What about Crash n' the Boys Street Challenge? One of the best for NES.

PC Gamers top 50 free games

In case you feel like never paying for games again...

don't read PCGamer, AFAIK it's full of crap.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/201...e-games-on-pc/

Will play all 50 on both lists and compare. What's wrong with PCgamer though? I tend to like their weird articles and their reviews are decent. Will start following RPS as well because I always forget about them but like what I've read from there.

I just really like RPS, their lists seem genuinely well crafted, especially when it's sometimes 'I bet they didn't include x' and bam it's on the list. I also like their 'have you played' series.

PCGamer is simply too big imo to be reliable, I know it's a tin foil hat talk and inner scepticism but I really believe it in a capitalistic world.

And http://techraptor.net/content/love-e...nship-revealed not too long ago

I haven't followed the gaming press in a long time due to the assumption that they're all just access-oriented shills.

Definitely looked forward to checking out that new PC Gamer edition in the late 90s though.

Definitely second any recommendation for RPS. It's the only gaming site I check pretty much daily.

They do a really good job of balancing comedy, facts and good writing/ideas and they have a great selection of personalities working for them.

After a while they all kinda seem like the buddies you'll happily listen to if only because you know how what they like matches up to what you like and can make judgments about games from there. They're active in the comment-section below their articles too and back up points/explain/discuss/admit mistakes there too.

It's the kind of site that makes you wonder why everyone else doesn't just do it like that - just keep it simple, be honest and (genuinely) listen/work with your audience and it'll all work out in the long run.

Free browser based factory + idle game: http://factoryidle.com/

All the big sites can be accused of being shills-after all they make their money through advertising-but I haven't really found any of them to be terrible. The whole "buying influence through relationships" thing is way too Gamersgatey for me, especially when they explicitly point out that the writer didn't review any Ubisoft games.

That said, I would appreciate a more innovative approach to writing about games, as something like IGN had pretty much been the same since I started reading it in the 90s. Truth be told most of my interaction is through Twitter so I should just follow whoever has the best account.

"the site you read that one time is garbage and this other site is the good one"

- every single gamer on the internet ever

IGN IS AWFUL, ALL THE WOKE PPL READ DESTRUCTOID or what the **** ever

shut up and go away.

Hahaha, awesome

We can all agree through that Kotaku is a garbage site staffed by garbage people.

Online gaming journalism died with OMM

Based off of..?

Kotaku's only redeeming feature is that gamergate hates them, their core group of writers includes a huge number of completely unreadable hacks. They cover "some fans are angry at a nerf" and **** like it's ****ing Watergate, and their house style seems like it is "grating AF".

Haha yea, used to hate Kotaku (but read them anyway), now like them a little because they managed to almost completely flip their position on game industry "SJ".

They still have that Brian Ashcraft though who is absolutely awful, writing borderline racist and sexist posts about how weird and cute Asian countries are.

Haven't read anything of substance from them in a long time though.

Kotaku used to post some decent reviews and stuff

Now they just repost stuff that they read on reddit. That's not a snarky quip or exaggeration either. That's literally what they do.

Jason Schreier at Kotaku is pretty solid

Yeah their reviews are also not bad, but they review like one game a month, the rest is Ashcroft telling some bizarre story about manga cosplay, Patricia Hernandez rambling about her relationship with PewDiePew, and like a solid third of their posts are Buzzfeed-style collections of Reddit or Twitter posts. It's never "The Division has a bug" or whatever, it's "Why are so many people salty about The Division" and then like, 20 reaction gifs that other people tweeted.

Basically, their coverage of VIDEO GAMES is fine, but their coverage of video game "culture" is unreadable.

And like you said, their actual coverage of video games happens like once or twice a month, tops

And I'm not being pretentious, I'm just saying that the site has gone very far downhill and is not living up to its potential. A common theme in the Gawker universe.

For big sites I mainly frequent Giantbomb and Gamesindustry.biz these days. Everything else is just twitter and youtube.

Any of the sites mentioned apart from Kotaku is fine for just news though.

LOLOLOLOLOL

Random question I thought I'd toss in this thread since I'm not the most knowledgeable gamer.

I occasionally teach a grad level sport finance class and I always try to think of fun and quirky assignments since the topic of finance itself it pretty dry for sport management students.

I was thinking about having them have to play some type of simulator and write a reflection about the financial outcomes and implications. Any thoughts on what my best option would be regarding a game that would be fun and somewhat educational in this regard.

I was initially thinking about SimCity or Civilization, but I really don't know the genre very well and was wondering if there were any better options out there. While it's a sport finance class it really doesn't have to be sport related, finance is finance pretty much.