1 It depends on what your opinion of "prohibitively hard" is.  Games like Clash of Clans and Boom Beach are perfectly fun to play without ever spending a dime, you just have to understand that you won't progress past a certain level (often weeks or even months into the game) without paying.  If that doesn't bother you, play away.  A lot of people lose interest long before they hit those walls.

2 I have a Cinderella Girls account that I play for free. Certainly, it is a handicap of sorts, but nothing insurmountable.

3 That said, life within the confines of Kindle was insufferable, because Amazon market contained zero games that I wanted (== navite Japanese games). I was very happy to move to a normal Android tablet where Google Play market is available. Later it turned out, however, that most of it was region-locked. I had to buy Kanon from anigema.jp. Those guys don't mind us kuso gaijins, as long as credit card works.

4 Usually it's not a matter of "prohibitively hard" as it is "getting good things is competitive with other players and you'll eventually need to pay to compete with other people who are paying". Good ones are designed to edge you ever closer to that without quite slapping you in the face with the "hey, dig out your credit card or go home" moment, while bad ones will make it clear almost instantly.

I'm currently on a WOW kick again. Won't last forever but it's some fun in the meantime. Next month has a couple of rhythm games... Persona 4 Dancing All Night and the Mirai DX vocaloid game.

And Paradox announced they were going to do a space-type sim with a Europa Universalis flavor. Oy. That's like sugared crack for me.

5

So maybe I should visit GOG again? Problem is, I've bought seven games from them and only ever play two of them.

I bought and played more games from GoG than seven or two, and last week, they answered (At least in part.) the single most desired item on my wish list, when they started rolling out the Classic AD&D games published by SSI.  So there is hope for something at GoG.

I also got around to watching Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou and rather enjoyed the anime.  However, the anime only covered just over a third of the light novel series it was based on, and reading the translation of the light novels left me conflicted.

6 Based on what I've heard from Ubu, This is yet another series which started well and ended up squandering a good setup. From what Ubu has told me, we're better off not going past the point where the anime ended.

7 I just looked through the "Adventure" listing of games on GOG and saw that they had The 7th Guest, The Dig, and The Labyrinth of TIme. I have fond memories of all those, so maybe I'll shell out $18 and get them all.

8

GoG has proven to be a treasure trove of titles that I wanted to see back in circulation - Darklands, Covert Action, Imperialism, the SSI-published AD&D games - and no download client to worry about.  Even some of the classic games from Japan like Ys is appearing on GoG, which is even better.

Regarding Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou:

I read all 13 volumes of the light novel series, and the first 10 volumes were pretty good and would have worked well as an anime - but the last three were where the plot went into deus ex machina territory and made me want to put down the series.  You know it is going to be bad when they kill off one of the two leading female characters in a very horrible fashion.

 

But at least we got this picture from Volume 2 of the light novels, which Wonderduck might find of interest.  Sadly, I had to link the picture itself, rather than the page for it, due to the link not working properly.

 

9 What the heck is that duck doing there?

10 That duck is the real demon king, remember?

-j

11 Credit where is due: the link I had in my post is actually part of the fan translation project for Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou at Baka-Tsuki, which is a site that consolidates various fan translation project (Light novels that have been licensed for US release will obviously not appear there.).  Among other things, you can see that Infinite Stratos going completely off the rails was not solely the responsibility of the anime studio...