Gaming Resume

/lab | Lab Notes | Gaming Resume

This page is not really a resume. It is a running archive of what I actually played, what platforms I had, and which games genuinely stuck in my head.

It is also a living document. Some entries are exact. Some are “I know I played this, but the platform memory is fuzzy.”

Early / Family Access (but not limited too)

• Scrabble: I literally read a dictionary to get better at it.
• Monopoly
• Candy Land
• Yahtzee
• Operation
• Candyland
• DOOM on floppy disk: early family-PC memory, not “I grew up as a PC tuning kid.”
• 007: GoldenEye: definitely played it, but I do not currently remember the exact platform.

Dreamcast

• Tomb Raider
• Crazy Taxi and Crazy Taxi 2: played these to death. In hindsight, this was probably my first simulation-adjacent fixation.
• Jet Set Radio
• The House of the Dead 2: one of my first major zombie-game memories.
• Sonic: title uncertain.
• GTA 2: probable, but not fully locked in.

Dreamcast is still one of the strongest style-memory platforms in my head. A lot of the arcade energy lives there.

PlayStation 2

• God Hand
• MetropolisMania I did play sim cities, but this was one of the starting introductions into traffic and city planning. There was a very formulaic way of here’s the budget, here’s the map. Start designing the town, citizens moved in and you could ask them to move to a new city. I haven’t had a game that let me do that since this.
• Max Payne and Max Payne 2: played the hell out of both. Max Payne 3 did not work for me, but it did introduce me to HEALTH.
• Mortal Kombat: Armageddon: still almost my favorite MK entry and probably still the best one to me. Favorites were Ermac, Havok, and Hotaru.
• Resident Evil Outbreak File #1 and File #2
• Lifeline
• Jak series
• Splinter Cell and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory: Chaos Theory was the one I played the most.
• Fullmetal Alchemist 2: Curse of the Crimson Elixir
• Yu-Gi-Oh! The Duelists of the Roses
• Hitman: Contracts
• Hitman: Blood Money
• Hitman 2: Silent Assassin via the trilogy
• 50 Cent: Bulletproof
• Destroy All Humans!
• Destroy All Humans! 2
• Stubbs the Zombie
• Alter Echo
• Bully
• Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
• Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
• Grand Theft Auto III
• Medal of Honor: Frontline
• Enter the Matrix
• Blade II
• The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth games
• The Chronicles of Narnia
• Crash Bandicoot
• Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII
• Minority Report
• The Sims Bustin’ Out
• Final Fantasy X
• Final Fantasy X-2
• InuYasha: The Secret of the Cursed Mask
• Banjo-Kazooie: memory sits here, though the platform memory may need correction later.

PC

• Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault: I could barely run it on what I remember as a normal Dell laptop.
• Spore
• Black & White
• The Sims 2 and The Sims 3: later this culminated in my first job letting me buy The Sims 4 plus all the DLC.
• Dying Light: The Beast
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines: one of the few games I could really play on the old lime-green Dell laptop before I got a budget gaming PC around 2018, and I fucking adored it.
• Cities: Skylines: played it until the load times got increasingly ridiculous.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Anomaly: the only S.T.A.L.K.E.R. version I really care about.
• DayZ, 7 Days to Die, and SCUM: I mainly care about these if I can run them solo or on a private server. Public-server commitment does not interest me much.
• Elder Scrolls Online I actually played it first on Xbox, and then continued on heavily on PC. I played most during Summerset. I tried to get back into it during Necrom and Silkroad (iirc), with the new Daedric prince info. But alas, the only serious engagements I had in that was Summerset, the Clockwork City (the Ravencourt) and I also collected in-game music boxes. The best thing about ESO is that it’s an elder scrolls game, the worst thing is that it’s an MMO. You can play and quest solo fine and thrive, but it’s still an MMO. It’s the only serious MMO that I’ve played.

Most PC games around me early on were pirated unless they needed an original disk. I was not coming up through a polished enthusiast-PC pipeline.

PSP

• Daxter
• Ghost Recon
• ATV Offroad Fury
• MX vs. ATV Reflex
• The Sims 2
• SOCOM

Game Boy Advance SP

• Metroid Prime
• Pokemon
• Rush’n Attack

Those are the only titles I clearly remember from that platform.

