Valheim is broad but not deep enough and its success is mostly due to when it appeared. If it weren’t in the early access cycle and the devs had made the game they wanted to make instead having the community poke and prod them it probably wouldn’t be very fun.

Satisfactory is absolutely hampered by the unreal engine’s limitations.

TLoZ: A Link to the Past, the enemy respawns get annoying when backtracking.

Chrono Trigger: Rewired my brain to make me like DBZ character design

TLoZ: OoT & MM: gave me nightmares which I was not expecting going into them from the previous games in the series

Super Metroid: led to me constantly waiting for MP4 but it’s totally coming this year for sure. The sheer missile-sponginess of the bosses is kinda tedious I guess?

Any Tribes game: it will never be the same and I am sad.

Dwarf Fortress, Kenshi: I cannot play these anymore because I forget to eat in real life and I will die.

Red Alert series: Yuri was kind of a misstep I feel and limited the series’ development.

Sim-Anything: Maxis selling to EA for a cash grab ruined one the coolest studios ever to exist.

FFXIV has too little content being released once you actually get through everything they made in the last decade.

Disco Elysium and BG3 are both incredibly well written, to the point where my first playthrough was so good, and so perfectly fit my head canon, that playing it again with different choices and playstyles just feels tedious, and an exercise in futility.

Helldivers 2 really needs some sort of end game content. The gameplay loop is fun, but i’m not even max character level, yet I have everything unlocked, all warbonds, and maxed out resources.

El Paso, Elsewhere is flawless and there is nothing to criticize, go buy it now you losers.

Morrowind’s combat sucks even if I got very good at making it work for me. I get what they were going for, but it’s a very weird thing to allow you to aim at people in first person and still have your accuracy determined by dice roll.

disco elysium insists upon itself

in Steambot Chronicles, it sucks that your character can’t wear the fancy dress.

ETA: one criticism for two games, i love both project zomboid and terraria, but both of them suck to try to get working with a controller.

ITT: a lot of very good games that I’ll never play because now I think they’re all terribly, irredeemably flawed

Life is Strange has a lengthy stealth section in a dream sequence near the ending which doesn’t really add anything to the game but tedium.

Cultist Simulator literally involves building an exploitative cult and sometimes sacrificing your followers so you can ascend higher. Though this does make for some interesting commentary when you can play as a priest who is still said exploitative cult leader or be exploited as an exotic dancer who must perpetually expose themselves more and more to the point you shed your skin and become a bug creature. Dwarf Fortress is hard, but losing is FUN! I feel like it sometimes incentivizes you to stop growing and be content where you are or not continue to dig ever deeper past a certain point when all the FUN comes from trying for infinite growth. Sure it has a high chance of killing your fort, but that’s better than sitting around and nothing happening from a gameplay perspective.

you can only play outer wilds once

Mega Man Star Force 1’s story has hit me more personally than any other piece of media and in general it’s well-written despite it still being a kid’s game. But it really rushed the friendship between Geo and Pat, you’ve barely even seen Pat throughout the game so Geo becoming so wrecked by his betrayal feels forced. Pat/Rey’s betrayal is also telegraphed so blatantly that it makes Geo look like an idiot.

Pat/Rey also falls into a problematic DID trope of a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” type personality split, with an aggressive alter ego when most people with DID aren’t dangerous like that.

Geo falling back into depression and fear of getting close with people, and cutting off everyone would be very relatable as someone who relapses into depressive thoughts, but the setup was too rushed as just mentioned and it’s also right as the alien antagonists are starting their full-on invasion of Earth. It just made me go: “Get in the fucking mech, Shinji”.

Fallout 4 is a terrible disappointment of a game. The writing is downright awful, especially following New Vegas. The factions are nonsensical, most of the companions are not interesting and the world building is so lazy (the institute just so happened to simultaneously invent FEV on the other side of the country from the Master). The combat is clunky at best. The base building is far to limited and inconsequential. Why can’t I stop playing this game.

Dyson Sphere Program is ChInEsE!!!

My only real gripe actually might be that I think terraforming shouldn’t cost dirt. In the game, you can only plot down tiles if you have dirt that is used as currency, essentially. It’s such a boring mechanic that I use a mod to make it free.

