There are a lot of great suggestions here already, so I will just share Mini Review with you as a discovery tool. I like to use them because they have a lot of filters to help you find a mobile game. For example, here’s their list for free, single-player, offline games with no ads or in app purchases, sorted by highest user score. They also have an app for both Android and iOS with the same info and filtering as the site.

Apparently, they have twice as many players on PS4.

Have you tried Itch.io? They have a lot of Gameboy and NES roms that are “Name your own price.” I don’t have any recommendations - I’ve just started poking around with homebrew roms myself.

• https://itch.io/games/top-rated/downloadable/free/tag-nes-rom
• https://itch.io/games/top-rated/downloadable/free/tag-gameboy-rom

Those responsible for sacking everyone have been sacked.

I can’t speak for others, but for me it’s just a nuisance. I’m not furious about it. I avoid buying EA and Ubisoft games too. It’s a small thing for one game on one account, but when you acquire a lot of games across a bunch of different accounts, all those different logins and launchers just become a bother.

I don’t mind DLC that’s done right for games I love. I just know it’s a common complaint for Paradox games to have a lot of DLC. That said, there are games that have produced a ton of free updates with very little DLC, like No Man’s Sky, Terraria, Minecraft, etc. So, I don’t know that it’s always necessary to have a ton of DLC to support ongoing game development. It’s all very subjective and varies a lot from game to game.

I had not heard about Life By You being on hold. That’s frustrating. Paradox games go nuts with DLC too, but some competition is better than none.

Oh okay. A while back, their VP Lyndsay Pearson explicitly said they plan for Sims 4 to continue to exist side by side with Project Rene (aka Sims 5). I was wondering if that had changed. My cynical take on the plan to keep both going is that Sims 5 is probably going to be a live service abomination, which they wanted Sims 4 to be, so keeping Sims 4 might be hedge in case Sims 5 fails hard. Of course, they could also have been lying.

They didn’t need to announce this. They could just fix the bugs and players would start noticing that a bunch of bugs were getting fixed.

Where did you see that they are no longer making new content for Sims 4? The article doesn’t seem to say so and the last I heard they planned to release content for Sims 4 alongside Sims 5. FYI, I would prefer they stop with Sims 4 content.

Maybe I’m reading into it, but that phrasing seems intentionally vague. If it’s a permanent exclusive, they could just say so while praising Epic for supporting them.

I’m guessing that they don’t mean a legally grey area. I think they probably mean it’s a grey area for Microsoft because Proton helps people get around needing Windows to play games made for Windows and Microsoft has an interest in keeping people on their OS.

I just want Marvel Heroes back.

If you excuse me now, got to continue playing Last Epoch which is even in its early access fucking amazing.

What’s the deal with the Epoch points? I keep wanting to check it out, but the Epoch point packs makes me think it’s going to be the same deal where you can’t earn cool looking stuff in game and have to buy it.

I love the title of this post. The only arpgs that I don’t see mentioned already are Victor Vran, which I think is a lot of fun, and the Warhammer arpgs, I haven’t played yet, Chaosbane and Inquisitor Martyr. Inquisitor Martyr is supposed to get a fully offline mode soon and they’ve patched it to have all the seasons available to play through.

I don’t know if it’s the “most authentic” experience, but for a “pick up and play” setup, you might want to look into Emudeck (www.emudeck.com). It was originally made for Steam Deck, but has a desktop version now and it pretty much automagically handles setting up all your emulators. Plus, it integrates with Steam. Russ with Retro Game Corps has a installation guide on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05dunYi6hkY&t=1s

EA App is not even a little bit better than Origin. Offline mode straight up doesn’t work in the EA App, which has been reported so many times and ignored. You can’t move your installation to another drive like you could with Origin. You can’t gift games or DLC to your friends in the EA App like you could in Origin. EA apps sucks so much that when I recently purchased Mass Effect Legendary Edition for the ridiculous deal of 90% off (on Steam), and then remembered I would have to use the EA App to play it, I immediately refunded it. Given a choice, I would happily go back to Origin. I hate the EA App so much. It deserves a negative score.

I remember when Steam curated their store and indie devs complained because Steam didn’t select their games - Steam was basically a king maker. In response to those complaints, Valve introduced the Greenlight program and a bunch of asset flips and shovelware started getting the green light. So, Valve added a cost for publishing a game to slow down the volume of crap getting green lit. Since then, they have added the Discovery Queue, Steam Curators (which is useful for specific use cases, like finding couch co-op games or multiplayer games you can self-host), and Next Fest (which brought back demos) to help gamers find the games they want. So, it’s not like Valve is ignoring the problem, provided that you think the problem is difficulty finding games you want to play.

Also, my remembrance is that after they opened the store up to more games, they discovered audiences for genres that they (Valve) were not aware had much of audience these days, like visual novels, hidden object games, and adventure games. So yeah, I think if the choice is between less curation with tools to find games or more curation with more indie games or entire genres potentially being overlooked, I prefer the first option.

Epic doesn’t see gamers as their customer - they see developers as their customer and shape the customer experience around that. For example, Epic said that if/when they add reviews, developers could choose to opt their games out of reviews. That’s very pro-developer, but very anti-consumer, whatever you might think of the value of reviews. Informed customers can rattle off a long list of reasons they don’t like Epic and why they’re bad, but they are a small minority of PC gamers. The “silent majority” doesn’t keep up with this kind of stuff or really care about it, so they are literally judging stores on their merits and Epic is a bare bones platform that doesn’t offer customers a good reason to spend money in their store because they don’t think they need to.

Thank you for naming the game in the screenshot.