What was your last 4AM game?

Alright 3AM crew, what's got you burning through your oil reserves just a little longer?

I played more FF7 Rebirth yesterday than I'd care to admit. Even at 4AM I had to willfully put myself to bed. I'm sure we'll all talk about it in a future discussion.

Anything delighting your senses and destroying your REM cycles?

There are multiple meanings for this, at least for me. There's "stay up until 4 AM playing," in which case...I think maybe Tales of Xillia, a game I don't even really like, but my sleep was very screwed up during the first days of the pandemic. Then there's "wake up at 4 AM because you're old and went to bed early," in which case...a LOT of games. These days Brotato, but I will often sneak in game time after waking up early. Multiple times a week.

At this point I don't think a game can be so good that it will keep me up until 4 AM. Maybe midnight or 1, but at a certain point it's just not that fun and I'm probably not playing well and it can wait until some other time.

I have two kids and a dog, my gaming time in the evenings is very limited. For me, 4am gaming is going to bed very early and waking up around 4 to squeeze in a few hours before everyone else is up. Lately it’s been infinite wealth.

@bigsocrates @bribbins Heh, I suppose I should have accounted for your lot as well. I guess the overall intent is those games that you lose sleep over.

I see Brotato, and my mind is still like Balatro?

I probably haven't had anything resembling a consistent sleep schedule in 15 years. Being up at 4am isn't an oddity for me, though being up at that time because of a hours long gaming session is. I don't typically spend more than an hour to an hour and a half in a single gaming session these days. However, I did spend midnight to 4am last night playing Shining in the Darkness.

@spacemanspiff00: Well I've played Balatro at 4 AM too. But runs in that game can take a long time and if you're doing well it can be hard to stop (even though it has an excellent mid-run save system) so I try not to start that if I know I have to stop in the next hour or so.

That game is so good.

Not 4 AM, but I accidentally did Tartarus stuff in Persona 3 Reload until about 2:30 AM, which is extremely late for me. I usually quit playing games at around 10:30 or 11 PM if I'm playing something late at all.

Before that was probably BOTW, which I accidentally stayed up until like 5 AM playing. I unintentionally booked a week vacation for the week that game was released so it didn't matter but still.

Pacific Drive is making me stay up late, doing just one more run over and over again. Great loop on that game and just the right speed of progression, so long as you don’t die.

@brian_:Coincidence? I've got my eye on you. Perhaps your shining in the darkness more than you let on.

@bigsocrates I'm not a gamblin man but... Nah I'm just not much of a card game player, including Queen's Blood--and Triple Triad(kinda like the theme though) and Tetra Master(boooo forcing it into the main story). That Balatro gambling ban is bunk.

@ben_h Gotta love the IDGAF nights.

@tartyronhttps://youtu.be/-5FKNViujeM

@spacemanspiff00: ah, that does remind me of one complaint I have for Pacific Drive. The music, while the songs on the radio themselves are great, there aren’t enough of them, so you hear them too often.

@tartyron: The new Crazy Taxi will just be 'All I Want' and 'All I Want" Remixes.

Geometry Wars 3 during an Extra Life stream many years back. I quit and went to bed pretty quickly.

I rarely breach 10pm. I value sleep at a reasonable time just enough.

Using the original intent of "gaming until it becomes A Problem for your sleep cycle", I nearly stayed up until midnight this past December playing Against the Storm. I can't remember anything beyond that, since I've got two small children that have irreversibly damaged my brain.

If Balatro were on my phone, I might never sleep.

Baldur's Gate 3 was fucking up my shit for a good stretch. honestly it kind of feels like i'm still in deficit (and that was in like, oct 2023 hah).

@allthedinos: gotta leave that phone outside your bedroom. I got a old school alarm clock and my screen time per week went down like 25% and my sleep went up like 2 hours a night on average. It's super worth it to keep screens out of bed.

I still have the problem of going to bed at all, though. My evenings are my only "me" time so I often game way too late into the night parked on the couch.

I'm too old to stay up past 2 am at the latest but the last time I've stayed up playing a game was probably Final Fantasy XIV.

Or HuniePop.

@chamurai: huniepop hmm?

Looks like someone is taking their guess the game research to extremes. Gotta memorize every pixel.

I’m the same way with Cho Aniki.

@bigsocrates: When it gets selected as the next question, I'll be ready.

Slay the spire. One more run syndrome is real.

These days, balatro.

SteamWorld Build. I didn't really like it much and almost uninstalled it. On my third attempt, though, it clicked and all of a sudden I needed a week to recover that lost sleep.

Yeah I also got bit pretty hard by the first couple of days after Rebirth came out. It was thankfully a weekend.

The Witcher 3, maybe? Been a while.

The Jurassic Park Survival mod for Warcraft 3.

Probably like... 2007, i was unemployed and had a friend who was unemployed.

Update. I woke up early this morning and played some of The Crew, which I am trying to finish before the servers shut down at the end of the month. So my new answer is "The Crew."

I had a lot, but the most I remember is Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam. From 2 am to 5 am, and then 2 hours of sleep to wake up to go to school haha.

I still miss those days. I met a lot of people, made good friends.

Truthfully, it's been a bit of a 4AM year so far. I'm off work Tuesday through Thursday right now, which coincidentally is when most of the podcasts I stay current with drop...and that's led to a significant number of late night-early morning sessions with some Founders All Day IPA and the likes of Infinite Wealth, Helldivers 2 and FFVII Rebirth. Before that cornucopia sprang loose, I'd gone ahead and finally taken the plunge on FFXIV when all of it was on sale for just $20 shortly after Christmas.

To my credit, though I did essentially finish Heavensward before my 60 days expired (that's 122 hours, actually played over about half those days, so, like...yuck) and could see that the game was building towards what all the zealots proselytize to the secular masses...I uninstalled the game when those first 60 days were done, and of the four games I've mentioned here it was by far the worst offender so, for now, I'm happy to only sometimes lose sleep over those other three games than always lose sleep over some goofy little MMO that probably isn't actually all it's cracked up to be anyway, right?

Right now, Persona 3: Reload on Game Pass. That game and FF7: Rebirth are the main games I'm playing throughout the day, with a little live service thrown in. Good times.

Fallout 3 a few years ago when I was going through another bout of Insomnia. I think I ended up getting through the whole thing in 4 nights.

3 - 4 am is the usual time that I go to sleep, but I normally stop gaming by midnight. It then just takes my brain multiple hours to wind down.

Unicorn Overlord already hitting me with some absolutely heinous "Just another map... just one more"

Dead Space remake and swore "never again."

Persona 3 Reload had kept me up to 2 am, and still dealing with the hangerover 2 weeks later now.

My wife and I stayed up until 5AM last night playing Dinkum. It's very rare that she gets into video games like this, so when she does, I take full advantage!