Humanoid

I couldn't justify paying the upfront fee to try Midnight (or let's face it, to try player housing), but I could certainly see myself playing this variant for a month at least. Hopefully I still have enough gold in my bank from when I last played in 2019 to buy one month of gametime.

The main thing about the time limit that sounds questionable to me is that the act of simply using skill points consumes time. That sound utterly bizarre to me. Morti's review mentioned that he finished the game with a hatful of unused points because it wasn't worth that sacrifice to use them. It means the mechanic takes a weird meta turn, where instead of choosing between doing quest A or quest B as is seemingly intended, you instead do both quests and then just not use your skill points if you feel you're powerful enough already. That said, "failing" the limit is not a game over, and apparently it's something that people going for a second playthrough may be nudged into doing deliberately.

Starcraft Adventures

It's just really hard to get me to play a vampire game in general, horror is something I steer well clear of. Sure, if it's absolutely exceptional like Bloodlines I'll make an exception, but that's literally been a one-off in my decades of gaming. The reviews for Dawnwalker on the other hand seem to be more along the lines of "great first effort by a rookie studio" rather than simply "great". Minor point, but the PC version supposedly needs some patching to be as polished as the console versions are at launch. Anyway, the only thing I'm playing at the moment is Two Point Museum, and only a few hours a week. Don't know how I feel about it overall yet, I'm finding the expedition mechanic a bit unfun at the moment and it's dragging the game down a bit. I've let my Game Pass subscription lapse so my Avowed save is back on ice, as is my intention to finally start KCD2 after that. Though I might just buy it outright if I catch a good price on GOG. Another thing I'm considering is getting Tabletop Simulator (sadly Steam only) in order to play the Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective game.

Last GTA I played was San Andreas. At the start of the game, there's a section where you have to mash certain buttons in order to ride a bike to flee ...something I've long since forgotten. Anyway, I failed to ride that bike a dozen times or so and have never touched the series since.

Similarly, I find myself logged out of the forums so often and because I have my password in a password manager, I can't be bothered logging back in unless I happen to have already opened the password manager to do something else. On a completely different note, I had accepted for a long time that a lot of users here had broken avatars, and assumed it might have been because of the forum software upgrade/migration. But only recently did I find that it was a result of my blocking the path used for the banner ads at the top of the forum. For some reason, a bunch of people's custom avatars are stored in the same location as the ads (obsidian-forums.s3.amazonaws.com/monthly_202x_xx), weird.

Yeah, can't really do that because then I'd have to count the tens of thousands of times I've replayed Freecell.

Depends on the genre, surely. The examples you've given are RPGs or open world games with big time commitments, and I likewise almost never replay an RPG. But adventure games? All the time. Either Fate of Atlantis or Day of the Tentacle probably takes the crown for me. For a non-adventure game that involves a fairly decent time commitment, I'd say Privateer.

Unless there's a separate project I'm not aware of, this just seems to be the old game patched up just enough so people won't refund it immediately due to crashes after buying it.

Well Nintendo just announced that they're shutting down Mario Kart Tour.

Solo, or with optional party members, great. Mandatory pre-made party members, I begrudgingly accept. Manually creating a whole party, just about a dealbreaker.

We don't even know if the game is intended to be Fallout 5 as such, and I suspect much of the outcome is dependent on whether it is, or whether it's a spinoff. In the former case, I assume it could only be the Creation engine because that's what people expect from a "Bethesda" game. In the latter case, all bets are off, Obsidian could even point to BG3's success and argue to make a game in that style.

I'm not generally fussed about which IP they use unless it's one of the few I specifically dislike. I guess my greater concern is how much work will be simply thrown away now given it's not exactly a genre fit like adapting Van Buren content to New Vegas. Actually, whatever, just put the Avowed companions in Fallout 5 without modification or explanation. cue Jefferson Rhapsody

I should go back and finish Avowed before my Game Pass expires later this year. I tend to find I lose momentum in dark, gloomy zones and such was the case in the second region of the game. I do agree with the criticism that it's a bit formulaic though - I understand it's not meant to be a game with grand ambitions and multiple ways to tackle every quest, but precious few quests were resolvable with anything but combat, and stealth merely existed as a means to open combat, rather than to bypass it. I get that it's a lot of effort for a mechanic relatively few players even engage with, but it's the only reason I persisted with Cyberpunk, for example.

D&D always had a problem where there were so many levels with no interesting decisions to make ...then 5E made it worse by making feats even less frequently obtained, and merging the ASI system into it, meaning the optimal feat to take often was just ...+2 Dex. Feels like I'm just levelling on rails. Funny you explicitly mention the rogue/fighter multiclass. I prefer to not take any levels in fighter, and to not dual-wield. However 5E punishes this heavily by removing native multi-attack from rogues. Unless I dual-wield, or get extra attack from taking 5 levels in a different class, all my eggs are in one basket. If I miss the one attack roll I get per round, I'm complete dead weight. (And as is often relevant in videogames, if I get pulled into a scripted combat setpiece without the opportunity to stealth and win initiative relative to the fighter, I'm semi dead weight. And then sneak attack gets outscaled the moment weapons with extra per-hit damage dice start appearing.)