Asklemmy

The Sims 2. I’ve played a fair amount of all four Sims games including their mobile editions, and Sims 2 remains my favorite after a near (yeeesh) 20 years.

The modding community is still relatively robust, especially for a game that’s so old and out of the four, I feel like I can enjoy even the basic gameplay as a storyteller in Sims 2 more than in 3 or 4. In Sims 3, the focus was less on playing multiple families, so it had to be modded right out of the gate to get back to its foundation and I never liked the way the sims looked. Sims 4 “feels” a lot more like Sims 2, which a lot of people hated, but its expansion and content packs are a complete joke. It costs like $2K to have everything, and they’re still releasing packs. I know it’s just the state of gaming these days, but it just sucks the fun out of a lot of the game.

Half the fun these days, though, is just getting the game up and running on modern PCs. I installed a new hard drive a few months ago and it took the better part of a weekend to get the game fully installed and running. I do have Ultimate Collection, but the less time I have to spend in that stupid EA app, the better.

dcss

Crusader Kings, Europe universalis and imperator Rome. I know this is three games but it's the same general idea, as a history fan, this game scratches a very specific itch for me

There's also bannerlord/warband, amazing experience, sorta like ck3 on a micro level

Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft. I don't play the latter online at all.

Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead

Subnautica and Enscryption :)

It's 240 comments and no reference to Touhou?????

I play Taisei Project (FOSS bullet-hell shooter) and 3D Pinball: Space Cadet because it was #1 game in the list on Discover app.

Oblivion

Rimworld and factorio cause time to disappear

Minecraft I keep coming back to year after year.

FTL is pretty fun too

In the category of "bullet-heaven" / vampire survivors I have been putting a lot of time into Bio-Prototype. It has a really amazing upgrade/combination system for your weapons. And it also only costs like $4

Space Engineers with my 1.5k hrs of played.

I love to start a new round of Civ 6 or a create a new city in City Skylines, because i learned so much from my previous mistakes and this time i will create a perfect civ/city... only to make super stupid mistakes nonetheless and fail miserably. It's still great fun though.

Two Point Hospital

I'll still install Duke Nukem 3D every couple of years to replay or to play the custom maps that were so easy to make.

OpenTTD is also great to mindlessly play while listening to podcasts.

Caves of Qud

Minesweeper. I can always guess the first one right, but after than it gets way harder.

Another vote for Vampire Survivors. It feels like a game that has given the developer so much joy to make.

I tend to get bored of games fairly quickly. I'll hop from game to game to game, over and over again, never (rarely) beating a game before moving on to the next. Sometimes I come back to these games I've abandoned and start over, only to repeat the cycle. There's only one game that I keep going back to again and again. The Sims. I do wish there were other competing life sim games that offered a similar amount of content and mod support, but alas, there's nothing out there quite like it yet.

Hitman: World of Assassination