Nintendo 3DS

• Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor

I barely played the 3DS and eventually sold it. It was a gift and also just another system I did not really need.

Xbox Ecosystem

I had an Xbox 360, then an Xbox One, then an Xbox Series X.

• BloodRayne

• Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon

• Ninja Gaiden

• Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition

• Halo 3: the reason I got an Xbox.

• 1 vs. 100

• Army of Two

• Assassin’s Creed series, minus a few exceptions like Liberation

• Agents of Mayhem

• Battlefield 3

• Battlefield 4

• Battlefield: Bad Company

• Battlefield: Bad Company 2

• Borderlands

• Borderlands 2

• Bully: Scholarship Edition

• Crackdown and Crackdown 2: loved these the most.

• XCOM

• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

• Call of Duty: World at War

• Call of Duty: Black Ops

• Clive Barker’s Jericho

• Civilization Revolution

• The Chronicles of Riddick

• Command & Conquer: Red Alert

• Condemned: Criminal Origins

• Dead Island

• Dead Rising series

• Dead Space

• Dead Space 2

• Dead Space 3

• Spartacus Legends / Spartacus: Blood and Sand memory

• Deadpool

• Def Jam: Icon

• Deus Ex: Human Revolution

• Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

• Diablo III: Reaper of Souls

• Dying Light

• Dying Light 2

• DOOM 3: BFG Edition

• DOOM II: Hell on Earth

• Dragon Age series

• Frostpunk: only the first game. One of the few city builders with a story that I played in a committed way.

• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion: life-changing, especially with Shivering Isles.

• Expeditions: A MudRunner Game

• Shivering Isles

• Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

• F.E.A.R. series

• Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 5: peak to me.

• Fable series

• Fallout 3

• Fallout: New Vegas

• For Honor: I wanted to like it more because of HEMA and fencing interest, but it never fully landed.

• Forza Horizon games: played a bunch and loved them.

• Gears of War series

• Lost Planet: Extreme Condition

• Lost Planet 2

• The King of Fighters ‘98 Ultimate Match

• Samurai Shodown II

• Killer Instinct

• Mortal Kombat

• Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord: fucking loved it.

• Dragon’s Dogma 2: basically everything I have ever wanted out of a combat RPG and melee game. The combat feels fully physical, and the pawn system is peak.

• MudRunner

• Left 4 Dead

• Madden NFL games: really only for Create a Player and Create a Team.

• Way of the Samurai 3

• Marathon: Durandal

• Mass Effect

• Mass Effect 2

• Mass Effect 3

• Medal of Honor: Airborne

• Mercenaries 2: World in Flames

• Metal Gear Solid 3

• Metal Gear Solid V

• Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

• Metro series

• Naruto: Rise of a Ninja

• Naruto: The Broken Bond

• Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

• a few NHL games

• Overlord

• Overlord II

• Payday 2

• Peter Jackson’s King Kong

• Perfect Dark Zero

• Pinball FX

• Prince of Persia

• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

• Prototype

• GRID 2

• Guitar Hero

• Homefront

• Rainbow Six: Vegas 2

• Splinter Cell: Double Agent

• Splinter Cell: Conviction

• State of Decay and State of Decay 2: played both to hell.

• Sunset Overdrive: played, beat, and adored it. Favorite EP is Fizzco Jam Sessions, and I own that too.

• Sleeping Dogs: beat it and loved it.

• Toy Soldiers

• Toy Soldiers: Cold War

• Vampire Rain

• Watch Dogs 2: the only one I liked, and I specifically loved the DedSec art direction.

• Control: loved the theme, art direction, and atmosphere more than I liked actually finishing it.

• The Witcher 2 and The Witcher 3: liked 2 way more. 3 had a similar “great atmosphere, not enough pull to finish” problem.

• Cult of the Lamb: one of the few roguelites I genuinely enjoy.

• Cyberpunk 2077: beat it, but it was a personal letdown in a few areas.

• Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales

• Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr

• Grounded: adored it because I love rat-sized games.

• Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy: still the best Marvel game I have played.

• Kingdom Come: Deliverance: liked it enough that I later bought it on PC for moddability.

• Hogwarts Legacy: adored the atmosphere, but wished it had been much deeper as a system and maybe a little more life-sim.

• Hunt: Showdown: liked the theme and feel, did not like the PvP side.

