I play so many shop sims, everything from normal simulators like Supermarket Sim to fantasy dungeon crawlers like Fell & Sell or Moonlighter to gimmicky ones like The Walking Trade, I have never found one that I enjoyed as much as Recettear. It’s a hard act to follow.

I really dig Nibelsnarf. Such a cool design. It’s not super different or exciting or anything, but it works.

Honestly, I found many hundreds of hours of Monster Hunter to be absolutely no help when I played my first Soulslike. I tried to play it like I would MH and got destroyed constantly until I forced myself to forget what I thought I knew and let the game teach me its own way. I just got the new Steam Controller, so I’ve been playing a bunch of games to try to get used to it because I really loved the old model. I don’t know if it’s just a case of needing to get used to the camera movement or if I’m super rusty, but my most recent journey into Wilds was rough. I want to keep playing a little bit now and then to keep my skills up for the upcoming expansion, but I’m still a bit burned out on it. Always happens with this series.

I’ve been replaying Batman. I’m still plodding along with challenge maps for achievements alongside the story modes. Asylum is completely done, City has Robin and Nightwing to go plus most of NG+, Origins I’m partway through the story and it’s still my favourite, haven’t touched challenge maps yet, Knight I only need to do 4 more maps but they’re really tough ones, I’ll probably still be beating my head against them when I finish the Origins story and start this one. I’ve also started a separate replay of the series alongside my normal replay so that my GF can see it all and I can infodump on her the whole time (don’t worry, this arrangement goes both ways, she got me though about 9999 hours of Lord of the Rings movies and cartoons and books first).

We also got through Luca in Final Fantasy X. I won the tournament, she lost. We’re treating this the same way we watch TV series and overanalysing everything as we go, really digging into characterisation and whatnot. For such an old game with relatively primitive models and animations it’s still surprisingly in-depth, there’s a lot going on that I never picked up on in the past.

Replaying Metal Gear Solid V. It still rules.

Finally, the only new thing on this whole list, I am obsessed with janky, kind of shitty business sims because I love watching them grow and being able to interact with the devs, and it’s nice having a small community mostly free of anti-woke bullshit. I’m currently into Car Dealer Simulator. I don’t know if I could really recommend it to normal people, but I’m having a great time.

I need the updates. My apartment door is a few minutes and a card-locked lift ride away from the street, even if they could get to me I wouldn’t expect anyone to go that far. It’s not like I could just note the estimated delivery time and be ready for that, I’ve had more punctual doctor’s appointments than the average food delivery.

I hate the yes vs not now choices. I use DoorDash maybe once a month or two when we’re having a lazy night in, and every time I open it (including to check the order progress of an order I just made) it prompts me to turn on notifications. Yes or not now. Here, I’ll grab it now.

The thing is, I have notifications on!

I will “never miss an order update” as they say because it’s allowed, I’ve only turned off the million ads they want to send me. These companies constantly being as shitty as possible is getting to me more and more these days.

I’m not getting anything like this and I only have a debit card, there must be something else going on. I’m not sure what else to look for but I can get to Resident Evil and porn game store pages without issue on the android app and website (I’m not home to check the PC client). My account is 15 years old so obviously I’d have to be old enough, but since that wasn’t a factor for you I don’t know what the rules are.

Boots were equipment, not an item. You couldn’t assign them iirc. You might be thinking of a later game.

I have two email addresses that I use to sign up to everything, and they themselves are both over 18 years old. The only thing I’ve let verify my age is my Microsoft account, and they did that by looking up my email with their “age verification partner” or whatever, and they determined I was over 18.

Not that I was ever planning to give any websites my ID or do any selfie shit with anyone anyway, but now that I know it’s completely possible to be verified without all that I definitely won’t now. Discord never tried to lock me out, so I guess my account there is old enough? I signed up pretty early when they started. I’ll go completely offline before I play along with any of this.

I’ve (only?) got about 100 hours in it, I think it’s pretty good. The main worry with the new one is that the devs are working with Paradox Interactive now, so everyone expects excessive monetisation and minimal bugfixes because that’s what they do. Since the game isn’t even out yet and they’ve just announced a deluxe edition, limited time collector’s edition, official merchandise, loyalty discounts and preorder bonuses, I think I might pass on this one.

