Hmmm... quite varied, but it’s mostly in short bursts; except for one (which I’ll get to at the end).

- Heroes of the Storm

Best, and only, MOBA game out there...

Yes, I exaggerate. But maybe not, lol. Honestly though, I have played a few other MOBAs (no, of course, not every single one of them in existence). I tried the ‘big ones’, League of Legends, SMITE, etc. I enjoyed League of Legends a bit, but not enough to keep playing (I don’t “hate it”, might play it again one day). I also enjoyed SMITE... and, well I mean by now they have the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in there so... tough to argue now, it’s a good game. BUT... they’re not quite like Heroes of the Storm, for me. Trying to make this short but, essentially, HOTS is addictive, plain simple. I keep coming back to it, pretty much daily (very few days where I skip playing at least one single match). To me a clear sign of what is a ‘good game’ is quite simply that I keep coming back to it. It has charm, the voice acting for all the characters (even Murky) is amazing (well ok, maybe not Lunara or Chromie, they can both stay somewhere in a corner in Hell and never be heard again).

But more importantly what makes it so good for me is quite simply because the Characters are ones I care about, ones I can give at least one rat’s arse for; and most of which I actually know at least by name, heard of them somewhere at some point, played as some of them in some capacity in my gamer life, or fought against them. They are Blizzard characters. And if Blizzard has always done something ‘the right way’ across most of its history as a development studio is making stylized, memorable (and often re-occurring) characters that will quite literally last the audience more than one full generation. Those are the type of characters you’ve at least heard of the first time as a young adolescent (if not a kid by now with the newer gamer generation), played as them in WoW, WarCraft, StarCraft, Diablo or Overwatch, and now you’re in your late 20s (minimum), or approaching or entered your 40s and those same darn characters (and many of their respective voice actors) are STILL OUT THERE and active in their respective game and universe.

And THAT, in the end, makes the biggest difference for me. So yeah I play HOTS pretty much at least 1 or 2 matches every day, nothing too crazy, maybe 30 mins to 1 hour max per day; but I play it often.

- Overwatch

How surprising, I play a Blizzard game. Well what can I say, they make good characters, it’s Blizzard, it’s what they do; that’s how it be, that’s what it do. Now I didn’t specify above about HOTS, but it applies to both HOTS and Overwatch but in addition basically to what I said about that made HOTS ‘special’ I’ll add to that the SOUNDTRACK for these games, man. Both the soundtracks for HOTS and Overwatch is superb. Obviously, Overwatch (specially originally back in 2016, mostly coming off of it’s first official trailer with the two kids at the Museum) has more of a ‘super hero’ esque sound and feel to it; with its main theme 100% inspired by The Incredibles (very fitting source of inspiration really). It’s not going to please everyone, not everyone likes it when it sounds so... so typical almost Disney-esque to some degree, but at this point in time I think at least all the respective map’s track introductions of this game gives so much variety that it’s hard to fault.

But outside of the soundtrack, I really like Overwatch’s simplicity of a multiplayer game, in the end. Now, DO NOTE: I do NOT play this game competitively. I do not touch the Comp mode, at all. I did once back in 2016 for about 19 minutes (it still shows in my account history, 19 minutes of Season 1 qualification something ’something in there somewhere). That was it. I understood right from the start when I first played this game in the first ever tutorial they had at the time with Soldier 76 that there was NO WAY I would attempt at playing this game ‘seriously’ when you have characters with “Ultimate” abilities that can auto-track for headshots on purpose, when you have a sniper with a wallhack and when you have a potentially mentality-unstable climate scientist that can completely lock-freeze your ENTIRE team in an AoE effect.

HOW any sane human beings whom happen to be video gamers can even spend 10 minutes in Comp mode in this game will always be a mystery to me.

But pushing the Comp mode out of the way, this game is a true little gem of gaming for me. I play it casually, ‘for fun’ and the heck of it. Now, yes, it is true that the actual community of this game is - more often than not - extremely childish, immature and susceptible to bursts of anger and desires of revenge (it really doesn’t take much for many of them to go bunkers on you via mic or in chat) you’ll ever face in an online gaming environment. But Blizzard provided the players great tools to avoid those as much as possible: the Mute and Block features; USE THEM, it’s a Godsend.

