327. The Walking Dead S1

Perhaps the quintessential Telltale adventure game, and a classic "sad dad" game. It's probably a bit cliche now but this was really something special for me, and the last act hits at something very true about being a parent, surrogate or otherwise.

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326. Spec Ops: The Line

This hasn't aged as well bc it delivers its message with the subtlety of a mallet. But it stands out to me because it was trying to illustrate a point about war crimes, which I had written about and got invited to speak on a PAX panel with @robertrath.bsky.social

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325. Stardew Valley

Another contender for the game I've played most in my life, I fell deep down a Stardew hole. It perfectly recaptured the magic of Harvest Moon from college, with a little questing twist that felt super rewarding. I'm not saying anything that's not common knowledge.

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Is anybody cooking a turkey four days in advance, is that a thing I’m supposed to be doing right now

Yeah they’ve definitely taken a lot of steps to make it easier for lapsed players to jump back in.

They’re trying very hard to give their followers the impression that the video said “you should defy the president’s orders, because they are illegal” because that’s the easiest way to make his insane overreaction seem less guilty

Look if you’ve gone this long without learning about Elphaba’s cool skateboarding wizard neighbor I’m not going to be the one to spoil it for you

Funny you say that. I committed a crime so ingenuous it would take a world-class detective to solve, and I know my town doesn’t have any of those. There is this one guy, but he lives far away. So as long as the local police don’t call and present him with an irresistibly complex challenge, I’m set.

I’ve seen this before, he’s part demon and hiding his patterns from his best friends

I think they’ve built him up so much as some kind of feral monster that anything short of screeching and lunging for Trump’s eyes is BFF territory

Yep, went straight on my wishlist. But someone needs to tell all these indie devs to stop putting their games out in October and November. We're already drowning here and they're splashing cups of water on our face

I’ve always taken this as just instinctive greasy gladhanding, the kind that might become reflex after a lifetime of real estate cons

Yeah absolutely, if you wanted to just be satisfied with it as an alternate prequel history to the Wizard of Oz you could do that

324. Hearthstone

Perhaps the game I've put the most time into, in my life. My sole 12-win Arena run was in the hospital waiting for my first child to be born. I rocked all my kids to sleep in the middle of the night playing it on my phone. It's had its ups and downs, but I'm still in it.

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323. Super Mario Maker

This was a brilliant way to showcase Mario platforming, and obviously it's become a meme to create death-defying stages and post videos of completing them. For me, it's a real case study in how hard it is to make a classic Mario stage that's just fun to play.

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Remember how it turned out MegaMan.EXE turned out to be Lan's dead brother

We used to be a proper society

As an act of protest I shall only watch it six times