JD-D2

Got a few potentially off-beat ones:

Bowser’s Fury: it’s a joy and throws out good idea after good idea for 4 hours.

Olija: unusually strong world-building and atmosphere for a 2D action platformer.

Clap Hanz Golf: it’s a good Hot Shots Golf! on my phone!

What the Dub?: the best Jackbox game and it’s not even made by Jackbox.

The Longest Road on Earth: deeply pretentious but equally beautiful narrative game that doesn’t compromise.

I need to play a ton more, including many games mentioned above. Others I‘m liking but still working my way through include Dorfromantik, Returnal, and It Takes Two.

Cyberpunk 2077 for well-worn and obvious reasons. Some solid writing, Keanu is great, but no patches are going to fix the banal design and boring direction of that game.

Final Fantasy XV is just plain stupid. The plot drives straight off a cliff halfway through, and half the mechanics seem designed to be inconsequential as you use them. Using Potions: The Game.

Halo 5: Guardians is a mess. Like, visually. It's a pain to actually look at. It's too much.

And for my blasphemy pick: Control. Some of its writing is embarrassing. People talk about it like it's this subversive action game, but underneath the cool fonts and lighting effects is more left-trigger/right-trigger, more collectibles, more quasi-meaningless upgrade trees, more go-here-shoot-this. It has this vague undercurrent of political commentary ("the red guys in the gov't are bad!"), yet it doesn't get past shooting people with guns without consequence. For a power fantasy, it doesn't even feel all that good to play, so you just wind up throwing chunks of the floor over and over from hour 2 through to the end. You get a magic shape-shifting gun, so magic it can become such crazy things as...a pistol, shotgun, submachine gun, sniper rifle, or rocket launcher.

F1 2020 has a phenomenal career mode and lots of assist options if you’re not into the “sim” style so much. (Though it’s definitely not arcade.)

Gran Turismo 4 and 5 are still excellent “simcade” racers, too, especially if you have a wheel. God I must have put somewhere around 1000 hours into GT5 last decade, played it to death and even beat all those Seb Vettel challenges.

If you really want to go hardcore, iRacing and Assetto Corsa are good for that, though they take serious practice and almost demand a wheel.

There also was not 10 games better than Art of Rally from last year, either.

Any job becomes A Job once you’re doing it. And honestly, nobody wants to stay at their first job forever, regardless of what it is. (I remember actively getting myself fired by the end of my first gig so I could at least collect unemployment.) All told, four years at a gig that thrust her into a spotlight (and made her subject to jerky comments from some of the dumbest people on the internet) is a pretty strong run.

Marz is great, one of the better LPers out there, doesn’t just yell and consider that ”humor.”

I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but there’s something about the current streaming industry that just bothers me (on top of the issues raised in OP’s post). Yes, people do it willingly, but it’s like this objectivist fantasy land where everyone competes on their own merits, all while enriching the massive platform holders, even as they‘re out here asking everyday people for tips. It‘s not a pyramid scheme per se, but it’s not not a pyramid scheme, effectively, either.