What videogames are you playing in 2026?

[Reynard]

My experiences with GTA in general (and tbf, most of that experience is with Vice City) is that it's fun as hell tooling around town listening to the most absurdly hilarious talk radio but that literally every other part of the experience is an exercise in misery.

It's a big part of the reason why I've never even bothered with the Yakuza series despite the few bits and pieces of it that I've actually seen being incredibly charming

What I wouldn't give for a GTA 5 like experience except you are a superhero.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

My experiences with GTA in general (and tbf, most of that experience is with Vice City) is that it's fun as hell tooling around town listening to the most absurdly hilarious talk radio but that literally every other part of the experience is an exercise in misery.

Definitely most of the missions (always with a few, exceptional, er, exceptions) are somewhere between okay, humdrum and actively tedious, I think that's true for literally every GTA game, and it's true by the standards of the time too. It's a game held together more by the interstitials gameplay than the focused gameplay, as you indicate. Over time the GTA games have got better like - GTA V is, gameplay-wise and driving-around-wise and so on, way better than Vice City, but the stories are still about mostly repulsive people, and in fact GTA V is particularly bad there because Trevor is in the mix (I get what they were trying to do with him, and how he is indeed what someone who acted like how most people play GTA would be like, but it was a bit much), who is possible the most vile (not most objectively morally reprehensible, just most vile) GTA protag, even if he is played with a lot of panache by Steven Ogg (who is the perfect man for the job).

Be interested to see how 6's Bonnie and Clyde thing plays out. GTA's writers have never had to handle a female protag before. Two of the main writers of all previous GTAs except GTA 1 (Dan Houser - who was effectively the "showrunner" of GTA - and Michael Unsworth) both left so only one of the three previous writers remains, Rupert Humphries, joined by a couple of new people (one of whom worked a lot on Brooklyn 99 but only wrote 3 episodes), so we'll see if that'll result in much tonal change. I suspect it will - hopefully for the better but we'll see.

It's a big part of the reason why I've never even bothered with the Yakuza series despite the few bits and pieces of it that I've actually seen being incredibly charming

Yakuza's gameplay has basically nothing to do with GTA though right? So how does that follow as a "why"?

The mainline Yakuza games are basically a giant pile of minigames (some of them good) held together with a story that's both stronger and considerably better-told and more relatable (imho) than anything in GTA, and running around (there is some driving in some but it's not the main mode of getting around/exploring, walking is) and beat-em-up sections which are nothing like GTA's driving nor GTA's terrible shooting bits. Plus two of the most recent Yakuza games are turn-based JRPGs! I'm not kidding or exaggerating either - they have literally have full-on turn-based combat, job systems, party management, etc. etc. Apparently they're loosely inspired by Dragon Quest (That's Like a Dragon - maybe not the most subtle name, come to think of it - and Infinite Wealth).

Are you sure you're not maybe conflating GTA with Sleeping Dogs, which does have the same basic gameplay loop as GTA and is also about Asian gangs, albeit the Triads, not the Yakuza. That said, Sleeping Dogs was flatly superior in the combat and missions to, well, pretty much any GTA game - however it was wildly inferior in the interstitial driving around and so on. The only relationship between GTA and Yakuza is that they're both technically open-world games (albeit with wildly different open worlds) and themed around the criminal underworld.

I guess it would follow if you really hated games about violent criminals specifically? But even then the Yakuza people are, well, morally and likeability-wise vastly superior to any GTA protags.

 

[Gradine]

Yakuza's gameplay has basically nothing to do with GTA though right? So how does that follow as a "why"?

The mainline Yakuza games are basically a giant pile of minigames (some of them good) held together with a story that's both stronger and considerably better-told and more relatable (imho) than anything in GTA, and running around (there is some driving in some but it's not the main mode of getting around/exploring, walking is) and beat-em-up sections which are nothing like GTA's driving nor GTA's terrible shooting bits. Plus two of the most recent Yakuza games are turn-based JRPGs! I'm not kidding or exaggerating either - they have literally have full-on turn-based combat, job systems, party management, etc. etc. Apparently they're loosely inspired by Dragon Quest (That's Like a Dragon - maybe not the most subtle name, come to think of it - and Infinite Wealth).