• Gwent: the only card game I liked since Yu-Gi-Oh!, but I did not stick with it because of the PvP reliance. I still liked collecting the cards and the animation.

• Mad Max: loved it until it left Game Pass.

• Metal Gear Survive

• Rogue Company

• RoboCop: Rogue City

• Ryse: Son of Rome

• RUINER: adored it.

• Vigor: major PvP exception because I could choose to exfil whenever I wanted.

• Aliens: Dark Descent

• APB Reloaded

• Attack on Titan 2

• Hood: Outlaws & Legends

• Need for Speed Unbound: liked it enough that I bought a racing wheel and gear shift, then realized I did not have a good setup for the wheel because it has a motor in it.

• Outlast Trials: really, really enjoyed it.

• Outlast and Outlast: Whistleblower: did not beat the main game, but I did beat the DLC.

• Overcooked and Overcooked 2: adored both, but solo progress only gets you so far.

• Pathologic 2: really liked the idea, atmosphere, and general feel, but it did not feel great to continue. I do expect I will play Pathologic 3.

• The Evil Within: liked it a lot and beat it, but never got to the DLC.

• The Evil Within 2: was deeply into it and beat it on the hardest difficulty.

• Resident Evil 6: liked it enough to beat it on the hardest difficulty with a friend. The giant snake boss is still a suffering memory.

• Resident Evil 7: did not enjoy it much, but I did like the End of Zoe DLC.

• Resident Evil 2 Remake and Resident Evil 3 Remake: absolutely deserve to be here.

• Titanfall and Titanfall 2: liked the first a lot, liked 2 so much more.

• Tom Clancy’s The Division and The Division 2: really fucking adored both.

• Rainbow Six Extraction: played more than a bit of it.

• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege

• Escape from Tarkov

• PUBG: Battlegrounds

• Call of Duty: Warzone

• Yakuza 0: played the fuck out of it and finished it start to finish. I tried the rest of the series, but it never felt the same.

• Evil Dead: The Game

• Friday the 13th: The Game

• The Elder Scrolls Online

• Elite Dangerous

• Wolfenstein: The New Order

• Wolfenstein: The Old Blood

• at least two X-Men games

• X-Men Origins: Wolverine

• Saints Row series

• Shadowrun: the Xbox 360 competitive PvP game, not the tabletop RPGs. It was a precursor-style competitive shooter where you could also play against bots. BRIGHT (the Netflix movie with Will Smith) is the closest anything has come to that same vibe since. I tried the Harebrained Schemes turn-based games but ultimately could not get into them, even though the art direction and music were genuinely great.

• The Simpsons: Hit & Run

• Skate

• Skate 2

• Red Dead Revolver: I genuinely enjoyed the wild west setting. When it became Red Dead Redemption, I did not like it anywhere near as much. For the first Red Dead Redemption, I only really played RDO and Undead Nightmare. I own Red Dead Redemption 2 but only played Online there as well.

• Resident Evil series

• Rock Band 2

• River City Girls

• Ugly Americans: Apocalypsegeddon

Additional Xbox notes:

