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My wife and I tried God of War 2018 recently because the internet sings its praise.
Turns out we were both pretty turned off by the Neanderthal toxic masculinity Kratos shows the boy all the time.
I’m sure it’s setting up the story for character growth, but it was annoying as hell.
It was for the story. It's not a clone of the earlier games where Kratos is hellbent on tearing everything down, and everything revolves around that goal. The end of the game hits abruptly without closure on the god-killing aspect, and that's when I figured out it's actually a soft story about a father and son, burying their deceased loved one, and slowly recovering from the trauma and grief. The god-killing part is just a long sidequest, the story begins and ends with the mother's burial.
Assuming you're not going to play it:
Tap for spoiler
Yeah, he slowly changes throughout the story. By the end he's actually a decent dad
I would recommend even watching a let's play because for me it was one of the best games / stories in the last decade or so
I don't have the original disc, but absolutely Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 Platinum Edition. Most bang for my buck, enough back in the day I found a copy online and had an amazing time playing it again. I LOVE it more than the first 2 games purely for the ability to ride the coaster first person rather than through 3rd person following the track.
As for least bang for my buck, absolutely a Hot Wheels Stunt Track that I picked up thinking it would be like Beat That. Didn't even make it past the first level without hating it. Was just a single stunt jump and then the level ends from what I can recall.
I got Rollercoaster Tycoon on the front of a Cereal box. I’m still playing that copy decades later… i think I’m working on dollar per decade rather than dollar an hour here
Vampire survivor. $4.
1000+ hours. Of just staring at pretty colors.
Bought every single DLC to continue supporting them.
Most - SimCity 4. I don't remember buying the CD but countless hours later I can say it was worth it.
Least is really hard. Like you have to really really fuck up a game for me to not like it. Three come to mind. Cities Skylines 2. Mortal Kombat 1. Starfield. Both games coming after two of my all time faves. I spent 500+ hours in CS1. If you can't tell city builders are my jam. So for me to actively despise a city builder is pretty condemning of the quality of the game. That's my problem with Skylines 2.
MK1 I powered through the story and had no desire to play any other part of it. It was a buggy incomplete mess. The roster was a step back from MK11 IMO. The game play was supposed to address the main complaints of how slow and limited MK11 was. They did that by adding a gimmick instead of going back to the MKX formula. MK1 is just a failed mess of a game.
I would have forgot about Starfield if not for seeing it in my Steam library just now. Mechanically this game fucking blows. I really hate some of the design decisions they made in the game. Like oxygen frequently stopping you from sprinting early game. The menu designs. Space flight. It's all so baffling to me. They really fumbled the ball.
Even before it went F2P, Rocket League. 10,000+ hours, and counting.
Minecraft is obviously up there, as is TF2 like you. Factorio is very high for me, relatively low cost and many hours sunk into it.
My current worst is probably Baldur's Gate 3, I bought it to play with a friend but we've only done one session so far.
The Sims 2. I paid for all the extensions, so quickly calculated, something around 300€ in total, back then. But I've been playing it for twenty years. I do not know, how many thousand hours I have on it, so I cannot calculate the price per hour, but I think it is pretty low at this point. And still getting lower.
// The least I do not know, I do not play many other games.
Most bang for the proverbial buck? Valheim for $20 in early 2021. Played the hell out of it until well into Ashlands and the souring that caused (more the FPS drops than endless enemy spam).
Least? Probably pre-ordering Fallout 76 Tricentennial edition for... $76. Hated most of my early play, only stuck it out for a year because of how much my wife loves the IP, then quit for over 4 years. We play again, but it's also not quite the dumpster fire it was at launch.
Maybe also Simcity 2013. Cheaper but infinitely worse.
EDIT: best might be tired with Master of Magic. Bought on sale in 1994 (no clue how much), still playing to this day. A heavily modded Windows native version (Caster of Magic II) that supports submods and was itself last updated in 2025.
I kept having this really weird problem in Valheim. It would run perfectly fine, running at 140fps. Then, randomly, for no discernable reason, after 15–90 minutes of playing it would suddenly and without warning enter what I call "lag mode", where it would just tank down to 8fps and become unplayable. The only temporary fix was to restart my PC, which was extremely annoying when playing with friends.
I would just endure the lag when doing housekeeping. Making homes and buildings, making equipment and potions and portals, etc. Then when it came time for an adventure or boss, I would be like, ok brb guys, restart my PC, and hope we killed the boss before I got hard CC'd and taken out by poor performance.
