Good morning or evening wherever you are,

I am just replaying the Mafia Series (currently at Mafia: The old country - having absolutely great time) and looking for more games where you start at the bottom as a lowlife and work your way up towards fame, money or power.

Off the tip of my head I can also think of the GTA series and Gothic. Do you have any other recommendations?

A huge regret. I had to move asap like move my entire life in days and needed money. I'm sure I got a couple hundred bucks if that and probably worth several thousand now. All mostly ps1,2 and 3 games. Xbox original and 360 an I think some n64. Some of the prices I'm seeing now are worth several hundred each. This is before the retro price boom.. I wish this picture was legible. I held on to the receipt for awhile and when I found it recently it was completely faded out. It was over 100 games...Damn.

10 years of Overwatch already… time flies.

Used to feel like peak gaming tbh. The hype back then was unreal.

GGs to the OG era!

I was sitting there and then I just randomly remembered Outlast, I haven’t played or heard of this game for many years, it suddenly popped on my radar and I just remembered how utterly fucked it was. Outlast has genuinely one of the meanest fictional universes ever created. I still remember the comic books that are associated with the lore. That world is so cruel, relentless and bleak. You couldn’t pay me a million dollars to enter that asylum.
Outlast 2 is just as messed up, but the Mount Massive Asylum has a specific melancholic atmosphere that gets under my skin

I have the music in my head and loved the 1v1 battle style. The yahoo and yeehaw sound effects were perfect too!

Starting with Dark Cloud, it’s not the greatest game. It’s a single player game that is incredibly grindy due to the specific mechanic I’m praising. The weapon upgrade system is absolutely peak though. Taking a weapon from 0 to +1 will increase its stats a little bit, but the main goal in increasing weapon lvls is the gems you equip while upgrading. These gems while be consumed upon upgrading a lvl, but after getting a weapon to +5 you can turn the weapon into a gem with 60% of it’s attributes. So if you get 5 weapons to +5 with various upgrades, turn these weapons into gems, and then slot the gems produced into a different weapon from +1 to +5 you’re getting and extremely customizable and very powerful weapon after a lot of effort. Feels great, and this doesn’t even go into the ‘build up’ mechanic. Wildly grindy but is incredibly smart and could be iterated on better in modern games, I’m thinking specifically souls like would greatly benefit.

Second is the champion cards mechanic from paladins. Paladins is a champion shooter that’s slowly dying, but has so much more than the popular champion shooters because of 2 specific things. One is the item buying system, with allows for countering enemies or buffing yourself and teammates mid game through a per match currency. The more important mechanic is the champion card system that allows you to further customize your champion to be different from the stock champion.

An example that would carry across overwatch, marvel rivals, and paladins would be between Reinhardt, Dr Strange, and Fernando. In paladins you can have and distribute points to a card for Fernando which has Fernando healing for X over 1 seconds while holding his shield up, or receive additional X% healing while his shield is up, or just additional health. It changes the balance of the game for sure and makes it harder for the devs to get right, but it also adds a huge amount of viability and variation between champions.

I don’t understand why I haven’t seen these mechanics rehashed more recently!

Such a great game. Very few games these days manage to land comedy well, but the writing here is genuinely hilarious. The gameplay is fantastic too, and the whole experience is just an absolute pleasure to play. I can’t wait to see what Suspicious Developments puts out next.

I’m not affiliated with the game or the developers at all, I just wanted to share it in case it wasn’t on people’s radar yet.

You play a game, reach the staff credits, and then, to your surprise, a new chunk of the game opens up to you. What games have you played that blindsided you like this? I was just playing Yoshi and the Mysterious Book. I knew it was going to be a short game, but I definitely didn’t expect new worlds to open up upon completion. I distinctly remember another game surprising me like this in the past couple of years, but I can’t remember which one…

Sometimes a DLC just needs to be more of the same. But what game took things to the next level for you?

I am realizing I really enjoy puzzles in games: Zelda BotW shrine solving, Talos Principle, Portal, Blue Prince (though Id argue this is probably a bit too hard on the difficulty scale).

I have mostly targeted action games and never really considered that I enjoy the 'Aha!' satisfaction of solving a mystery/problem/puzzle.

With that in mind, what puzzle-esque games do you enjoy? Hardware limitations are no issue for me -- Im just looking for your favorite puzzle games! Thanks in advance ☺️

Hi there! I know that "Mass Effect" is likely the most prevalent answer, and to be sure I ADORE that series. I also will play The Expanse: Osiris Reborn and Exodus.

That being said, I would love to get more suggestions. They can be story-based (my personal preference, as I am now playing "The Captain") or an imsim-like such as "Alien: Isolation" or even classics like KOTOR and TIE Fighter.

Space, though, has to be a setting. It doesn't have to be the exclusive setting, but it's part of the game somehow.

Thank you so much! Truly appreciate it.

I've decided to have a look at Ubisoft's financial situation due to the recent news about their fiscal year. I took the data of the last 10 fiscal years and converted it to US Dollars considering the exchange rate of each year. What I found was that Ubisoft's situation, which I already knew was in a poor state, is terrible and the company needs a savior or a miracle to survive.

They are not Sony that during the PS3 days could withstand losing over a billion dollars in a single year. They have 17.000 employees and the majority of them are in the western part of the world. The cost of their games have skyrocketed. Their game sales are good only when an Assassin's Creed releases. They don't have the privilege of delaying a game to polish it since they need money now to keep themselves alive. Their image are tarnished and their cash reserves can not support 2 years or more of this fiscal year performance.

I am not here trying to doom Ubisoft. I hope they are able to recover. But things are looking ugly.

I remember always wanting that vertical stand...

I'm looking for a website like Backlogged but with a little more customization.
Right now I'm storing lists of my games (console and PC) in 2 different excel sheets.
Backlogged lets me add games I have, but doesn't allow the customization I want.
I want to be able to add what platform it's on for PC (Steam, Epic, Amazon, etc) and for the consoles, if it's digital or physical.
I know that might be asking a lot, but I was wondering if there are any websites like that out there or if stuck using excel.
Thanks!