• Halo 3 is why I got an Xbox, nuff said.
• Oblivion plus Shivering Isles was life-changing.
• I loved Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, especially the role-based combat. The only game that came close to that used to be the Battlefield series.
• I played a fair bit of Madden NFL, but explicitly for Create a Player and Create a Team. I also played a few NHL games, same aspect.
• The Assassin’s Creed entries I actually played through and beat because I enjoyed them that much were Syndicate and Odyssey.
• Valhalla came close, but it did not pull me in as much. Origins wasn’t interesting at all for me.
• I played Left 4 Dead a lot, but it really depended on having friends around. Horde-based games have the pressure of needing to rely on friends to ensure that it’s enjoyable. Cresencedo events were interesting but there was never a point, where we could work towards avoiding that.
• I finally got to play and enjoy the Metro games on Xbox, even though I never really beat them.
• Overlord and Overlord II were iconic to me in the sense that I’m playing a bad game, there’s comic mischef and I had minions. If I had a budget, I’d adadpt the series to be a bit as it is where the heros are vain and also villians - worse but often prized for it, but make it a bit more like the Fable games in systemic depth.
• Peter Jackson’s King Kong was one I loved and actually finished. It was a horror and a combat game, using the spears was really fun but it was one of those horror games that actively kept you moving and constatnly in tension.
• I liked Agents of Mayhem, but it felt too procedural and grindy to beat.
• I loved Crackdown 1 and Crackdown 2 the most; didn’t care for Crackdown 3 even though it was awaited. It felt like a let down in character leveling and destruction as well as fun.
• MudRunner and Expeditions: A MudRunner Game were fun; I played it for the arcadey-simulation aspect of it and I enjoy any vehicle-based game where there is wear and tear involved.
• Far Cry 3 and Far Cry 5 are peak to me. I did not see much point in finishing Far Cry 4 because the Pagan Min ending felt like the best one anyway.
• I tried to like For Honor more than I actually did, especially because of my interest in HEMA and fencing.
• I only really like the first Frostpunk. It is one of the few city builders with a story that I played in a committed way.
• I played a bunch of Forza Horizon games and loved them. Collecting the cars and arcade racers without worrying about the simulation aspect has always been interests in games.
• I fucking loved Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord. What’s not to love for me? It’s a dynasty-based management game with resource allocation. You have the option of letting a spreadsheet sim a batle, or you could just opt to actually play a part in the battle, which is way more agency and decisiveness.Like the spreedsheets say you should lose, but in-game, you can cheese but also just not lose.
• I played nearly all of Gears of War except Tactics.
• I beat Sleeping Dogs and loved it. Mainly because it was in Hong Kong, it was a spiritual successor to the True Crime series. Basically, I enjoyed being an undercover cop or a loose cannon cop. For sleeping dogs, the story was genuinely interesting and some of the side-activites were fun and didn’t feel like a drag. Also, environment-based combat aloud for unique takedowns and such.
• Prototype landed much harder for me than Prototype 2. With Alex Mercer, it also had this disguise mechanic that I remember fondly from Destroy All Humans. So in both, I enjoyed the deception of walking around as the worlf among sheep so to say. Just realized, I’d be super interested in a sympathy-monster playing game as a life-sim with end-states like that.
• I never really got to enjoy Skate 3 the way I did Skate and Skate 2.
• I played both State of Decay games to hell. It became car collection and storage management, as well as trading supplies with friends and helping them. What made the game insteresting was that there wasn’t a - you CAN’T take a friends rucksack back. You technically could take rucksacks by loading them and switching to a new survivor while collecting the cumulative rewards due to helping. Outside of zombies and base management. The resource collection, scarcity, zero-sum environments, and zombie containment is what makes State of Decay one of the best zombie feature games I’ve ever played. The core of the zombie genre is co-operation, struggle, collection and then
• I played, beat, and adored Sunset Overdrive. It was the customizable and Jet-Set Radio stylized combat and traversal that kept me invested. The soundtrack was also great enough that I actively sought out the Fizzco Jam Sessions, and I own that too.
• Tenchu Z was on Xbox 360.
• Vampire Rain felt a little ridiculous even at the time.
• I only liked Watch Dogs 2, and specifically loved the DedSec art direction.
• I liked the theme, art direction, and atmosphere of Control, but not enough to finish it.