I also have everything forwarding to another account, with a rule to tag the ones sent to my gmail so that they’re highlighted. It’s a big task at first but just do a couple every now and then and eventually it’ll be done.

I’ve restarted Pokémon Legends Z-A, which I haven’t played since completing my shiny dex 6 months ago. I spent the first 8 hours looking for a shiny Pancham to be my starter (luckily it appears in an area that’s really easy to cheese) and now I have a full Dark type team.

While I liked the character customisation the first time as a girl, it’s a lot harder to scrape a good looking outfit together as a boy. Here I am with Gristle

I never use the same species more than once, at least not as part of a new team (I’ll recreate old “characters” in each game to add to a roster to mix up the endgame), so since that takes about 200 species off the table that makes building them a fun challenge, especially for single-type or gimmick teams. This one’s Pangoro, Krookodile, Sableye, Sharpedo, Malamar & eventually Yveltal.

I’m also replaying Batman Arkham Asylum, possibly for the first time since Knight came out. I was devastated to learn even that one’s already over a decade old. These games are masterpieces. The plan is to get 100% in all 4 of them over the next year or so, and I might go for all achievements while I’m at it because I’m missing a bunch of the challenge room stuff.

Then I’ve recently gotten into games like Quarantine Zone (decent) and That’s Not My Neighbor (fantastic), that are all about attention to detail and thoroughness. QZ you’re checking for symptoms of infection to let people into an evacuation camp during a zombie apocalypse and TNMN you’re making sure doppelgangers don’t get into an apartment building.

After beating both of those 100% I was waiting for Security 51 which came out a couple of days ago but I’ve been working too much to play it. It’s like Papers Please but you’re guarding an alien lab. My girlfriend can’t believe I come home from my job as a security guard just to play security guard games. Contraband Police is on sale so I picked that up today too, it’s more of the same but it scratches an itch.

I think most blue collar and service workers would be fine. I wonder what the world looks like to someone who doesn’t know anything except office work exists.

I kind of enjoyed BotW, but once the awe factor of the landscape wore off it was just a load of mostly unrewarding traveling to too many shrines that were too small. Combine the 120 shrines into like 20 that were 6 times longer each and they would have been cool mini-dungeons that I would have happily done, but as it was I was so bored. The main dungeons were good and I still put 80 or so hours in, but unlike everything pre-Skyward Sword I’ll never revisit the game.

Then Tears of the Kingdom was like hey here it all is again but there’s three times as much and this time there’s no WiiU version to emulate so the performance will be so much worse. Nah.

I’m most of the way through Cat Mail Co, it’s a nice time waster. I’m also trying to get into Medieval Dynasty. We’ve got a tiny group of 4 people so far, there’s a lumberjack who collects like 1 log a day, a dude who allegedly gets buckets of water from the well, and a hunter I’ve literally never seen do anything. It’s uh… fun.

I might start another run of Elden Ring. It’s been about a year and a half since I last played, so a nice slow-paced game with a new weapon type might be a bit of fun. I didn’t like the expansion at all, but for the most part the main game is pretty chill.

You’re forgetting the secret bonus rule, which says everything can only be at most mildly infuriating when compared to Israel

Man it’s probably been over a decade since I played this, for some reason I thought the original version was taken down when it was remade in 3D.

I recently downloaded an emulator and TP with someone else’s save just to go fishing in that lake again. Best part of the game. Your next dungeon is pretty interesting too, have fun.

Satisfactory just got an update too. There are a couple of big changes to vehicles that make me want to jump back in. I’ve been too busy playing FOUNDRY though, which is basically a voxel Satisfactory.

I hope they aren’t paying to take care of someone’s dog.

I just took 2 wonderful weeks off and played about 160 hours combined of Transport Fever 2 (city builder but without the city-building that only focuses on logistics), FOUNDRY (voxel Satisfactory), Teddy’s Haven (cosy fantasy shop sim) and Bobo Bay (basically Chao garden from Sonic Adventure 2 that someone finally made into a standalone game).

Less than two hours into my first shift back I was already utterly miserable, and now 90 minutes after that I’m just… burned out. I guess it’ll be back to Pokémon after this because I won’t have the mental bandwidth for much else. Just gotta win the lotto!