Madzookeeper

if i'm entirely honest, the game i have the most time in is LOL. i've put money into it, at one point had every champ, had friends i wouldn't have met without it, and have literally thousands of hours in it. but holy crap is that game toxic in a lot of ways. i don't know if i can say it's best or worst value simply because of time put in and fun i had with it, but i also flat out refuse to touch it again at this point for a whole host of reasons. bit of a conundrum there. best value: the mass effect trilogy. i've played it by myself like 8 times, and just in the last year went through it with my wife making all of the decisions and she loved it, was a great time playing with her, and it's hard to argue with 9 times through it, i have to say. that's like 900+ hours easy, and that's not even including the multiplayer that i have at least another hundred hours in. morrowind. oh morrowind. i have one character ever in that game, and said character had 860+ hours and was an absolute blast. couldn't mod the game due to being on xbox, but the game of the year edition... *chef's kiss* hours in elder scrolls games have done nothing but go down since then. as an example, i think i have more hours modding skyrim than actually playing it at this point... which is extremely sad, though i did beat everything in the base game and the first expansion, though just kinda burnt out going through dragonborn. never did finish that. dark souls series, elden ring are pretty up there. i've only beaten 3 and elden ring, but i've had nothing but fun with all of them other than the freaking capra demon fight. i would like to slap whoever designed that fight as it may be the single worst boss fight i've ever encountered just off the design. such a small space with THREE enemies coming after you is just stupid, especially when you don't have an effective jump button to get to the ledge for falling attacks, which is the only practical way to handle the stupid thing given dodging and blocking are almost out of the question given your equipment and space to move around in. just no, no, no. otherwise seriously enjoyed my time with all of them, even dark souls 2. and i do love me some civ, going all the way back to 2, test of time, 3, 4, call to power, 5 and 6. almost never finished games, but i loved starting them and everything up the renaisance time period. after that it just gets to be such a slog with all of the units moving around and everything, but i do have a LOT of hours in these games over the years, along with games like them such as alpha centauri, masters of orion 2, age of wonders 1-4... so yea. fun times. least value is... harder. i don't tend to play games i don't like for very long, and there's been more than a few of them. the one that stands out to me the most though, probably biomutant. i was looking forward to that game but holy crap was it disappointing. played it for like two hours, trying, trying to get some fun out of it, but between lack of fighting when you get to the overworld, lack of anything really, bad controls, bad fighting, just... oh god, let me play dark souls. or elden ring. it tried to be a souls like in some ways, and oh god did it fail hard. otherwise, well, i just don't really remember games i don't like, because i just don't play them long enough for them to really stick in my mind. and it's seldom that i'm actually THAT disappointed in things. but i did just remember one other game. NBA 2k20. got that with the money i got for christmas. oh how i tried to enjoy it, put easily 40-50 hours into it... but the shooting mechanics and everything else were just so abysmal that i gave up and haven't touched a sports game since as they all seem to have identical problems now. sure, i got it down to almost 1$ an hour... but i had zero fun and was utterly frustrated almost the entire time i was doing it. that has to count for some really bad value right there, since it was actively the opposite of what a game is supposed to be. i suppose any of the games that i've bought and haven't played yet could count here as well, but so many of them were on really good sales that i have a hard time really feeling like i haven't gotten some value out of them just because i got them cheap. and often times it's also supporting a dev that i like or think deserves it, so there's value in that whether i've played it or not. especially if it's a dev doing things i am very appreciative of, or a company actually making changes towards much healthier practices in general. i think and feel that rewarding that kind of behavior is a net positive for gaming as a whole.