line, which looks to be a morally ambiguous experience), I pick them up. It helps that years old titles (like the remastered BioShock series) run OK on my rig.

Spec ops the line is great!

XCOM2 is great. And Eurogamer is a good website. And I don't get paid by either.

Have been planning to get into XCOM2 for a while now. Really liked XCOM:EW even on a mobile device.

Be careful with XCOM2 if you like strategy games... I lost many weekends to that game in college. The expansion pack (War of the Chosen) is well worth the money. Honestly just talking about it now is making me want to reinstall it. I like that game so much that I've actually bought it twice.

You gotta play xcom:ew long war mod. It's amazingly deep and different (and difficult). But the game play is a lot more intense and engaging.

Those PC magazines of your youth were little more than advertisements themselves :)

I remember buying Computer Shopper specifically because it was a giant tome of ads. Whenever it was time to upgrade I poured through it looking for the best deal and ogling all the cool stuff I couldn't justify buying.

Now that I think of it, it's sorta weird that despite ads being such an omnipresent nuisance these days there's not a website equivalent of that today.

And the Lab of Doom and Pepsi Cola. I really miss that magazine, too. It was my newsfeed for the latest computer technologies.

I used to read CustomPC, a magazine in the UK that covers hardware (why I started reading) and games (that it got me into).

I don't any more, but I believe it's still published. It never really felt like advertising, of course they were sent free copies to review, but there were plenty of negative reviews.

If you can apply a mental 'Fortnite filter' (or want to read about Fortnite) then Polygon is good too.

I find Polygon has good content usually, but I've also found many reviews from Polygon that seem to betray a lack of understanding or familiarity with the genre from the reviewer. Also, they have more content that is about gaming (e.g. regurgitating stuff from Reddit, their critical analysis of genres, anything vaguely "gaming culture" related) than they have content that is about games.

I'm ashamed that I forgot about it in my other comment, but Rock Paper Shotgun is my other favourite gaming site. I've never gotten any whiffs of shilling from there, but I may not have the nose for it.

There's plenty of gaming publications, blogs and streamers which aren't "advertising". Rock Paper Shotgun is some of the best writing on games right now, and has been for the past several years. Eurogamer is also excellent.

I’ve found the Internet is a pretty good replacement for word-of-mouth-recommendations. Yes, they’re less ‘personal', but the sheer scale more than makes up for that. Reddit, Metacritic, and Twitch are all useful sources.

Back the day I used to binge play games. If I couldn't get myself to do that it was a clear sign I lost interest. Now, older, family and generally less time (or need to sleep ;-)), I stuck half way through Borderlands 2 since more than a year. Last game I really played was Battletech, no idea where I found the time for it.

Ehat really stopped was the recurring hardware upgrades ever two or three years. The last one was more than 5 years ago I think...

Most of my recommendations come from the handful of YouTube streamers I follow these days. The best of them are entertaining, and give you something like a demo and quick analysis in thirty minutes while you do something else. I rather like manyatruenerd.

>I’m not sure if it’s just me, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve played a lot less games

Me too. Reminds me of this quote: "we don't stop playing game because we get old, we get old because we stop playing games".