I couldn't find any explanation for this anywhere, I tried everything to fix it. Years later after patches it was still an issue even with a brand new OS, but it was isolated to my PC. My only guess was it was a memory leak or something unique to my setup. It kind of sucked the joy out of the game.
Same!
Also, I love building. It made the process miserable for any sizable base. Doubly so in my Ashlands one.
So much wasted potential with the stunning lack of optimizations and glacial pace of development.
At least they got a pony.
Most...probably Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Bought it when it first came out, and as soon as I beat it, when the credits finished I created another character. I must have beat the game over a dozen times on OG Xbox, 360 and Xbone (I still have the original disc).
Least? Maybe Bioshock Infinite which I bought full price at launch and probably made it less than 1/3 through before I put it away and never touched it again. That or Returnal, I bought a used copy for maybe under $15, played a couple hours before throwing the game away because of how much I hated it.
This edition of PC Zone Magazine cost £4 back in 1995. The cover CD had 1,000 Doom levels and IIRC a bunch of modding tools. I probably got 1,000 hours of entertainment out of it and often think back marveling at the value for money!
Of course all this stuff is available for free online nowadays!
Garry’s Mod, 10 dollars and 6000 hours logged.
Elden Ring for one, because my buddy liked it so much he bought it for me. Not sure if it counts though because I ended up passing it on and bought a copy for my brother so we could all play together.
Otherwise Splitgate, free basic ass arena shooter that is the only thing that has scratched the itch that quake 3 started me on when I was a child.
Mount and Blade Warband, CKII, and EUIV are all up there extremely highly but I guess Warband due to less dlc.
Least is tougher. Probably a couple of NES stinkers from way back would be in the running. Though lord knows I have games in my steam library I've yet to play. Hard to say.
Most: Fallout 4, I have over 7000 hours in it. Bought it pre-launch with season pass.
Least: I have no idea, probably several games I bought and never played.
I used to play WoW back in the day, and I would pay a monthly subscription of 13 euros per month, for three years straight, which is a total of around 470 euros, but I would play 8-14 hours a day almost everyday (for around two years), so in the end it was a good overall value-for-money (although a complete waste of time). Minecraft is also in the top 3, with a licence of 25 euros (while it was still owned by Mojang) and countless hours (easily over 1.000). But the biggest value for money was is Skyrim on Steam: I got it for 1 euro in a sale, around 330 hours spent (playing vanilla on my Steam Deck). I had to quit it cause I could see it going to the thousands of hours easily.
Biggest regret so far is Rimworld: paid full price (30 euros), played less than two hours. I always say I'll make it worth its price someday, but my backlog is already in the hundreds, so I don't see it happening any time soon.
I feel like I'm the perfect demographic for Rimworld, but I just can't get into it for some reason
I have wasted so much time in Satisfactory. Bought it on sale in 2020 I think, whenever it came to Steam.
Now get your downvotes ready, because the game that has been a waste of money for me is No Man's Sky. Its just... not fun. Its repetitive. Im sure there is some obvious thing somewhere that I'm missing that makes the game fun but so far it's hidden behind hours of grinding.
I think NMS is excellent, and not for me. I love logistics and puzzles. NMS is mostly exploration and combat. Their attempts at logistics and crafting are paltry, despite showing huge promise. Oh well. Maybe some day.
I love NMS but it's been shelved for the better part of a year at this point and I don't even really return for the updates anymore. Mods do a lot to improve the game and the new stuff they add is really cool but it's built on a painfully limited and outdated foundation. Every planet might as well be the same so what's the point of exploring?
NMS is the perfect game for a specific kind of person. Unfortunately that person isn't me either. I'm glad some people like it though, and it seems well made
Hmmm...
There are a few but my time tracker are all off for various reasons.
Minecraft, Skyrim, Conan Exiles, Rimworld, Baldurs Gate 3, XCOM2, Fallout 4, Civ 4. Cyberpunk might be in here.
Lots old games without trackers are likely in here. Final Fantasy Tactics has got to be really high on this list... Maybe FF3/6... Mario RPG?
All of these are easily at about 1000 hours now. I've played them for actual enjoyment. The best deal is likely Minecraft as I got that during my Indev... Skyrim I may have bought twice so that might be the worst deal of these.
As for the worst, hmmm. Maybe sometime like one of the more recent farcry. I guess a franchise game could count. Like ones that never really improve anything but I play cus friends or something. Like Forza Horizon. It's not complete dogwater, but I have giving them money for it.
Most enjoyment per dollar: I want to say RimWorld, but that shit’s expensive at over a hundred dollars for the base game plus expansions even during the rare times it's on sale.
