genres you find mentally exhausting

Felix

I wonder if this is a common phenomenon, and playing Metro 2033 recently has put it firmly enough in my mind to want to ask:

are there are particular genres of games that really tire out your brains to a point where you can't play them for very long and/or you have to rest afterwards? Oddly enough, I have this with both cinematic single-player FPSes and cover shooters (Gears does it to me, as does Half-Life 2, but Halo and UT don't) as well as with word games (like Scrabble), though I can easily play more "complicated" tabletop stuff like Terra Mystica or Eclipse for hours.

these are probably two completely unrelated phenomena in my case, but I'm curious whether I'm the only one.

Felix · Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 12:29 am

Felix · Posted: Mon Aug 18, 2014 1:19 am

yeah, see, that's the kind of thing I'm talking about

and fwiw I could easily play XCom or its ilk for like five hours at a clip if life didn't intervene and feeling good about myself afterwards wasn't an issue

whereas I can't play RTS games at all because they swing so far to the side of "tiring" for me -- way past FPSes, which I can usually appreciate -- that I don't find them at all fun.

Felix · Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2014 5:31 pm

never found Drod (or SpaceChem) that likeable

Escape Goat 2 was excellent though

Felix · Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2014 8:57 pm

that's actually why I hate modern jRPGs though, the notion of "investing time" weighs so heavily

my advice: play a different genre

Felix · Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2014 6:00 pm

wow, we are opposites!

it's OK though because I love Cosmic Encounter too.

Felix · Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2014 6:45 pm

Felix · Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2014 7:23 pm

I'm not an avid racing game person by any means but I do really enjoy their particular brand of tension. I can easily imagine that if I were playing Forza in first-person or something it would have a similar effect on me to Metro 2033, but as it stands the difference between Forza and Sanic Kart 2 might be similar the difference between Metro and Unreal Tournament.

Felix · Posted: Wed Aug 20, 2014 10:02 pm

I would say that I almost universally detest PSP titles for the way they seem to share the traits I describe in the top post (even those that aren't jRPGs). it took me a while to realize that this was actually a PSP-centric thing (I think people usually generalize from MonHun) and I don't really get it other than "Japanese game design busywork."