Not a favorite game, I do still like it though, but in Stardew Valley since I’m doing a modded run currently, I think the days should be 0.5 times longer and businesses should open at 8 instead of 9. Also the tractor should be an actual in-game item. Tweak it a bit of course because it’s pretty game breaking since you get to get way more done in a day.

I might add more games if I think of a few.

New Vegas could be even more trans. Also, i’ve never liked the look of the games done with that Bethesda engine.

Dark souls 1’s second half low-key sucks ass.

CW before I start: I will reference a phrase now recognised as an ablist slur against the neurodivergent people like myself. A slur (I guess?) against people with autism. I am on the spectrum.

---

Okay. Fine.

Counter-Strike. Where do you want me to begin?

In the good old days when I started playing you had to download like 20 zip files to get the latest version of CS. You know what they did? They forced us to install a piece of software called Steam. CS was the thin end of the wedge that drove Steam into every true gamer’s operating system.

Now there’s good and bad aspects of Steam as a platform. Good and bad aspects of Valve as a company. But that move, funneling all us OG dial-up using CS players who were there since the beginning onto that janky ass platform that ate up system resources we didn’t have to spare? Well a lot of us didn’t like it. I didn’t like it. But we went along with it because we wanted to keep playing our fucken shooter.

Now I have what, 21 years on Steam per my “veteran badge”? It’s been longer than that, I guarantee it. I wasn’t even using Steam 21 years ago, so I had to have been forced onto it earlier than that. I have a library of games I spent money on that I will never play. Slop.

But that’s off-topic. Lets talk about CS.

CS is a game of rage and frustration, triumph and victory, it’s play hard, play well or get brutally tormented and humiliated. Long before the horrorshow that CS has become today, it was already a torment nexus. You get killed early in a round? You’re out. 15 minutes of watching everyone else have a good time while you wait for the next round to start. Get AWP’d thru the doors on Dust 2 a couple of rounds in a row? Shit I have seen people destroy expensive hardware in the fits of rage that CS can produce in its most passionate gamers.

CS is a game that will have you training with the intensity of an athlete while your body rots in a chair.

CS is a game where you better do your fucken research, you BETTER know your meta, you better not break the unspoken rules of the economy as it phases from round to round during a match or you will receive a torrent of abuse from your team mates even if you go on to clutch out the round and turn things around against the odds and have them all buying full loadouts in the following round because you dared to P90 rush B on a hunch and totally destroy the opposition. Even when you play well, if you play unconventionally you will be harassed.

You’re a woman, playing CS? Forget about voice chat. Unless you want to grift. But that comes further down the line. CS has always been toxic, paranoid and intense. I remember playing CS 1.4-ish with a microsoft ball mouse that I knew so well that I could whip 360+ degree spins just from the momentum of the mouse ball and slam my mouse down on the mat to put my crosshairs on the head of someone unfortunate enough to come up those stairs on the CT side of Aztec too early in the round and catch a .50AE to the dome. “Obviously” I’m aimbotting. No fool, I have just been playing far too long and my brain is wired to work this system.

Fast forward, we’ll skip CS:Source because I didn’t even fucken bother. I was touching grass and washing dishes for shit pay during that period of the game’s history. I returned for CS:GO. That was damn near a decade ago and I was “aged out” of peak performance. I played better than I had in my teens, I was actually good.

But then came the crates and the keys. Teenagers who were introduced to me as the children of family friends would add me on Steam, we’d queue, we’d rock shit. All femme trans team just beating gamerboy ass every night after work while doing mad drugs. But those kids, man, no life experience or education to teach them about the risks of the loot crate system, the total fucking black hole of gambling that they were playing with. I watched children cheat, grift and steal thousands, literally thousands of dollars worth of cosmetic skins from incel gamers who just liked having a girl to talk to while they played. “Hey hehe can I borrow your bayonet for a few rounds it looks so cool” and then yeet it’s onto the gambling market, then gone, nothing to show for it but broken hearts and gambling addictions. Violations of the social contract, violations of the heart. A soulless situation.

