For ARPGs if you feel burnt by Diablo IV, I can recommend Path of Exile. Arguably the king of the genre today.

Others mentioned Grim Dawn, which has a bit slower gameplay, but a good choice nonetheless.

If you’re looking for indie ARPG, then there’s Chronicon. Nice little game that I really want to go back to again.

“Oh hidy-ho officer, we’ve had a doozy of a day…” Definitely a good watch.

And that’s the way it should be.

I’m actually tempted to say Snatch too. City of God (Cidade de Deus 2002) is up there with it. Some time ago I probably would’ve said Donnie Darko, but I’ve grown out of it over the years.

I guess I should mention 4 more. Most of these are playable in some form or other too, but still.

• Dune II - I didn’t understand any English when I was playing this as a kid, but had lots of fun with it either way. Open source remake (needs original data files): https://dunelegacy.sourceforge.net/website/index.html
• Golden Axe - This one was somehow memorable to me out of all the cheesy beat 'em ups. https://store.steampowered.com/app/34276/Golden_Axe/
• Stunts - The first racing game I played. Very nice map editor too. I even remember the bug where if you hit a peak between two ramp edges you’d fly straight up towards the sky! A brief search didn’t give me any faithful offline remakes, but here’s the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunts_(video_game)
• Secret Agent - I’m fairly sure this or Dune II was the first graphical game I ever played on PC. https://store.steampowered.com/app/358350/Secret_Agent/

I second XCOM, if we are talking about the original two, Enemy Unknown/UFO Defense and Terror from the Deep. I heard good things about the more recent ones, but I never played those.

Might I recommend the timeless classic Heroes of Might and Magic III? Most of the campaigns are not too difficult after you get the hang of things, if I remember correctly. And you can get a hundred hours out of it even if you only play the official campaigns.

Quake III Arena. It came out in the 20th century, which sounds crazy to me. It was about 10 years ago I last played it or its remakes.

I got into Q3 a few years late, but there was still a fairly healthy local community for it back then. Quake 4 came out and then Quake Live, which I played for a while, but the local community was missing by then.

Sure I could still play it, but I’m guessing there aren’t even enough people to fill a 5v5 capture the flag match anymore, Q3 or QL… a shame. But at least I have good memories of it.

I’ve been slowly playing through Vampire Survivors again with each hero only using their starting weapon. I did the lightning ring dude on the first map the last time. Only barely made it to 30 minutes with that one.

I very much use the subscription feed. I don’t know how alone I am with this, but I usually only subscribe to channels when I want to watch almost all videos they post.

A lot of the time if a creator gets a little bit popular they start to spam videos and that’s when I unsubscribe, even if I generally like their content. I feel like I cannot ever keep up anymore so I just watch their videos sporadically from then on.

Academics needs good discipline for the most part provided you have an okay head for it.

Somebody with a very high intelligence can cruise by for a while, but they will hit a wall eventually where they need to sit down and do the boring, borderline useless or administrative stuff too. Lots of people have a hard time to find the motivation to do these parts and fail.

Battle for Wesnoth is a nice and polished turn based strategy game. You need to get used to the sometimes annoying rng hit system, but it can get addicting trying to protect a favourite unit, give them the last hits so they can level up and then faceroll the map.

Most classic RPGs have lots of combat. What I don’t see mentioned here so far is Neverwinter Nights. Especially the first expansion of the second game. Mask of the Betrayer. Lots of combat of course, but a story that your behaviour has an impact on. Search for a cookie cutter build, lower the difficulty. You can skip through the combat parts quickly that way, if you don’t like them.

Also mentioning Planescape Torment again because it’s weird and not so combat focused.

Okay, pretend I mentioned a female celebrity you like… are you still with us? How are you feeling?

That’s just teenagers. They will arrive eventually if Lemmy gets more popular.