So I'd have to say Terraria, which I bought for maybe fifteen bucks back at release when it had like three bosses and IIRC ended at Skeletron. Fifteen years of massive free content updates later, it's a sprawling randomly generated Metroidvania with dozens of bosses and an endgame that barely resembles its beginning, and I've probably done a dozen full playthroughs over the years.
That's not even getting into the mods, with tModLoader being given the official seal of approval and letting you swap between a multitude of content overhauls from within the game itself.
Least enjoyment per dollar would probably be Caves of Qud. It's not a bad game, but I went in with sky-high expectations that it couldn't possibly meet and I couldn't bring myself to enjoy it for what it was; instead feeling frustrated at what it wasn't (and didn't try to be). It didn't help that I regularly play freeform games like CDDA and Dwarf Fortress and the comparatively static structure of CoQ felt extremely restrictive in comparison.
Least enjoyment per dollar had to be Fallout 4. I bought it full price on release, roughly $60, and got the PC version, because I didn't have a working console at the time. I can only game on PC with EDSF, not WASD. But that game hardcoded Use/Action to E while also allowing E to be mapped to move forward. So everywhere I ran, if there was an action to do it would automatically do it. I kept opening doors to hiding monsters, opening crates, doing whatever when I just trying to walk around. I probably only played that game for 10ish hours before giving up.
Most enjoyment per dollar has to be NES Tetris. I have no idea how much my parents paid for that back in 1989, but I still plug in my NES and play it occasionally. Even accounting for buying a second NES in college, multiple replacement controllers, a replacement cart reader tray, and a used copy of the game off ebay far later, I am probably only in for $200. And I can't even make a guess at how many hours I've played NES Tetris. I would skip full days of school in 8th grade to play. I would play for hours in college. I still play a few hours per year now.
Most number of hours is WoW, but at $15/mo plus $60/expansion times probably 6 expansions I've probably spent over $1000 on it for a rough estimate of 7200 hours played.
Fallout 3 or New Vegas. I can't remember which cause they're both pretty close in overall hours played.
Probably Cyberpunk 2077...
Got it on sale, after they had taken steps to correct the horrendous launch, coupled with a handful of QoL mods and now I've gotten $.05 per hour out of it.
Price: ~$20 USD
Logged time: 436.5 hours
Edit:
Forgot least... uhhh... hell, probably Ff7 rebirth. Can't really count hours, since it takes a stupid amount of fucking time to do anything, but I really can't overstate how just fucking awful this game is. Just....just fucking terrible.
First, IMO enjoyment ≠ playtime
If it's about enjoyment, then Signalis takes the top spot. It was probably the cleanest purchase to end credits I've ever had in my life. Saw the store page on steam, bought it for 29.99, played through the game in 3 days. Never touched the game since and it is by a large margin the best game I've ever played.
For least enjoyment it must be the recent Warhammer Space Marine 2. Bought it for the Coop at full price (luckily just the standard edition). Extremely short and boring campaign and very repetitive and lackluster Coop mode. Wish I could get a refund but im already 7 hours in. The amount of games I've paid full price for in my life can be counted on two hands and this one definetly takes the price for most money and least enjoyment.
Bonus round: There are 2 games that, while I enjoyed at first and put 100s of hours in, have become so unbearably bad that I didn't even request a refund (even if I still could) but straight up deleted them from my account. Thats Helldivers 2 and Squad. I got both them for fairly cheap but even if I didn't. FUCK THOSE GAMES. They are the epitome of a waste of time.
Least - Hogwarts legacy: I bought it on sale mostly to "own the libs." My personality did a 180° in that same year so never opened the game again.
The 2-3 hours I spent felt like one huge tutorial, dialogue options just didn't matter, and also game didn't run great.
Most - Blade and sorcery: Modded the hell out of it daily. Also there was an update some time ago that doubled the native content.
What made you change your perspective?
I interacted with some trans people online that made me question the "they are all pedophiles" talking point.
Also I was still imagining myself being a girl almost daily during this phase so it snowballed from there as soon as the initial hate was gone.
Interesting. Thanks for sharing
While Minecraft doesn't have an hour tracker, I almost certainly have over 1000 hours for £15. I have nearly 700 hours in The Binding of Isaac, which is currently £1.09 on Steam.
Most: Terraria on PC. I paid $5 during their first big sale on Steam and have like 500 hours in it so $0.01/hr (1¢/hr )
Least: Spawn for the PS1. I got a special launch version that was $60. I hated it after 20 minutes and was full of regret. That's $180/hr
