The Mario & Luigi games are similarly approachable and good RPGs, Superstar Saga (the first one) especially. They are handheld games so maybe a bit more difficult to play together with someone, though you could emulate them very easily to play on a more suitable device.

Sea of Stars also might be worth a try. Takes a lot of inspiration from Paper Mario.

Good fucking riddance. I hate these things, people leave them just lying across the sidewalk all the time.

Your Only Move is Hustle is pretty much exactly what you described.

I grew up in the southeast US and while I don’t think I have a strong accent and have tried to cut other southern things out of my speech, I quite like “y’all”. In my opinion it’s the best gender neutral second person plural word. Most others are needlessly gendered or sound even weirder.

Don’t know if you’ve played/heard of these, but some good short singleplayer stuff on gamepass that might fit the types of games you like and you could easily finish before then:

A Short Hike is getting added today and is something I’d recommend to anyone if you haven’t played it. Very pleasant game, and as the name suggests it’s very short, you can complete it in an afternoon.

Celeste is on there and is one of the best 2D platformers, if you enjoy those and haven’t played it definitely try it out.

Death’s Door is a top-down zelda-like, and one of my favorite takes by indies on that type of game.

Doom 1/2 are classics that are still very much worth playing and hold up well.

Mirror’s Edge is a first person platforming/parkour game, a bit older at this point but holds up pretty well.

Monster Train is a deckbuilder roguelite, which I know is a polarizing genre, but if you’re either into those or open to the idea of trying them it’s one of the best. Might not fit as a shorter game depending on how much of the stuff in it you want to do, but you could at least get a good taste for it and see if you like it.

Both of the Ori games are good metroidvanias that are relatively short.

Prey is a great immersive sim/fps/stealth game, if you’ve tried other Arkane stuff like Dishonored, or the Deus Ex games, it’s similar to those.

Both of the Psychonauts games are great 3D platformers. 2 is especially good and a big step up in gameplay, as you might expect with the time gap between them.

Tinykin is a 3D platformer with some Pikmin inspiration, where you’re a tiny person exploring a giant house, very fun if you like platforming and collectathon type stuff.

I’ve been playing a couple of neat games.

Time Bandit is a really unique mix of genres focused on real time-based interactions. There’s puzzles you solve that take hours and you have to leave machines running and check back later, people you meet at certain times, stores that have different schedules. It’s a dystopian setting where you work in a factory, and there’s this guy you meet early on who’s with a rebellion group that teaches you about communism. It’s really neat, and less of a time commitment than it might sound like, most of my sessions have been like 10 minutes just checking in on stuff, sort of like a very weird animal crossing. It’s pretty cheap and getting a criminally low amount of attention for how cool it is.

The Void Rains Upon Her Heart is a roguelite boss rush shmup. Really approachable for that genre. I got interested in it because the dev got hired by the Revita team (one of my favorite games from last year) to work on the expansion for that, and it definitely has some similarities to that, also kinda reminds me of Undertale combat. It’s got a ton of content and does a great job at pacing the unlocks and stuff.

Last, Pseudoregalia is a 3D movement focused metroidvania. It’s very N64 inspired in style. You’re exploring a big castle, with a lot of platforming and interesting movement abilities. There’s no map, so it definitely requires some patience with that, but it’s a really neat game overall. Seems to allow a lot of sequence breaking. It’s looking to be fairly short as well, which is nice.

It’s got a variety of speed settings that increase in difficulty, and it absolutely gets fast enough for anyone lol. I like it a lot more than the actual wipeout games I’ve tried even though its mechanics are more styled after that.

As for the antigrav racers you mentioned, have you checked out BallisticNG? It leans more towards Wipeout than F-Zero, but even as a huge GX fan (and looking forward to Aero GPX myself) I’ve really enjoyed it. I believe it does have splitscreen as well, though I haven’t tried it personally.

Although they’re somewhat different the modern Hitman trilogy scratches this same itch for me (especially turning some of the guidance in the UI off and exploring the levels yourself, they’re actually designed well for that). Gloomwood is in early access but is shaping up really well and is inspired by classic Thief.

I want more games like Resogun and Geometry Wars

Have you tried Nex Machina? By the same devs as Resogun, and it’s great no-nonsense arcade gameplay. Assault Android Cactus is another game of that type I really enjoyed too.

There definitely is a lack of actually good ones in the modern era. Poi and Grow Home are some good ones you may not have heard of.

Seconded, one of my favorite podcasts.

Backed the kickstarter and eagerly awaiting it!

Eh, other developers are already basically making Zelda games minus the name, and you can play them without giving nintendo money. Unsighted, Death’s Door, and Crosscode are all great and take strong inspiration from Zelda, just to name a few.