• Same with The Witcher 3. I liked The Witcher 2 way more. Even though there was certaintly a great deal of tthings in the Witcher 3. Honestly? I only cared about the art direction, some characters and the atmosphere. Geralt and Ciri are cool; but the creatures, elves and being a human with vested interests in both worlds are what made it enjoyable. Also it’s that the game is oppressive. It’s a dark fantasy game that doesn’t shy away from the harsh realities of the world; even if it was a power fantasy if, I could make my own Witcher, I’d be more invested. If it was only a power fantasy in some ways but kicked my shit in - I’d love that hypothetical entry even more.
• Cult of the Lamb is one of the few roguelites I genuinely enjoy.
• I beat Cyberpunk 2077, but personally found it a letdown in a few areas.
• I adored Grounded because I love rat-sized games. I believe more games need toy-box / rat-sized levels in especially PvP matches for maps. Hell, if it’s something like that but also had normal-sized human AI moving around to avoid. That would be hella interesting.
• Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy is still the best Marvel game I have played. Beat it, enjoyed that representation of Adam Warlock.
• I greatly enjoyed Hogwarts Legacy for the atmosphere, but I wished it had been much deeper as a system and maybe leaned a little more life-sim.
• I liked the theme and overall feel of Hunt: Showdown, but did not like the PvP aspect at all.
• Gwent was the only card game I really liked since Yu-Gi-Oh!, but because it leaned so heavily on PvP I never stuck with it. I did enjoy collecting the cards and the animation.
• Thronebreaker deserves to be here too.
• I loved Mad Max until it left Game Pass.
• Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr is on the list too.
• I played Rogue Company.
• I played RoboCop: Rogue City. I stopped playing to due streaming issues via UE5. Due to skipping through an already seen cutscenes, it would make the game crashes. So if the cutscene was 5 minutes long, it would be 5 minutes of just waiting for the cutscene to end else it’d crash if I skipped through it. Some of the police department debrefings and the worse part about that issue, was actually during the bank machine intro.
• I played Ryse: Son of Rome. I played the wave-based survival mode. If I could play a game like this that was also like an fictional-fantasy rome dynasty survival, that’s an immediate buy. I beat the story and stayed for that.
• I adored RUINER. Art direction and music. The actual game itself was confusing in how to proceed in some of the level design which is ultimately why I stopped.
• Vigor was a major PvP exception for me too, mostly because I could choose to exfil the map at any time.
• I did not beat The Phantom Pain at all. It got too grindy in a way that I didn’t enjoy despite loving basebuilding and the general exfil / infil gameplay loop. It was technically a RAID based game with a basebuilding and staff management coponent.
• I actually loved Metal Gear Survive, fully beat it, and played the co-op portions.
• The only Warhammer games I really enjoy playing are the FPS ones. However, I did play Inquisitor Martyr, Necromunda, Space Hulk and the Boltgun typing game.
• Aliens: Dark Descent? I honestly should have played it more, I stopped mainly because it’s a strategy game. But there is a certain level of preplanning investment needed to go back and forth between the game.
• APB Reloaded was one of the few MMO PvP games I willingly played. I always wanted to play it on PC but could not run it, then later grabbed it when it came to Xbox. It caught my interest because it was vigilanties vs. criminals, so it was a cops and robbers game. One of the pressures with playing it was against it stil boiled down to very simple mechanics.
• Attack on Titan 2 was a lot of fun. I did not beat it, but I played a fair amount. Enjoyed the fact that I could make my own character and take apart of some events. Which whenever I buy or play an anime game; I’m playing it to experience the story in a different way not just re-experience the storyline in a fighting game format.
• Hood: Outlaws & Legends was another one of the few PvP games I genuinely wanted to play and liked enough while it lasted. I probably still would have been playing it, and actively spent money on it if I could play it offline.
• I played and loved Need for Speed Unbound enough that I bought a racing wheel with a gear shift, then realized I did not have a good way to use it because the wheel has a motor in it.
• I did not beat the main Outlast, but I did beat the Outlast: Whistleblower DLC. I really, really enjoyed Outlast Trials. I played a lot of it, and actually I want to play more. Part of why I enjoyed it is that the darkness is a true mechanic like in a game such as Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. I can hid in the total darkness even without the NVGs working. So the fact that I can sit in a corner or duck inbetween two objects in the darkness and the AI won’t be able to immediately find me unless they bump into me is peak stealth design. I’ve been annoyed with most horror games akin to something like this being PvP focused. I do understand that it’s cheaper and resources to do.
