goosemunch

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is probably the worst offender of this (though it's the least of the game's many faults). by my non-scientific estimation about 90% of its boss battles do this.

There's already a precedence of MS taking your purchases away. When MS shut down GFWL Marketplace and rebranded it to Xbox, none of the past purchases became re-downloadable. I bought quite a number of games from them too. I foolishly predicted that because MS is a much bigger and more stable company than Valve is, my digital library would be safer with them.

Anyways, this is why I don't buy digitally from MS.

Where did you hear that SteamOS costs money? OEMs have to sign distribution license agreement but they don't have to pay anything

The reason why AYA/Lenovo/etc don't want to use SteamOS is because then they'd be competing with Steam Deck and that's a losing battle (Steam Deck is heavily subsided by Valve). By having Windows preinstalled, they can put themselves in a different price bracket and not compete in the same space (in their minds at least).

Yeah I find "take a break from gaming" just doesn't work for me. What helps is to appreciate different aspect of the game (for example gameplay does next to nothing for me now, so I focus more on storytelling, design, aesthetics, etc) or intentionally play bad/mediocre games to engage in criticism which can be more fun than the game itself.

My favourite types of Quick Looks were "first look" type of things where the staff were launching the game for the first time and discovering what it is along with viewers (ie me).

Of course the internet completely freaks out if the person holding the controller on a Quick Look isn't 100% knowledgeable about the game and leave angry comments demanding them to be fired or whatever, so I understand why they don't make them anymore - the pressure and time commitment required to play a big portion of the game first in order to prepare for a Quick Look is just unrealistic especially when they're short staffed.

One of the most disappointing sequel of all time? It's super pretty to look at even today, but the puzzles are just bonkers nonsense. I don't remember the specifics but I remember having to look up solution every couple hours and going "I never would've thought of that!" which is a hallmark of bad puzzle design in the words of Ron Gilbert.

What's odd is that Myst had almost none of the issues - I beat Myst without getting stuck once (well once truthfully, because I missed a door/panel behind a chair and didn't know where to go next)... I think the limited budget and scope of Myst actually meshed well with their design sensibilities because puzzles are mostly localized/self-contained and kept it from exploding in complexity.

Antarctic Adventure probably. Simplistic by today's standards and very much eclipsed by its way-superior sequel Penguin Adventure (the best game Hideo Kojima was ever involved in making if you ask me)

Cocoon falls in the (perhaps lesser) category of more "exploratory" puzzle game than actual puzzle-solving puzzle game. I never got stuck or not know where to go, which is a testament to its design and polish, but most of the times I didn't know what the goal of the puzzles were - I'd say about half the puzzles were solved "accidentally" because the solution was the only affordance available at the time and I had no set objective in mind (i.e. I just followed very linear path/set of actions because it closed off all other options).

But don't get me wrong, I still had a good time and I think it's really well made.

I agree with OP's sentiment that it's pretty dry and lacks any sort of personality - though I must admit that I'm not a car guy. I was hoping they'd finally fix the 3rd person camera or add an option to lock the horizontal view to the direction of the car (Gran Turismo fixed that since 5) but it's the same as previous Forza and Horizon games, so playing in 3rd person chase cam still feels like controlling an unresponsive/laggy drunken camera instead of the car. You can definitely get used to it but it's an inferior experience IMHO.

Visually disappointing as well. I generally don't care about graphics but since I didn't care about much else in the game I was hoping to at least enjoy the scenery. I have a pretty beefy CPU with a modest GPU (rtx 2080) which I figured would be good enough for high settings at 1080p (with DLSS) but noooo... At "auto" settings it's one of the fugliest racing games I've played. It can't hit consistent 60fps at medium preset at 1080p with raytracing disabled so I have to use low setting or leave it at "auto" which makes everything look like blurry mess. It's especially disappointing because Forza 7 and Horizon 5 looked way better and ran better on older machines.

I'm still playing it mostly due to sunk cost (didn't buy it since it's on Game Pass but I still spent 100+ GB of bandwidth) but I can't imagine sticking with it for much longer.

Yeah The Dig might be my least favourite LucasArts adventure game.

A lot of puzzles in this game are too abstract "puzzley" and don't feel natural or fit into the story (which is weird since other LucasArts games excel at that),

But probably my biggest complaint is that I don't find the world very interesting. Every environment is just a different shade of purple with random geometric shapes and they all blur together in my mind. It wouldn't be so bad if it were filled with interesting characters but of course there's nobody because it's a dead civilization and snail's pace story progression doesn't help either.