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.

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...

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.

Probably Vampire Survivors or Vampire Hunters: Sometimes it's just nice to play something where you don't really have to think too hard.

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.

At the risk of pissing some people off, Kenshi has a special kind of jank

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.

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

Mechwarrior 5 Mercs - stomping around the inner sphere with a 1000 to 1 kill ratio

Counter Strike 2. It’s a toxic community, but I find it oddly addictive.

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 fighting mechanics are peculiar, but the game is very dear to my heart. Thinking about giving it another go now, ha!

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.

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.

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

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"

super deepthroat

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Vanquish is so idiot and the story is atrocious but damn the shooting is good.

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.

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'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.