• I adored Overcooked 1 and Overcooked 2, but could only get so far by myself. I would very much like a management entry in this series that uses a game like Galaticares’ formula.
• I really liked the idea, atmosphere, and general feel of Pathologic 2, but it did not feel great to keep playing. I do think I will probably play Pathologic 3.
• I really liked Dying Light. I did not like Dying Light 2. Though I did enjoyed Dying Light: The Beast as a standalone game. My only gripe with it is that with how loot availbility is teh game should probably have had a focus mechnically on reducing the game, it’s like 20+ years since the apocaylse, I should be able to use bones from zombies to make arrows, glue, and etc. It’s not like there’s a shortage of zombies.
• I really liked Titanfall, but liked Titanfall 2 so much better.
• I really fucking adored The Division 1 and The Division 2. I played both of them an awful lot, didn’t really play much of the Dark Zone.
• I also played more than a bit of Rainbow Six Extraction. It’s a nice concension but a literally procedure, rogue-lite terrorist hunt thing with a completely customiable operator would have have been peak for me. I enjoyed that it was playable, but I didn’t enjoy it relied solely on co-op, timers and was more akin to GTFO but with aliens.
• I played an alarming amount of Rainbow Six Siege, but the more esports-focused it became, the less I wanted to keep playing.
• I played Siege the most before and after Operation Health. The most was when Frost and Buck were added. As well as Hibana, Dokkaebi and Echo. I played Jackle enough. I stopped playing more around… Year 6. Then sparsely on and off. I almost came back during Year 8 Season 2 with Fenrir. Year 9 Season 3 with Skopos. Sadly, bringing Solid Snake as an Op in Year 11 should have interested me but it doesn’t.
• I have 200+ hours in Escape from Tarkov; I only really started playing it once PvE was dropped and then only really in co-op or during events.
• I played the fuck out of PUBG and Warzone; Warzone I was able to get top 1% in rebirth resurgence and plunder. That is one of the exceptions to my general dislike of PvP: I do like that kind of battle royale / extraction-adjacent structure. A lot of the appeal there was dropping in, customization, and running modes where the point was eventually to die, exfil, or win as a squad. If a battle royale did not have solos, duos, or trios, my chances of sticking with it dropped a lot. I never really played Apex Legends. I may have tried once, and then was like: NOPE.
• I played the fuck out of Yakuza 0 and finished it start to finish. It was funny, it was dark and the mini-games. Including the carabet club management kept me invested. The first introduction to it that immediately switched to the menu with that song just really tickled my brain. I liked it enough that I tried the rest of the series, but it never felt the same.
• Ugly Americans: Apocalypsegeddon was a weird little Xbox 360 game I enjoyed a lot, and I really liked the show too.
• I briefly played The Elder Scrolls Online.
• I stopped playing Elite Dangerous when Xbox online support was halted.
• I liked The Evil Within a lot and beat it, but never got to the DLC. I was deeply into The Evil Within 2 and beat it on the hardest difficulty.
• In Resident Evil 6, I liked it enough to clear the hardest difficulty with a friend. The giant snake boss is one of the suffering memories that stuck.
• Resident Evil 2 Remake and Resident Evil 3 Remake deserve to be here too.
• I did not enjoy Resident Evil 7 much at all, but I did enjoy the End of Zoe DLC.
• I played, beat, and loved Resident Evil Village. I have basically all of the Resident Evil games (on xbox)
• Evil Dead: The Game is one of the few horror PvP games I genuinely enjoyed. Alongside it, Friday the 13th: The Game is one of the only others in that lane that worked for me.
• I liked Wolfenstein: The New Order and The Old Blood.
• I liked Red Dead Revolver for the wild west feel, but Red Dead Redemption did not land for me the same way. I only really played RDO and Undead Nightmare from the first RDR. I own RDR2 but only played Online.
• Rockstar essentially lost me as a customer during GTA IV. GTA V had too many protagonist switches — too much context to track for an engaging story — so I got bored and only played GTA Online. Same pattern repeated with RDR2 which yeah. I never beat the campaign of GTAIV, GTA V, or RDR2 or RDR1. I did beat Red Dead Revolver though but that was when the game was published by Capcom.
• I surprisingly did not like BioShock. Only played some of Infinite.
• I only really played Borderlands to play with friends; otherwise I found it boring.