It’s not out for a few more months but I recently tried the demo for Fortune’s Run, which is now one of my favorite depictions of a cyberpunk world in a game. It’s an immersive sim, maybe with a bit more focus on direct combat than most. The gameplay is fun if a bit rough in some spots, hopefully it gets polished up for launch but it’s very promising. Everything about the presentation though is top notch.

Not saying that these shouldn’t have a more stable official release, but hasn’t this been solved by mods for a long while now? At least New Vegas I remember when I last set up mods installing a fix for this, it’s actually quite stable now if you install all the recommended fixes.

Nice reviews. I hadn’t heard of Botany Manor or Horticular and they both look interesting, I’ll check them out. Getting 10 hours out of a demo is crazy, really good “selling” point to check it out.

I think it will absolutely support 4K as a marketing point, but nothing is going to run at that natively. They have a partnership with nvidia so the next switch will definitely have DLSS, and probably run heavily upscaled to output at 4k. Still wouldn’t expect good performance though.

People ate up the switch oled. I’ve heard a ton of people who already had a switch say they bought one. Sales numbers are also pretty good I think? If they just call it a Switch 4K or something people will definitely buy one. I think you’re mistaken about both the insane popularity of the switch, and also the demographic that uses nintendo handhelds. They’ve frequently done refreshes with the gameboy and DS lines, and people buy them because they can hand off the old one to a family member or friend.

New batch of demo reviews for stuff I tried today:

Memori Basically a Celeste clone, everything from the art style to a lot of the mechanics seem to be just trying to copy that. Not necessarily a bad thing, because Celeste is a great game and I’m always down for more pure 2D platformers, but this one definitely needs some work. The basic controls aren’t bad, but they’re nothing amazing either, and interacting with any of the special mechanics in the levels it starts to feel really bad. A lot of the mechanics in the demo are basically copies of level mechanics from Celeste but not executed as well, and the few more unique ones felt really awkward to use as well. Hopefully it has a while until release and can get polished up.

SteamWorld Build I’ve liked most of the other SteamWorld games I’ve played, and while this one didn’t look too interesting to me on the surface I figured I’d give it a try. The first half of the demo is a pretty basic city builder, didn’t really feel like it had much of an interesting twist on the formula and was pretty easy. When you get access to the mine it gets a lot more interesting. The mine basically plays like a second city, with resources shared between the two areas and many only available from one or the other. Rather than building houses, you have tile by tile zoning control for different types of mining camps. You can choose which walls to dig out and have to build support structures to stop cave ins, and bridges to cross chasms. Planning paths with your limited resources to most efficiently dig minerals out of the walls feels like a great adaptation of SteamWorld Dig to another genre. This part of the game was way more engaging, and while I like the idea of having to balance the two areas, it was only really an annoyance when I had to go back above ground and plop down some more buildings to keep things going in the mines. It’s not as innovative for the genre as something like Against the Storm, but it does have a pretty unique hook that is worth checking out if you’re into this sort of game.

SokoSolitaire This is a Sokoban (block pushing puzzle) game, with the main twist being that the blocks are now cards. Cards have to go in specific locations, and sometimes form solitaire-like sequences. The main mechanic other than that in the demo are these special tiles where you can stack multiple cards, but only if they’re in numerical order, and you can push them out in a last-in-first-out approach. The puzzles pretty quickly got quite difficult for me, I’m familiar with this genre but usually bounce off of these games after a while, and while this seems like a decent one of those I don’t think it’s really for me. You probably already know if you’d be interested in this or not. Also, you play as a cat wearing a suit.

Vampire Hunters A first person shooter take on Vampire Survivors, this got my attention from seeing the screenshots of your character holding a dozen guns with them covering half the screen. Unfortunately, it’s not really as fun as that sounds. The guns don’t feel particularly good, and the gameplay entirely consists of walking down a narrow corridor and shooting incredibly basic enemies that just move towards you in a straight line, which doesn’t really translate well from top down games to this. There’s also a pretty bad lack of variety here in all aspects, and the meta progression seems very grindy for some very uninspired upgrades. Hopefully this gets a lot more time in development, because it could turn into something pretty fun.

Peaks of Yore A monochrome first person mountain climbing game, with some intentionally awkward Bennett Foddy inspired controls. You have a book of mountains of varying difficulties to pick from, and the starting few at least are quite short but quickly get more challenging. You get a stamp to put in your book for each climb you complete, and go back to your cabin between missions, where you get unlocks and decorations delivered to you in packages. I think this is really well executed, and while it’s more fun to play than most games of this type, I’ll probably enjoy watching someone play it more than playing more of it myself.