Are you sure you're not maybe conflating GTA with Sleeping Dogs, which does have the same basic gameplay loop as GTA and is also about Asian gangs, albeit the Triads, not the Yakuza. That said, Sleeping Dogs was flatly superior in the combat and missions to, well, pretty much any GTA game - however it was wildly inferior in the interstitial driving around and so on. The only relationship between GTA and Yakuza is that they're both technically open-world games (albeit with wildly different open worlds) and themed around the criminal underworld.

I guess it would follow if you really hated games about violent criminals specifically? But even then the Yakuza people are, well, morally and likeability-wise vastly superior to any GTA protags.

Yeah I think that was a comparison that I've been holding on to based on faulty assumptions; like I always assumed at least the early Yakuza games (I'm aware of the recent change to turn-based RPG combat) played like a GTA, like I have this genre in mind (GTA, Sleeping Dogs, Yakuza, Saints Row, Mafia, etc.) that I feel like are all in the same bucket when some of them aren't and I know what that with more than a casual glance.

I had always kind of known that Yakuza protags are vastly more likeable than GTA protags [the one meme I know best is Kiryu being a total champ ally to a trans woman in Yakuza 3 (from 2009!!)] but I guess I always assumed they played the same too so I stayed away even when Like a Dragon clearly bucked the trend.

Maybe it's time to finally dive in (although I've heard Kiwami 3 is vastly inferior to the original)

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Yeah I think that was a comparison that I've been holding on to based on faulty assumptions; like I always assumed at least the early Yakuza games (I'm aware of the recent change to turn-based RPG combat) played like a GTA, like I have this genre in mind (GTA, Sleeping Dogs, Yakuza, Saints Row, Mafia, etc.) that I feel like are all in the same bucket when some of them aren't and I know what that with more than a casual glance.

I had always kind of known that Yakuza protags are vastly more likeable than GTA protags [the one meme I know best is Kiryu being a total champ ally to a trans woman in Yakuza 3 (from 2009!!)] but I guess I always assumed they played the same too so I stayed away even when Like a Dragon clearly bucked the trend.

Maybe it's time to finally dive in (although I've heard Kiwami 3 is vastly inferior to the original)

Yeah I can see how that would happen - I've definitely made pretty big assumptions about the gameplay of a series before only to be confounded when I actually played it - I'm trying to think of what it was, it was something pretty well-established - but yeah it was like "Wait this isn't even the genre I thought it was!". The rest are all basically "of a genre" to be clear.

 

[Parmandur]

I definitely think any game with elaborate crafting and building would be just a whole other level of appeal/obsession when you're a kid. The sheer amount of time I could spend on elaborate Lego builds at that age was crazy, and I can only imagine how obsessed with stuff like Minecraft or Terraria I'd have been. I feel like, as an adult, I'd be a lot more efficient and precise and think stuff through but would I build anything as crazy impressive? Almost certainly not!

That makes sense, a lot of my focus recently has been on bite-sized puzzle and platform games which are rewarding but less energy intensive.

To be clear, it's not just that they build stuff: my gradeschool children have beaten Terraria, and are kind of intimidatingly hard-core.

In other news, my son's latest speed run of Hollow Knight clocked in at 2 hours and five minutes with 25% completion...

 

[Parmandur]

My experiences with GTA in general (and tbf, most of that experience is with Vice City) is that it's fun as hell tooling around town listening to the most absurdly hilarious talk radio but that literally every other part of the experience is an exercise in misery.

It's a big part of the reason why I've never even bothered with the Yakuza series despite the few bits and pieces of it that I've actually seen being incredibly charming

Of all random things, I really enjoyed The Godfather that EA made twenty years ago, which was just a GTA clone that hired a bunch of the actors from the original movies. It had style.

 

[Parmandur]

What I wouldn't give for a GTA 5 like experience except you are a superhero.

That Wolverine game may fit the bill when it drops.

 

[Gradine]

There's always Prototype, which is like if you took the GTA experience except you are essentially The Thing, from the John Carpenter film The Thing