Steam Time Signal

This is the reality-check layer, but not a perfect one.

My actual rule is closer to this:

• under 1h: basically noise unless there is some other strong reason to keep it
• around 1.6h+: can still be real signal if I know I actually played it
• around 3h+: usually the point where a game was notably played

There are also false negatives and false positives:

• false negatives: older Xbox-heavy games like Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Fallout 4 where the real play history lived off Steam
• false positives: games where Steam hours got padded by idle time or repeated attempts to “make it click”

Deepest Loops

• Project Zomboid (169.0h)
• SCUM (166.9h)
• Fallout: New Vegas (145.4h)
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance II (135.1h)
• RimWorld (117.6h)
• I Was a Teenage Exocolonist (105.5h)
• Mist Survival (95.1h)
• Our Life: Beginnings & Always (90.5h)
• DREDGE (72.3h)
• Skyrim Special Edition (65.7h)
• Abiotic Factor (63.2h)
• HELLDIVERS 2 (63.0h)

Strong Mid-Tier Commitments

• The Forest (55.9h)
• The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria (50.6h)
• Phasmophobia (50.5h)
• Green Hell (48.3h)
• Cities: Skylines (45.3h)
• Sid Meier’s Civilization V (44.8h)
• Garry’s Mod (42.9h)
• Travellers Rest (42.3h)
• 7 Days to Die (41.5h)
• Schedule I (38.9h)
• RoboCop: Rogue City (37.9h)
• PAYDAY 2 (31.5h)
• Core Keeper (31.2h)
• Stardew Valley (29.4h)
• Galacticare (27.6h)
• Palworld (26.7h)
• Frostpunk (26.0h)

Lower-Hour But Real Signal

• MISERY (8.9h): definitely real.
• Pacific Drive (6.8h): adored it.
• Titan Quest II (6.3h): still playing and love it.
• DEVOUR (5.9h): liked it, but lost the friend group needed to keep playing.
• GUARDS! (3.6h): genuinely funny, genuinely loved it. It is basically COPS but medieval.
• SCP: 5K / SCP: Pandemic (6.5h): I normally hate SCP games, but this was an occult tactical shooter, so I actively tried to support it.
• Achilles: Legends Untold (1.8h) and Achilles: Survivor (4.6h): short times on paper, but real play signal.

Steam Lies Sometimes

• Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Fallout 4 under-report the actual attachment because the heavy play happened on Xbox in middle school / high school.
• Some Total War hours are inflated by idle time. I did play them, but the Steam time is not fully trustworthy.
• Graveyard Keeper is more of a false positive. I kept trying to like it and see what was enjoyable, but it never really landed.

Support-Purchase Weirdness

For SCP: Pandemic, I backed the project hard enough to buy a high edition partly because the occult tactical-shooter angle was rare.

• small in-game painted portrait on a shared wall
• 2 physical Global Occult Coalition patches
• 5 copies of SCP: Pandemic on Steam
• in-game credits listing
• Discord backer role
• Kickstarter-exclusive weapon camo
• soundtrack
• digital artbook
• name on the in-game Memoriam Wall
• unique in-game backer patch

I never got the rewards sorted correctly, which still annoys me. I onnly got the kickstar camo and 5 copies; nothing else.

What This Actually Says

The real Steam pattern is not “finishes everything.” It is:

• survival sandboxes and base-management loops
• atmosphere-heavy systems games
• strong repeat-play survival / extraction / colony-management patterns
• selective obsession rather than broad completionism

Other Games In The Orbit

• Wasteland 3
• Prey (2016)

Other Randoms / Definitely Played

• Diner Dash
• Dig Dug
• Mappy
• Insaniquarium
• Alien Swarm
• Galaga
• WeeWorld
• IMVU
• Mafia Wars
• Reign of Blood

Recurring Tastes

Even with the genre spread, a few patterns keep showing up:

• simulation or management curiosity
• systems-heavy RPGs
• weird mid-budget experiments
• zombie games
• role-based combat
• games with strong mechanical identity
• titles that feel like they have a machine inside them
• private or solo serverable survival sandboxes over public-server obligation
• games where atmosphere is strong enough to carry me even when the surrounding systems do not fully land

Sandbox / Server Preference

I learned something very specific from games like DayZ, 7 Days to Die, and especially SCUM: I mostly care about them if I can run them solo or in a private server. Public-server play asks for a level of social investment and maintenance that I usually do not care about.

Extraction-style PvP is one of the few PvP structures that reliably works for me. Vigor did because I could exfil whenever I wanted. Escape from Tarkov did enough that I put 200+ hours into it. That risk loop works for me much better than standard competitive PvP.

Side Note: World of Darkness

I bought as many World of Darkness digital games as I reasonably could partly because there just are not that many urban gothic horror IPs around. I liked the setting enough that I even tried making a fan supplement for Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition. The IP is in it’s infacy in digital games, but the bulwark of content which why I can’t still get heavily invested is still mainly visual novel experiences. Or playing already made characters. I should like VTM:Bloodlines 2 but… Bloodhunt had better character creator to me which is a defining part of RPG experiences for me now, and I don’t like the talking parasite that no-one else can see angle.

Other gen

I’d only get a playstation to play all of the Jak and Daxter games. If it included Daxter too, for instance. I’d be the only reason I turned it on.