A Green Mushroom

Exploring and revisiting some of my evergreen games this month has been interesting.  I'm finding that more of them have fallen off the evergreen playlist than I thought. Two that are still "evergreen" in my mind are Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike Global Offensive.  But, I'm finding them much less welcoming than they once were. It seems like all the casual fans of the game, including me, have drifted away from them.  All the players that are left are the players that never stopped playing the games. Whenever I go online in either game I just get destroyed.  It's not as fun as it used to be.  I played both of these games a ton when they released and there were players of all skill levels.  Now, most of the players are very highly skilled and will destroy me. They're not as welcoming as I wanted them to be.  It almost makes me afraid to even try some of the "higher skill" games that I've liked in the past, such as StarCraft II.  I feel ...

After talking yesterday about an evergreen game that has faded away for me I thought it would be appropriate to talk about some that may become new evergreen games. I've found myself spending a bunch of time with both Crypt of the Necrodancer and Mini Metro lately. Crypt of the Necrodancer is a rhythm based dungeon crawling roguelike music game.  I'm still not very good at it, but I keep coming back for more.  I've been using it to fill in spare time here and there between other games. I feel like Crypt of the Necrodancer could go one of two ways.  I could get good at it by continually coming back to it or I could get frustrated that I'm not making enough progress and give up on the game for good.  If the first happens then this could become one of my future evergreen games.  Only time will tell. Mini Metro, on the other hand, I'm fairly sure will stick with me for the long haul.  I love this game so much.  Organically drawing out metro t...

This is really weird.  I'm almost at the end of my game backlog. Since I got my first job at age 15 (and got my first real buying power) this has never ever ever  happened.  I'm 28 and I've had a gaming backlog for 13 years at this point. What do I do when I finish all the games I intended to play!? This doesn't mean I'm about to stop playing videogames.  It just means that I've always had games I own that I intend to play but haven't.  That list is dwindling fast. I've noticed that I'm going through games faster these days.  Since I've been playing videogames for as long as I can remember I'm now really good at analyzing a new game.  I figure out it's systems and what it has to offer, usually within the first 30-60 minutes of play, and then I decide if it's offering enough newness that I want to keep playing.  Usually I don't.  I have enough experience with games that I don't need to retread old ground most of the tim...