Space Harrier II, Sexy Parodius and Mega Man X1,2,3. All are games I played an obsessive amount back in the day. I like to periodically go back and see how badly my reflexes have deteriorated. Saints Row the Third too. I'm playing through a second time right now despite a huge pile of un-started games staring at me.
What's your safe game?
Pokemon (any of them). That familiar formula and gameplay always makes me feel like a kid all over again
Assassin's Creed Brotherhood or Revelations. I just pop it in for a few hours to mop up sidequests and chill.
Don't really use them to relax, but I use Torchlight 2, Civ 5, and Crusader Kings 2 for wasting time/listening to podcasts.
Any strategy or 4X game (mostly Heroes of Might and Magic or Civ V) is generally the kind of thing that I can spend inordinate time with when I don't feel like playing much else. Also FTL has been like that recently, to the point where I edited the wiki page for it. I haven't edited a wiki page in a long time. FTL is pretty great guys.
EDIT: Also classic Resident Evil, for some reason. I find something very cathartic about trying to speedrun those games.
I go back and play games like Sonic 1&2 on a regular basis. It's often just the first few zones, but it's been pretty consistent for years.
League of Legends (mainly ARAM so it's light on stress), Counter-Strike: Source (hard for me to do though because I've got to play for a while to get back to my former skills, such as I had), and Final Fantasy XI (probably not going back to that now but for a while I would go do mindless activities in that game to kill time).
Oh, and Minesweeper xD
Civ V and the 1st 20 hours of Skyrim (Need to nail down a character build I like and stick to it :D)
Minecraft!
I'd say that's a pretty common one. I have yet to even try that game but as Terraria and Don't Starve do nothing for me, I doubt it's for me.
Minecraft would be my answer too, i'll always go back to that game.
Best thing is there are so many mods, if it starts getting boring there are plenty of mod packs that can change pretty much everything about the game in a few clicks
Skyrim. Launch the game, start walking in a random direction and see what happens...I've put over 50 hours into that game, and I've yet to touch the main quest. It's more or less been my "safe game" from day one.
Mine has been Counter-Strike for a few years now as the game I always go back to when I don't feel like playing anything else. If I really just want to shut off my mind then I will play on gungame or deathmatch servers or something. But it's always CS.
Like recently I've been playing Bioshock and I was around the middle (at Fort Frolic) and I felt a little bored with the game. I actually didn't plan on it, but I stopped playing for a week and went back to CS which I haven't played in over 6 months. Came back to Bioshock this weekend and I've nearly completed it now and I'm really enjoying it.
So yeah, it tends to help.
I don't have one for the same reason as Hamst3r. I just reach a point when playing a game where I'm like "Yup, okay, I know what this is about now and I don't need to play more of it. I've gotten just about the amount of enjoyment out of it as I could" and look for something new to play.
I don't think I've ever had like a game I can just boot up at any time and not be utterly bored by it. At most I'd say that at one point I thought it was fun to replay games. You'd get better and better at them, not to mention coming up with your own rules for them (like attempting crowbar only runs in Half-Life) or replaying when you got a new computer so as to set the graphics settings to as high as they could go, and of course after you'd beat a game legit you could treat yourself to replay it with cheat codes enabled and squeeze that little extra bit of value out of it. I mean, sure, I've played some games excessively but I'm super tired of those games at this point and wouldn't dream of playing them. Like Counter-Strike. At some point that game just turned into me basically loading up de_dust, spawning in a bunch of bots that only had knives. I played it like that so much so that my mother eventually started to refer to it as "The Knife" and asking if I didn't have anything else to play.
But, that said, I do see the possibility of having a safe game in Anarchy Online. Because I still know that I can fire up that game at any point and be entertained by it and/or use it as a podcast game. After having spent 2000 hours with it, I honestly don't even know if it's a game to me anymore or what it is. There's always more you can learn about it. The thing holding me back from the game at this point is that the game has a subscription model (I wouldn't want to start over as a free player) in addition to very dated quest mechanics.
But no other game gives you that satisfaction of doing things like spawning a level 100 pet on a level 24 character or equipping some seriously OP weapon doing like 400 damage when you're supposed to be doing only 40, as a reward for doing some heavy mathematical twinking, using custom designed implants to equip some gear so you can swap the implants for better ones and... yeah, that game's pretty great.
I don't have a game like that. If I am ever feeling a point where I want to play a game but not sure which one I will not play any.
I find myself playing through Resident Evil 5 from time to time, as its short enough to storm through in one sitting :-)
UMvC3 is my vice/comfort food atm, I hadn't played it in months but Evo got me hyped to try and get better. So I jumped back into Ranked fights only to get bodied left and right but when you get that win its oh so sweet. Minor note the ranking system for UMvC3 is a bit ridiculous.
My "safe" game is usually my podcast game. Games I play because I can turn my brain off and listen to podcasts. Lately that's been Dragon's Dogma. I've put 120 hours into it since I discovered this beautiful gem last month. Beautiful game and an excellent one to play while listening to podcasts.
Other games have been Skyrim, WWE 13, Oblivion, and Dark Souls. I think Dark Souls was the longest running "podcast" game for me. 200 hours and 7 complete plays later I just can't touch it anymore.
Hmm come to think of it, I don't think I have any one safe game. It's always usually from a handful of games I have yet to finish that I continuously rotate around, be it Saints Row The Third, Assassin's Creed III, etc. But once I've finished a game, I rarely go back to it.
Star Wars: The Old Republic and Forza 4/GT5 have been my go-to games this year. I pretty much exclusively do PvE in MMOs, so it ends up just being a routine of number presses dependent on the enemy type. It can be challenging in its own right, but it strikes a balance of being slow-paced enough to allow me to space out without getting instantly destroyed. Forza 4 has a ridiculous number of races to do (I've got 450+ hours in it and I'm done about 80% of the races), and it's fun to just tune a really dumb car and throw it around the track for a bit; I know I've spent too much time tuning a Ford Transit Van to drift around Suzuka. My go-to used to be any Call of Duty or Battlefield game, but I've lost pretty much all interest in competitive multiplayer at this point.
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