My favorite way to play this game lately, however, isn’t to just play Quick Match, but to search for unique and fun Custom Server games. I’m finding plenty of original ideas around and it’s fun to just explore some of them. The best ones for me so far are the PvE-type games where you collaborate with other players to survive Hordes of enemies, or Boss Fights and so on. So lately I’ve been mostly browsing the Custom servers in search for unique stuff. When I don’t find anything of my taste I just hop in a Quick Match or two and leave, have my fill. I also play OW for about 1 to maybe 2 hours almost every day. Not as often as HOTS, but recently yes I have played OW quite often.

- Total War: Warhammer 2

I’m mostly ‘done’ when it comes to Total War Campaigns, in general.

However, I’ve always played the custom matches whenever I could. And creating custom armies and simply treat the game like a direct-to-battlefield clashing of armies simulator now is the way to go for me. It’s SO satisfying to just jump right away into the action without having to micromanage and play the Turn-Based portion of the campaigns. I’ve ‘been there done that’ when it comes to Total War campaigns, I’ve had my fill of them really. Started them with Rome: TW like many have here too. I played about 5 or 6 of their games with the Campaign as my main mode of play. But by now so many years later I’m fed up with the Turn-Based aspect of it all.

So yeah, TW WH2 ‘skirmishes’ basically is what I do. I create my own armies and have them duke it out on the field and just watch the carnage ensue.

- Retro Gaming (General)

This is very broad, but there’s quite a bunch in there. Basically this is referring to me basically playing short burst sessions of Beat ’em Ups, Shooters and Platformers. It ranges from old-school 8-bit to 16-bit era games in some Steam Collections to emulators to actual hardware + original games. I play anything from Contra and Streets of Rage and their respective modern Indie-made clones to old arcade racers and the likes. With your usual doses Super Marios and Donkey Kongs thrown in there for good measure. I also include Build-engine FPSes like Blood, Duke Nukem 3D and so on, a few of them are on my list right now (and currently installed).

I don’t play those every single days though. It’s more of a once-per-week kinda thing (sometimes two). This week was a short session with Road Rash 1 on Genesis (emulation), and Syphon Filter 1 on PS1 (original hardware and game). This week-end I’ll probably have a few matches in MK1 (SNES version, also original hardware and game). Last week it was a mixture of Shooters (including Twin Cobra, one of my all-time favorite vertical-scrolling shooters).

Basically, whenever I play retro / old-school games it’s limited to short sessions, I never play them from start to finish in one sitting or things like that. I play 1 or 2 maps of a Beat ’em Up, I play 1 or 2 tracks of a racing game, I play 1 or 2 matches of a Fighting game; etc. It’s rarely more than 1 to 2 hours max, sometimes just 30 mins and it’s enough. I just want to go back to some games I always loved, and some semi-new ones that I discover so many decades later.

- Elden Ring

Ah yes, Elden Ring. Praise the Elden Ring, indeed. This is the latest ‘big boy’ in the house.

I rarely play games this much anymore. But this one is an exception. It’s the first time I play a game game this much since probably Breath of the Wild (which I did originally play about 200 hours on the Wii U version, although all that play time was greatly scattered over more than one year). The huge difference between Elden Ring and everything else I’ve been playing recently is that I simply haven’t finished my first playthrough yet. This game Just. Keeps. On. Giving. It refuses to stop, it just doesn’t. Whenever I think I’ve reached “near the end” there’s a new portion of the map that apparently wasn’t ‘out of bounds’ of the game world and is actually a map that I need to explore now, but this new map is just about as big as a full-fledged triple A game world on its own. This feeling of “Ok, now, this has to be close to the end” but isn’t... happened about 3 times now.

And since I actually do really enjoy the game, I simply intend to finish it. But I’m exactly 102 hours in, level 120 now, and I STILL find new things, and I apparently still need to even reach one ‘full map’ that isn’t revealed on my world map yet (in the fog of war part of it). It’s truly an epic game in scale and proportions. I’m not even sure I can “100%” this. It’s not quite my intention, although I do search and explore a lot of nooks and crannies but Jesus Christs man there’s always yet another thing to find every time I take a new corner down a road, always something to ‘distract’ me from whatever objective I had in mind. It’s not a negative, it’s just making the game last longer.

So I just appreciate the game and I play it at least 2 to 3 hours a day, I skip one or two days at times to take some break. But I do often come back to it. At least I want to finish it one time. After that I’ll be done for at least one or two months. I think I won’t have a 2nd playthrough until the DLC comes out. I also expect some sort of Shuffling / Randomizer mod to come out at some point that will cover everything in the game (not just items, but enemies and maybe even weather patterns, etc). We’ll see. But for now I just focus on this one first playthrough of mine, but man... this game is big, REALLY f_king big.