I’m not gonna pretend I was above it, I bought keys. Why wouldn’t I? I was an adult, I had disposable income back then and a drug addiction that made gambling feel even better than it normally does. I somehow managed to unbox stuff so rare and desirable that it once paid off my entire real world debt before I ran it back up again.

CS was the backbone of competitive shooters. The REAL deal, the hardcore shit. At least that’s how we saw it. Everything else was a joke to us. We only had to tune into the international competitions to confirm it for ourselves. Suddenly gaming was legit. Suddenly we resented our families for chastising us for gaming when really, we should have been gaming MORE, that could have been US winning hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.

Gaming. Leisure activity to unwind. Morphed into an economic monstrosity, corrupted youth minds, a whitewash for brutal regimes who hosted the tournaments. And you’d still get called a slur if you spoke in mixed company on mic.

CS:GO2? I haven’t indulged yet. But I already know it sucks. I have made up my mind without playing it. I know they changed map geometry. I know they “fixed” the quirks that made each playing field unique and special and to which we dedicated tens or hundreds of hours to learning and discovering obscure boosts and 'nade techniques. But you gotta churn right? Gotta add something fresh or you’ll stop growing in the market… right?

Well I dunno.

Peak for me was 1.5 with the WoW mod run on independent ISP servers over dial up internet where I could pick a class and grappling hook around the map. I wasn’t at my most performant (a metric that makes no sense when it comes to how you enjoy your leisure and off-work entertainment hours) during that era, but it was chaotic and fun, our shitty internet connections meant it was always the same people queuing for the servers. You’d get to know each other. Mask appropriately and you might even be accepted and make friends.

You bring in ELO matchmaking, country-wide or even region-wide players meeting, randomly, never to see each other again? Mix in the promise that one day you could make it into the big leagues? Add in a mechanism to gacha-gamble at the micro-level and then mega-bet on the competitions?

I saw a game, a creation of love and labour that used stolen Deftones music as the loading music for some of its levels become the most monetised and commercialised franchise in existence.

Now I don’t play games.

There’s a lot of reasons for that, most of them are related to my broken mind, my traumas, the way I was raised. But deep down. Despite having beaten multiple drug addictions. It’s because I know. I KNOW. That all roads, for me, lead back to CS. It doesn’t matter what it is. I will go back. At this point I’m resigned. Will I still beat the pubes at 40 the way I surprised myself being able to do at 30? I dunno. I fear finding out. I fear the learning curve, the meta study, the pitfalls of gambling vice, the conniving, the harassment, I fear that if I cleverly ninja my way past all those laser traps I will land on a pressure plate at the end that confirms to me, finally: you’re too old to game.

CS. The start and end of gaming. The only true game. Haters will disagree. I will allow them their perspectives. Hell I still aspire to create my own video games, as I have since before I graduated highschool and now after my career burnout as a software engineer. But the real game? the only game? I fear it. I respect it. I keep it at arms length or further, for the psychic damage it carries inherent to its designs which have been iteratively honed over the decades to become more and more exploitative.

I love you, Counter-Strike. I always have, since I first played you at a LAN party on novelty maps scaled such that we had the perspective of rats in a kitchen or play room, to the last time I played you before my brain broke. But you ruined games for me, you ruined the minds of many younger gamers. You will continue to contribute to the moral decay of our neoliberal dominated world.

You are the first skinnerbox I truly found, not the last I have to escape, but you might be the salvation, the salve, the cope that I need to scratch the itch that I have replaced with other addictions, more brutal lifestyle choices etc.

But you are evil. I see you, Satan. Volvo plz, etc.

GG. No ree. I am beyond ree. I am partially defined by the final defeat, as I sit out all of the metaphorical rounds now, enviously watching other gamers enjoy their time.

I wish my parents had just bought me a fucking console.

I forgive you, GabeN. Despite all the harm you have caused. The years of enjoyment you robbed from my years gaming and the years I could have gamed that I lost due to the way your co-opted and perverted versions of CS shaped my mind. I forgive you, because it is the healthiest thing for me to do.

---

I declare myself, the most stable, most normal CS veteran with this post.