I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
I really don’t get the sims. Everything you do in it is stuff you can make yourself do in real life. It’s a life inside a computer simulator. Except for easily getting a job and designing a house freely. That’s certainly not tue case for real life me.
I do however really love The Sims Medieval. That’s a game with epic replayability.
That depends which of them, and the style you play it. I have played the Sims 2 for twenty years, and do not remember when was the last time I played some boring everyday life with a single family. I do things, like create huge family trees and play the entire neighborhood as one, tangling the relationships, and making drama and whatever I feel like. Murder mysteries, cults, monasteries, a nursing home for the elderly, fill big graveyards with a serial killer, build random stuff like an opera house or an art gallery, and run them as a businesses… Adding mods especially lets you play however you want. I even played a genuine Zombie Apocalypse scenario, with mods, that made the zombified sims npc’s, that would attack everyone on their own, and infect the attacked, who would then soon die and turn into another zombie.
I’m glad that you enjoy playing with it that way, I’ve also started to enjoy role-playing and story writing elements more as I get older.
I would have loved Sims Medieval if it didn’t have that roguelite meta progression where it expected me to restart my game from zero all the time and repeat the same quests over and over to progress the “god” unlocks. In every game I like long campaigns that I can sink my teeth into and build up meaningful progress, so this one aspect just sucked the joy out of any replays after the first run.
But I remember I loved the graphics (and music!) bc they used my fav Sims 3 engine, just made the textures prettier.